Reindustrializing Africa: In praise of Aliko Dangote

“We believe industrialization is the key to Nige-ria’s economic prosperity and we also believe Nigerians should drive the industrialization process. As a practical demonstration of our business philosophy, we have massive investments in the real sector both within and outside the country. Currently, we have over 13 subsidiaries in Nigeria and operations in 14 other […]

“We believe industrialization is the key to Nige-ria’s economic prosperity and we also believe Nigerians should drive the industrialization process. As a practical demonstration of our business philosophy, we have massive investments in the real sector both within and outside the country. Currently, we have over 13 subsidiaries in Nigeria and operations in 14 other African countries.” Aliko Dangote: ‘Nigeria beyond oil’ at the 2013 9th All Nigerian Editors’ Conference held in Asaba, Delta State

Wednesday, Novem-ber 20th marks 2013 Africa Industrialization Day (AID).  Africa Industrialization Day is celebrated on November 20 each year. It is a day    dedicated by governments and other organizations in many Afri-can countries to examine ways to stimulate Africa’s industrialization process. It is also an occasion to draw worldwide media attention to the problems and challenges of industrialization in Africa.
In the age of systemic corruption and absence of development agenda, social scientists in Africa might very well know the meaning of graft by route than they would be able to define Industrialization. Many thanks to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) which plays an important role in coordinating events on or around Africa on Industrialization Day with special effort to unite leaders or representatives of as many African countries as possible to stimulate discussion on the industrialization of Africa and assess the progress made in the past year.
AID happily returns us back to Development Economics 101 in Africa. The point can therefore not be overstated; Indus-trialization is the “…the process of transforming raw materials, with the aid of labour and capital goods, into (1) consumer goods and services (2) new capital goods which permit more goods (including food) to be produced with the same human resources…” Industrialization is at the heart of development discourse. Industrialization delineates between growth and development of nations. The advantages of industrialization include, creation of sustainable mass decent jobs, lessening of dependency on imports, thus saving scarce foreign exchange and enhanced government revenue through company taxes. The campaign for Industrialization by the nationalist leaders at independence in the 1960s was part of the decolonisation process.
Under Colonialism African colonies were producers of raw materials and consumers of goods and services from the metropolitan Europe. We are all familiar with how according to Walter Rodney, “Europe underdeveloped Africa” through deliberate denial of value additions, exportation of raw materials and dumping of finished products. It was to the credit of Africa’s founding fathers that a decade after independence, they commendably reversed dependence, built factories, trained the hands, mass-employed millions, produced goods and services through value additions which a century long colonialism denied.
In Nigeria, we recall today with nostalgia, the great industrial estates of Ikeja/Ilupeju, Sharada/Bompai Kano, Trans-Amadi of Port Harcourt, Aba and Enugu industrial estates as well as Kakuri, Nassarawa industrial estates of Kaduna among others. In the case of Ghana, late Kwame Nkrumah as far back as 1961 in addition to scores of factories such as the Black Star Line, Beef Factory, Kumasi Jute and Shoe factories, Aboso Glass Factory, Kade Match Factory audaciously established Tema Oil Refinery even without discovery of oil and gas then! African founding fathers certainly had a vision of beneficiation and worked their vision through aggressive, industrialisation and internal articulation of their economies which in the 60s and 70s which made them ahead of countries like China, India, Indonesia in terms of manufacturing value added. Alas today, we are inadvertently back to deindustrialization of the colonial era.
Africa is a resource rich continent yet it has low levels of industrialisation, with materials being exported in its raw forms. Some African leaders gullibly talk agonize about  ‘resource curse’ when the founding fathers long foresaw resource blessings, promoted strong industrial policies that recognized manufacturing as a key engine of growth for national economies. •        UNIDO (2004) shows that manufacturing industry in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lags behind other developing regions in almost all measures of economic development, namely income per head, industrialization and agricultural productivity. The distribution of manufacturing activity in SSA, measured by the dollar value of manufacturing value added (MVA), is highly skewed. Indeed with the exceptions of South Africa and Mauritius, MVA per head in the 15 most industrialized countries is very low.
South Africa is the only country in which manufacturing plays a major role in both domestic output and exports, while Mauritius, an island with a population of only1.2 million inhabitants, is best described as an export platform. Nigeria that once in 70s and early 80s boasted of robust manufacturing sector contributing as much as 25 per cent of GDP has fallen down on manufacturing ladder to less than 5 per cent of GDP relying on extractive sector of oil and gass with very lilltle value addition. Against this background, we must single out Alhaji Alilko Dangote as the new African re-industrialiser.
Undoubtedly the richest man in the continent, but what increasingly marks Aliko out is his commitment to value addition and beneficiation to the abundant raw materials in the continent. African development observers were recently excited about the bold corporate decision of the Dangote Group, the West African conglomerate for to blaize the trail in Re-industrialising Africa through an unprecedented investment of $9billion in oil refinery and petrochemical complex in Nigeria. The refinery located at the Olokola Liquefied Natural Gas (OKLNG) Free Trade Zone in Nigeria would be Nigeria’s first private and Africa’s largest petroleum refinery, with a projected daily production output of 400,000 barrels a day, the same capacity of the combined 4 Nigerian government-owned refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna.