I think you could sum up the problem by saying that aviation is meant for use in a disciplined, relatively wealthy environment. To try to foster it in undisciplined, flat broke Africa means that failure is a given.
You get operators trying to run machinery that requires regular, expensive servicing without budgeting for that, using operators who do not get regular, expensive recurrent training, overseen by corrupt governments.
Here, you really have to ask if there is a safety problem? A quick look at the accident statistics shows that, doesn't it? The rest is just discussion of the flamin' obvious.
In the First World we do stuff that makes no sense to an African of a certain stripe, taking apart a perfectly functioning machine and throwing away perfectly good parts, just because some stupid sheet of paper says 'At 3000 hours you must exchange the knurled frabulators.' Well, given that the knurled frabulators cost 10 thousand dollars each and that they are working just fine, plus that there are two of them, why not just pencil-whip that item and carry on until one of the two breaks? Ah-henh! And then, if there is still no money in the knurled frabulator replacement budget, you carry on until the other one breaks. At that point either you are lucky and it turns out that the knurled frabulator is not as safety-critical as the manufacturer seemed to think or else you have some sort of accident. At that point you go out of the airline business with immediate effect to retreat until the dust settles.
Of course one must take into account that I am a total racist prick even to think this, let alone write it. On the other hand, I have seen a Boeing 737 operating during the hours of darkness with no, zero, position lights for a period of days. Okay, the beacons were operating, otherwise I would be lying to say that I had seen the aircraft, instead of just seeing a black outline where it was, but still.... I am sure the crew were under threat of being sacked if they did not fly without the required lights but in the First World such a thing is unthinkable. In Africa worse things happen all the time.
To fly, instead of to travel by mammy wagon or ox cart, is inherently expensive. The way the game is run in Nigeria, for instance, means that people can travel below the real cost of properly-run air travel, when this is done in various ways. At some point inevitable reality catches up, when either there is a crash or an operator goes bust, and Nigeria has run through something like 30 airlines in recent history, many departing the scene after some horrific accidents.
The latest, Arik, is in prolonged death throes when it was obviously doomed from the start, with the next one already in the starting blocks ready to repeat the same nonsense, and so it will go until the oil money finally runs out.