Challenge: A Great Power in Africa

As others have said, Egypt & South Africa are both easy targets. I'd also suggest a federal West Africa post-France would have had the potential. Perhaps not a great power in the traditional sense, but certainly equivalent to the BRICS.

EDIT: As such.
 
If the DRC got their shit together, they would be the power to beat. $24 TRILLION in resources. Both an amazing gift and a deadly curse.

Same month, so this isn't a necro, but it strikes me that in an ATL the Democratic Republic of the Congo could become the Soviet Union of its world, a superpower that is unstable and has an expiration date, and lags behind in most areas of technology but keeps pumping resources into the ones important to keep up an arms and propaganda race with the United States.

Maybe a Vichy-style government in Belgium and the Belgian officials in the Congo following it could lead to the liberation/occupation of the Congo as a side-theater of a side-theater in WWII, and the Allied occupation government naturally helping to reconstruct (or in this case construct) the region and encourage democracy on a local level in the post-war period, which coincidentally makes it impossible to re-colonize. A Republic of Vietnam type puppet government in the fifties eventually gives way to a civil war that all of the advanced COIN tactics of the 60's fail to win for the United States and South Africa, and ultimately to the rebel government taking power and becoming as stable a state as communist Vietnam in our world (and with a similar more nationalist than communist character).

By the 80's, the natural resources of the Congo and its high levels of protectionism (though with some trade with Communist bloc and Unaligned countries) have turned it from a non-concern like Vietnam to a secondary antaognist in the Cold War, or potential third force, like the PRC.

And maybe instead of collapsing in the 90's like the Soviet Union, the regional empire-less Supercongo instead gets a new lease on life as the unfortunate ATL consequence of its existence, a NATO-supplied apartheid garrison state in Southern Africa, collapses into protracted civil war that eventually results in the Supercongo and others supported African rebels defeating the Afrikaaner regime. With its only regional rival now a satellite while it reconstructs and sorts itself out, Supercongo is able to benefit from the post-Soviet era, opening its markets to Western countries (as most were never really comfortable with Super-Apartheid-SouthAfrica in the first place).

I can even imagine PRC-style state financed investment in real estate resulting in a very interesting landscape along the "Congo Riveria".
 
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