Idrissa Diabira: Industrialise Africa or Stay Sitting on the Ground!

Less than 5% of working Africans hold formal employment. Every year, 20 million young people enter the labor market, while only about 3 million formal jobs are created. This gap fuels precarity, economic exile, and instability. It’s not merely an economic issue — it’s a matter of collective sovereignty and social dignity. Without industrialisation, there can be no large-scale job creation, no strategic autonomy, and no locally captured added value.

Yet the countries that built industrial power have always done so based on a strong collective narrative — one that gave meaning and legitimacy to the productive effort. In the United States, the 1953 Small Business Act extended the myth of the self-made man — the free entrepreneur forging his own destiny. By protecting SMEs, it cemented an ideal in which economic success became a near moral obligation.

“ It’s not merely an economic issue — it’s a matter of collective sovereignty and social dignity”

In Japan, after the Meiji era and post-war reconstruction, industrialisation advanced under the maxim 和魂洋才 (wakon yōsai) — “Japanese spirit, Western techniques” — absorbing global know-how without rejecting the collective spirit: discipline, hierarchical respect, pride in well-executed work. This imagination aligned personal sacrifice with national industrial ambition.

In Malaysia, the New Economic Policy of the 1980s, born from interethnic fractures, forged an ethos blending Islamic values (solidarity, integrity), Confucian heritage (discipline, hierarchy), and Malay pride. This composite narrative enabled industrial upgrading and strong local content strategies.

Why has Africa struggled to generate such momentum?

Because since independence, our trajectories have remained tethered to imported models, leaving our economies outward-facing and lacking an endogenous industrial foundation. In the 1960s–70s, Africa replicated the South American model: shaky state-owned industries that collapsed at the first shock. Then came the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s–90s, liberalising markets at full speed and dismantling what was left. The result: Africa deindustrialised before it even had the chance to industrialise.

Cheikh Anta Diop reminded us that no renaissance is possible without cultural grounding. Felwine Sarr urges us to “reclaim our imagination,” to invent our own horizons of meaning instead of passively absorbing those imposed from elsewhere. To industrialise is precisely that: to make production an expression of our ethos, not a servile imitation.

Through our SMEs and our African ethos

 We must rethink the SME paradigm: differentiate survival micro-businesses, intermediate SMEs that need consolidation, and “transformational” SMEs that must be integrated into ambitious policies — industrial zones, clusters, local content. But above all, we must build a shared African imagination that values creation, innovation, and risk-taking beyond rent-seeking logic. This ethos can draw from our own resources: Jula trading networks, Hausa solidarity, Mouride entrepreneurship — to become the cultural foundation of true African Small Business Acts.

“I call for an African Small Business Act — not as a copy-paste, but as a hybrid architecture combining visible institutions and invisible ones”

I call for an African Small Business Act — not as a copy-paste, but as a hybrid architecture combining visible institutions (agencies, financing, special zones) and invisible ones (social norms, trust, shared narratives). Just as the U.S. sanctified the self-made man, Japan fused modern techniques with local spirit, and Malaysia anchored its industry in identity, Africa must invent its own productive narrative.

To industrialise Africa is not merely to build factories. It is to assert our economic and cultural sovereignty, create formal employment for millions of youth, and embed our continent into global value chains — no longer on the margins, but with agency.

Joseph Ki-Zerbo expressed it in a striking phrase:
“He who does not sit on his mat, sits on the bare ground.”

If we do not build our industrialisation on our imaginations, our solidarities, and our African ethos, we will remain seated on the ground — dependent, and unable to capture the value we failed to create.

* Idrissa Diabira is a practitioner-scholar, CEO of Sherpa – Driving to the Next Africa, former Director General of ADEPME Senegal (1st in ECOWAS, 3rd in Africa according to ITC), and Team Leader for ROGEAP.