Millions of ordinary Africans export the ore and import the battery. That blunt economic reality sat at the centre of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s special lecture at the Southern African Development Community Summit in Durban, where he challenged the structural arrangements that have kept African economies locked in a subordinate position within global supply chains since the colonial era.
The civic stakes are direct. African nations continue to ship raw materials abroad while purchasing finished goods at prices set by others, a pattern that drains wealth, suppresses job creation and limits industrial growth at home. The consequence for citizens is not abstract: fewer manufacturing jobs, constrained public revenues, and reduced capacity to fund healthcare and infrastructure.
Additional reference context is available at https://newsnote.co.za/sadc-summit-sets-radical-tone-for-africas-economic-emancipation/.
Ramaphosa traced the problem to deliberate colonial design. “Colonialism did not merely conquer our people and occupy our land. It deliberately fragmented our region. It divided communities, separated producers from markets and constructed transport systems designed to carry Africa’s raw materials to distant shores rather than to connect African economies to one another,” he said. That fragmentation persists today, constraining trade between African nations and weakening the continent’s collective bargaining power in dealings with wealthier economies.
The mineral question is where the daily stakes become sharpest. Africa holds a substantial share of the world’s critical minerals, materials now essential to the global energy transition. Yet those minerals continue to cross African borders in raw form, feeding an industrial revolution elsewhere. “We export the ore and we import the battery. We supply an industrial revolution taking place somewhere else and we then purchase its products at a price set by others. We need to use our own resources to drive our own industrial revolution,” Ramaphosa said.
Several African governments have already introduced policies aimed at encouraging domestic processing and reducing dependence on unprocessed exports. Converting resource wealth into manufacturing capacity, jobs and sustainable growth will require coordinated industrial policy, investment in regional trade, and the infrastructure and skills needed to support higher-value production. The political will is visible; the institutional follow-through is the harder test.
Meanwhile, the broader push for economic independence has intersected with a renewed campaign for reparations for slavery and colonialism. South Africa has backed these calls alongside Ghana, which hosted a summit on the issue in Accra in June and has emerged as a leading voice in the African Union’s reparations campaign. Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni put the argument plainly: “The Jews were compensated for the Holocaust, but Africans were not compensated for the slave trade and the after-effects of colonialism. Africans deserve not only an acknowledgment of the wrongs that were visited on them, but Africans deserve to be compensated.”
Ghana’s role carries particular historical weight. The country was a major departure point in the transatlantic slave trade, with millions of Africans transported from the region to the Americas. As the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence, Ghana has long positioned itself as a Pan-African leader. Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okuzeto Ablakwa described the country’s role as part of that tradition, noting that Ghana proved “it is possible to fight imperial might, and win.”
The broader policy framework shaping these ambitions includes both the SADC Vision 2050 and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, which promote industrialisation, regional integration, infrastructure development and improved living standards. These are not ceremonial documents. They speak directly to employment, healthcare access and the daily economic security of millions of people across the continent.
The question that will define the coming years is whether political declarations translate into sustained coordination on industrial development and regional infrastructure. For citizens across southern Africa and beyond, the answer will determine whether the continent’s resource wealth generates prosperity at home or continues to flow outward, enriching distant economies while leaving the communities above those mineral deposits with little to show for it.