I laughed at that too. Let's take the hard way out and test these admittedly-ridiculous-to-deploy web stacks instead of spending a few minutes installing a LAMP stack.
PHP can scale too: look at Facebook as an example or any hugely popular website running Wordpress/Drupal. Where do you want so spend your time: scaling your PHP production environment or configuring your JVM/rvm/Python/Passenger?
Actually, I think the line in my post is correct, I was specifically referring to this happening in Africa and I am not aware if it happens in other countries.