You forget your history. Why is America in that position right now? Industrialization that was funded off of slave labour, stole land from its native peoples and largely were physically unaffected by the World Wars which destroyed much of Europe. America came in to help only when it felt like it. For three years it was just Britain against the Nazis and all we would do is run guns and reject Jewish refugees.
Ethiopia's only real faulting was taht Emperor Haile Selassie was incredibly selfish in maintain power for himself and refused virtually all pulls for industrialization and kept education from the masses. When he was finally thrown from power Ethiopia had something like a 10% literacy rate. The problem was that those that threw him out of office were communist dictators whose policy was officially called "Red Terror" and they killed a million Ethiopians in purging the country of their opposition. Now, feeling the affects of no industrialization and dependence on single crops, when drought and the subsequent famine set in, the people were f***ed and million more died of starvation.
In 1993, that government was overthrown and now they have a republic and things are getting better. There are going to be lots of problems in Africa for generations because of the way that Europeans carved it up, set up corrupt ruling elites, exported their resources and, especially after colonialism, didn't give a shit about it. Why do you think Mobutu had billions of dollars, and yet Zaire was one of the poorest countries in the world despite their fantastic mineral wealth and the billions of dollars in aid the West was handing him? Because Zaire had healthy uranium resources and we were saying, "Don't sell it to the Russians. Here's your money, we don't give a shit what you do with it, just don't sell it to the Russians."