Ghanaian business magnate and University of Cape Coast Chancellor, Sir Sam Jonah, is urging African economies to place the private sector at the centre of the continent’s industrial and trade transformation.
Speaking at the launch of the Africa Trade Summit 2026, he underscored the long-standing challenge of exporting raw materials while importing finished goods— a pattern he noted has deprived the continent of meaningful value for more than half a century and effectively outsourced jobs.
“When are we going to move from merely exporting to whatever we want to producing what the world needs. For more than half a century, we have exported cocoa, gold, timber, oil, and bauxite, yet the jobs, technologies, and the real value of those have been treated elsewhere.
“Every time we ship our raw materials and import finished ones, we effectively export jobs and import unemployment, and we cannot and must not industrialize if we continue to feed other people’s factories instead of building our own.
“The transformation we seek will not happen in ministry conference room, it will not happen in committee and not in reports. It happens in the real world through businesses, through factories operating consistently, through entrepreneurs solving people’s problems, through investors taking long-term bets and through regional supply chains linking producers to markets. That is why the private sector must be at the very centre of Africa’ industrial and trade transformation,” he said.
Sir Sam Jonah stressed the need for African countries to draw lessons from Asian economies such as Singapore, South Korea and China, whose disciplined industrial strategies helped drive rapid economic transformation.
“If Singapore with no natural resources could build industries from scratch, what excuse do we have with all the wealth that we are endowed with?
“We cannot keep admiring Asian success from afar. We must apply the principles: discipline, long-term vision, private sector partnerships and regional integration,” he added.
