For decades, African countries have exported vast quantities of valuable minerals in a raw, unprocessed form, only to later buy back the finished products made from them. Increasingly, this dynamic is seen as unacceptable if economies are going to grow.
"A situation in which the raw minerals are extracted from our countries, exported, refined, and sold to us as finished products merely consolidates the foundations of our misery and pushes us further down the depths of underdevelopment,” said Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu recently. “We must end the cycle of exporting rocks and importing finished goods."
