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"Africa Industrialization Day" or the day of fighting Africa's industrialization?
November 20, 2025 by Muhammad Mahdi Rahimi, journalist and researcher
Imagine a school where several hundred students share a single teacher and only one small classroom suitable for instruction. Now imagine that once a year, the students' parents gather for a day, and the school principal speaks about the necessity of using the world’s most advanced teaching methods and the need to compete with other schools.
This bizarre and questionable situation is remarkably similar to what happens annually under United Nations sponsorship under the title of commemorating Africa Industrialization Day.
“Innovation,” “artificial intelligence,” “eco-friendly production,” “empowering women,” “local and indigenous production.” Where do these words steer your mind? A startup? A transformation blueprint in a European corporation? Part of an academic text on the future of industry in the US? Astonishingly, these are the central themes of gatherings and discussions surrounding Africa Industrialization Day for at least the past five years. For anyone familiar with the state of industry on this continent, such rhetoric immediately raises a red flag: something about this situation is deeply troubling.
 
The colonizers do not wish to leave
With the end of traditional colonialism in the years following World War II, independence movements took root across Africa, and the colonizers, weakened by war no longer had the capacity to maintain a permanent military presence on the pre-war scale. France and Britain’s last attempts at permanent military occupation, in Kenya and Algeria, ended in failure, prompting the aging European victors of the war to devise new strategies for returning to Africa and seizing its natural resources.
Africa was also a key theater for the Western Cold War against the Soviet Union. This very rivalry between the West and the USSR created conditions for the advancement of some African nations—particularly the Arab countries of North Africa. However, for the sub-Saharan African nations, the story was not meant to end so simply. Using economic and political instruments, the West once again established its foothold in Africa to exploit its abundant resources. Copper, oil, cobalt, diamonds, uranium, and gold were just a portion of the continent’s extraordinary wealth, coveted from those years until now.
Hundreds of years of war, plunder, and European colonialism had destroyed much of Africa’s educational, cultural, and industrial infrastructure. With the withdrawal of the colonial powers, the resulting political and economic vacuums prevented newly independent countries from enacting lasting changes in their economic and industrial development. Civil war, poverty, and a lack of effective policy-making paved the way for Europe’s return. It was at this point that the western financial institutions returned to Africa, using instruments such as coups, as in Ghana, or negotiating with incumbent governments.
Loans were the primary tool of entry. The initial loans, granted to African countries for investment in the mining and raw material export sectors, were structured with repayment timelines that made actual repayment virtually impossible. In the early years, the funds were spent on building essential infrastructure like roads, healthcare, and education; or, in corrupt governments linked to Europe, it was divided among the powerful; or lost as the prices of minerals would collapse. These factors forced most African borrowers to turn once more to the international institutions, this time from a subordinated position, accepting their terms for loan extensions or new financing.
 
Loans arrive with consultants and legal bills
The conditions set by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for extending installments and granting new loans placed African countries into a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle. Henceforth, new loans were spent under the supervision of these institutions’ consultants, and the economic policies they prescribed had to be transformed into law, becoming the new economic structure of these countries.
Very quickly, these consultations and the imposed neoliberal policy left African governments defenseless. The main features of these policies were economic austerity, the privatization of mines and industries, and money printing. The limited educational, healthcare, and industrial infrastructure that had developed in the wake of independence movements soon lost government support. Privatizing the mines once again placed ownership in the hands of wealthy European companies, effectively draining governments of the stable revenue they needed for national development beyond debt repayment.