I have no idea either why people conflate. At the least, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa should never be conflated

North Africa is part of the Middle East culturally, politically, and religiously. The Arab Spring was largely North African in focus, before the Syrian civil war preoccupied attention. Democracy faces a major hurdle even in the stablest nations there. Authoritarian traditions stretch back +2,000 years.

Sub Saharan Africa is far less influenced by ME Islamist traditions and far more aligned to a similar postcolonial timeline as South Asia and caudillo era Latin America. Despite some truly vast cities, most folks remain rural. This is also the region that rightly or wrongly, is seen as both a wild National Geographic idyll, or conversely one threatened by overpopulation. Crucial point. Democracy is the general prevailing ideology here, even if more honored in the breach.

And even this summarization grossly oversimplifies. Shameless plug, it's fascinating to read about ECOAS and the African Union

I never said "the whole of Africa" was shitty - why are you putting words in my mouth?

All I said was that Africa does have a bunch of shitty regimes, relative to most other places on Earth. This is true - I talked about Afwerki and Kais Saied, but I could've mentioned Paul Biya, or Museveni, or Teodoro Mbasogo, or any number of violent dictators or corrupt governments that have managed to remain in power. In comparison to, say, Europe, it is indisputable that things like freedom of the press, democratic participation and free elections, or the Human Development Index, are lower. While it is true that there are a number of stable regimes with societies that are becoming better to live in, the continent in general, on average, compared to other continents, remains less developed and in the grasp of more dictatorial regimes.

This wasn't a statement intended to generalize the people living in Africa (as, quite obviously, the people from South Africa have a markedly different set of cultures than the people from Kenya, for instance), and it certainly isn't "because they're Africans" or whatever; the simple reason this is the case is that, much like the Middle-East, the continent has been r*ped by centuries of reckless colonization by imperialist powers that care not for cultural boundaries or human rights and have divided the land like fuckin' contestants at a competition for artistic cake-cutting.