Trade and Industry Minister Dr Rob Davies has urged South Africa and the rest of the continent to scale up its industrialisation.

Speaking at the National Localisation Indaba, in Durban, this week, he said the continent could no longer hope to continue to live, prosper, create jobs and ensure the sustainable livelihood of its people if it remains “entrapped in the global division of labour as producers and exporters of primary products and raw materials and importers of value-added products”.

“As long as we stay there, we will be battling over the distribution of resource rents and we will not be taking our productive economy forward. The entire African continent is coming rapidly to the conclusion that the next phase of development should involve industrialisation,” he commented.

Meanwhile, Davies reiterated the success of the Department of Trade and Industry’s Automotive Incentive Scheme (AIS), pointing out that it had, since its inception in 2009, incentivised 193 projects with a total investment value of R22.5-billion.

He noted that, over the past 20 years, government’s industrial policy levers – the Motor Industry Development Programme and the recently implemented Automotive Production and Development Programme – had been successful in transforming the local automotive sector.

“The assembly industry [which] was predominantly a fragmented low-volume producer of many platforms, in a high-tariff environment, mainly for white middle-class consumers, [was transformed into] one that is now globally competitive with greater economies of scale in production, producing vehicles for both international markets, as well as South Africa’s growing middle-class, black and white,” he said.

Davies further stated that government’s sound economic policies and manufacturing support helped prevent South Africa from slipping into major deindustrialisation.

“It was investment by original-equipment manufacturers and component manufacturers, supported by the AIS, which ensured that significant levels of the country’s manufacturing and employment base were retained.”