Why Africa’s Cement Problem Isn’t About Stones – It’s About Energy

By Apollo Buregyeya

“It is not possible for us to continue importing cement. We have limestone and all the other raw materials. Somebody needs to explain to me why we want to go and import stones. Limestone is just stones. How can we spend our money to import stones from other countries while we have our own stones?”
– William Ruto

President Ruto’s frustration is understandable. On the surface, importing cement when limestone deposits lie beneath your feet seems absurd – a testament to economic dysfunction or colonial hangover.

But his diagnosis, while politically resonant, misses the industrial reality that transforms his rhetorical question into Africa’s infrastructure paradox.

The Villain Hiding in Plain Sight

Cement is not stones. Cement is stones plus chemistry plus a controlled furnace running at approximately 1,450°C continuously, with predictable power, predictable fuel, predictable logistics, and predictable financing.

When energy is expensive or unreliable, every bag becomes a national penalty – even if your limestone sits politely in the ground, doing nothing but being “patriotic.”

This is why countries import cement or clinker: not because they reject their own geological resources, but because they are importing what their industrial systems cannot supply cheaply and consistently. Heat. Stability. Scale. Confidence.

It is also why “local content” speeches sometimes materialize as imported content in different packaging.

Infrastructure as Inherited Constraint

Here lies the uncomfortable truth. Africa’s infrastructure was designed to extract and export raw materials, not to power factories at industrial scale.

Decolonizing infrastructure is not a hashtag or a speech. It is the unglamorous work of making industrial power cheaper, supply chains predictable, and establishing standards that reward performance and durability rather than outdated notions of material purity.

The cement sector crystallizes this challenge. Production requires continuous, high-temperature processes that cannot tolerate the power interruptions common across much of the continent.

A single unplanned shutdown can damage kilns worth tens of millions of dollars. Backup generators add costs that make domestic production uncompetitive with imports from countries where electricity is both reliable and subsidized.

Beyond Resource Nationalism

Africa will not win cement wars by invoking limestone deposits. Victory requires reducing the clinker burden, cutting embodied energy, and leveraging the continent’s diverse mineral resources to develop high-performance binders suited to African energy realities.

This shift demands technical innovation, not just political will. Supplementary cementitious materials – volcanic ash, calcined clays, industrial byproducts – can reduce energy intensity while maintaining or improving concrete performance.

These alternatives exist across Africa’s geological landscape, waiting for industrial strategies that prioritize efficiency over rhetoric.

Quietly, companies like Eco Concrete Ltd., are building toward this vision: a green, Pan-African cement logic that is African in ingredients, African in standards, and African in purpose. Their approach recognizes that resource sovereignty without energy sovereignty produces dependence with a different label.

The Electricity Bill as Economic Reality

President Ruto is right to question cement imports. But the answer requires explaining not just the stones, but the electricity bill.

It requires acknowledging that industrial competitiveness rests on energy infrastructure as much as mineral endowments.

Until African nations can offer manufacturers the power reliability and cost structure available in competing markets, import substitution will remain aspirational. The limestone will continue sitting in the ground, patriotic but unprocessed, while cement arrives by container ship.

The path forward is neither simple nor sloganeering. It involves grid investments, regulatory reforms, technological adaptation, and the patient construction of industrial ecosystems that can transform Africa’s raw material abundance into manufactured value.

Resource nationalism without industrial capability is theater. The real work – boring, technical, essential – is building the infrastructure that makes domestic cement production economically viable, not just politically appealing.

And if we are serious about ending Africa’s industrial dependency, we must confront the deeper issue: infrastructure that still serves extraction over production. That argument is explored in greater depth in my book, Decolonising Africa’s Infrastructure: Why Roads Still Lead to Ports and Not to People.

Until energy works, limestone alone will not.

Apollo Buregyeya, Ph.D., is a civil engineer and entrepreneur focused on developing sustainable African industries that leverage local mineral resources to improve living standards. He is the founder and CEO of Eco Concrete Ltd, a construction company specializing in innovative solutions tailored to the African environment. Committed to resource ownership and appropriate technology for value creation, he also teaches at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.