More a marathon than a sprint

VIEWED from above, the great steel roofs of Nigeria’s textile mills are an impressive sight, occupying block after block in the northern city of Kano. Yet from the ground a very different picture emerges. Entire estates sit eerily empty in what was once the country’s industrial heartland. A handful of indigo-dye pits and the odd leather tannery constitute what little is left of a manufacturing business that was booming just a couple of decades ago. The collapse of Nigeria’s textile industry, which has gone from employing more than 350,000 people to fewer than a tenth as many, reflects a wider problem of deindustrialisation across Africa that has occurred during a decade of rapid growth driven by high commodity prices.

Over the past 15 years sub-Saharan African economies have expanded at an average rate of about 5% a year, enough to have doubled output over the period. They were helped largely by a commodities boom that was caused, in part, by rapid urbanisation in China. As China’s economy has slowed, the prices of many commodities mined in Africa have slumped again. Copper, for instance, now sells for about half as much as it did at its peak. This, in turn, is hitting Africa’s growth: the IMF reckons it will slip to under 4% this year, leading many to fret that a harmful old pattern of commodity-driven boom and bust in Africa is about to repeat itself. One of the main reasons to worry is that Africa’s manufacturing industry has largely missed out on the boom.