Dr. Obiora Madu

Thank you very much.

My response will be that there is a need for a fundamental shift in the way Africa thinks about trade.

Africa should stop thinking about trade as a collection of national activities and start thinking of it as continental value creation. The reason is that strategies developed by individual nations may not necessarily coordinate to deliver the benefits that are expected.

We have spent decades building economies around borders. Trucks cannot move freely to deliver goods. Agreements do not move goods; supply chains do.

We need to standardise documentation, procedures and, in some cases, even the way agencies operate to make the system work.

What we have achieved so far is not full integration. I think the agreement has provided the basis for integration, but the real work is to make the architecture operational. That is why not much has happened.

If cocoa is produced in Ghana, processed in Côte d'Ivoire, packaged in Nigeria and sold across several African countries, we should not see four separate national supply chains. We should see one African supply chain.

So, my position is simple: Africa should begin designing supply chains without allowing national borders to define the architecture.

We must move from asking, “How do we protect what is within our borders?” to asking, “How do we create more value within Africa?”

The mindset must shift.

A road is infrastructure. A corridor is an economic system.

We must always see the distinction between the two because it is very important.

A road will allow trucks to move, but a productive trade corridor will involve goods, capital, information, skills and investment moving efficiently and predictably.

I guess that is why we are having challenges with many of our corridors.

For any corridor to become economically productive, five things must come together: connectivity, trade facilitation, productive capacity, logistics services and market access.

These are very critical.

A corridor without production is simply a transport route. A corridor with production, logistics, finance, technology, skills and market access becomes an economic artery.

That is what all our corridors must become if AfCFTA is really going to take its place.

We should stop measuring corridors simply by kilometres because that is what I see happening now. 

We have to measure them by the trade created, businesses established and generated, manufacturing stimulated, logistics costs reduced and value retained for Africa.

Trade corridors are key to AfCFTA's success, but again, almost everything we are talking about requires a mindset shift. When we define a trade corridor correctly, we can then begin working in that direction.

Infrastructure is a very necessary tool for logistics to prosper, but infrastructure alone does not create logistics performance. 

You can build beautiful ports, construct good roads and still have a dysfunctional port and transport system.

Building new highways while trucks continue to spend hours at checkpoints does not make sense. You can modernise a border post and still have mountains of paper based processes creating delays.

So, the real issue is that logistics performance is a function of an entire system; it is not a matter of roads alone.

Why are we not seeing corresponding improvements despite the investments being made in infrastructure?

The difference between hardware and operating architecture is where the challenge is coming from.

Africa has invested significantly in hardware. What we have not invested sufficiently in is the operating architecture around that hardware.

In fact, in some cases, most of those investments are not real.

We need to examine customs processes, regulatory duplication, corruption, informal payments, poor information, fragmented government agencies, inefficient truck utilisation and poor warehousing systems.

We must also address the soft infrastructure skills, inadequate supply chain visibility and the broader capability gaps within the system.

Then there is the predictability challenge.

Disruption has become a permanent feature of African supply chains.

Unnecessary delays and port congestion continue to undermine efficiency.

Policymakers should move beyond asking how much infrastructure we have built and start asking:

How efficiently does the entire system convert infrastructure into economic value?

That is what it means for the people.

Digitisation is critical, but you cannot digitise what is not in existence.

You have to have processes before you automate or digitise them, and it is useless to digitise a bad process.

So, what do you do?

You redesign it before you digitise it.

If you take a dysfunctional paper process and put it on a computer, you have not created digital transformation. You have simply created electronic bureaucracy.

Our trade ecosystem should allow information to move across borders as easily as the goods themselves.

We need interoperability. For that to happen, we need single sources of good, common data standards, digital identities, interoperable payment systems and electronic documentation.

Most importantly, real cargo visibility and risk-based regulation are key.

Artificial intelligence can do a lot for us in this particular direction, but technology is not the only part of the equation.

Government must be willing to redesign regulations around digital processes rather than simply adding technology to old bureaucracy.

The ultimate objective should not be to ask, “How digital are our ports?”

The question should be:

“How much friction has the digital ecosystem removed from Africa's trade?”

That should be the metric.

Africa is not short of talented people.

Our greatest deficit is the shortage of people who can connect strategy, technology, operations, finance and execution.

A supply chain professional of the future cannot be someone who only understands procurement, warehousing or transportation.

We need systems thinkers on the continent people who understand the entire value chain.

Supply chain professionals are beginning to make more progress because they have started to understand finance, negotiate internationally, manage technology, understand trade policies, anticipate risk and lead.

We need a major shift from theoretical learning to applied capability.

That is where the RAPID Supply Chain Framework, designed by Multimix Academy, comes in.

You have to subject learning to real practical situations. That is where simulations come in.

The War Room is basically like a pressure-cooker situation where people face real-life scenarios and have to make decisions. Whatever you choose will have implications for your KPIs.

That is why I strongly believe that War Room thinking, scenario-based planning and RAPID will be part of the way out for Africa.

Because disruption has become permanent, I think the next generation of supply chain leaders in Africa must be willing to make decisions under heavy pressure. 

They must be ready to lead.

Africa does not need simply better supply-chain managers.

Africa needs supply chain leaders who can influence government, financiers and policymakers.

This is the capability gap we must close and rapidly too.

I agree completely with the question about logistics and supply chains driving industrialisation. In fact, I will add that logistics should be one of Africa's industrialisation strategies.

We have treated logistics as a cost of doing business.

We should begin to treat logistics as an enabler of economic transformation.

If you look at agriculture, for example, Africa should stop exporting raw agricultural commodities.

Each time you ship raw commodities out, you ship employment with them, and we eventually import finished products made from those same commodities that we exported.

Quite an irony.

Supply chains should connect the farmer to aggregation, packaging, cold chain systems and transportation. These are all the things we need.

We know it cannot happen in one day, but we want to start seeing evidence that it is working.

The same principles apply to minerals and other areas where Africa has strength.

What we have to do is call for value chain orchestration.

Government must create the policy environment.

Infrastructure must connect production centres to markets.

Financial institutions must provide capital.

Logistics providers must create reliable movement and storage systems.

Manufacturers need to do better, and more manufacturers need to emerge.

So the objective is not simply to move more African goods.

The objective is to create African value before those goods reach the market.

That is what it means for logistics to become the engine of industrialisation in Africa.