European countries created African country borders without an understanding (or care) of the culture and relationships/feuds between a whole continent of people. They put these people together in countries and flipped all of that long history upside down.
As far as the S/W engineering take away -- simply put, an interface allows two disparate pieces of code to work together. One compiled piece of code, for example, can interact with another piece of code, which could be written and compiled years after the initial.
I think you're thinking of the wrong thing. govWorks was more of a digitization of traffic ticket payment/appeal, property registration, and other minor government admin processes. You must be thinking of Startup Junkies, which was a series on MoJo - a former/original HD channel.