Towards Post-Neocolonial Industrialization and Economic Sovereignty of the African Nations

This article explores the strategic necessity of sovereign industrialization as a means for African states to overcome the structural legacies of neocolonial exploitation and break the cycle of chronic underdevelopment. The African experience demonstrates that imported models based solely on deregulation and liberalization fail to address the root causes of underdevelopment and instead reproduce the colonial economic architecture under new ideological banners. By analyzing the intersection of development theory, exploitative neocolonial heritage, and the extractive effect of the contemporary global value chains, contrasted to the earlier Soviet-led approach successes, it argues that industrialization, grounded in the sovereign economic development doctrine, national independence, and self-determination, is essential for resisting Western economic domination and achieving long-term development beneficial to African people. The article, based on the identified barriers to industrial development and inherited weakness of the neoliberal governance, advocates for a new, sovereign economic developmental model and industrial policies. Without a deliberate strategy of industrialization rooted in sovereign control over national resources and production systems, African states will remain trapped in a neocolonial matrix of dependency. Industrialization is not merely a path to higher GDP; rather, it is the foundation for reclaiming political and economic sovereignty in Africa. With such a revival of the industrial policy approach to sovereign economic development, with a new wave of development thinking imbuing their governments, and with the help of the key nations and institutions of the multipolar order, the African states will be able to exit the vicious cycle of external domination and internal stagnation.