African Industrialists: The Obligation of Now

A decade on from “African Philanthropists and Economic Progress”

May 31, 2016 – May 31, 2026

When I wrote those lines ten years ago, I was a young father of a two-year-old and a four-year-old, learning simultaneously how to be a parent and how to lead better. There is something clarifying about those early years of fatherhood. You cannot impress a toddler. What they need from you is presence, consistency, and the belief, sometimes irrational, that things will be better tomorrow than they are today. That was the lens I brought to Accra in 2016.

Long before anyone used the word philanthropy in West Africa, the Nana Benz of Lomé were already doing what this essay argues for. The Nana Benz as a collective were the original African women industrialists: they financed schools, infrastructure, and political movements from market stalls. Women like Dédé Rose Gaméli Créppy built textile fortunes from the Grand Marché, financed schools and roads, and moved capital across borders with no institution behind them but their own judgment. They asked for no foundation. They built the economy and the community simultaneously. They are the original proof of the argument.

Jacinda Ardern, in the documentary about her premiership in New Zealand, described optimism as true world courage; a mindset that makes you push through, often mistaken for dreaming. It was not naivety, she said. It was hope. That is the spirit in which I published that piece ten years ago today. And that is the spirit in which I revisit it now.

The decade between that article and this one has been full. I restarted the Ecobank Foundation and the institution won the Euromoney Award for CSR in Africa. I then built the Social Impact function at Visa across Central & Eastern Europe Middle East and Africa. And then came what I can only call a new education; food systems, agriculture, the science and politics of how Africa feeds itself, at AGRA, the organization created twenty years ago to attempt one of the hardest transformations on earth. My children are now teenagers. I am no longer turning around a foundation or building a function. I am co-creating partnerships for a movement.

In ten years, many things have happened. Dangote built a refinery many doubted possible in Africa. Arsenal, known to be a Dangote favorite, won the Premier League this season. PSG won their first Champions League in 2025 and last night, as I was finalizing these lines, they faced Arsenal in the final. PSG won. I am publishing this the day after, on the tenth anniversary of the oped, on what feels like exactly the right kind of day: one where Africa’s names are in the conversation, even when the conversation is about football.

A personal note before the argument

I should say something about how I arrived at the intersection of public and private sectors solving African problems with African resources. My first serious encounter with that question was not in a boardroom. It was during the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Through the Africa Against Ebola Solidarity Trust, a coalition built in the white heat of that crisis, when the world had pledged billions and the continent had pledged something harder to quantify: itself. I saw what African private capital could do when organized with conviction. MTN played a foundational role in that response. And it was there that I first encountered Phuthuma Nhleko: not through a press release, but through the work itself. Quietly, without ego, instrumental. The work was the point.

That experience has shaped everything I have thought about African industrialists, financiers, corporate architects, and philanthropy since.

What the decade confirmed

The core argument of 2016 held: transformation, not relief, is the only acceptable ambition for African philanthropic capital. The evidence has come from across the continent and it is important to name it geographically, because Africa’s story is not one story.

In West Africa, the career of the late Pathé Dione stands as one of the most instructive examples of what patient, African-owned institution-building looks like. Born in Dakar in 1941, trained in Paris, Dione spent years building the insurance sector from the inside. First as African Director of UAP and then AXA before doing something rare: he bought the African subsidiaries back. In 1998, he founded SUNU Group, which became a leading life insurer across multiple African countries. He believed in Africa. He simply created the conditions for employment and putting food on the table. Insurance is not glamorous. It is, however, the infrastructure of economic dignity. Dione understood and acted accordingly.

From Southern Africa, the story of Christo Wiese and Shoprite offers a different but equally instructive lesson. Wiese took a chain of eight supermarkets and built one of Africa’s largest grocery retailer with employment opportunities for Africans across the continent. There is something important in creating employment, it does not require a foundation at first. In building a business, with this geographic reach and employment density, he enabled one of the most consequential instruments of prosperity on the continent; jobs. Also, access to affordable food at scale is not philanthropy. It is industry in service of human dignity. The distinction matters.

From North Africa, the career of Othman Benjelloun of Morocco commands attention from any serious student of African institutional building. Now in his nineties, Benjelloun built Bank of Africa, formerly BMCE Bank, into a pan-African financial institution connecting capital flows from Casablanca to Dakar to Nairobi. The significance of that achievement is not in the branch count. It is in what it represents structurally: a North African institution that looked south, decided that African economies deserved African financial infrastructure, and built it. For decades, the movement of money across francophone Africa ran through Paris. Benjelloun’s life work was, in part, a quiet act of financial sovereignty by rerouting those flows through Casablanca, through African hands, toward African balance sheets. That is a different kind of philanthropy. It does not build a school. It builds the economy that builds the school. And it does so at a scale, and with a durability, that no foundation can match. What Benjelloun represents is the North African dimension of the argument I was making in 2016 and did not make well enough: that African industrialism with a continental conscience is not a West African or a Southern African story. It runs from the Mediterranean to the Cape.

And then there is Dangote. The man I wrote about in 2016 as an industrialist with potential has become, in 2026, the clearest proof that African ambition can scale to the level of civilizational consequence. The refinery that took decades and absorbed skepticism from every direction now stands as a symbol of African industrial confidence. He is investing four billion dollars in Ethiopia for food self-sufficiency. He has not stopped. He does not appear to plan to.

The dimension I underestimated: African corporate boards

I wrote in 2016 about industrialists and foundations. I did not name a third force that has emerged as equally consequential: the African institutional architect at the level of governance itself.

I recently wrote about Phuthuma Nhleko and his book The Invisible People; a sweeping meditation on African identity and economic sovereignty. Reading it against the arc of his career, I was struck by what his life’s work actually represents. CEO and Chairperson of MTN, which connected hundreds of millions of Africans who had never had reliable connectivity. Chairperson of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Co-founder of Phembani Group. What Nhleko embodies is the emergence of a class of African leaders who understand that the governance of African institutions is itself an act of sovereignty.

Where Cheick Anta Diop restored Africa’s memory, Nhleko has spent a lifetime building on it. Diop said: remember who you are. Nhleko says: now build accordingly. An African company governed by African leaders who understand that their decisions have continental consequence is not just a business. It is the operationalization of the dream. The philanthropy flows from that governance culture. The long-term investment thesis follows from it. The reform of tax architecture follows from it. Because leaders who believe Africa owns its own story will eventually build the institutions that protect that ownership.

The emergence of African corporate boards. Genuinely African in leadership, in orientation, in the questions they ask about capital and reinvestment. It is the development I failed to name in 2016. It deserves its own argument.

The shadow we must also name

But there is a shadow here that we must confront if this is to be an argument of utility rather than praise.

We cannot celebrate the scale of our mega-industrialists without interrogating the economic topography of the continent. True sovereignty cannot be built on a few isolated peaks of wealth. We have to find the balance between intergenerational equity and industrialisation anchored in national champions. Simply because nation building requires a shift away from rent-seeking meaning lowering the drawbridge for the next generation of innovators. We should not replicate the extractive models of the past which favored accumulation without local, regional and continental value addition.

The transition from private success to continental consequence requires a deeper imagination from these corporate boards. It demands a value-chain citizenship model.

The measure of an industrial giant’s continental conscience is no longer the size of the charitable foundation, or how many bags of food it distributes in a crisis. The measure is the density of the ecosystem she seeds. Whether a refinery or a supermarket chain acts as an anchor thus pulling thousands of small, local, youth-led enterprises into the economic mainstream. In this way, reimagining the old model of the vacuum, sucking up market share and exporting capital to offshore safekeeping.

This is also a succession question. The continent is producing a new generation of builders in fintech, agritech, health, digital infrastructure who are not waiting for permission. The question is whether the industrial giants of today are designing the conditions for these builders to scale, or whether the architecture of today’s success becomes the ceiling of tomorrow’s ambition. The Diones and Benjellouns of the next decade are already working.

Fatoumata Bâ is one of them. The Senegalese entrepreneur who helped build Jumia into Africa’s first tech unicorn left a senior position to found Janngo Capital. She is committing 50 percent of its investments to companies founded or co-founded by women, not as a concession, but as a capital thesis. In 2025, TIME named Janngo one of the world’s 100 most influential companies. She did not wait for the drawbridge to be lowered. She built a different gate entirely. That is the energy the continent’s industrial establishment must now choose to enable rather than ignore.

What they need is not charity from those ahead of them. They need open value chains, accessible capital markets, and corporate governance cultures that treat African enterprise as an ecosystem rather than a competition to be won once and defended forever.

If our corporate architecture does not deliberately design paths for distributed prosperity meaning democratizing ownership eventually through the very stock exchanges that African board leaders chair then our industrial triumphs will remain fragile islands in a sea of systemic resentment. Our builders must shift from accumulate wealth from Africa to embed economic resilience across it.

If they fail at this, they are not building the Renaissance. They are just managing the estate.

The unfinished business

The tax reform argument I made in 2016 remains, embarrassingly, current. Most African governments still offer no meaningful incentive for philanthropic giving. The 6th African Philanthropy Conference concluded in Cairo in 2025 with the same call for African-led financing frameworks we were making a decade ago. The vocabulary has not kept pace with the urgency.

And the stakes have changed. The aid architecture that was meant to buy Africa time has partially collapsed. What replaces it will be determined by what African capital decides to build and how quickly.

What the optimism looks like now

When Ardern described optimism as true world courage, she was not describing cheerfulness. She was describing the discipline of believing in possibility while seeing clearly. That is harder now than it was in 2016. The safety nets are thinner. The world is less generous.

But I look at what has been built: the refinery, the insurance group covering seventeen nations, the grocery chain feeding a continent, the Moroccan banker rerouting capital through African hands, the corporate board member who showed up during Ebola without needing his name on it. I look at my teenagers, who have grown up watching Africa’s story being written in real time. They have no patience for the argument Africa must wait.

That is the optimism I choose. Not because the problems are smaller. Because the builders are real.

The transformation of Africa will not come from pity. It will come from industry, from investment, and from the disciplined deployment of African wealth in service of African sovereignty. We have more industrialists today than we had in 2016. The question is whether they understand the historic weight of the moment they are standing in.

That is what separates the Renaissance from the resentment.

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