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THE rapid growth of industry throughout SADC, that is new businesses, new factories, new processes, new investments and growth of existing industries, is encouraging and will go a long way in expediting the industrialisation of the region.

Officially opening the Seventh SADC Industrialisation Week in Harare this week, President Mnangagwa stressed the practical paths, and there are multiple paths, for industrialisation.

While, foreign direct investment is always welcome, this is not going to build more than a fraction of what we require. A lot of the investment and the work that needs to be done must come from our own citizens, our own investment funds, our own savings. This is how everyone else built their industrial base, one factory, one job at a time. Outsiders can help, but we have to do the main work.

The basis for industries are there. Southern Africa mines a lot of minerals, just about everything that is needed for a huge industrial economy. The farmers produce almost every conceivable raw material, as well as all the food we can eat if that sector is built up and supported by the industrial base.

In effect there are no excuses why we should sit in poverty and why we should have low productivity and thus low incomes. But as the President was stressing, this move towards a proper modern economy is not just going to happen unless we make it happen.

And the President was stressing the modern economy. We are not trying to recreate something that would mirror something Queen Victoria might admire, or even for that matter something that was a direct copy of the new Chinese economy of the late 20th century, but the mid 21st century economy that we need to be flourishing.

That implies a lot of clean energy, since we are going to need energy and cannot rely on historical sources.

It implies we take advantage of the Fourth Industrial Revolution from the beginning as we build, so that we build smart and that in turn usually means we are creating highly productive jobs, and thus jobs that will pay decent wages and provide decent returns for the many self-employed.

We do have our own financial resources, although we tend to waste these or lock them up in non-productive areas.

People tend to think of how to spend their money, rather than make their money, and the consumer orientation of our economies is, in many ways, a product of the colonial and settler past and Southern Africa was the last area of Africa that was liberated.

Under the settler and colonial regimes, the vast majority of the population were seen as either unskilled or semi-skilled labour, and very cheap labour for labour-intensive processes, or as a huge block of consumers with a lot of effort put in place to extract the small amount of money they had for the benefit of the ruling castes.

In a swathe of the region, indigenous people were denied the opportunity to acquire skills by law for many decades, and even when doors were in theory opened there were many practical bars. But those days are dead. It has been more than 30 years since the last transformation was made, the arrival of democracy in South Africa, and whole generations have grown up in a liberated environment.

President Mnangagwa stressed this coming of age of the new generations, of smart, well-educated and innovative young people who are seeing that the traditional path to a very basic standard of living, that is finding an employer, is not really the ideal.

There are not enough traditional employers so we need to open new, and better businesses ourselves.

Financing is of course required. Yet some cultural changes will find that finance. China exploded into rapid home-driven growth because of a culture of savings, with Chinese people saving up for their consumer goods, rather than seeking credit or taking out consumer loans.

That built up huge pools of savings that industrialists were able to tap into, through the banks, and that created the wealth that then allowed many to save up enough to buy what they wanted.

The Chinese miracle was created on savings and production, not spending.

The same rapid growth came in other countries and not just during the first industrial revolution. Japan, for example, was bombed into rubble in the Second World War but grew rapidly afterwards largely through some innovative industrialisation, grabbing the results of modern research, applying what was seen as an odd fixation on quality, and becoming a huge and wealthy country.

South Korea is a prime example. At the end of the Korean War in the mid-1950s, the country was very poor. GNP per capita was below that of Ghana, and that country was still a colonial territory without any pressure to economically develop.

The gap between the two now shows that a concentration on industrialising a country, while building up the education and skills levels and encouraging people to innovate and build, is a path that leads to success.

There are many examples and they tend to be countries that have risen in the past 50 or so years into the top tier of industrial nations while some older developed countries, such as Britain, have de-industrialised.

There is nothing automatic about industrialising or growing an economy. It does not just happen unless Governments, people, education systems, private entrepreneurs, bankers and many others combine to make it happen, and that is what the President was stressing. It is up to us to make it happen.