RECLAIMING AFRICAN ECONOMIC SOVEREIGNTY: INDIGENOUS POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT

This paper contributes to African political economy by advancing an indigenous-centred framework for understanding and reconstructing African development. Rather than treating indigenous African economic institutions as remnants of a premodern past, the study examines them as historically significant sources of institutional knowledge concerning land, production, exchange, redistribution, ecological management, community organization and economic governance. It contributes to decolonial development scholarship by challenging the assumption that economic modernization necessarily requires the wholesale adoption of externally generated institutional models and instead argues for a critical reconstruction in which indigenous knowledge and institutions interact with modern science, technology, industrial policy, financial systems and continental integration. The paper further contributes to the literature on economic sovereignty by conceptualizing sovereignty not simply as political independence or state ownership, but as the capacity to control productive assets, retain economic value, develop technological capabilities, mobilize domestic and continental capital, process natural resources, produce knowledge and determine the terms of integration into the global economy. In policy terms, the study contributes a framework for moving African economies from commodity dependence toward value addition, industrialization, regional value chains and knowledge-based production. It also contributes to Pan-African political-economic thought by positioning the African Continental Free Trade Area and broader continental integration as potential instruments for reconstructing economic power at a scale that individual African states may struggle to achieve independently. In this respect, the paper's principal contribution is the proposition that African economic sovereignty can be reconstructed through the deliberate integration of indigenous institutional knowledge, productive transformation, strategic state capacity, community institutions, technological innovation, African capital and continental economic integration into a coherent development architecture.