Africa is haemorrhaging an estimated US$25 billion every year to power outages while continuing to export unprocessed raw materials at a fraction of their potential value, Ghana’s Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson has said, warning that the continent faces another generational failure unless governments move decisively from extraction to industrial production within the next twenty-five years.
At the 12th Ishmael Yamson & Associates Business Roundtable in Accra, Ato Forson placed the energy crisis and the trade integration deficit at the heart of a sweeping industrialisation argument, telling an audience of business leaders, policymakers, and financiers that the AfCFTA’s projected US$450 billion boost to continental income by 2035, and the lifting of approximately 30 million Africans out of extreme poverty, would remain unrealised without the structural conditions to make integration functional and industrial output competitive.
Over 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity.
Intra-African trade accounts for only around 15 percent of the continent’s total trade volume, against nearly 70 percent within Europe and over 50 percent across Asia.
Together, he argued, these numbers represent not a development footnote but an indictment of decades of missed structural investment, and a basis for what he called “urgency reflections” among those with the authority to change course.
On energy, Ato Forson was categorical.
It was, he said, “unacceptable” that a continent endowed with gas, hydro, solar, wind, and the critical minerals driving the global energy transition continued to debate industrialisation without first securing reliable and affordable power.
Without electricity, manufacturing cannot scale, logistics cannot modernise, and digital infrastructure cannot function.
Ghana, he noted, is targeting 3,000 megawatts of installed generation capacity by 2030, with a commitment that at least 40 percent of that capacity comes from renewable sources, a signal, he implied, of the seriousness with which Accra is approaching the energy-industry nexus.
The AfCFTA, which he described as among “the most consequential economic projects in modern African history,” cannot deliver its promise through the text of an agreement alone.
“Agreements alone do not create integration,” he said, arguing that efficient borders, cross-border payment systems, harmonised regulations, and policy coordination are the real instruments through which a US$3.4 trillion combined market becomes operationally meaningful for African manufacturers and exporters.
The cost of moving goods across African borders, among the highest in the world, remains a structural tax on continental competitiveness that no trade framework can offset without accompanying infrastructure investment.
Ato Forson extended his argument to the commodities question with deliberate specificity.
The goal, he said, is not simply to extract lithium but to refine it; not to export bauxite but to produce aluminium; not to ship cocoa beans but to “build competitive value chains” around processed chocolate and finished goods.
That shift, from raw export to value-added production, is the defining industrial transition Africa must execute over the next quarter century if it is to avoid repeating a pattern of resource wealth without retained prosperity.
On governance and investor confidence, the Minister drew a direct line between institutional quality and capital allocation.
Investors, he argued, do not simply follow resources; they follow “systems,” by which he meant institutional credibility, policy predictability, rule of law, fiscal discipline, and public trust.
Ghana, he said, remains committed to “sustaining macroeconomic stability” as the precondition for private sector-led growth, framing stability not as an end in itself but as the platform upon which jobs, investment, and industrial capacity are built.
