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Grieve Chelwa is currently Associate Professor of Political Economy and Chair of the Social Sciences Department at The Africa Institute. He has previously held academic and administrative positions at the New School, the University of Cape Town and Harvard University where he was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Center for African Studies.

Marion Ouma is a research associate with the South Africa Research Chair Initiative (SARChl) on Social Policy at the University of South Africa, where she also completed her PhD. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Nordic Africa institute, Uppsala, Sweden and has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.

 For issue #135 of The Internationalist, we continue our conversation with Chelwa and Ouma on the themes of their latest book, Can Africans Do Economics?

You can read Part 1 here.

Tanya: How have corporate extraction policies shaped—and still harm—Africa’s economy? What would a truly emancipatory development path look like today?

Marion Ouma: The exploitation of Africa began in the colonial era—yes—and it has never truly ended. The extraction of resources by colonizers didn’t just shape Africa’s economic and social structures in the past; it continues to define them today. Extraction persists in countless ways—copper from Zambia, oil from Nigeria, cobalt from the DRC—all feeding into a system designed to keep Africa dependent. The legacy of colonial plunder is unmistakable, visible in the economic stagnation and social struggles that haunt so many African nations.

At the heart of this problem is a brutal cycle: African countries remain locked into exporting raw materials while foreign corporations—often backed by their home governments—extract, refine, and sell back finished products at inflated prices. The global trade system, enforced by institutions like the WTO, ensures that Africa stays a supplier of cheap commodities rather than an industrial competitor. The rules are rigged. Countries are pressured to export copper, cobalt, and oil in their rawest forms, stripping them of any chance to develop their own manufacturing sectors. The result? Minimal economic gain, with most profits flowing outward while African nations are left with scraps.

But the damage goes beyond economics. The human cost is staggering. In mines and oil fields across the continent, workers endure deplorable conditions—low wages, dangerous environments, and little recourse. The environmental destruction is just as severe. Extraction is, at its core, an act of violence—against the land, against communities, against any possibility of sustainable development. And yet, despite the vast wealth pulled from their soil, countries like the DRC and Nigeria remain mired in poverty. The resources are taken, the land is left scarred, and the people see no improvement in their lives.

This isn’t accidental. It’s by design. The corporations doing the extracting are extensions of their home nations—wealthy, industrialized powers that benefit from keeping Africa in a subordinate role. Africa serves as a feedstock for the Global North, its resources funneled out, processed elsewhere, and sold back at prices set by those who hold the power. Even the tariffs and trade policies—like those imposed under Trump—are tools to ensure African exports stay cheap and African economies stay weak. When prices crash, budgets collapse, and nations are forced to beg for loans from the very systems that exploit them.

And so the trap tightens. Loans from the IMF and World Bank come with strings—debts owed in dollars, repayments that drain already struggling economies. Africa is left in a cycle of dependency, forever indebted, forever at the mercy of the same forces that have exploited it for centuries. Meanwhile, other regions—Southeast Asia, for example—have managed to industrialize, to grow, to escape the worst of poverty. But Africa, despite its immense wealth, now holds the largest share of the world’s poor.

Is this intentional? Yes. How else can we explain decades of so-called independence with no real sovereignty over resources? The system is built to keep Africa poor, to keep it exporting, to keep it from ever challenging the global order. The question isn’t just about extraction—it’s about power. Who controls the wealth? Who sets the terms? Until that changes, the exploitation will never end.

Grieve Chelwa: We also need to return to those fundamental aspirations from the immediate post-independence era. Every nation that's achieved meaningful sovereignty and emancipation has done so through industrialization—there's simply no other way. Look at China's transformation in our own lifetimes—from a marginal player to a global power now standing toe-to-toe with the United States in this tariff war. That didn't happen by accident. It came through deliberate value addition, through moving beyond raw commodity exports to actual manufacturing and production.

This is our urgent lesson: Mozambique can't keep exporting lithium raw, Congo can't keep shipping unprocessed cobalt—not when these very minerals are becoming the lifeblood of the new green economy. We're stuck in this absurd situation where Africa holds the keys to the world's energy transition, yet remains trapped in colonial patterns of extraction. The path forward is clear—industrialize, industrialize, industrialize. Produce finished goods. Add real value. That's how China did it. That's how Japan and other Asian success stories did it. There are no shortcuts.

The China-India comparison is particularly revealing. These neighboring giants started from similar positions but diverged dramatically - one embracing neoliberalism in the 1990s while the other focused relentlessly on building domestic productive capacity. Now, one reshapes global order while the other struggles with uneven development. Even the United States understands this fundamental truth - why else would Trump romanticize America's manufacturing past? Whether the US can realistically return to that model given current labor costs is another question entirely.

For Africa, the industrialization imperative must be continental in scale. Our 54 fragmented nations are too small individually, but together, with over a billion people, growing skills bases, and combined markets, we could build something transformative. First, we make things. Then we master services and finance. Not the other way around. That's the proven sequence of development no one wants to admit: production before post-industrial fantasy.

TS: I’ve always seen the Non-Aligned Movement as the natural vehicle for Global South solidarity—a way for newly independent nations to unite politically and economically. But after neoliberalism’s rise in the 1990s, the movement seemed to fade abruptly. Today, while it feels almost impossible to imagine a similar collective force, BRICS provides some hope.

GC: You're absolutely right. Projects like the Non-Aligned Movement and South-South cooperation—despite their incredible political vision—lacked the necessary economic foundation to sustain them. We were politically aligned, articulating a clear geopolitical agenda, but we never developed a parallel economic agenda robust enough to support our political aspirations. The politics and economics needed to work in tandem, but they didn't.

This disconnect explains so much—why progressive movements often lose momentum after initial enthusiasm, why leftist governments in Latin America rise with huge support only to falter later. We get the politics right, but without an equally strong economic program, the political vision can't be sustained. That's what I'm trying to explore in my chapter—emancipation requires both political and economic transformation. Politics is necessary but not sufficient; it's the economics that makes liberation real and durable.

What's fascinating is that BRICS represents almost the inverse problem. Where the Non-Aligned Movement had strong politics but weak economics, BRICS is developing serious economic alternatives, including a development bank that challenges the IMF and World Bank, discussions about de-dollarisation, and payment systems that bypass Western control. However, its political vision remains unclear. The West's intense opposition to BRICS tells us they recognize its economic threat; where they dismissed the Non-Aligned Movement as merely political, they're attacking BRICS precisely because it's succeeding economically.

Yet this success could be undermined by BRICS's political ambiguity. Is it anti-hegemonic? Committed to multipolarity? What exactly is its political vision beyond economic cooperation? This vagueness creates vulnerabilities. Without clear political principles, BRICS risks being co-opted or divided by Western strategies of infiltration and divide-and-rule.

The solution isn't to abandon BRICS—it remains our best hope—but to explicitly marry its economic achievements with a political agenda worthy of them. Just as emancipation requires both politics and economics, BRICS needs to articulate both clearly if it's to fulfill its potential as a genuine alternative to Western domination. The economic foundation is being laid; now we need the political superstructure to match. Otherwise, we risk repeating history's mistakes in new form.

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