I think it's correct, but it's not a govornement cover up. It's a subconcious cover up most people seem to nourish. It's the same mechanism behind giving money to aid.
Here's my theory. We seem to like the 3rd world being poorer than us and when we send them aid it makes us feel a little better about ourselves. But this needs the 3rd world to be poor, so we subconciously fight their possibilities to become modern and industrialised. Just this thing with solar panels in the country-side of Nigeria. It's an extremely expensive way of producing power. We would never atempt to pull it off in Europe. It's economically undefensible.
So it's basically down to good old racism, but prettied up so much that we might even fool ourselves we aren't racists.