Afreximbank has spent three decades positioning itself as the financier of last resort for African trade. Speaking during a mid-year media roundtable at the bank's African Trade Centre (AATC) in Abuja, President George Elombi set out a broader ambition: using the bank's balance sheet to move Africa up the value chain in minerals processing, deepen a continental payments system now facing competition from stablecoins, and build medical research capacity the continent currently exports to hospitals abroad.
Responding to a question about recent investments in electric-mobility firm Spiro and telecoms infrastructure group Liquid Telecom, Elombi traced the decisions to a recent Afreximbank delegation trip to Shanghai, where bank officials toured China's battery and electric-vehicle supply chains.
What struck him, he says, was less the scale of Chinese manufacturing than the composition of the batteries themselves, assembled from hundreds of small cylindrical cells rather than the single composite block he had expected.
The visit, he said, reinforced his view that Africa risks repeating a familiar pattern: exporting the raw minerals that feed the global battery supply chain while importing the finished product. "We are no longer interested in anyone who wants to mine and export lithium in its raw state," he tells African Business. "We only want people who mine and process at home."
Originally published by African Business.