By Charles Pemu 
The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) is embarking on a pivotal strategic shift, vowing to end the era of raw commodity and mineral exports from the continent while championing domestic industrial processing.
The bank’s new President, George Elombi, revealed this bold agenda at his swearing-in ceremony, where he pledged that his tenure would focus intensely on transforming African raw materials into finished goods.
“No more Nigerian bauxite, or Gabonese manganese, or Cameroonian bauxite, or South African bauxite, raw. We are not interested. We will focus on domestic processing. This has numerous benefits,” Elombi declared, signaling a radical departure from past commodity export models.
Afreximbank will solidify this new focus by creating a new high-impact financing window specifically dedicated to projects that process raw minerals into semi-finished or finished goods.
The bank intends to establish a strategic minerals development programme designed to finance entire value chains, covering everything from extraction and refining to the eventual manufacturing of finished components. Elombi noted that this approach is crucial because less than twenty percent of investment typically goes into mineral extraction, while the overwhelming majority—over eighty percent—is directed toward essential supporting infrastructure like railways, ports, power stations, and roads.
Infrastructure Push to Boost Intra-African Trade
Beyond industrial processing, the Afreximbank President highlighted poor infrastructure as a major bottleneck impeding intra-African trade. To address this, his administration will accelerate investments in critical trade-enabling infrastructure projects that directly connect African markets to one another.
Priority will be given to modernizing seaports, constructing vital highways and rail lines, and building specialized logistics hubs, warehousing facilities, and pipelines. The focus will be on infrastructure that links production centres directly with markets, a crucial step to unlocking trade potential and significantly lowering the cost of doing business across the continent.
In line with this new mandate, Afreximbank reaffirmed its commitment to partner with the Ogun State government in Nigeria. President Elombi stressed that partnerships are already in place to drive finance for a planned fabric processing zone in the state, directly supporting the objective of moving raw materials through to finished goods.