Addis Ababa, May 31, 2025 (FMC) – African countries should leverage their abundant resources to focus on food sovereignty, energy, and developing a robust industry, Fadhel Kaboub, associate professor of economics at Denison University and president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity underscored.
In a Zoom interview with local news agency ENA, Kaboub emphasized that colonialism created specific economic structures that assigned a particular economic role to the African continent, and these structures persist to this day.
As a result of this legacy, he said, African countries are forced to produce inexpensive raw materials for the industrialized world.
Additionally, this extractive system has turned African countries into consumers of industrial output and technologies from industrialized countries.
Furthermore, the existing extractive economic model has made Africa the destination for obsolete technologies and assembly-line manufacturing no longer needed in industrialized countries, Kaboub argues.
According to the associate professor, this legacy has led to food and energy deficits, as well as a lack of value-added manufacturing in Africa.
In the long run, this creates serious fiscal policy constraints, he underlined.
He argued that if African countries are committed to achieving sustainable economic development, then the economic structures that have placed the continent in its current position must be dismantled and the system must be decolonized.
Moreover, Kaboub argued that the solution must lie in targeting the root cause of the problem, which is investing in food sovereignty in African countries to ensure they can feed their people.
Citing Africa’s former reputation as the breadbasket of its colonies, he urged African countries to invest more in agriculture and reduce their reliance on foreign food sources.
He said Africa has a large amount of renewable energy sources and must salvage this capacity to sustain economic development.
Furthermore, he suggested that African countries focus on industrial policies that allow them to escape the bottom of the value chain.
Specifically, he called on African countries to focus on regional and continental industries to control the entire value chain, achieve economies of scale, and expand their national industrial economies.