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AFRICAN Union chairman President Robert Mugabe’s Africa Day message was couched around the need for the countries on the continent to industrialise their economies and move away from the continued exportation of their raw materials at very low prices for beneficiation and value addition in other countries.

The President said the raw materials usually returned to Africa as finished goods at very high prices and in this regard the continent should leverage the abundant and diverse resources for its benefit. “Africa is richly endowed with vast natural resources which, if harnessed in accordance with our vision, Agenda 2063, will improve the livelihoods of the peoples of Africa, through the rapid eradication of hunger, poverty and disease,” said President Mugabe.

“As a Union, we must build an Africa that is prosperous, an Africa that is economically integrated and politically guided by the ideals of Pan Africanism, an Africa that subscribes to democracy, respects human rights, and respects the rule of law. We must have a peaceful and secure Africa, an Africa with its own cultural identity, common heritage and shared values, an Africa whose development is based on the creativity of its people, particularly its youth and women.”

We feel the President’s message is apt coming in a year in which the continent adopted its economic blueprint, Agenda 2063, which will be implemented in Five Ten-Year Plans. Next month, the continent will adopt the first Ten-Year-Plan under Agenda 2063 at its mid-term summit in South Africa that will further expound on the development agenda. Africa is therefore on the path to economic renaissance anchored around the need to beneficiate and add value to its products.

For many years, Africa has acted as a raw material source for the rest of the world, particularly its erstwhile colonial masters. After plundering the continent’s resources during years of colonial rule, Western Europe and to some extent, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada continue to access cheap raw materials from Africa.

Outside South Africa, most African countries provide Europe and the developed world with cheap raw materials and minerals further perpetuating the underdevelopment of the continent. A poignant illustration of Africa’s slow pace of industrialisation was the commissioning of the first ever chocolate factory in the world’s biggest producer of cocoa — Cote d’Ivoire last week.

According to reports from that country, Cote d’Ivoire residents have never quite embraced chocolate as part of the national diet because they never get to enjoy the pleasure of tasting the product whose price is beyond the pockets of average people. Cocoa is Cote d’Ivoire’s biggest cash crop, accounting for 22 percent of gross domestic product, more than half its exports and two-thirds of people’s jobs and incomes, according to the World Bank.

Although it has been the mainstay of the economy since independence from France in 1960, the “brown gold” does not feature strongly in its French-influenced cuisine. Last year a YouTube video went viral showing Ivorian cocoa farmers TASTING CHOCOLATE FOR THE FIRST TIME.

But Cote d’Ivoire’s first major chocolate factory hopes to change all that. With an investment of €6m (£4.28m) and production capacity of 10,000 tonnes per year, the plant will produce chocolate “made in Cote d’Ivoire” on an industrial scale. President Alassane Quattara toured the new facility in Abidjan last week and later told Agence France-Presse: “We wanted to be able to … make chocolate for Ivorians, for Africans and especially West Africans.”

Patrick Poirrier, the chief executive of French chocolatier Cemoi, which owns the plant, said: “The arrival of a new chocolate factory in the world’s largest cocoa producer … will also allow Ivorian planters to finally access the pleasure of chocolate.”

Despite its French ownership, the plant represents a small victory in the continent’s battle to profit from its natural resources instead of exporting them to be processed elsewhere. Botswana has moved towards cutting and polishing its diamonds domestically, creating local jobs while Zimbabwe is working on setting up a cutting and polishing plant in Harare.

Beneficiation is at the centre of the country’s economic blueprint — the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation and we hope other African countries will embrace President Mugabe’s vision and work towards adding value to their natural resources.