Strategic narratives autonomy matter more than industrial policy

Industrial policy has returned to fashion. Governments are subsidising industries, reshaping supply chains and asserting economic sovereignty. Across Africa, plans for industrialisation, value addition and green growth proliferate. On paper, the ambition is impressive.

Yet outcomes remain stubbornly familiar.

The problem is not that African countries lack industrial policy. It is that many lack strategic narrative autonomy: the power to author futures that are not only persuasive, but binding.

In the modern political economy, narrative is not messaging. It is a mechanism of control.

 

The power to define what is “realistic”

Every industrial policy rests on a story about the future. What technologies will dominate. Which markets will grow. How fast change must happen. What is feasible — and what is dismissed as wishful thinking.

These stories do not merely describe reality. They produce it.

When investors say local processing is “not viable”. When financiers insist a “window of opportunity” is closing. When experts declare that sequencing is unrealistic in a competitive market — these are not neutral assessments. They are narrative acts that delimit policy space.

Countries that cannot contest these narratives do not control their industrial trajectory, no matter how sophisticated their plans.

 

Industrial policy without narrative power is aspirational

This explains a persistent paradox. African governments adopt well-designed industrial strategies, yet implementation bends toward rapid extraction, early liberalisation or export-led pathways that contradict stated goals.

The usual explanation blames capacity or coordination. The deeper cause is narrative asymmetry.

Industrial policies are written domestically, but the binding story about the future is authored elsewhere — in investor roadshows, feasibility studies, credit committees and geopolitical frameworks. Once those narratives harden, national strategies become aspirational documents rather than governing instruments.

Policy follows narrative, not the other way around.

 

Sequencing is a narrative struggle

At the heart of industrial policy lies sequencing: when to extract, when to process, when to export, when to scale. Sequencing determines who captures value and when.

But sequencing is impossible without narrative authority.

If the dominant story says speed is essential, delay becomes irresponsibility. If markets are framed as unforgiving, experimentation becomes risk. If competitiveness is defined narrowly, domestic learning appears inefficient.

Countries that cannot impose an alternative narrative — one that legitimises patience, learning and phased development — will always be forced to accelerate.

This is why industrial policy so often arrives too late: after contracts, standards and infrastructure have already encoded a different future.

 

Narrative as hard power

Strategic narrative autonomy is often misunderstood as communication or branding. It is neither.

It is the ability to ensure that a country’s preferred future is reflected in contracts, standards, timelines and financing structures. It is the capacity to make one’s story operational.

The United States understands this. The Inflation Reduction Act does not just subsidise industry; it defines a future of “secure, allied supply chains” and embeds that narrative into tax credits and trade rules. The European Union does the same through climate standards and regulatory frameworks. China does it through long-term industrial planning and control over midstream processing.

These actors do not merely announce strategies. They make their narratives binding.

 

Why Africa struggles to hold the line

African countries face a structural disadvantage. They are often required to accept external narratives to access markets, capital and technology. The price of participation is alignment.

Under these conditions, even leaders committed to transformation find their room for manoeuvre shrinking. They speak industrialisation, while signing agreements that entrench export dependence. They promise value addition, while accepting timelines that make it unviable.

This is not a failure of will. It is a failure of narrative power.

 

Reclaiming narrative autonomy

Reclaiming strategic narrative autonomy does not mean rejecting foreign investment or global integration. It means recognising that who defines the future defines the policy space.

It requires states to engage upstream — before feasibility studies, before contracts, before standards solidify expectations. It requires treating narrative as a strategic asset, contested and defended, not as an afterthought.

Above all, it requires coherence: aligning what is said publicly with what is signed privately.

 

The real hierarchy of power

In the end, industrial policy is downstream of something more fundamental.

Countries that control narratives control sequencing.
Countries that control sequencing control value.
Countries that control value control development.

Those that do not are left implementing futures written by others.

Africa’s challenge is not to write better industrial policies. It is to regain the authority to make its own stories stick.

Until then, even the best plans will remain exactly that — plans.