Senate President Godswill Akpabio has called for a major shift in Africa’s approach to natural resource management.
He recently urged countries to abandon the habit of exporting unprocessed raw materials and importing finished products.
Speaking recently during the maiden raw materials summit with the theme: “Shaping the Future of Africa’s Resource Landscape,” Akpabio said that African nations cannot continue to restrict themselves to supplying raw materials to the global market, while they profit from innovation, branding, and economic control.
The Senate President disclosed that focusing on importing the finished products gotten from our raw materials is the reason for the challenges Africa keeps battling, including a lack of jobs, poor skills development, and weak tech advancement.
According to him, deciding to extract, while others manufacture, will keep restricting industrial growth and economic sovereignty in African nations, if nothing is done asap to curb the rampant trend.
Stating that the Senate has resolved to be proactive in tackling the structural imbalance, he noted that henceforth, no raw material of Nigerian origin will be exported without undergoing a minimum of 30% local value addition.
“We extract, yet others manufacture. We export in raw form yet import with added value.
It is in this spirit that I reaffirm our full legislative backing for the 30 per cent Minimum Value-Addition Bill, currently under consideration. This groundbreaking bill mandates that no raw material of Nigerian origin shall be exported without undergoing a minimum of 30 per cent local value addition, whether through processing, refining, packaging, or industrial transformation,” he said.
Akpabio said that the legislation is not meant to restrict trade, instead, it is designed to boost domestic enterprise, create employment, invite capital and develop resilient value chains that will benefit Nigerians.
Godswill concluded by saying that it is time to move away from the era of sustaining developed nations and concentrate on local processing, regional integration, and sovereign economic vision.
“This extractive model fuelled by colonial legacies and sustained by global asymmetries must now give way to a new paradigm rooted in local processing, regional integration, and sovereign economic vision.
We must reject the historic pattern in which Africa merely supplies inputs while others reap the benefits of innovation, branding, and global market control. The future of Africa lies not beneath our soil but in what we do with what lies beneath. And what we do must be backed by law, driven by policy, and sustained by enterprise.
Our task is to empower African entrepreneurs, SMEs, cooperatives, and young innovators who will turn mineral wealth into exportable machinery, agro-resources into packaged goods, and research into revenue.
We invite African pension funds, sovereign wealth institutions, and multilateral development banks to direct capital into processing infrastructure, industrial parks, and green energy corridors linked to our raw materials.
We are drafting laws to support climate-smart mining, regenerative manufacturing, and the circular economy. This is our commitment not as a gesture, but as a generational mandate,” he added.
