A former Senior Special Adviser on Industrialisation to the President of the African Development Bank, Professor Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, has released a new book, The Quest for Industrialisation: Pioneering Technology Innovation and Industrial Development in Africa, urging African leaders to prioritise technological capability and manufacturing as the foundation for sustainable growth.
Oyeyinka, a professor of development economics and a globally respected scholar on innovation policy, describes the book as a compilation of his selected works spanning decades of research, policy engagement, and intellectual reflection.
“This book speaks to what I describe as my journey of Intellectual Discovery. The pursuit of knowledge is an endless search for meaning,” he said.
Oyeyinka began his academic career in chemical engineering at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) before earning a master’s degree at the University of Toronto, Canada. However, while preparing for his PhD, he experienced what he calls a defining ‘epiphany’.
“My appetite for engineering was totally replaced by a curiosity to understand better the forces that drive economic growth and why there is so much inequality in society,” he stated.
That moment, inspired by a lecture on technology transfer to developing countries, redirected his career towards development economics and technological change. He later completed his doctoral work at the science policy research unit, University of Sussex, specialising in industrialisation and innovation systems.
Over the years, Oyeyinka has served in several high-level policy and academic roles, including as Senior Special Adviser on Industrialisation to the AfDB President, where he provided strategic guidance on Africa’s industrial transformation agenda.
In the book’s introduction, the scholar argues that Africa’s weak industrial base has come at a heavy cost, particularly during global crises.
“The cost to Africans of a weak industrial base manifested most severely during the COVID-19 pandemic,” he notes. “In the face of acute shortages of vaccines, African countries looked on helplessly while individuals in Western nations received multiple booster shots. It was not only about money.”
He pointed to the rapid development of mRNA vaccines by pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer as evidence that technological dominance, built over decades, determines economic resilience.
“History matters, and progress is path dependent,” Oyeyinka emphasises, arguing that knowledge accumulation is cumulative and that industrial capability cannot be built overnight.
The book strongly critiques Africa’s reliance on crude oil and mineral exports, describing it as an “unsustainable pathway”. “Resource dependence without the attendant technological base has been a race to the bottom of the wealth hierarchy,” he writes.
According to him, Nigeria’s oil discovery and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s mineral wealth exerted “a strong exclusionary effect on industrialisation”, stifling growth in manufacturing and tradable sectors.
“For most African countries, the share of manufacturing to GDP and manufacturing exports to GDP have declined or stagnated. Clearly, therein is the root of the pervasive foreign exchange crisis that countries face,” he states.
He warns that many African economies are experiencing premature deindustrialisation, a decline in manufacturing at much lower income levels than was the case in advanced economies, thereby losing the productivity gains that historically powered growth in Europe and Asia.
“Development is signalled by structural transformation from agrarian, low-technology economies to industrial countries that process commodities into high-value manufactured goods,” he explains.
Oyeyinka insists that sustainable industrialisation is Africa’s “non-negotiable development imperative”. “The mastery of manufacturing provides the greatest opportunities for countries to engage in learning, innovation and manufacturing exports,” he argues, adding that technological change, mediated by sound institutions and leadership, is the key determinant of long-term prosperity.
The volume also draws from his earlier influential works, including From Consumption to Production and Reversal of Fortune, which analyse Nigeria’s economic trajectory in comparison with rapidly industrialising Asian countries.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, in his endorsement of From Consumption to Production, described Oyeyinka’s scholarship as “well researched and supported with forcefully argued facts and figures.”
Similarly, political economist Richard Joseph hailed Reversal of Fortune as ‘a magisterial study’ that convincingly explains the divergence between Nigeria and Asian economies.
Through The Quest for Industrialisation, Oyeyinka says he hopes to reach a broader audience beyond academia.
“I have pulled these impact papers into one volume for those who have not had access to my two dozen books,” he writes. “My hope is that those who feel the pains of the poor but hope for an African renaissance would consider how its lessons and challenges continue to resonate even now.”