Selling to More Buyers is Not Economic Freedom for Africa, By Collins Nweke  

Diversifying export destinations may reduce risk, but it does not necessarily change Africa’s place in the global economy. The real prize is building industrial partnerships that create value, competitiveness and resilience on both sides.

In April, my colleagues at the CBL-ACP Chamber of Commerce and I were in Nigeria meeting entrepreneurs, institutional leaders, public officials, and the media. Our immediate purpose was practical: to mobilise serious Nigerian participation in the 2026 Nigeria Belgium Luxembourg Business Forum in Brussels. But beneath every meeting lay a larger question about the economic relationship we are trying to build.

The response has been remarkable. Nigerian business leaders came forward with ambition, experience, and concrete propositions. Back in Belgium and Luxembourg, and across the wider European business community, we encountered not merely polite interest but invested companies, financiers and institutions looking for credible opportunities and dependable African counterparts.

Now, only days before we gather in Brussels, I find myself preparing for two related conversations. One will be with my visiting Nigerian friends. The other will be with my European friends. They may begin from different experiences, but they concern the same question: what would it take to convert commercial interest into a fair, productive and durable economic relationship?

My answer is becoming clearer. Africa does not need a greater number of relationships that reproduce the same old economic structure. It needs multi-alignment that expands its productive choices. And Europe should not regard this as an African demand to be accommodated at European expense. Fairer industrial partnerships can strengthen Europe’s own supply security, competitiveness, market access and geopolitical resilience.

What I will say to my Nigerian friends
To my Nigerian friends, I will say that multi-alignment cannot mean presenting the same unprocessed commodity to a longer queue of prospective buyers. Selling crude oil, cocoa, lithium or other raw materials to five competing powers instead of two may diversify customers. It does not necessarily transform our position in the value chain.

If extraction still occurs in Africa, processing elsewhere, technology ownership abroad and profit accumulation outside the continent, the destinations may have changed but the dependence has not. We should call this what it is: diversified dependence. Genuine multi-alignment must give an African country greater capacity to compare offers, impose credible conditions, switch partners when necessary and retain more value at home. It should generate competing propositions involving finance, processing, technology, skills, market access, and supplier development. The purpose is not to replace dependence on one partner with dependence on another. It is to enlarge strategic choice.

But sovereignty requires preparation. Nigerian delegations cannot arrive in Brussels with aspiration alone. They must bring investable projects, competent counterparties, transparent ownership structures, realistic financial requirements, and credible implementation plans. Investors are entitled to regulatory predictability, contract enforcement and evidence that the required energy, logistics and workforce will be available.

The conversion chain is demanding: strategic priority must become an investable project; the project must attract appropriate finance and a capable counterparty; implementation must produce a commercial outcome; and that outcome must create measurable national value. Diplomatic access may open the door. Domestic capacity determines what comes through it.

What I will say to my European friends
To my European friends, I will say that supporting African industrialisation is not economic charity. Nor does it require Europe to sacrifice its prosperity so that Africa may advance. The stronger argument is one of enlightened economic self-interest. Europe needs diversified and dependable supplies of critical minerals, cleaner industrial inputs and resilient value chains. It also needs new markets for its machinery, engineering, financial services, pharmaceuticals, digital systems, and specialist knowledge. An industrialising Africa can provide both. A permanently extractive Africa will remain a smaller market, a more fragile supplier and an increasingly dissatisfied partner.

The evidence is already visible. According to European Union trade data, trade between the EU and Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana has more than doubled since their interim Economic Partnership Agreements began operating. Processed cocoa now represents a substantially larger share of both countries’ cocoa exports to Europe. EU-South Africa trade has also grown since 2016, while transport equipment has become an important higher-value component of that relationship.

The South African vaccine manufacturer Biovac offers an even more concrete example. European and international financing is helping to build African manufacturing capacity and skilled employment. At the same time, around half of the equipment for the new facility is expected to come from European suppliers. Africa gains production, technology and health resilience. European firms gain commercial opportunities. The world gains additional vaccine capacity. That is not aid disguised as trade. It is productive interdependence.

The same logic can apply to green industry. Africa’s renewable-energy potential can support the production of green iron, ammonia and other intermediate goods. Europe can use those inputs to reduce the cost of industrial decarbonisation while retaining important downstream manufacturing. Africa can capture more value than it would through the export of raw minerals or energy alone. The intelligent choice is not between keeping every production stage in Europe and relocating entire industries to Africa. It is to determine where each stage can be performed competitively while producing shared value.

The commercial cost of waiting
There is also an urgency that European policymakers and companies should not underestimate. Europe retains a very substantial stock of investment in Africa, but other partners are moving rapidly from diplomacy into commercial ecosystems. Chinese engagement, for example, is increasingly extending beyond infrastructure and resource extraction into privately financed manufacturing, industrial parks, component supply and regional distribution.

Recent analysis places Chinese direct investment in African manufacturing at almost eight billion US dollars in 2025, more than fifty per cent above its 2016 level. This does not mean that Africa should simply exchange a Western dependency for a Chinese one. It means that Europe cannot rely indefinitely on historical familiarity or political declarations while competitors establish factories, suppliers, standards and customer relationships. The partner that helps build Africa’s production systems today will be better positioned to supply its machinery, finance its expansion, shape its technical standards and serve its consumers tomorrow. The earlier Western economies embrace fairer trade relations, the stronger their own long-term commercial position is likely to be.

Fairness does not suspend commercial reality
None of this means that every mineral-producing country should construct its own refinery, smelter or battery factory. Industrial policy cannot succeed by declaration. Processing requires affordable electricity, reliable feedstock, adequate water, transport infrastructure, skilled workers, patient finance and committed buyers.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has warned that uncoordinated national processing mandates can produce small, competing plants that never achieve commercial scale. Africa therefore needs regional industrial strategies: processing hubs serving several countries, shared power and transport infrastructure, compatible standards and coordinated investment incentives. The African Continental Free Trade Area should provide the market architecture for this approach.
Fair trade must also be reciprocal in responsibility. African governments must reduce arbitrary regulation, opaque contracting and policy instability. European governments must examine tariff escalation, restrictive standards and financing structures that make it easier to export African raw materials than African processed goods. Companies on both sides must accept that local employment figures alone do not prove transformation. The deeper tests are supplier development, workforce learning, technology diffusion, tax contribution and the capacity of local firms to move into more valuable activities.

The conversation we need in Brussels
This is the conversation I hope we will have at the Nigeria Belgium Luxembourg Business Forum. The purpose cannot be another round of handshakes, photographs and declarations of goodwill. It must be to move serious propositions through the difficult middle between interest and outcome.

I will be asking my Nigerian friends for preparedness, institutional discipline and commercially credible projects. I will be asking my European friends for imagination and a longer investment horizon. Nigeria must present opportunities capable of surviving due diligence. Europe must recognise that the strongest relationship is not necessarily the one that extracts the cheapest input today, but the one that helps create tomorrow’s customers, suppliers and industrial partners.

I approach this conversation with a stake in both continents. I do not write for Africa against Europe, or in defence of Europe against Africa. I write for fair trade relations. That means acknowledging Africa’s responsibility to make itself investment-ready while asking Europe to move beyond an extractive understanding of supply security.

Africa does not need its partners to choose African prosperity over their own interests. It needs them to recognise that the two interests increasingly converge. The durable partnership will not be the one that extracts the most at the lowest immediate cost. It will be the one that leaves both sides more productive, more resilient and less dependent than before.