Afrilition and the prophesy of an African renaissance, By Adéwálé Àjàdì

Afrilition is a call to service to be the generation that is willing to sacrifice comfort so that posterity will stand in excellence. Like the story of Joseph, prophecy is not determinism but a call to duty and commitment in faith so that our vision becomes our fate.

Afrilition expresses ancestral promise and affirmation, and it inevitably strays into a prophetic voice, not just as a spiritual invocation but also as critical engagement with trends and patterns. For me, as a writer, this is not new territory. In the early 2000s, I wrote a piece for Vanguard newspaper based on my experience of a Venezuelan film titled Sequestro Express. It dealt with kidnapping that had become endemic in this oil-rich but deeply divided society. It awakened something in me, and I  wrote to warn that kidnapping on a mass scale was coming to our beloved Nigeria if we did not address the social cracks urgently. The comment section was devastating to my ego, as responses mocked and attacked me; they especially seemed to suggest that living abroad dislocated me from understanding Nigeria. Well, we have watched kidnapping replace armed robbery as Nigeria’s violent pathology.

The thing about prophecy is that only God sees all and is always right; even with the highest gift, we prophesy only in part. Afrilition as part prophecy is showing early signs of alignment. This last week, the IMF published the top 20 countries with the largest GDP based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). The report has two African countries ranked 18th and 19th, respectively: Egypt and Nigeria. PPP ranking provides a better reflection of each country’s true market size, production volume, and domestic purchasing power, without exchange rate distortion. In line with Afrilition‘s prediction, the trend towards economic transformation is emerging. IMF further predicts that Nigeria will be the sixth largest contributor to Global Economic Growth in 2026 by driving 1.5 per cent of all new economic activity in the world.

Some African institutions are acting in very visionary ways, especially in processing African mineral wealth and developing industrial capacity to change patterns from being producers of raw and primary commodities to adding value through industrial processes and producing secondary and finished goods. Kenya has banned all unprocessed minerals, starting September 2026, whilst constructing three local gold refineries. Zimbabwe added to its restrictions on raw lithium concentrate, the extraction of antimony and tungsten in September. Both Guinea and Ghana have prohibited the export of unrefined gold, with stricter raw gold export regulations in Guinea. Malawi and Botswana have also implemented bans on critical transition minerals like cobalt, lithium, manganese, and rare earth elements.

There is the boom in agro-processing and its effect on import substitution, like the ongoing effort of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire to translate their 60 per cent of world cocoa production into processing chocolate, with a 2030 plan to process 80 per cent of their own cocoa beans locally. Ethiopian coffee is going through something similar, and so is the West African cashew.

The Dangote case study is worthy of a standalone, as the level of intention to transform here is a force of true Pan-African imagination. In 2003, at the end of the Obasanjo administration in Nigeria, the outgoing government offered that Nigeria’s moribund refineries in Port Harcourt and Kaduna be sold to a consortium that included Dangote. There was a major public outcry that this was the worst kind of cronyism. Editorial after editorial depicted this proposal as state capture. In my own family, this fuelled a major disagreement between my youngest brother and me. He saw it as part of my glorification of Obasanjo because it seemed, in those days, that he could do no wrong in my sight (things have since changed completely).

My brother’s position had a lot of merit, and so did the editorials because, in a privatised public business, the questions of true value will never end. Had Dangote taken over the Nigerian government refineries, he would have had to go through business by attrition. Today, he has built the largest refinery on the continent and is expanding it towards the largest in the world. He has also broken ground on another refinery for East Africa, while the wind of war has benefited his refinery, so that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz put wind beneath his business wings.

The emergence of these patterns and policies is in line with Afrilition. These are just the beginnings, and the battle to keep Africa as an extractive provider of primary commodities will enter a new and more sophisticated phase beyond the blatant violent destabilisation we see in many corners of the continent.  The most egregious of which is in Sudan and the DRC Congo.

There is the boom in agro-processing and its effect on import substitution, like the ongoing effort of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire to translate their 60 per cent of world cocoa production into processing chocolate, with a 2030 plan to process 80 per cent of their own cocoa beans locally. Ethiopian coffee is going through something similar, and so is the West African cashew. The emergence of these patterns and policies is in line with Afrilition. These are just the beginnings, and the battle to keep Africa as an extractive provider of primary commodities will enter a new and more sophisticated phase beyond the blatant violent destabilisation we see in many corners of the continent.  The most egregious of which is in Sudan and the DRC Congo.

The dreams that Joseph told his brothers did not say they were not stars themselves, but their own insecurity led the brothers to nearly kill him and eventually sell him into slavery. Over the next few decades, there will be many tests of African will to transform and realise its civilisation. Despite African excellence not being to dominate others, this will not stop them from doing all in their power to maintain their chokehold. They will try to keep Africa as an extractive and consumer- or importation-dependent space. Afrilition is a call to service to be the generation that is willing to sacrifice comfort so that posterity will stand in excellence. Like the story of Joseph, prophecy is not determinism but a call to duty and commitment in faith so that our vision becomes our fate.

Adéwálé Àjàdí, a lawyer, creative consultant and leadership expert, is author of the newly released Afrilition: 21st Century African Manifesto, and Omoluwabi 2.0: A Code of Transformation in 21st Century Nigeria.