By Victor Mapunga
A year ago, a friend invited me to attend a meeting held by
a Korean delegation and multilateral financier. The Koreans kept emphasizing
that Africa is struggling to leverage the strengths of such countries because
we keep sending the wrong people to them.
It's insulting to amalgamate the best in your society for a
global agenda only to be introduced to opportunists and extremely incompetent
hustlers on the other side of the table. China also complained about a similar
thing years ago. The Americans figured this out years ago and don't really take
Africa seriously. They would rather send Aid than do business on the continent.
Worse, we've actually become addicted to that aid, but that's another story.
Why are we doing this to ourselves? Most of our leaders are
still stuck in the 20th century, where politicians and their associates
mattered far much more than private capital & enterprise. But in an era
where private individuals are building companies worth more than your GDP,
that's misguided thinking. We need them far much more than they need us. Most
of them already extract value from our markets without paying a single tax.
The CEO of Samsung or a similar company isn't interested in
hobnobbing with your bureaucrats & sycophants. They are interested in
meeting the people actually 'building' in your country, who can leverage what
they've built to grow their businesses.
We completely defecate on this logic when we impose our
preferred tribesmen on them in order to make a quick buck. These are very smart
people, and they see right through the bs. They'll take photos with you, but
that's the best you'll ever get from them, and the closest to them again in a
while.
I've always asked that if Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg were
to fly into Zimbabwe, for example, who would we introduce them to? I ask this
frequently because the answers might shock you. There's a group of utterly
shameless individuals who'll prioritize momentary fantasies of personal
enrichment by association and completely desecrate on such a collective
opportunity. These people are dangerous, and they are the reason FDI in Africa
remains embarrassingly low relative to our investment needs.
Perhaps, what got to me the most from that meeting is that
the Chief Investment Officer at that multilateral complained that these same
individuals never bother to do follow-up meetings or provide adequate
documentation to move forward with deals, the moment there's some kind of due
diligence, they vanish! Some finance Ministers have stood up investors in Zoom
meetings.
A lot of these funds also have mandates. It makes zero
sense to pitch road projects to people looking to build Data Centres for you.
The same CIO highlighted this as a point of concern when we challenged him as
to why funding seemed to be going to the same bs time after time. Some in our
gvt love these projects because they create self enrichment avenues without any
real impact, so the funding goes elsewhere.
So what's the solution?
For now it seems, if you are an ambitious African
entrepreneur living in one of these countries, the best is to incorporate
elsewhere and use that flag instead. That also means your target market needs
to adjust. You need to get yourself into these rooms without public sector
support because they won't do that unless it's for a political agenda. Your
competence will be severely punished so long as you're not a part of such
initiatives. He was writing on X
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