Founder and Executive Chairman of BUA Group, Abdul Samad Rabiu, has called on African governments, financiers and business leaders to rethink the continent’s development model by prioritising industrial processing and value addition instead of simply exporting raw materials.
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Rabiu made the call while speaking as Special Guest of Honour at a forum organised by the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) during Mining Indaba 2026. The event brought together policymakers, investors and industry players to examine the future of mining and industrial growth in Africa.
He praised AFC for its consistent role in providing long-term funding for key sectors and noted that its recent positive rating from S&P Global highlights how vital strong development finance institutions are to Africa’s economic progress.
Using BUA Group as an example, Rabiu reflected on the company’s decision more than 16 years ago to abandon cement importation and invest in domestic production, despite the heavy capital requirements and long waiting period before returns.
“At that time, Nigeria had abundant limestone, yet we were importing cement,” he said. “We found ourselves spending more energy searching for foreign exchange than actually doing business. The real issue was not the availability of resources, but the courage to produce locally.”
Today, BUA extracts and processes about 40,000 tonnes of limestone every day, producing nearly one million tonnes of cement monthly. According to Rabiu, that move helped turn Nigeria from an importer into a net exporter, saving billions of dollars in foreign exchange each year.
He credited much of this success to patient financing from development institutions, especially AFC, which has provided more than $400 million to support BUA’s industrial expansion. A large share of those loans, he added, has already been repaid, proving that properly structured African projects can be both impactful and profitable.
Looking at the wider continent, Rabiu pointed to what he called a troubling contradiction: Africa is rich in natural resources but continues to ship most of them abroad in raw form, missing out on the real value created through processing.
From gold and copper to diamonds and cocoa, he said, Africa supplies global industries yet receives only a small portion of the wealth generated.
“Africa does not lack resources,” Rabiu stressed. “What we lack is the capacity to process them at scale and the discipline to follow through.”
He noted that the situation is similar in agriculture, where the continent holds vast arable land but still spends billions annually on food imports.
Rabiu therefore urged governments, financiers and private investors to work together. He called on development finance institutions to expand long-term funding for industrial value chains, while governments should create policies that encourage local production and invest in infrastructure such as power and transportation.
“Industrialisation is deliberate,” he said. “Nations that achieved it did so through careful planning. Africa must be intentional too.”
He concluded that the continent’s real opportunity lies in combining entrepreneurship, patient capital and supportive policies to shift from exporting raw materials to building industries that generate jobs, wealth and shared prosperity.
