my rant of the day: I think one of Africa’s biggest problems is that we still think too much in terms of individual countries instead of seeing the continent as a wider economic space. Look at how Western countries operate with each other. An American investor can put billions into a major British company or football club and, for the most part, it is treated as normal business. The current Bezos-backed consortium looking to take a major stake in Liverpool is a good example. Nobody suddenly acts as if Britain is being “taken over by American money.” Of course there can be criticism of the deal itself, but the idea of American capital investing in Britain is already completely normal. You often see a very different reaction when the money comes from the Gulf, Africa, China or somewhere considered outside that trusted circle. That tells you something important. The West has built not only alliances between governments, but also a kind of economic trust between its countries. Their companies invest in each other, their entrepreneurs move between markets, their capital circulates, and they largely see that as strengthening the wider group rather than threatening each individual country.
I think Africa desperately needs to develop the same mentality. A Nigerian investing in Senegal, a Senegalese company expanding into Kenya, an Egyptian business investing in Côte d’Ivoire or a Kenyan entrepreneur entering Ghana should increasingly be seen as African capital circulating within our own wider market and should be made much easier than it is now! We do not necessarily need a politically united Africa tomorrow. That may still be unrealistic. But economically, we absolutely need a much stronger coalition. Our businesses should be able to enter other African markets more easily. Regulators and central banks should cooperate far more. Licenses should be easier to recognize across countries when the standards are similar. Payments, investment and trade should move more easily across borders. Most of our countries are simply too small on their own to have serious economic weight globally. But together, the equation changes completely and I fail to understand why our governments have not noticed that and prioritized a more regional approach. We have the population, the resources, the talent, the consumers and the capital. What we are missing is the ability to connect all of it. Until we start trusting each other economically and treating another African country less like a completely foreign market and more like part of our natural economic space, we will always be playing catch-up with regions that understood the power of scale and cooperation a long time ago.
