At a pivotal gathering of African leaders, financiers, and industry captains during Mining Indaba 2026, Abdul Samad Rabiu, Founder and Executive Chairman of BUA Group, delivered a compelling call for Africa to redefine its economic future by moving decisively from raw material extraction to large scale industrial processing and value addition.
Speaking as Special Guest of Honour at an Africa Finance Corporation forum, Rabiu urged governments, development finance institutions, and private sector leaders to confront what he described as Africa’s enduring structural paradox: a continent rich in natural resources, yet capturing only a fraction of the value derived from them.
“Africa does not lack resources,” Rabiu stated. “What it lacks is processing capacity, industrial scale, and disciplined execution.”
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His message was clear and urgent. For decades, African economies have relied heavily on exporting minerals and agricultural commodities in raw or minimally processed form including gold, cobalt, copper, iron ore, diamonds, and cocoa while the real wealth is created elsewhere through downstream processing and manufacturing. According to Rabiu, reversing this pattern is not optional; it is essential for sustainable growth and shared prosperity.
Drawing from BUA Group’s own transformation, Rabiu illustrated what deliberate industrial strategy can achieve. Sixteen years ago, Nigeria was heavily dependent on imported cement despite possessing abundant limestone reserves. BUA made the bold decision to pivot from importation to local mining and production, embracing the capital intensive and long gestation realities of heavy industry.
“At the time, we were spending more time chasing foreign exchange than selling cement,” he recalled. “The real question was not whether the resources existed, but whether there was enough conviction to stop importing and start producing locally.”
Today, BUA mines approximately 40,000 tonnes of limestone daily and produces about one million tonnes of cement each month. The result has been transformative. Nigeria has moved from being a net importer to a net exporter of cement, conserving billions of dollars in foreign exchange annually and strengthening domestic industrial capacity.
Rabiu credited this success in part to patient, well structured development finance, particularly the more than 400 million dollars in support provided by the Africa Finance Corporation. He noted that a significant portion of these facilities has already been repaid, underscoring a crucial point. African industrial projects, when properly structured and executed, are not only developmentally impactful but commercially viable and bankable.
He commended AFC’s leadership in mobilising long term capital for Africa’s industrial sectors, highlighting the institution’s recent S and P Global rating with a positive outlook as a testament to the growing credibility of African led development finance.
Beyond mining, Rabiu extended his argument to agriculture. Despite holding a majority of the world’s arable land, Africa continues to import billions of dollars’ worth of food annually. For him, the challenge is not scarcity of resources but insufficient investment in processing, storage, logistics, and industrial systems that convert potential into productivity.
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To unlock this transformation, Rabiu called for alignment across three pillars: policy, capital, and infrastructure. Governments must adopt deliberate policies that incentivise local processing and manufacturing. Development finance institutions should expand long term funding targeted at beneficiation and industrial value chains. Meanwhile, investments in power, transport networks, and integrated industrial systems must accelerate to support scale and competitiveness.
“Industrialisation does not happen by accident,” Rabiu said. “Countries that industrialised did so by design, not by chance. Africa must do the same.”
As conversations at Mining Indaba 2026 focused on the future of mining and real sector development, Rabiu’s message resonated as both a challenge and a roadmap. The continent’s opportunity, he concluded, lies in aligning private enterprise, patient capital, and enabling policy frameworks to move Africa from extraction to transformation and from promise to shared prosperity.
