President William Ruto alongside his Ugandan counterpart Yoweri Museveni address the inaugural Africa We Build Summit in Nairobi. With them is the President of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote (left).
As we marked our 63rd year of self-governance in Kenya, we rightly demand reform in the global financial architecture.
We challenge the IMF, the World Bank, and the asymmetries baked into a system not designed with Africa’s prosperity in mind.
Have you noticed that lately Dr Aliko Dangote, Africa’s wealthiest man and one of the continent’s most audacious investors, has been sounding an alarm directed at us Africans? Almost every day I get one of the many videos doing the rounds. The last one got me. It was titled “Africa’s Wealthiest Have a Civic Duty, and Most of Them Aren't Living Up To It”. It is true that for years he was almost alone pouring billions into Africa when the prevailing wisdom among the global investor class was that the continent was too risky, too volatile, and too uncertain. But the message he is raising now cuts even deeper if you read between the lines, and it should stop every African leader, policymaker, and citizen in their tracks.
Africa sits on a fortune of over $1 trillion in pension money accumulated from the most sacred financial trust a society places in its institutions, the deferred wages of teachers, nurses, civil servants, and laborers who worked their entire lives on African soil. And yet, 99 per cent of the private equity money actually building the continent, our roads, hospitals, enterprises, and even infrastructure flows in from outside Africa. In fact, at the All Africa Pension Summit in Kampala last year, leaders did not mince words. They called it for what it is: a crisis of belief, not money.
