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Trailblazing African Business Minds
Publisher’s Message
“Don’t worry about being successful but work toward being significant and the success will naturally follow”. – Oprah Winfrey We are thrilled to present this issue (40 Under 40 Trailblazing African Entrepreneurs) of Business Elites Africa. We welcome those of you that are following us and reading us for the first time. SMEs make up ninety percent (90%) of the economic fabric of the continent of Africa. These men and women are rarely recognized for their strides and courage. Deeply rooted in their minds are scars of failures, pains, loneliness, and lack of security.
Embedded within these pages are prolific profiles of Africa’s 40 young and emerging business leaders and minds under the age of 40. These men and women have held center stage for years in redefining the African economy. Their stories and aptitude are inspiring and poignant, filled with failures, heartache, pains and yet courage.
In this edition you will also find persuasive articles and engaging business tips that are incisive and actionable. We strive to stay on the cutting-edge of the ever-changing landscape of the African economy.
Piloting business venture is not for the weak-at-heart. Much are the pains of business ownership than meet the eye. Something extraordinary must be given to attain the realm of extraordinary success. It is a journey marked with pains, frustrations, failures, and the element of successes as a reward. It spells doom and hands mischief to the weak at heart through the night; and rewards the resilient with success at the dawn of the morning. These stories of successes and strives have few things in common: courage, resilience, vision, and compelling mission.
On behalf of the team at Business Elites Africa, I would like to thank the business minds featured in this issue for allowing us These African finest business minds are to tell their stories, and for participating in unwavering in their quest to attain greater our publication. height against all odds. We celebrate business minds the likes of Goitse Konopi Many thanks to you, our ardent readers and of South Africa; Fehintolu and Olorunfemi followers for your continued support! Our Jegede of CredPal; Maryam Apaokagi – continued existence and relevance is owed Taaooma – Nigeria’s Freestyle Slapping to you. Comedian; Babatunde Akin-Moses of Sycamor; Onyeka Akumah – Nigerian Please send us your thoughts on how we can serial disruptor just to mention a few. continue to improve and what you’d like to You are true champions and heroes of see in our future publications. our land!
Enjoy the issue!
Ethelbert.nwanegbo@businesselitesafrica.com
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Content 8 How 30-Year-Old South African Became a Medical Cannabis Entrepreneur After Losing his Mom to Cancer 18 Antonio Depina’s Thrilling Move from a Basketball Star to a Successful Entrepreneur 20 Taaooma: Nigeria’s Freestyle ‘Slapping’ Comedian
Antonio Depina
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22 Babatunde Akin-Moses Tells us about Sycamor’s Ambition for the rest of the Year
24 Onyeka Akumah: The Journey of a Serial Disruptor 28 Two Friends, Buky Akinmboni and Bolaji Fasanya 34 Born into a Nigerian Logistics Empire, Obinna Anyaegbu is now Leveraging Tech to Forge his own Path in Business 36 Meet Ex-Jumia Executives Redefining Logistics Business in Nigeria with Warenext
Michael Collins Ajereh
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40 Michael Collins Ajereh – A Don in Africa’s music industry 42 Bako Ambianda: From Humble Beginnings to Founder and CEO of a Conglomerate, Labacorp Group 44 How Tobi Asehinde’s Startup is Bridging the Digital Skill Gap in Nigeria and Across Africa 48 Bako Ambianda
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42
Insights on Africa’s Real Estate Market
52 The Making of Mr. Macaroni, Nigeria’s Famous Instagram Comedian-turned-activist
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Content 54 From Teenage Entrepreneur to African Business Mogul, the Story of Ashish Thakkar 58 Movie Star Enyinna Nwigwe Talks about his Career Growth and Nollywood 62 Nigerian Space Entrepreneur, Temidayo Oniosun on why Africa’s Space Industry May be the Next Big Thing 68 How Renewable Energy is Powering Africa’s Growth
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Goitse Konopi
80 Cleo Anastasia Johnson’s Journey to Becoming a Hospitality and Marketing Maven 84 Evans Akanno: Building Thriving Brands Against All Odds 90 Gil Sperling: A Techpreneur Driving Innovations in Africa’s Property Industry 92 Dimeji Falana Discusses Edtech and what Foreign Investors Look out for in African Startups
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Fehintolu Olaogun
Olorunfemi Jegede 96
Thato Kgatlhane: South Africa’s Social
Entrepreneur who created solar-powered school bags out of waste for poor school kids 98 Genevieve Barnard Oni: A Healthcare Visionary Transforming Medical Diagnosis in Nigeria 102 Moulaye Taboure: Taking Africa’s Culture to the World via E-commerce 104 Oluwasoga Oni: Building Nigeria’s Most Robust Medical Diagnosis Infrastructure
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28
Buky Akinmboni
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Interview
By Dimeji Akinloye
How 30-Year-Old South African Became a Medical Cannabis Entrepreneur After Losing his Mom to Cancer
G
oitse Konopi’s life’s mission is to make quality medicinal cannabis accessible to all, though that was not his childhood dream. At 19, soon after school, he was already working with GovChat, a government-affiliated tech company in South Africa, where he later became the chief data officer. He was part of the teams in the Presidency that developed the National Development Plan and Vision 2030 for the country. Everything looked good, career-wise, until 2013 when his health-conscious mother was down with cancer and eventually passed away. Goitse was determined to help other cancer patients stay alive and also beat other ailments. He believes the solution lay in Cannabis. Therefore, he invested
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all his savings, together with other peoples funds, in his startup.
In 2014, he founded South Grown, a cannabis company that scientifically cultivates, processes and manufactures cannabis-based products. In this interview with Business Elites Africa, Goitse elucidates his mission and his strategy to succeed in this highly regulated industry. You started your company 4 years before Cannabis was legalized for private use in South Africa, why?
It was due to my mother’s terminal illness. She was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2013. At that time, her oncologist suggested that we tried cannabis oil to supplement her treatment plan. All the products
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we found were non-regulated and inconsistent in terms of quality and availability. So between 2014 and 2017 when the guidelines and regulations were released, I began travelling and researching, to simply experience what the industry looks like in different parts of the world. We started in 2014 conceptually and moved from there to start the process of understanding and following the guidelines and regulations that were put into motion by the government. To be clear, did the Cannabis-based treatment for your mom work?
Yes. The Cannabis oil was beneficial for her as an appetite stimulant. As a side effect of the chemotherapy, she lost her appetite and that is a key part of how the cancer progresses. As you are treating one side of the ailment, you are also creating a problem on the other side. And that’s where our core focus is as a company. We’re focused on the pharmaceutical aspect of cannabis, but in the first place we are also rolling out consumer products – Cannabinoids (CBD) products that are descheduled.
Our focus, however, is on the active pharmaceutical ingredients that you get from CBD. In Africa, we have CBD such as THCv which is an appetite suppressant and THC which stimulates your appetite. So part of what we are doing is to fully understand these compounds to create a really clear clinical trial pipeline. We are following the same process as the way drugs and pharmaceutical products have been historically created and made available. We have to go through drug discovery, phase 1a clinical trials, phase 1b to phase 3 and then posttrial evaluation and monitoring and all of that. So we’re following the entire pipeline to make medical cannabis accessible. About the legalization of cannabis in South Africa, it was legalized for
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private use but your company is in On the manufacturing side, we have business for the commercial use of manufacturing capabilities of CBDfocused products. Those products are it, can you clarify that? low THC, high CBD (about 0.03% and So it’s legal for personal cultivation lower). We manufacture consumer in your own private home and the products from that. personal possession and consumption in your personal environment is legal, The subject of cannabis, whether although there is a restriction around for personal or medical use, is the number of plants and all of that. controversial and highly regulated But there is also a clear regulatory in the same countries that have environment for medical cannabis, which is cannabis that is cultivated, legalized it just as South Africa. processed and manufactured for Why did you choose to do business medical purposes. This is not only in in this seemingly volatile industry? South Africa, it’s the same in multiple For me, it’s about making jurisdictions. quality medical cannabis-based We’ve positioned ourselves as a multi- pharmaceutical products accessible. country operator. We have partners It’s about studying the historically in Ghana, Jamaica, Zimbabwe and the controlled substances, understanding United Kingdom. We’re exploring the their compounds and creating biotic capabilities, looking at how we pharmaceutical products that can can expand and synthesize the existing help people like my mother. That’s CBD research in these countries. It’s especially what drives me. It’s also important to work across multiple about creating pharmaceutical regulatory environments because products that are extremely beneficial this is a highly regulated sector. We’re and have to be accessible. working with other partners who have a strong background in those markets. That’s the mission and the goal of South Grown. It takes anywhere What part of the value chain do you between 6 to 10 years to create a new belong to? Do you guys have a farm pharmaceutical drug and requires a lot of focus, hence, we haven’t stopped where you grow cannabis? working at it. At the same time also, we have entered into consumer products It’s two-fold. There are two sides to so that we can keep the lights on. South Growth – the first is Consumer and Wellness and the other is Biopic, So money is not a driver for you? which is the active pharmaceutical ingredient-focused part. The biotic Not at all. Money is a tool to create more part is highly regulated and controlled value and we see value in really helping but for the consumer side, the CBD people who need this pharmacological has been descheduled for consumer intervention, with this intervention access. studied and explored. For instance, how do we synthesize something like We have built a facility, where cannabis THtv and create formulations and products are analyzed and processed, pharmacological products that can for medicinal purposes, which is help people who want to go through under the inspection of the South surgery because of weight issues or African House Product regulatory whatever the case is. authority and that facility is expected to be licensed in the foreseeable How do we treat obesity in the future. We have been working on developing world? How do we treat getting licensed in the past 4 years. lymphoma using cannabinoids? How
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I don’t have the luxury of giving up. We have too many people counting on us.
South Grown’s newly-acquired 2300sqm/24,756sqft cannabis manufacturin do we treat chemo resistant liver cancer? Those are the questions that we think about and are working to build a team of solution providers around that. That’s what drives us.
creating pharmaceutical products from formulas that we understand to treat certain conditions. Tech is crucial there because we have to be efficient, we have to use biotech standards, processes and procedures.
How are you driving all this with What are the challenges you’re tech? facing right now with South Grown? There is a lot of peer sharing in most of the pharmacological part of Mostly regulatory lee-time. It has the cannabis space. For us, we are taken us years to get to where we are not necessarily trying to be a large now, which makes sense because it’s cultivator of medicinal cannabis. a highly regulated industry. It’s also We’re effectively building laboratories getting people to understand that where we can synthesize and study because of the nature of the products the cannabinoids. we are manufacturing and putting together (biotic products), we can’t There are other amazing companies roll out so much, any time soon. It all across the country and the world may take up to 10 years before we can who have the capacity to cultivate have commercially ready and viable at scale. We are more focused on products that can be ingested by
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patients. Sure there are opportunities around consumer products but the real value is essentially to make sure that quality plant-based pharmaceutical products are made available. Are there days you feel like giving up on the business, especially when you’re overwhelmed by the challenges that come with it?
I don’t have the luxury of giving up. We have too many people counting on us and a team that is working way too hard for that to even be an option. IT’S challenging. But we wake up every morning with the mission in mind to solve this major problem, to make quality medicinal cannabis accessible. This is a capital intensive project; do you have venture capital backings?
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ng facility. We were fortunate to raise capital funds from some Angel investors who are venture capitalists and private equity legends in their own rights. They gave us a couple of million South African Rands. That got us to start building the facilities, getting the compliance done and other things. These are people who genuinely believe in what we are doing. When one is trying to conceptualize a business idea, in your opinion, what are the viability indicators one should look out for?
firm while being compliant and build a distribution where we are able to test that our idea works. This is a drive towards the mission. Everything else will come along the way to enhance that.
can be available commercially, what are your consumer products – the Cannabinoids coffee drinks and water?
Those will roll out quite soon. We Do you work with scientists in don’t have the luxury of going 8 years without revenue, hence the Africa or outside the continent? consumer products. And it’s a very big Yes, there are a couple of scientists we and exciting vertical. The consumer are working with – from pharmacists products are non-psychoactive. They to pharmacologists. They are in Africa are on the wellness side, to substitute and Jamaica. We’re also exploring for energy drinks and all kinds of soda. other partnerships in the UK with one We’ve partnered with some large or two scientists and with an institute retail outlets in South Africa. We’ll be in Australia. But our core focus is making announcements in the next African scientists. coming weeks.
I guess the important thing is how big is the mission? What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? For us, our I know you said your cannabismission is to make quality medicinal based pharmaceutical products cannabis accessible. And the trigger would take up to 8 years before they question; how do we scale a biotic 11 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Interview By Emmanuel Abara Benson
Fehintolu Olaogun and Olorunfemi Jegede
Discuss Fintech Regulation in Nigeria and Expansion Plans for CredPal Fehintola Olaogun serves as CredPal’s Chief Executive Officer while Olorunfemi Jegede serves as the Chief Operating Officer.
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here are many Nigerian startups with multiple co-founders. But it is not all the time that a journalist is lucky enough to interview these cofounders at the same time. That’s exactly why I was super excited when Fehintolu Olaogun and Olorunfemi Jegede (Co-founders of Nigerian fintech company CredPal), agreed to grant me an audience. My colleague and I drove down to CredPal’s Yaba office where we discussed extensively with them on wide-ranging topics, including their take on the recent regulatory oversight on the sector as well as the company’s expansion plans. Enjoy the conversation. BEA: When did you both realise that you needed this partnership in order to bring the CredPal dream to reality?
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Fehintola: Before we co-founded CredPal, we‘ve known each other for a while and even worked together in a company that I previously founded. One thing is that entrepreneurship is partly instinctive such that you see a problem and you want to solve it. The same problem that we founded CredPal to solve has long been faced by very many people. But no one thought to solve it. But then we discussed the problem and realized it’s something we could solve together.
Now, this problem has to do with people having to pay in full for anything they want to buy. Like normally in Nigeria, if you want to buy a laptop, phone or furniture, you will be required to pay in full. Whereas in developed countries, there are options for you to get instalment payments for pretty much anything you want to buy. Even for food
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and coffee. You can use your credit card to buy them. The advantage is that you can live a comfortable life by paying for whatever you need in a more convenient and flexible way.
Agreed, technology actually helps you to scale your business a lot faster because, instead of doing things manually, you can automate. Tech also enables you to solve certain problems which you normally are not able to solve manually. But even at that, tech presents its own challenges because before you can automate, you will need to buy some expensive equipment and hire people with expertise. It’s either that you as the founder have these technological skills or you have to get someone with them. And as it is right now, hiring tech talents is getting a bit more expensive. Even paying for the initial cost of some technological services might be a bit expensive.
We recalled that this kind of flexible payment was practically non-existent in Nigeria when we came into business. And it was a big problem, not only for our customers but for us as well. Back then, Femi had an eCommerce site that had a lot of products and a lot of his customers were asking for an installment option of payment. But of course he wasn’t offering an installment option because there was none available. So, this was why we came together to develop a solution to that problem. But the good thing about technology is that because of its high growth Olorunfemi: I’d like to add that one potential, you are more motivated to of the things that inform co-founding inject money. Having domain and tech is when two people meet and they expertise can always help you to easily are both passionate about solving a overcome these challenges. particular problem. Just to buttress that, the inspiration for CredPal BEA: It’s been about 7 months came up in a discussion we both had, since last December when your where we both instinctively saw the company raised $1.5 million from need to come up with a solution to Y Combinator and others. What this problem. So, it was that natural. are some of the good things that He was excited about the problem have taken place as a result of the we wanted to solve and I was excited fundraising? about it as well. Olorunfemi: One of the most exciting BEA: What are some of the biggest things we’ve been able to do with challenges you’ve had to contend the money is the innovation of new with as tech entrepreneurs? products. These new products will basically make it possible for us to Fehintola: Yeah, there are a couple tap into new markets. And of course, of challenges. Let me begin by saying we’ve also been able to overhaul our that as much as tech business might entire product lines to make them look like it’s different from other types a lot more customer-friendly and of businesses, it’s challenges are not competitive. I’ll now let my Partner quite peculiar. For instance, tech speak more on this… entrepreneurs still face the challenge of securing initial capital. As you know, Fehintola: We’ve also been able to in most cases tech entrepreneurs are grow the team quite significantly. just trying to sell a commodity or a And what that means is that we can service that could have been sold handle more customers now. Building without technology. So, in that sense, new products (like he mentioned) even the daily operational hassles of now happens a lot faster. There is just running the business are still there. So that increased capacity to do a whole also are other problems like hiring the lot more. We are making plans to right people to work for you, figuring partner with other businesses within out the right business model, etc. our space to further drive a whole lot 15 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
more value to the ecosystem. So, I’ll say watch out for what’s coming. BEA: Any prospects of future capital raise?
Olorunfemi: Absolutely! I mean, it’s typical for startups generally. You want to go from your pre-seed to seed round. And from there you want to do your Series A. I think CredPal is getting to that stage when we are ready for a Series A. In the next couple of months, we should be commencing our Series A round. BEA: Based on your experience, how profitable is fintech business in Nigeria right now?
Olorunfemi: I would say it is actually very profitable, especially if you have an amazing fintech product. But it gets really profitable at scale. And the reason is that a lot of times, in order to be very competitive in technology business, margins are very tight. So, basically, you are playing the numbers game to really, really make the business profitable. And that’s even why you are leveraging technology in the first place because technology allows you to serve really huge markets. I mean, you can literally build in Yaba Lagos and you are serving the whole of Nigeria and Africa. There are currently a number of Nigerian fintech companies that are serving businesses across the world. And when you get to play at that level, trust me, that’s when it becomes really profitable. The profitability really is in the brilliance of your technology.
Fehintola: What I will also like to add is that one thing that makes fintech very profitable is the fact that finance is an essential commodity in everyday life. There is no one really living that doesn’t need to spend money every now and then. And that in itself has made the business one that has arguably the largest customer base. I’d like to add that because most tech products are digital, tech businesses have less need for a lot of other
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moving parts which other businesses might require. As such, it’s easy for you to build and scale at a massive rate. Agreed, the initial cost may be high, because it takes a lot to set up all the regulatory and compliance infrastructure. But once you can get all of that right, then scaling it is pretty much easy. That’s why you see that a lot of the most successful startups in Nigeria right now are fintech startups. Good examples include Paystack, Flutterwave, Paga, etc. And just like Olorunfemi has said, growing the business and scaling it is where the juice is; not just the initial profitability.
solved? If so, after you’ve identified the is the method you are using to solve problem and come up with a solution it. Your solution method must be innovative, scalable and sustainable. for it, then you are good to go.
Secondly, your customers are who will determine if your business is going to be successful or not. Of course, this is a very old saying. But it’s funny that somehow, people still don’t take it seriously. Customer is always king! And ultimately, it is not even enough for you to build for your customers; they must also be able to connect with and love your product. It is very important that customers love your product. Now you may ask; what’s the yardstick to measure customers BEA: What would you say are the loving your product? Well, they should six most essential things someone be talking about it. They should be needs to start a successful fintech referring new customers. Also, your company in Africa? product/service must make their lives better. Olorunfemi: I think we should start by looking at what success actually Thirdly, I will say that having a decent means for you. Is it about building a domain expertise is necessary towards product that customers find valuable, building a successful fintech company building a product that customers in Africa. Let me explain; I won’t just love, or is it all about your bottom line; wake up tomorrow and say I want to about making a lot of money? I’d say invest in aviation, because I do not for me, when we started this business, know anything about the aviation one of the things that really motivated industry. I think it’s just a standard us to start was to ultimately ensure rule of business that if you want to a future where every Nigerian can venture into any business, it should be conveniently walk into a store and buy one that you are quite knowledgeable on credit. This would literally aid their about. That way, you are coming along quality of life and ease the financial with a lot of skill sets which will help burden. As you know, our quality of you to navigate the very challenging life can be very low in Nigeria, much world of business. as living here can be very stressful. And that’s because a lot of things are Fehintola: What I would like to add not done the way they should be done. to that is that one thing that will So, for me, I would say I have built a determine your success is how you successful fintech business when this are solving the problem you are dream eventually becomes a reality in solving. Sometimes, you find out that the next couple of years. whatever problem you are trying to solve, someone else is already solving But if I am just going to go with the it. Before payment fintechs sprung up standard definition of “success” as everywhere, people were using other we are used to in Nigeria and say a means of payment which were mostly business making a lot of money, then inefficient. Before ride hailing became the first thing I would say is necessary a thing, we had some companies is building a good product that will that would have you call in so they solve a real problem. Have you been could help you book a cab. In reality, able to identify a serious pain point whatever problems are there, people of the people? Do you have innovative have tried to solve them before you. ideas around how this problem can be The most important thing, therefore,
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I will also like to touch on the domain expertise which Olorunfemi already mentioned because it is quite important. I recommend that you have two separate domain expertise, first is the technology itself, and what that means is that you must have a good knowledge of coding and full-stack development. Secondly, the problem you are trying to solve requires domain expertise as well. For instance, in the finance space, if I don’t know anything about finance and how money moves, it’s going to be very difficult for me to just wake up as a programmer and say ‘hey, I’m now a fintech entrepreneur’. If I do that, I might end up creating a product that might not work because there are loopholes and maybe even some compliance issues that will affect me in the long run. So, ensure to develop domain expertise in both technology and in the particular area you want to play in.
Lastly, I will say this; most tech companies pivot when they need to. One thing that kills a company fast is not knowing when to change. You can start off doing something before you feel that’s the way to go. But in reality, the market will always show you the way to go. Now, if the market reacts to you and you don’t adapt your product, you will likely keep trying to serve customers the same thing and they will not take it. Eventually, the product dies. So, that ability to respond to the market very fast is very important. And like I mentioned earlier, most businesses pivot when they need to. If you read the history of some of the most successful companies in the world today, you will realise that many of them resorted to pivot at some point. Even Facebook was supposed to be something meant for a small university community. But now, it is something that everyone across the world is using without restriction. So, being able to adapt to the market is
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important. And that comes with having perspective from just one angle. very good instincts. And that’s part of So, adopting a more collaborative what makes you a good entrepreneur. approach will always allow to add a whole lot more comprehensive picture BEA: What is your take on the which also will naturally enable better recent regulatory oversights that regulation. have taken place in the Nigerian fintech space this year? BEA: Let’s get back to CredPal for a moment. What is the most expensive Fehintola: Let me begin by saying I thing I can buy with a CredPal credit don’t think the CBN had any negative card and what security measures intentions with regards to the have you put in place to protect regulations that were passed this year. against loan defaults? Certain issues called for those policy changes. And if we are being honest, it Olorunfemi: I would say one of the is part of the CBN’s job to come up with most expensive things you can buy these policies. That said, the problem with your CredPal account is a car. I I have with such moves is that these mean, you can access credit facilities policies came all too suddenly. They all up to millions of naira. So, whatever came in almost at once, thereby giving you choose to do with that is left for stakeholders very little time to react. you. And that isn’t so good. Secondly, these policies could have been further fine Regarding your next question, of course tuned. There should have been better we are a forward-thinking business. collaboration with fintech companies; But we don’t take collateral, although some sort of forum where everyone we do have security measures in place. could voice their opinions. As much And these measures are embedded as the CBN has the right to regulate in our technology. We’ve been able the fintech space, the success of what to leverage a whole lot of data to be the fintechs are doing is the success able to come up with really decent of the business they are regulating. If underwriting models. And so far so you over-regulate a business and kill good, it’s been really efficient. Our all the operators, then there will be facilities are doing very well, meaning nothing to regulate afterwards. that our customers are actually performing well. One of the things that Let me reiterate that there definitely have been very helpful is the credit should have been some feedback bureau. It’s been a very important from the tech ecosystem before those asset, thanks to the government for policies were made and implemented. compelling pillars in the industry to And even if they didn’t want to receive report customers’ performance and all feedback. There should have been of that. It has been really very valuable. more time for businesses to adjust. The absence of these two factors Fehintola: To add to that, I will say definitely impacted us significantly. that as much as you may try to ensure But ultimately, you have to always find that every customer gets credit, you ways of adapting and surviving. cannot give everyone. Some customers will apply and you will deny them Olorunfemi: Fehin has said it all; for various reasons, ranging from government regulations should perceived bad character, not having definitely be more collaborative. All the the capacity to repay. Take for stakeholders playing in the ecosystem instance, if someone that earns N50, should always be given room to 000 wants to buy a car of N50 million, participate in policy making because you will have to deny them because eventually, they are the ones who get that obviously will not work. So yes, affected by these regulations. It is we have a thorough underwriting almost impossible to get a complete process because we need to be sure 17 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
you are eligible for the loan. And in line with what Olorunfemi already said, we work with various data centres to assess the customer before we avail that loan. And the good thing is that once you give out good loans, you will most likely get the money back. It’s only when you give out loans on grounds that are not exactly good, that you will have problems collecting it back.
BEA: Lastly, some people have argued that the tech bubble will soon burst. Do you think so? Fehintola: I don’t think so. And I will tell you why,” he said. “The important question is — are we offering value? The answer is yes. Tech is offering significant value. Let’s use the example of cab hailing companies like Uber and Bolt; they came in and gave us a better solution that is offering better value. Trust me, that is not going anywhere anytime soon. In most cases, technology offers superior values to traditional means of doing things. What you should be worried about, therefore, is the effect of tech on traditional businesses. The effect might be negative as has been demonstrated in the case of the taxi industry. But technology itself will always drive the future of any economy. So, in my opinion, the tech bubble will not burst. As a matter of fact, there is no “tech bubble”.
We may consider the likelihood of ‘market correction’ in the future. And this can only happen if in the future everything goes entirely out of hand and prices of these tech products become too expensive. Only then will the market forcefully correct itself. But in itself, the essential service that technology provides will never change. We will continue to provide value to our customers and our customers will continue to enjoy our value.
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Interview By Simeon Onoja
Photo source: Netflix
Antonio Depina’s Thrilling Move from a Basketball Star to a Successful Entrepreneur Antonio Depina has made a fascinating transition from pro athlete to businessman. The 26-year-old is a first-generation American, whose parents migrated into the United States from very humble backgrounds in Africa. Under the care of his Cape Verdean father and Liberian mother, he found basketball. Antonio was a star athlete from high school and travelled the world playing professional basketball in Spain, France and Portugal.
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own the line, Antonio returned to the US and launched his entrepreneurial career. His first business was a real estate company in Delaware called 302 Home Buyers which is now thriving. Then he launched Overseas Basketball Connection (OBC), a basketball talent company that connects basketball players with pro basketball teams across the world. Having had a feel of some of the world’s most developed entrepreneurial ecosystems, Antonio returned to Africa to give back and help develop the continent’s sports business. He launched the Praia League in his home country, Cape Verde, and is on a mission to fulfil the dreams of basketball talents across the continent. Antonio gained celebrity status after his time on Netflix’s The Circle. He was recently recognised by Forbes Africa in its 30 Under 30 list.
What inspired me to launch Praia League is my country has been trying to boost tourism with a lot of different things. But I think we haven’t tried sports. Sports is something that can spotlight our country and boost tourism, provide jobs and boost the economy. That’s why I started the Praia League. What was it like launching a basketball league in Africa?
I played professional basketball in Europe and have seen a lot of African players leave the continent to go chase their basketball dreams in other places. So I wanted to create a league here that was sustainable, durable and that allowed African talents to play at higher levels.
What has the reception for Praia League been like Business Elites Africa had the delight of sitting with this since launch? vibrant serial entrepreneur on the launch of his basketball league, Africa’s sports business, and a lot more. So far the Praia League experience has been great. It’s actually running itself right now. My staff are really good
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at what they do and work really hard What would you say was your worst to make everything go smoothly. The day as an entrepreneur? people really love it. I wouldn’t say I had a worst day. We’re going to fill up the arena for the There’s a period as an entrepreneur, games as much as we. Everyone will be that I always call the moment of following COVID-19 protocols. People truth when there’s struggling in the want some entertainment and we’re beginning or should I say a little bit going to give that to them. after take-off. It’s a point where you have to choose if you really want to do What other ways can people this, or if you really don’t. And every experience Praia League? entrepreneur has to deal with this. It’s like things aren’t working, people are All games are streaming live on making promises they can’t keep. Praia League’s YouTube channel and Facebook. We’re getting lots of I went through that period. Everyone viewers every game, so it’s been going does. But at some point, you’re going really well. to realize, it’s a little farther to go backwards than to just keep going Where’s the league with African forward. You know you’re close to your sponsorships? destination than just turning around in defeat. That’s the way I looked at it We’ve received sponsorship from a lot and kept going. of huge local businesses here in Cape What’s your advice for Verde. entrepreneurs in Africa who have How would you say Africa is rated the odds stacked against them? in the international basketball ecosystem? My advice for any entrepreneur in Africa would be, find a problem and On a global level, Africa is at the make a solution. There’s a lot of lowest right now because we don’t problems in Africa that we need to have any professional leagues here, help fix. Simple things, for example, even though we’ve got all the talents. my country doesn’t have fast-food I believe Nigeria has eight NBA players system. We don’t who play for the Nigeria national team, have anywhere but there’s no professional league in we can go to get the country. It just doesn’t make sense normal driveto me if we have all these talents here throughs. So a and aren’t doing better. I feel we’re at simple solution the lowest right now, but we have the like an Uber eats most potential over any continent in would do. the world. Even if you don’t How can stakeholders help African have any money, basketball step up? come up with a solution. Work I feel like policymakers have not made hard until you it easy for us. They need to make it get to that point easier. I know that a lot of things in where you can Africa are bureaucratic, you have make it happen. to go to this person to get to that Never give up person, but they have to make it easy and don’t follow for entrepreneurs to do things here. the trend in Africa From what I have experienced so far, it needs to be easier. 19 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
where rather than fix the problem, people try to go around the problem which isn’t always the correct way to do things. What you need to do is go through the problem. That’s how our countries and our continent will grow exponentially. How do you relieve stress?
To relieve stress, I like to go to different places. I used to party a lot when I was younger, but now I stay a little low. I don’t really go out too much. I like to take my friends and family to different places, just to see new things. My dream has been to see the world and I’m doing that now. What’s your favourite part of being an entrepreneur?
My favourite part about being an entrepreneur is the freedom of being in charge. I like being the boss. It gives me the freedom to do anything I want, whenever I want. It’s just freeing, it doesn’t feel like I’m attached to anything or have to do anything. And I enjoy what I do because I only start businesses that I’m passionate about. So it never feels like work and it’s fun to me. I enjoy what I do every day. I’m blessed to wake up and do what I love.
Photo source: instagram/therealantoniodepina
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Profile | By Ruth Okwumbu
Taaooma: Nigeria’s Freestyle ‘Slapping’ Comedian The name Tao is no doubt a familiar sobriquet in the skit-comedy industry. The lady behind this name is Maryam Apaokagi. Already a success in her own rights, many find it hard to understand how this young girl moved from unpopular to celebrated and in-demand within a couple of years, and all under 25 years of age.
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he last of five children, Maryam Apaokagi was born on February 28, 1999, In Ilorin, Kwara state, Nigeria. She had her early education in Dolastar Primary school, Adewole, Ilorin before the family relocated to Namibia in 2009. She then attended Amazing Kids Privatew School & Academy, and Concordia College, Windhoek, all in Namibia.
She then returned to Nigeria where she studied Tourism and Hospitality at the Kwara State University (KWASU), Malete. She served her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) time in Lagos State. Earning a spot in Freestyle Comedy
directing from Nigerian Music Video Director – Abdulaziz Oladimeji aka Abula. At first, acting out the skits was just a way to put her editing skills to use. She recalled in an interview that Abula also assisted her in shooting some of the videos. Maryam’s first sobriquet was “je_suis_taaooma“ dating back to November 22, 2015, before settling for what many now refer to as Freestyle Comedy. What quickly singled her out was the template she created of a regular African mother and how this mother responds to her children’s actions.
She gained popularity by creating a single cast whilst switching roles, and on many occasions, Maryam started her comedy skits in 2015 as the audience finds themselves wondering if a student after learning shooting, editing and the roles are really taken by the same person.
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Her dexterity and versatility has her sliding into each role with perfection – father, mother, daughter, son, mechanic, neighbour, doctor and any other role which the drama skit demands. Taaooma also infuses some trending words and phrases into her comedy dramas, in line with recent happenings.
Another feature of her skits which the audience also finds intriguing is the thunderous slaps which have become characteristic of the mother figure in the skits – Ronke. The timing and accuracy of each slap is almost certain to provoke laughter in every skit, even if all else fails. About the inspiration behind all of her skits, Taaooma said she is inspired by everyday life experiences between an average African mother and child.
“I could remember things that happened and I’ll say, wow, it’s actually funny, I can act it out. And sometimes some of that may not be as funny, but I’ll just add some things. I have my storybook, that’s what I call it.
I just write stories, any ideas that come to my head and when it’s time for me to shoot, I just go through my stories and see which one I’m feeling at that moment”
She started out with just Instagram and did not have much of a role-model in freestyle comedy to look up to at the time, since the single cast genre of acting was largely unexplored. For a long time, she would create the content and put on her handles but there were hardly any views or engagements with it. Later on, as she started studying Instagram analytics, taking note of the right times to do her uploads, the engagement started trickling in.
Since the first video went viral, Maryam’s comedy videos now accumulate millions of views with her huge social media following growing month on month. She is now selfsigned by the Greenade Company which she co-owns with her fiancé – Abdulaziz Oladimeji.
Maryam Apaokagi is also co-owner of The Greenade - a music video-making company. The company has directed countless music videos, including ones from A-list artists. She has hinted that Sticking it through the company may be venturing into In several interviews, Maryam filmmaking soon. admitted that there were times she almost stopped what she was doing, Awards And Nominations especially when it seemed no one was watching. Her mother had expressed In 2019, Maryam Apaokagi won Best fears that excessive devotion to Online Comedian of the Year at the comedy could distract Maryam from Gage Awards. She was listed among her studies, but only allowed her to The Top 25 Under – 30 Nigerian continue because she made a promise superstars and one of Leading Ladies that she would not allow her school Africa #100woman. Apaokagi also performance to drop. made The Guardian Nigeria’s list of 100 Most Inspiring Women in the Maryam took deliberate steps to make country. it work. She watched some YouTube videos on video editing to advance On 8 November 2020, Maryam was her skills, and took time to study nominated as part of The Future Instagram algorithms to know when Awards Africa: Class of 2020 for the to make her uploads for maximum prize of content creation (YouTubers, engagement. Vloggers). Things picked up over time and so did her morale. She is now one of the most followed Instagram Comedians in Nigeria with over 2.4 million active instagram followers.
Apaokagi won the 2020Nigeria’s 25 under 25 awards for the Social Entrepreneur category and was nominated for the MAYA Awards Africa under the Skit Maker Of The Year category, as well as the City People Maryam has since then featured Music Awards for the Comedy Act of other top acts in her comedy dramas, the Year. including Falz, Don Jazzy, Twyse Ereme, Debo Macaroni, Williams Uchemba, The Cute Abiola, Adeoye Adeyemi Elesho, and EmmaOhMyGod. The money trail
Taaooma did not start making money from her hobby-turned-full-time-job until 2018. Speaking in an interview, she said she received payment to do a promotion for a single, and that Many say that the skit “When Your officially marked the beginning of Nigerian Mom Drives You to School” her promotions and advertisements was her breakthrough production as for companies and brands. She has bagged several endorsements as well. the video was the first to go viral. 21 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
She started a finger foods business – Chop Tao in 2020. She said that it was a business idea she had nursed in her heart since her university days.
I could remember things that happened and I’ll say, wow, it’s actually funny, I can act it out.
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Interview By Emmanuel Abara Benson
Babatunde Akin-Moses Tells us about Sycamor’s Ambition for the rest of the Year
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hen we first spoke to Babatunde Akin-Moses in January, he accurately predicted the Nigerian Government’s excessive regulation of the tech ecosystem in H1 2021. He also projected that the year would be favorably disposed to the fintech sector and by extension, positively impact his startup Sycamor. Now, looking back at the first two quarters of the year, he suggests that it has rather been an interesting and unpredictable year. As for the remaining two quarters, the plan is to continue to expand Sycamor to other parts of the country. Enjoy the conversation. It’s nice to talk to you again, Mr Moses. Earlier this year, we asked you about your expectations for the new year. Now, the first half of the year has come and gone. How would you assess H1 2021? Has it been what you expected?
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It’s been an awesome half year to be honest. As a business, it has surpassed our expectations. On the broad macro level, we have seen a lot of moves by the government to regulate the Fintech space as much as possible. We have seen more regulation by the SEC and CBN. Amid all these regulations, even Twitter was not spared. I’d say it’s been a very interesting and unpredictable year so far. Could you tell us some of the highlights of the first half for Sycamore? Any major accomplishments or hurdles that were overcome? I think one of the biggest highlights is us doing our last year numbers within the first half of this year, by way of disbursements. It’s been a lot of hard work and some good luck, of course. But we are very proud of what we have accomplished. I think the biggest challenge has been attracting and retaining top talents. The talent market is really competitive, but I’m glad that we have been able
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to attract the cream of the crop if I can was also predictable. But I didn’t see say so myself. the ban on companies that allowed people to trade foreign stocks. I don’t What does it feel like to be a suc- think it’s over by a long shot – we’ll cessful 40 under 40 entrepreneur probably still get some surprises in a place like Nigeria where many before the end of the year. people your age (and those even older) are still struggling to find Do you think these over regulations jobs? could possibly scare away investors? I feel really honoured, to be honest. I’m thankful that I’m fortunate enough to Perhaps. It will probably make some be recognised among a distinguished investors nervous. But let’s remember that the economy is not made of few. technology players only. For people What would be your advice to a who want to play in the real sector, I 30-something year old aspiring think the government will be happy entrepreneur in Africa who wants for them to come into the country to quit a good salaried job to pursue to do business, especially since they entrepreneurship? have the potential to generate jobs and help us retain more foreign exchange Very bold decision to take! And through local substitutes. that’s what it is – a decision; one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. The journey BEA: Bearing in mind everything requires more guts and perseverance that has happened this year, do you than intelligence. I’d say, be patient think Nigeria is ready for a digital for the first 12 to 18 months. Business economy? is not likely to take off immediately, and the process of stabilising, might The question of readiness is a tough seem like things are not working out. one to answer, because I think it is a In the interim while the business is continuous journey for any country. finding its footing, there should be In fairness, the government is doing a plan to have cash flow, no matter it’s best to digitise as many services as how little, during the early stages. possible. From company registration, This is particularly true when one has to filing of taxes, to drivers’ license dependents. Finally, find a partner or issuance, etc. Of course, there have two to go on the journey with you. It been issues with moving a lot of can get quite lonely so having people these processes online. I think the to support is helpful. government should be commended for making genuine efforts to do so. I When we spoke to you earlier will suggest that the government play this year, you mentioned that one a more advisory and regulatory role trend that would characterize to private companies, rather than the tech ecosystem in Nigeria this operating actively. year is regulation. Certainly, there have been a lot of government As someone with experience regulations. But are they what you in courting investors, anticipated? what do you think are some of the biggest mistakes There are some I suspected would entrepreneurs’ make when happen and some I didn’t. For example, seeking funding and how can the move against cryptocurrency, I they be avoided? suspected. Maybe not in the overnight manner it happened. But it wasn’t far- I would say lack of transparency. fetched in my opinion. SEC’s move It’s best to be as open and against certain investment models honest as possible. Then finding 23 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
investors that fit your profile or invest in a particular industry. Not every investor is a good match for every entrepreneur. Not knowing your business or your numbers is also not a great thing – especially when questions are being asked that the entrepreneur should know.
Would you tell us five essential things that are required to build a successful tech company in Nigeria? Great team, swift execution, good timing, a viable business model, and a good network
What are Sycamore’s projections/ expectations for the rest of the year? We expect to have a more national spread across the country, beyond our present focus on the south-west. We also plan to launch two more digital products, which we anticipate will be a game changer, and will be adopted by thousands of businesses across Watch this space! West Africa.
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Interview By Simeon Onoja
Onyeka Akumah: The Journey of a Serial Disruptor
I didn’t cut out to say ‘hey I want to be a serial entrepreneur’. For me, I wanted to create an impact in three sectors - agriculture, real estate and transportation. I kept on looking for how to use technology in those three sectors. My efforts turned out to become successful businesses, employing a lot of people and I’m happy about that. For me, It was more important to impact people’s lives.
At only 37, Onyeka Akumah has been able to build a number of thriving businesses. The serial entrepreneur set out on his entrepreneurial journey with a keen interest in agriculture, real estate and transportation sectors.
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ooking back, it’s easy to see the impact he has made in these sectors with his leading brands such as Farmcrowdy - an agritech company, Rent Small Small - a real estate firm, Plentywaka - a transportation startup and Crowdyvest - a fintech platform.
attention on building Nigeria’s foremost shared mobility platform Plentywaka as CEO whilst providing guidance to his other businesses.
Onyeka has received several awards African Leadership Persons of the Year 2020, The Top 50 African Disruptors 2020 by The Africa Report, 50 African Over the years, Onyeka has mastered Innovators to Watch by Global Shakers, the art of doing business in this part Vanguard’s Top 10 Nigerian CEOs of the world, working for notable Under 40 Years 2020, and a lot more. companies like GTBank, Deloitte, Jumia and Konga. Through his expertise in Business Elites Africa caught up with technology and marketing, Onyeka is Onyeka on his journey so far in the one of those entrepreneurs bringing transportation ecosystem in Africa, Africa into the international business among other issues. discourse through his endeavours. What’s it like being a serial He currently focuses the bulk of entrepreneur?
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Farmcrowdy was the first. It wasn’t my first startup but in focusing on the three sectors I was excited about, it was. We made a tremendous impact with the platform. We have close to half a million farmers on our network today that we are providing different kinds of value to, helping them boost their work as well as help us facilitate the production of food in the country.
Then there was Crowdyvest, which was almost like an accidental startup. I wasn’t focused on building a fintech startup, but we found that we could crowdfund beyond agriculture so we created a new business for crowdfunding and that was Crowdyvest. We’ve successfully exited Crowdyvest, it’s self-sustaining and turning into a digital bank. We’re excited about what the new owners are doing with that business. What I did with Rent Small Small is identify another opportunity in getting people to pay rent on a monthly basis. I co-founded that startup with Tunde Balogun who is doing an excellent job there. I pretty much just function at the board level and help with some strategic decisions, Tunde runs the company which he’s taking to another level. Over 500 people have used Rent Small Small to pay rent on a monthly basis across Lagos and other states in Nigeria.
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I now spend almost a hundred per cent of my time on Plentywaka. As a serial entrepreneur and Plentywaka being the largest shared mobility startup in Nigeria, we’re just getting people to move in a safer, affordable and more comfortable manner within the city and across cities in Nigeria. And with a plan to do this across Africa. I didn’t set out to say I want to be a serial entrepreneur, I just wanted to create impact in those sectors and it landed me big businesses.
Give us a picture of your early days at Plentywaka? When we started Plantywaka we took a path that many people thought was going to be tough to go, and that was getting people to move with buses in a more effective manner. People felt with all the regulation and population involved in public transport it was going to be a tough journey for us. I think the success we’ve had is not just credited to me, but my co-founders Johnny Enagwolor has done a lot with the regulation for Plentywaka, Oluseyi Afolabi with product development and John Shaibu with customer engagement. So it’s the four of us joining all might to make it what it is. We had to take a loan initially to start out with getting the first set of buses. We’ve translated that into a contract with our drivers. We went through that phase where everybody dealt with the pandemic in 2020 when we had to shut down our service for about 3 months. We hadn’t raised any money, otherwise. Initially, we were pretty much on a rocket ship, in six months we got over a hundred thousand people riding on our platform. Then the pandemic happened. Coming out of that to start back up, we quickly had to raise some funds. So we secured $300 thousand last year to sustain the business. One lucky break we had was when we got into Techstars this year. We began to get attention from investors and right now are in the 25 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
process of closing out a new round What are some of the ways you’ll that we’ll announce shortly. recommend for early-stage startup founders to source funding? We’re now building the largest shared mobility startup in Nigeria. Rather Anytime I have the opportunity to than having one driver move one speak with early entrepreneurs, I keep passenger as you have with other repeating this, ‘investors are looking mobility platforms, one driver will to invest in a company that is scaling, now move 14 or more passengers. one that has potential and huge People can now open extra seats in market appeal’. But before you can get their vehicles to move people from one them to invest millions of dollars you bus stop to another, and become what need traction. So what I advise every we refer to as ‘Heroes’ on Plentywaka. entrepreneur to do is first, in designing From that perspective, we are now your business model, you must find a seeing a lot of traction. way of making money from day one or at least identify where you’re getting your margins from whatever value you’re providing for your customers.
“You need to pay attention to the team because investors at that early stage are investing in the team.”
People are excited about Plentywaka because they are paying less than they would have paid on other ride-hailing platforms. The drivers or heroes like we call them are earning more, 90% of the ticket as against the 70% or 75% on other platforms. So I think that’s what is making people really excited and we’re just getting started. We’ve not even scratched the surface in the public transportation space not just in Nigeria, in East Africa, West Africa, and across the continent.
And two, identify the right people on your team. You need people on your team that possess complementary skills. For instance, say I’m strong in marketing. I need somebody who’s strong with engagement regulators, technology or customer engagement. We combined our different skill sets at Plentywaka to make the business successful.
Also, you need a team that has history. The least amount of time I knew all the co-founders in Plentywaka was five years. So it wasn’t an idea that brought us together, we knew each other before then. You need to pay attention to the team because investors at that early stage are investing in the team. The idea may be fantastic, but there won’t be so much for them to see at that point, apart from the potential of the team executing it. For us, the traction we had in the first six months before the pandemic was what allowed us to show that we had potential in Plentywaka. When the lockdown was eased we were able to present good numbers to investors and able to attract some funding into our coffers. When you get funding, at least the first set of funding, do not change the model. Stay on what has made you raise that funding and turn it into a sustainable traction. And
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then gradually you start scaling and now the CEO at Crowdyvest, at that tweaking your model until you have time, was leading operations and had something that is self-sustaining. to get into the farm. I and all the other tech people literally had to get into the Tell us about Travelwaka - the farms. That was a shocking moment in interstate travel network of our business and I think was one of Plentywaka? the worst moments we had in my own entrepreneurial journey. ‘Waka’ means movement. It goes beyond moving people from bus Another was when we ran out of cash stop to bus stop. We created three in my previous startup and had to types of waka, Dailywaka - moving shut it down. We had to look at all the within cities, Travelwaka - moving employees and say to them we were from one state to the other, and then out of money. Lucky for us, we were there’s corporate waka - a bus hiring able to exit the business to a bigger solution. With Travelwaka, we’re media house. All the good hands kept getting bus operators to sign up on their jobs and started earning higher. our platform and use our technology Generally, there are bad days but we to get customers. The likes of GUO, turn them into goods days as much Libra Motors, ABC Transport, can now as we can. list their inventory on our platform. Using our app, people can book tickets What’s your favourite part of being and make payments without having an entrepreneur? to queue at the bus parks. We started with Libra Motors bringing about 200 It’s getting to do two things. One is of the buses to our platform, GUO has having to conceive an idea, put it on paper, very quickly name the idea, done the same with 200 buses. create something out of it, and there’s Also, smaller players are using value for people. And then all of the Plentywaka as an inventory sudden people say, ‘I actually didn’t management system, so they no longer know he could have an idea that would serve paper tickets, but rather, digital solve this problem’. I think that’s tickets to their customers. Travelwaka exciting. is a major aggregator for interstate buses. The second thing is finding solutions that create jobs for people. So you’re What would you say was your worst seeing the impact and at the same day? time, you’re creating opportunities for people to earn. And I’m quite excited I think my worst day would be when about being able to do that with we started Farmcrowdy and I found all my businesses. out that one of my co-founders was going to leave. We had thought we were going to be depending on his agriculture perspective to run the How do you relieve stress? business. I came from a technology and marketing background and was trying I do my best to work out. I to create a solution in the agriculture play football. I’m a number space. We could have literally shut 9 or 21, a striker really. down the business. It was a case where Because I want to play I didn’t have anyone on the team that well on the pitch, I have to had that expertise. But we had to roll work out and that helps our sleeves. Tope Omotolani who is me relieve stress. When
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I get really burnt out in the office I can take it out on the pitch by just shouting ‘pass the ball!’ The venom I’m exhaling by howling ‘pass the ball’ may be coming from the office where someone didn’t ‘pass the ball’.
I also find time to rest. If I don’t sleep 6 hours-30 minutes to 7 hours every day, it affects my productivity towards the later part of the day. I like to fire up all cylinders at least between 8 in the morning and 6 in the evening.
I turn a lot of things into a sport, I’m quite competitive, and that continues to spark my energy. I want to be the best in what I do. I want to be at the top. So that fires me up. When I get tired, I can always look at other people who are champions in their field and how they continue to push themselves. And I push myself and pace myself, so I don’t burn out. I rest when I need to. Sometimes I travel to get new ideas, to relax and see things from a new perspective. I think all of this helps me and keeps me fired up.
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Interview By Dimeji Akinloye
Two Friends, Buky Akinmboni and Bolaji Fasanya Sacrificed a Life of Comfort to Build Nigeria’s Leading Fragrance Company
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uky Akinmboni had no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. She had a good job with one of the largest advertising agencies in West Africa, and earned a decent salary. But life had other plans as she and her friend, Bolaji Fasanya decided to start a business in an industry that barely existed in the Nigerian marketplace.
After convincing themselves that the idea was worth a shot, they started their company in 2015 and named it Scentify. These ladies, now in their late 30s, chose the complete unconventional roads, never played by the book and did everything contrary to what business experts and schools of thought would advise. No business plan, no market research and they created a product before identifying a market. All they had was passion and the willpower to succeed. Of course, the odds were stacked against them. Buky went on to quit her day job to give the business all the attention it
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required. And today, the brand is gaining cross-border traction and has become one of the leaders in its category. In this interview with Business Elites Africa, Buky elaborates on all the battles they had to fight and the price they paid to stay in business. She also admits they made lots of mistakes that other entrepreneurs can learn from.
we had only experimented with service-based businesses, and none worked out. I couldn’t wrap my head around a productionbased business. Apparently she had watched a documentary on how to make candles and saw it as easy and unique. She just thought it would be a novel idea in Nigeria because nobody was doing it. I personally loved candles and fragrances. But I didn’t really key into it at the time because I was still working a 9 – 5 job at Insight Communications. We had this conversation in 2014.
You guys started your company in 2016, at a time when that type of business was almost non-existent in Nigeria. Of all businesses, why What was exciting about it to me scented candles? was me getting to make candles for
Let me give you a bit of our background. Bolaji and I have a background in advertising, communication and marketing. So we’ve tried to do business together in that field but nothing really took off. And then one day, Bolaji calls me and says, ‘Buky, what do you think about scented candles as a business?’ I was, like where is that coming from? All this while,
myself. I just thought it would be interesting to make candles that I can use. That’s how we started researching and practicing, and I got sucked into it. And by December 2015, we sold our first product. So basically Bolaji’s inspiration from something she watched and my passion got us started. Some entrepreneurs would tell you to first find a hungry market and
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then create a product that’d serve the need of that market, but you guys did it the other way round. How did you find the market for your products?
You’re very right. The logical thing to do is to find a need and then create a product or service to cater to that need. But that’s not our story and I’m not going to try to sound intelligent or that we discovered any market. There is a reason why business schools will tell you to find a need before creating a product or service. That’s because it makes it easier for you when you enter the space. Because we didn’t do that, it was very difficult. First of all, we entered the market when the category was nonexistent. There were consumers but they were very few. I realized when we started that burning candles was not a Nigerian thing. I have always loved burning candles, so I just assumed that there were many people like me who appreciated candles. A lot of people’s association with candles was from growing up and candles served as a source of light when there is no power supply. So trying to sell the product beyond my immediate circle proved really difficult. When I presented the product to some people I thought would value scented candles, they’d ask me ‘what I’m I supposed to do with it?’ Some would even attach spirituality to it, insinuating that it’s diabolical. That’s because some religious sects (primarily white garment churches in West Africa) use candles for prayers. That was a huge shock for me because I didn’t do my research. I just assumed that since I was a candle lover, there are many candle lovers. I think that’s where passion also comes to play in a business because it was the passion that kept me going. It took a lot of re-education to let some Nigerians see scented candles in a different light. We let 29 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
them know it’s not for light and not for conjuring of spirits or prayers. They are for your ambiance and to make your place smell nice. Some would argue that they have air fresheners for that. Another barrier was that some people thought scented candles were only for posh and rich people. We had to re-orientate them and let them see that it’s for everybody. And this was an uphill task.
prices at a point that an average person could still afford. Then, we moved to promotions, which was obviously done via social media. We didn’t have a budget for any fancy promotion. We just launched organically on social media. We were taking pictures and posting content ourselves. Paid advertising didn’t come until much later.
Considering you didn’t have a big budget to work with, why didn’t you As people with a marketing consider printing your packaging background, what marketing materials locally? strategy did you guys deploy to sell We found ourselves in a market your product?
where there wasn’t a large ready audience. What’s the low-hanging fruit? People that use scented candles but shop abroad. What do we do to attract them? There was no way the quality of the packaging materials printed locally would appeal to this set of people. Our first batch of stickers was printed in Nigeria but the quality was poor compared to the foreign products. Local printing has improved tremendously now though. We were not going to stand a chance in this business if we were printing We first identified the consumers in Nigeria back then. we could easily reach. People who already use scented candles Would you advise anyone trying to and who usually shopped their go into your kind of business today products abroad. Then, we had to adopt the same marketing stratto make sure that our product egy as you guys? matches what they buy abroad in terms of quality and aesthetic Now the landscape has changed. appeal. We wanted our product One thing I should point out is that to sit side-by-side with the ones when we started, we thought we they were buying internationally, were the only ones in the business. so they’re not able to differentiate It’s when you get into a business which one is local or foreign. That that you would see the players. We was the first thing we tried to get were just like 3 players at the time. right. So the market wasn’t cluttered. Any little activity you did, whether you We also played with the pricing. ran an ad or just put an amazing When we entered the market, product out there, you were bound one thing that was very clear to to get noticed. us was that we didn’t want our product to be perceived as beyond Fast forward to 2021, this market reach for an average Nigerian. So category is now quite cluttered we deliberately didn’t overprice in its own right. There are loads it, even though the cost of raw of people making candles and materials and packaging were diffusers. So if you’re going to enter very high, because we were not the market now, your marketing printing locally. So we put our strategy will be completely When we started, a lot of our marketing was product-based. In marketing, there is what we call the 4 Ps of marketing – Product, Price, Place and Promotion. So we focused a lot on our product. Why? Because the product was for a novel market in Nigeria. So we felt like just advertising may not sell the product because it’s not a category people were aware of. First of all, we had to make sure that we got the product right.
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different. You have to sit back and really think about how you would stand out in the relatively crowded market. The competition has put us on our toes as well.
I absolutely loved my job at Insight Communications. I never dreamt I’d be an entrepreneur. In fact, when people were talking about business, I would always tell them that I’m a career girl and that I How are you guys managing to stay would retire as one. But when this business idea got planted in me, ahead of the curve now? I just realized that there was this As they say in marketing, it’s the innate pull within me everyday that first-mover advantage. We were not I could not explain. the first but among the first. That has worked well for us because I loved my advertising job. But I we‘ve had enough time to gather began to develop a strong liking a lot of attention so people kind of for the business, so my attention know the brand, Scentify. was divided. Plus, I was earning a decent salary at my job, so I was Another thing that has helped us is reluctant to leave the salary for a that when we started, we did a lot business I wasn’t so sure about yet. of exhibitions. We were at virtually As time went by, this pull to leave every trade fair we knew about. So the job became so intense that I the name Scentify has kind of stuck couldn’t ignore it anymore. I was in people’s minds. And as time more like a calling. went by, we obviously evolved. We’ve had to run promoted ads on Most people quit their job to start social media. a business when the business We didn’t just lay back relying on past glory. We’ve also improved on our products. We’ve had two product modifications between 2015 and now and also expanded our product offerings very fast. We started with scented candles but quickly added diffusers, room sprays and then, bath and body products. We have shower gels, hand washes, hand creams etc.
We created all these because not a lot of people were into candles, as earlier narrated. So we offered another way of scenting your house. And our product quality just kept selling us. When people use our products, the feedback we are getting is even better than the brands they were buying abroad.
Initially, you were running the business alongside your day job. You later quit your job to face the business full-time. What were the indicators that convinced you it was time to face the business squarely?
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is already generating a decent revenue, or you didn’t have recurring bills to pay?
Of course, I had bills. I lived on my own and paid rent. The truth is, we did everything contrary to the way it was traditionally done. And I don’t know if that was a good or bad thing, but we operated that way. I actually left Insight Communications around June 2015 to go work for House of Tara when I knew it was going into the business world. The reason I took that decision was because I didn’t have any entrepreneurial experience. I wanted to work with an entrepreneur who had become successful, to learn the ropes. And I actually planned to work there for a longer time but at some point I couldn’t continue because it felt like Scentify was my baby. And, I felt like I was abandoning it to take care of another person’s child. So I terminated my employment with House of Tara in December 2016.
At this time, I hadn’t saved up to 6 months’ worth of my expenses budget like experts always advise. We just jumped in the deep end and learnt how to swim while in the water. Personally, I’m not going to advise anybody to quit their job and go after their passion. Please, don’t. For me, I feel if I had sat down and done all the calculations and permutations, I’d still be in the 9 – 5 job. I don’t think I’d ever have made the move if I had been very logical and played by the books. But believe me, it was very difficult. But it’s paying off now, right?
Yes. Although the business has not started making the kind of money I want it to make, the payoff is huge in other ways that are not monetary. Post my 9 – 5, I felt like I started living life when I started running a business. It felt like I wasn’t living in the real world when I was in paid employment, maybe because I worked in the advertising industry. It’s a very glitzy industry. It just felt like I was in Nanaland. I hadn’t seen or experienced life in all of its facets.
Yes, I knew how to work and do my job very well but, as an employee, I felt shielded from the different dimensions of life. Now, as an entrepreneur, I feel like I live a fuller and richer life through the last 5-6 years. I feel like my character has been tested and built. That’s the biggest payoff for me. It is a tougher life, but somehow, I enjoy this journey more. On a soul level, it has impacted and is impacting me more. Distribution is key for a productbased business. Beyond social media, how are you guys circulating?
Distribution has become part of our strategy down the line. When www.businesselitesafrica.com
we started, you could only buy directly from us via social media, our website and our official phone line. We didn’t have a brick-andmortar store. We still don’t have one.
fit perfectly with everything Celebrations stands for. So when we realized this, we pulled out of quite a number of the other stores, as our products were just sitting on their shelf. We are now in House of Tara too. We are in a store called The offline method we adopted Revamp, an interior decoration was based on consumer feedback store. and the need to be able to reach more people beyond our circle Let’s talk about partnership. of influence. What we did was Finding a reliable business partner that we tried to get into as many is an uphill task. Yet it is probably retail stores as possible. The most the best option to consider these successful retail partnerships we days if one wants to go far. How did have is with a gifting store called you and Bolaji forge your alliance, Celebrations. They were only in and how do you make it work? Abuja when we started retailing with them but they now have a Again, this is going to go contrary to Lagos branch. what business schools or lawyers would advise. What has worked We would ship our product to them for our partnership is actually and that caters to the Abuja market. our friendship, whereas people And it’s been overwhelmingly say don’t bring friendship into successful. Our sales just went off business. And partnerships are not the roof since they started carrying easy by any means because it’s two Scentify products. Before then, we different people coming together. knew almost all of our customers Both of you are chasing only one because the sales were coming goal, but each of you has a different directly to us. But with Celebrations perspective and ideology. But what people we didn’t know were buying has always helped us circle back is our products, all we knew was friendship. Celebrations was coming back for re-orders. Whenever things get a bit rough with us as partners, at the end of Before we got to the gifting store, the day, we were friends before we had tried other stores and we became partners. Whatever is nothing worked. But we now going to threaten that friendship know why it has all worked with is what makes us find a resolution. Celebrations. That’s one. Number two is, for any partnership to work, the goals Why did it work? must be articulated. The Bible says ‘can two walk together unless they Celebrations is a gifting store. agree?’. That agreement is key and Candles and Diffusers are big needs to be your vision for the gifting items. They are easy gifts business. You may not agree on that anybody would appreciate. many other things. Besides, their store ambiance is great. There is a mindset a shopper I even think it is healthy for you has when they are shopping not to agree on everything else, for certain types of products. because that’s where it becomes For example, we figured that a interesting, and you can get diverse supermarket was not the typical opinions and views about things. place for consumers to shop for But every party needs to align luxury and ambiance kinds of with the vision for the business. items. With a supermarket, they One person cannot have a small are thinking about cereals and ambition and the other person a other supplies. But our products large piece. 31 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
There will always be friction. For example, when the idea of scented candles came, I wasn’t seeing it as a business, all I cared about was my personal liking for scented candles, but Bolaji had seen the whole business side of it from day one.
The business didn’t really take off until I aligned with that vision. So, in any partnership, whether of individuals or business to business, the vision has to be clear and has to be aligned. We have to have the same values. What are the lessons you’ve learnt in your entrepreneurial journey?
The number one lesson that I’ve learnt is to write a business plan. Don’t take it for granted. The importance of a business plan is not the final document, but the process of writing it. That’s because it forces you to critically think about every aspect of your business, even things that you ordinarily would not have thought about at the start. Do that due diligence. This might be a grueling process, but it’s very important for your business.
Secondly, don’t undermine customer feedback, especially when it’s negative and it feels like they rubbished your hard work. You need to detach that emotion and really pay attention to what they’re saying. One customer’s feedback can be your springboard to a product that will just explode. If you’re in tune with your business, you’ll know how to listen and you’ll know when nuggets of gold are being dropped, positive or negative. Another thing I’ve learnt is that there will always be seasons of abundance and there will be seasons when you’ll struggle and it will look like everything you’ve done counts for nothing. They come in different ways. Once you acknowledge that, you’ll be able to manage the two seasons.
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Interview By Emmanuel Abara Benson
Born into a Nigerian Logistics Empire, Obinna Anyaegbu is now Leveraging Tech to Forge his own Path in Business
am most interested in is how logistics influences trade. That’s exactly why I established Chisco Express. We are using technology and leveraging data to build a platform/marketplace that will enable trade to happen seamlessly.
As you know, logistics is a driver for so many other aspects of the commerce value chain. For this reason, we are building on logistics which is our base. That’s what we have honed into, as our strength, over the past 35 years as a group.
O
binna Anyaegbu is the first son of Chief Chidi Anyaegbu, a successful Nigerian business tycoon who amassed his vast wealth from his transportation and logistics business. In this interview with Business Elites Africa, he recounts his experience growing up in a family that was characterized by logistics and transportation, and how his father’s success informed his career path. Also, he discusses Chisco Express, a technologybacked startup he recently founded as part of his plans for the next growth phase of his father’s empire. Enjoy the conversation.
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People will like to know how your father’s success in transportation and logistics has influenced your decision to follow the same path.
Chisco Express is now coming along as the new kid on the block, backed by technology and bringing embedded services into the chain with our partners, all with the mission of consolidating everything Chisco Group has already done. With Chisco Transport, we already have on the ground over $25 million worth of logistics infrastructure across West Africa.
Obinna: I was basically born into logistics. From a very young age, I got immersed in everything there is about logistics – driver management, And that’s basically what we now fleet acquisition, spare parts, etc. want to build tech on top of. But then I’ve basically been in and around the again, it’s beyond just building on situation of logistics. what Chisco Transport already has on ground. It’s also about the other And I must admit that my father’s embedded services we are offering; mastery and success in this industry about making it possible for other through his company Chisco service providers to link into our Transport have been a big influence technology and provide services to on me. Right now, however, what I clients.
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Tell us more about Chisco Express. that even if it’s a 0.5kg parcel you are expecting to be delivered, you can Obinna: Chisco Express was monitor the movement down to the established around February 2020, bike man that will deliver it to your shortly before COVID-19. It was a door-step. In the same vein, if you are very rocky start for us. Our first load expecting a product from overseas, movement happened around March you can track where it is, when it is 14th when we transported instant coming down the ship and landing at noodles to the North and some cashew the port, all the way till it gets to you. nuts back to the West. It was a very tough period, bearing in mind the But like I mentioned earlier, all of these security situation and the pandemic have not yet been fine-tuned into one at that time. Fundraising was also very technology suite. But we are building. difficult. But we managed to surmount That notwithstanding, we already these difficulties. One thing is certain, have about 50 businesses that we and that’s the fact that logistics is a are constantly serving either through pandemic-proof business. domestic freight or international freight. And we are tailoring our Now, what we are building at Chisco products to actually suit each of them. Express is more than just your typical logistics firm. We are building a What stands you apart from the technology suite that can afford clients other players in the tech-driven the opportunity to not only transport logistics space? Talk to us through their goods, but also monitor every your Unique Selling Proposition. stage of the transportation process and even get other embedded services Obinna: Let me begin by saying such as loans, insurance, etc. It is that we at Chisco Express do not see truly a commerce enabler. And while competition. And I say this because it is not yet a perfect product, we are I don’t think we are even scratching continually fine-tuning it to make it the surface as far as logistics demand exactly what we envisioned it to be. in this market is concerned. The market is quite large. So, even if there Thanks to Chisco Transport’s years- are twenty of us competing, we still long service to Nigerians and West won’t be enough to meet the demand. Africans in general, Chisco Express We have a $102 billion addressable now has a range of customers from market size here in Africa. Even the big companies to the SMEs and focusing on the top fifteen African even individuals. And we are keeping markets alone, we still won’t be able it that way because we want to be able to scratch the surface. to tailor products for different clients, products that are best-fit for what they Now, because there are so many want. We already have the expertise to aspects of logistics, what obtains is handle any freight from 0.5kg to 1000 that most people will focus on just tons. one mode of transportation. Some people are focusing on trucking while And there are currently no other others are focusing only on last-mile technology suites in the Nigerian delivery. We, on the other hand, focus market capable of this kind of varied on facilitating the supply chain by service offering. There is none that I all means. What our clients want is know capable of handling all aspects to move their products from Point A of freight forwarding and domestic to Point B. And to do that for them, freight movement at the same time. we make use of different modes of logistics; provided it is the smartest Our service is all-encompassing, such and most cost-efficient solution. 35 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
Another reason why we are different is that we can actually tailor our solutions to customers’ needs, utilizing the infrastructure and physical network we have at our disposal. We also have a very robust and strong management and operations team.
We have in our team people who were former MDs of DHL, wonderful Board members with vast business experiences. With all these experiences and capabilities, we can easily execute service to our clients’ needs, whether they be Tier-1, Tier-2 or Tier-3 clients. That’s what makes us different. And we will remain committed to building the product so we can continually serve our clients better.” Let’s talk about fundraising; what has your experience been like in this regard?
Obinna: Fundraising has recently been a very tumultuous experience. It was a lot easier some years back, say in 2016 and even 2018. In recent times,however, it has become more difficult, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Luckily for us, we have a lot of values that we’ve been leveraging in all these years that have enabled us to perform quite well.
Right now, however, we are currently in the middle of a Seed Round/Pre-Series A fundraising stage. The pre-seed round was completed successfully with investors very passionate about our story and where we are headed. There are a number of investors showing interest in the current round and we are quite excited. We plan to deploy the funding towards financing the next stage we are taking the company. For one, we need to rejig our network of terminals. We also need to ensure that every aspect of our technology is properly built out to ensure optimal functionality. All things being equal, we hope to finalise the fundraising round in the next three months.
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Interview By Dimeji Akinloye
Meet Ex-Jumia Executives Redefining Logistics Business in Nigeria with Warenext
A
yo Olunuga was raised by a father who owned a logistics business in Nigeria. With his experience at the Royal Mail and Jumia, he had mastered the terrain and fully understood where the market gaps were. He was eager to solve the warehousing and last-mile delivery problems but he knew the journey is a marathon, and to win, he couldn’t go it alone. Ayo teamed up with his friend and former colleague, Damola Ajayi, a sales professional, to start Warenext, an end-to-end digital marketplace. According to the duo, the mission is to shoulder all the logistics burden of SMEs in Nigeria.
Warenext is helping online retailers warehouse their goods on a payas-you-go plan, with efficient and customer-centric last-mile delivery options to choose from on the platform.
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Ayo and Damola told Business Elites Africa in detail about their journey as employees and now as business owners.
well. That was what we did for a while, then this modernization of the railway came about, and the railway actually stopped working for some time.
BEA: Firstly, let’s talk about your That literarily halted the rail side of professional journey before you the business, but we went on with started Warenext. the road. That’s what I did prior to us joining and starting off Warenext in Ayo: I have been in the logistics 2019. business for about 10 to 15 years. I grew up around a logistics business BEA: For someone coming from the owned by my father and that’s what logistics industry in the UK where I studied at the University as well. I the system works, how would you actually had my formal logistics job compare it to the Nigerian terrain? in the UK, with the Royal Mail. From Ayo: In a way, logistics is similar there I moved on to Aston Martin. everywhere, because it’s the same I worked with Jaguar Land Rover thing that you’re doing. It’s how and I also worked with Jumia. I was you do it that differs, and what the the head of delivery at Jumia. When rules and regulations allow in each I left Jumia, I tried my hands on a country. Then, the environment is small logistics business, where we also different - the people you work did road and rail transportation for with and the level of expectation or a number of businesses. We moved exposure that they have to the job are goods from Apapa all the way to the really what’s different. In the UK, it’s Kano-Kaduna axis and down south as very regularized, there are certain jobs
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that you can do for a certain period of time, then you have to go on, and there are certain rules you have to follow. But in Nigeria, not so much.
Damola: I started off in Human Resources (HR). I was doing recruitment, talent management, and facilitating a lot of training, as far back as when I was a student, a member of the International Association of Students in Economics and Commerce (AISEC), a student organization that basically caters to young people developing their leadership potentials. So we did a lot of projects, training, and conferences across different countries. This student organization is in 115 countries. So you could travel and do exchange programs. Shortly after school, I went to Ghana, where I did a bit of AISEC stuff as well as talent management. From Ghana, I traveled to Gabon for a project with the United Nations and AISEC. Then, I went to India, where I also worked as HR personnel at TATA group – the IT arm of the company.
We had over 200,000 employees, and I was managing about 9000 people back then. After TATA, I came back to Nigeria and worked as an HR staff at an engineering firm; then quit and went to Jumia. At Jumia I did recruitment and training as well, more like HR and sales, which was my first experience in sales. Later in Jumia, I moved to become the director for the marketplace because the company needed to move from the retail business into a marketplace business, which informs some of the things we do at Warenext today.
After Jumia, I Joined Carrry1st, a gaming company. I was the manager for growth and expansion in Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya. After that, I ran into Ayo and Warenext happened. BEA: So how did Warenext happen? When did you guys start the conversation?
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Ayo: Warenext started in August 2019 and it was basically based on some of the challenges in the industry. One of the challenges I faced while working in the UK was that of short-term warehousing. During peak periods like Black Fridays, Christmas, and other major holidays, there is usually a spike in online shopping and all will go through a supply and logistics to get delivered. But the number of warehouses we run throughout the year was not usually sufficient for the peak period.
for rent into buying more stock. That’s why we started Warenext as a pay-asyou warehousing solution for small and medium-size enterprises. BEA: All the while, were you both having the conversation of starting the business together?
Ayo: I have always had the idea but wanted the business to go far. There is a popular adage that if you want to go fast, you go alone but if you want to go far, you go with people. And Damola is a friend, we worked at Jumia So we needed additional short-term together, plus he has some skills that warehousing spaces to accommodate I don’t have, so we naturally decided the extra volume that would come our to partner. way. Coming down to Nigeria, we had exactly the same problem at Jumia. So BEA: Damola, when Ayo started it really doesn’t matter if you are in the having the conversation with UK, US, Nigeria, or Ghana, that logistics you, did you key into the vision issue will be there. More importantly, immediately? my girlfriend then had goods she was selling and she was doing that from the Damola: Yes! As he said, we both had house. As her business grew, she had different experiences of the challenges more inventory and the whole house in the logistics industry in Nigeria – from the last mile to short-term was just filled up with the goods. warehousing problems. There was a So we decided to get a small space. huge demand for space. So the idea But also, the inventory fluctuates, she was super exciting. And when you gets a whole load and as she starts talk about SMEs, there are millions of selling, it goes down. So I thought guys out there trying to find solutions why would we rent a big shop when to grow their businesses. So it was we have fluctuating demand? But natural for me to come on board. we couldn’t find any solution to her business problem as at that time. And BEA: There have been instances of that was where this idea of pay-as-go big logistics companies mishandling goods kept in their warehouses. So warehousing came about. much that by the time the item is If you have a small business and you delivered to the consumer, it is in buy your goods in bulk, as you sell a poorer condition. How are you them, it gets lower so that leaves you making sure that doesn’t happen with a lot of empty space which you’re with Warenext? not making money on and you’ve already paid your rent upfront, as the Ayo: There are a number of touchpoints in the warehousing to delivery cycle, tradition is in Nigeria. and mishandling could have happened If you don’t have anything in the shop, within that chain. Understandably, you you’re wasting money. When you need would hold the warehousing company a lot of space, you pay for it and when responsible for the damage but the you don’t, you don’t pay. And when warehousing firm could have stored you don’t have any inventory, you it properly. don’t have to pay a dime. It saves the business money and they can reinvest The damage could have occurred when all the money they would have used the goods were being transported from
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the warehouse to a hub for delivery, it could have been mishandled at the hub and it could have been mishandled by the last-mile delivery guy. We are not absolving anyone but the damage could have happened at any point. And it could even be at the customer’s place and he’s looking for a reason to return it. For us, we understand warehousing and we understand how materials should be handled. If you come to our warehouse, you will see our storage facilities, how we handle it, how we pick, pack, and send goods out for delivery.
We have our delivery guys who also come in for training on handling items and that also helps us mitigate issues like this. There is no reason we will set up a business and make that mistake when we have identified the same issues in previous businesses that we have worked at.
We have learnt, we had feedback and we are ensuring that those issues that we faced when we were at our former working places are not repeated at Warenext. That’s why we have never had any issues like that even though we have loads of deliveries going out everyday. Our clients are happy with how their goods are stored in the warehouse because they always come around to look at the warehouse 38 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
digital marketplace, which means we’re a platform where all of these things that we’ve been discussing can happen. We have the pay-asyou-go warehousing part, we also BEA: So it doesn’t matter how small have the last-mile delivery, which is the goods are or how large, you can the question you asked. For the lastaccommodate them? mile delivery operations, our means of transportation include vans, Ayo: Absolutely! Especially for small minibusses, cars, tricycles, and bikes. businesses. You can get a compartment as small as half of a pallet; the pallets On the Warenext platform, we have are on racks. If you require a bigger different delivery companies that can space, you pay for more. For example, cater to our customers’ varied needs if you have a small business and you and budgets. For example, if you want require 3 pallets to accommodate to send an item from Victoria Island to your goods, you pay for 3 pallets and Surulere (both in Lagos) and you input as you sell your items, your pallet the two addresses on the platform, space requirement reduces to 2, which you would see 10 to 15 of our logistics means you would only pay for 2 pallets partners that could do the job. You can on your next payment. And if you see Gokada, DHL and many others and restock and your space requirement you can see different prices. increases to 6 pallets, you pay more. That’s how Warenext works. We’re There are some customers we handle flexible to accommodate your needs. their end-to-end logistics – from warehousing, fulfillment to last-mile BEA: Apart from warehousing, your delivery. Then our third stream of platform also has a list of last-mile business is freight. We help customers logistics companies that customers move trailer-load of goods from can choose from; tell us about that. state to state. We also experimented recently with our sea freight where Damola: Maybe we’re focusing so we helped customers move goods much on warehousing. We are actually from China to Nigeria. Of course, we an end-to-end logistics platform. We are going to do airfreight too, maybe have like three streams of businesses later in the year. that we do. In itself, Warenext is a facilities, they see how we handle other people’s items. People are very confident in our business and that’s why they’re still with us.
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Profile | By Ruth Okwumbu
boost when he went ahead to take producing lessons from O-Town record company.
After secondary school, he attended Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Edo state and received his first degree in Business Administration. At his uncle’s instance, Michael went to London in 2000 and started playing drums in his neighborhood church. He would also play juju music and do some minor gigs here and there. While at this, he took up a job as a security guard at McDonald’s, and soon got a chance to connect with some of Nigerian music stars, like JJC, Kas, The 419 Squad and D’Banj.
A few years later, he partnered with D’Banj to launch Mo’Hits Records, and by 2006, he was already becoming famous with his adopted introductory line “It’s Don Jazzy Again!”
The co-owned label – Mo’Hits Records – took him all the way into fame and over the next couple of years, Don Jazzy became a musical sensation affiliated with some of the biggest musical hits in the continent. Some of his most – memorable tracks at the time included Oliver Twist, Mo’hits Crew All stars, Wande Coal’s Mushin 2 MoHits, No long thing and D’Banj’s 1982 to an Isoko (Delta State) The Entertainer. father and an Umuahia Princess. Shortly after he was born, the Michael Ajereh also produced family relocated to Ajegunle, and added vocals for artistes Lagos wheree he also had his early like Dr SID, Ikechukwu, D’Banj, education. Kween, D’Prince, Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Kanye West. In 2011, he was As a child, he loved music. At age invited to work on Kanye West’s 4, he had started singing, dancing collaboration with Jay-Z titled “Lift and playing drums in church. In Off” for the “Watch The Throne’’ secondary school at the Federal album. Government College, Ijanikin, Michael developed interest in Mavin Record rises from the ashes instruments and started playing of Mo’Hits Record the bass guitar at age 12. He also learned how to play some D’Banj and Don Jazzy split in traditional and percussion 2012 bringing an end to the days instruments along the way. He of Mo’Hits Record. Some reports gave his musical skills a major say the split was a result of some
Michael Collins Ajereh A Don in Africa’s music industry
M
ichael Collins Ajereh is popular for many reasons, and has been for a long time. From the days of Mo’Hits records where he produced several hit labels, till now where Mavin Records is the label behind some outstanding artistes in Africa, Don Jazzy does not seem to be slowing down in his contributions to the African music industry.
Though born in Umuahia (Abia State), Michael hails from Delta state. He was born on 26 November
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disagreements on ownership and debt issues, but both parties cited artistic differences as the reason for their separation. Afterwards, Don Jazzy launched Mavin Records, and using the experience and network he had gotten over the years, it did not take long before Mavin Record became a force of its own. He signed on a new selection of artists, while retaining some of the old Acts from Mo’Hits Records. In an interview with City People magazine, he explained that he has a preference for signing up new artistes and working with them to grow, rather than stay hooking up the big boys.
relocating the respective offices to for their needs and the projects Lekki and Victoria Island. they care about. This appears to be another avenue for him to help Don Jazzy’s money mills people, as he announced personal donations of N100,000 each to 10 The top producer and singer also selected projects nationwide. has cash flowing in from other sources outside of the music Recognitions industry. He has endorsements from several brands like Loya He has been nominated for a lot of Milk, MTN, Samsung and Konga Awards as an individual singer, and E-commerce, which brings him as a music producer over the years. millions of naira in revenue. Very early in his producing career, He won the Producer of the Year at His endorsements from Loya the Nigerian Music Awards (2006) milk – 2012 till date are worth 40 and Nigerian Entertainment million naira, MTN - 40 million Awards (2007) naira reviewed upwards from the previous 25 million; Samsung He won the Headies award for (2013) - 110 million naira and Producer of the year for ‘’Over the Konga e-commerce mall (2013), moon’’, ‘’Mr endowed’’ and ‘’Pop worth 15 million naira. something’’ in 2011. In 2012, he won the Nigerian Entertainment He revealed in his interview with award for music producer of the City People Magazine that he year. has investments in oil, owning a large number of fuel tankers. Also He was also Producer of the Year reported is that he has some choice for Dorobucci, at the 2014 Headies, properties in Lagos state, as well and the following year, he clinched as a club known as POP which he the City People Entertainment decided to shut down for unknown Special Recognition award 2015. reasons. Ajereh received The Beatz Award TM (2019) for New Discovery Other Interests Producer.
On 8 May 2012, he released an album featuring the artists signed to his label. The songs on the album included: Amarachi, Forever, Oma Ga, Take Banana and Chocolate, YOLO and the anthem I’m a MAVIN. He also built a social network platform called “Marvin League” to complement and market his label. Mavin Records has a good number of top notch artists like Tiwa Savage ,Di’ja, Korede Bello, Reekado Banks, D’Prince and Dr Sid signed to its name. In 2019, he signed Rema and in 2020 signed Ayra Starr. Don Jazzy has an actor side to him. He made a movie appearance in The production Eminado Moses Innang’s ‘The last 3 digits’ and Surulere won the World in 2012, alongside other star casts Music Award for World’s best like Ali Baba, A.Y., Nonso Diobi collaboration in 2014, as well as and Dr SID. He also features in the 2014 Headies Award for Best skit videos and comedy dramas to Pop Single. Eminado also won support young talents. MTV Africa Award for song of the year in 2014, Surulere won The The popular music producer is 2014 Headies Award for Producer also known for his generosity and of the year, and Godwin Nigeria philanthropy. He has given several Entertainment Award for Best gifts to artistes like the brand new Collabo in 2014. Mavin Records Prado SUV he presented to Tiwa has also won several awards since Savage at her wedding. At the peak it was launched 9 years ago. of the COVID-19 lockdown, he initiated and did several give-aways In 2019, Don Jazzy announced that to randomly selected persons. in a bid to expand its operations, Mavin Records has commissioned Recently, he launched a its new creative and corporate crowdfunding platform, Sapio office spaces in Lagos, thus Funds, to help people raise funds 41 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
Other fun facts about Don Jazzy
Ajereh revealed in one interview that he writes all of his songs himself, and has not had anyone write a line of song for him in his career. He also claims to be a really shy person, and cannot rap.
Photo Source: Don jazzy/Facebook
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Interview By Simeon Onoja
Bako Ambianda: From Humble
Beginnings to Founder and CEO of a Conglomerate, Labacorp Group
Bako Ambianda showed a flair for entrepreneurship from his high school days in Cameroon. He would pick mangoes, avocados and bananas from around his home and sell them at his school dormitory.
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n 2011, Ambianda moved to the United States to further his studies in Civil Engineering. After a couple of months in the US, he got a job as Citizen Diplomat with the Maryland State House where he launched his career in diplomacy.
With just $850, Ambianda started his first company, Global Attain Advancement (GAA), which focused on events organisation. This endeavour brought him on the organising team for former president Barack Obama’s Energy Congress.
Down the line, Ambianda returned to Africa to develop the business and launched other entities including Labacorp Energy Ltd in Cameroon, Labacorp Investments SARL in Togo, and Labacorp Industries Ltd in Ghana. The conglomerate owns businesses across the manufacturing, power, construction, agribusiness and exhibition sectors, with operations in Africa, the Middle East and North America.
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Over the years, Ambianda has authored several books namely Destined to Win in the Game of Life, Invest in Your Mindset, Ingredients to Uplift Your Journey, The Unstoppable Warrior, and a lot more.
Bako Ambianda has won several awards - the Global Business Disruptor 2018 Award by Professional Association of Young Africans (PAYA), Most Admired Young Global African 2019 by PASSION VISTA, Most Influential People of African Descent (Under 40) by MIPAD - Class 2018, Africa Business Leadership Excellence Award 2018 by African Leadership Magazine and Forbes Africa 30 under 30. Business Elites Africa caught up with this serial entrepreneur, author, engineer and CEO.
What inspired you to launch a career in diplomacy at the Maryland State House? I was inspired by my vision for development in Africa. My story changed in 2011 at the age of 20 when I travelled to the USA to further my studies in Civil Engineering. As they always say, “we become the average of the 5 people we hang around with”.
contribute to economic development programmes and graduated more than 87 students as our contribution and social progress in Africa. towards a sustainable economy. So, back in Maryland, I launched my first company Global Attain What can we expect from Labacorp Advancement (GAA) with only $850. Group’s exploration of recycling I embraced the AWRAP method of technology? life: Aware, Willing, Responsible, Adaptable, and Persistent. I took every Labacorp Energy is strengthening challenge as they came and made it its presence in the Nigerian market my responsibility to overcome them. through a joint venture partnership with MECEN IPC and Calaya Engineering Services.
In 2014, I learned about OQP = Only Quality People, so I had to cut off everybody in my orbit that was not positive, productive, or profitable. From that action, an extraordinary new version of my life unfolded which paved the way for me to manifest my greatness. I learned that success is not convenient, so I had to make room for it through a sheer drive, hunger, persistence, and determination.
This is the best solution for recycling waste products as the plant is designed to accept various types of polyester wastes and recycle a wide range of products such as filaments, fiber, film, food containers, defective goods, etc. The PET Bottle Waste Recycling plant will be used to create new value from useless bottle wastes.
The plant will recycle post-industrial and post-consumer PET bottle waste and produce more value-added products such as rPET flake, Polyester staple fibre and non-woven geotextile with a wide application range in various industry fields. The target Where is Africa with renewable market will be the domestic market energy? in Nigeria as well as overseas.
I was fortunate that in my first few months in the USA, I gained a job position as a Citizen Diplomat at the Maryland State House - Office of Prince George’s County Delegation, working closely with senators, legislators, and delegates on actions related to community development. Africa remains the final frontier for renewable energy because of its vast What was it like launching the first unexplored potential for investment. instalment of Labacorp Group with Africa is the future when it comes to just $850? solar energy. And that is my focus. We are providing access to clean, I have always seen myself as someone reliable, and affordable energy in rural that wants to build great companies, and urban areas through Labacorp willing to push forward to develop Energy. We have lit up 120 homes, new concepts and engage in multiple and 34 businesses within 2 years aspects of creating, launching, of operation. In addition, we have and growing businesses that will provided top-notch solar training 43 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
In line with its objectives, Labacorp Energy and its joint venture partners have already set up an entity in Nigeria known as LMC EcoTech, Co., Ltd that specialises in the development of innovative technologies for recycling PET bottle wastes to become a valueadded product.
What’s your favorite part of being an entrepreneur?
Solving problems and helping to create an economy of the future! How do you relieve stress?
I read a lot of motivational and inspirational books. However, playing golf and/or listening to music help me to relieve stress.
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Interview By Emmanuel Abara Benson
How Tobi Asehinde’s Startup is Bridging the Digital Skill Gap in Nigeria and Across Africa
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s you may well know, the future of work is digital and only those with the right digital skills can excel. Sadly, the reality is that the gap between digital opportunities and skilled talents is quite wide. This is a major problem, one that Tobi Asehinde is trying to solve with his startup Digital Marketing Skills Institute (DMSI). In this exclusive interview with Business Elites Africa, he tells us how he is doing exactly that. He also talks about the importance of digital skills in a highly-digitalised world. enjoy the interview. It’s nice to meet you, Sir. Briefly introduce yourself to our readers, focusing on how your journey in entrepreneurship began. My name is Tobi Asehinde, I’m the founder and CEO of Digital Marketing Skills Institute (DMSI). My journey in entrepreneurship began at a very young age. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that both of my parents were entrepreneurs. I remember back then in college, I always knew where to get the 44 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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recommended textbooks at cheaper prices. I would buy these books very cheap and resell them to my course mates and make a small profit.
Well, I didn’t tell them that I didn’t build the website, nor did I admit building it. Interesting thing is that before I left America, I got two people that were willing to pay me $1000 each to build a website for them. And so by the time I returned to the UK, I sat myself down and started learning how to build a website.
Fast-forward to much later in my life, I went to study for my Master of Engineering degree at the University of Portsmouth. And, during my final year of the programme, I teamed up with my housemate to start a hotel The key to that is that I realized booking website. that there was an opportunity here. People are constantly on the lookWe hired someone to create the out for people with digital skills. website. Unfortunately, we made no Unfortunately, there is a huge gap returns from that investment despite between those in need of digital spending all of our savings on it. But marketing services and those with we took away an important lesson the talent. From the onset, I had a from that venture, and that’s the fact company called Vibeweb Solutions. that marketing is very important. We were rendering different digital Consequently, I took it upon myself marketing services to clients. But we to learn how to market. And that was couldn’t work for everybody. part of the starting point of my journey into becoming a digital marketing Our prices were also a little steep. entrepreneur. Using technology to We thought to ourselves ‘what better accelerate knowledge around digital way to make a greater impact than to marketing is the core of what I do now. replicate ourselves in other people’. The plan is to help as many businesses And that was what inspired DMSI. as possible to achieve results. So, we started to train people on how we do what we do and expose them Your startup, DMSI, is doing a lot to the opportunities around digital to bridge the digital skill gap in marketing. We also have a platform Nigeria. Tell us more about your that connects our students directly to journey so far with the startup and these available opportunities. the journey ahead. How do you classify yourself; as Let me begin with how the whole an edtech platform or a digital idea of DMSI came about. You know, marketing company? I did talk a bit earlier about starting a hotel booking website with my We are an edtech company, just as flatmate. Around the same time we much as we do digital marketing. started, I went to the USA for my I mean, we are primarily focused brother’s graduation. Being a typical on using technology to facilitate startup founder, I wore my company’s education and that makes us an edtech branded T-Shirt to the graduation platform. ceremony. Interestingly, this caught a lot of people’s attention. They would How much does it typically cost to ask me ‘oh what’s this about?’ and I do a programme in DMSI? would tell them it’s my startup. And then they would check out the website Before I answer that, let me just and the next thing they would ask me quickly talk about the value we is to build a website for them. They impact. One thing we take pride in actually assumed I was the one who is being able to provide a good level built the website myself. of support to our students. We have 45 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
three main programmes and all of them are designed to not only give students the opportunity to learn, but to also provide support to them.
Another thing is that we believe in practicality and that’s what our programmes centre around. As far as digital marketing is concerned, it is all about practicality. You cannot say you can build a website just by word of mouth, you have to be able to do it. You cannot say you can advertise and drive results for clients, you have to be able to do it. Also, you cannot just grow a social media platform by word of mouth.
It’s all a matter of practicality. You might be able to talk about the theoretical aspects, but doing it is a different ballgame because it requires a lot more than just talk. So, we don’t believe in exams, we believe in practicality. And one of the things we do is to give our students practical assignments which they must score above 80% to pass.
We are very strict about this such that anyone who does not pass will have to redo the assignment. We do this because not only are we ensuring to pass the right knowledge, these students will be representing our brand upon graduation, and we cannot afford to have ill-equipped ex-students of DMSI. That said, we have three main programmes – the professional programme which costs N250,000, the master’s programme goes for N350,000 currently and the executive programme which goes for N700,000. A lot of people in Nigeria are worried about the impact of the government’s over-regulation of the digital space. Do you share in their worry?
For some reason, I am not quite as worried as I might be expected to be. The digital space is quite complex. And it’s not just in Nigeria that it is being
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regulated. In America for instance, Mark Zuckerberg and other top players in the tech space have been summoned before senate hearings to defend their activities. So, regulation of the tech space is not peculiar to Nigeria. However, it should be more about working together than working against each other. What are some of the biggest challenges you face as a digital entrepreneur and how do you navigate them?
There’s been numerous challenges obviously, no thanks to operating in a country like Nigeria. One is the human capital challenge. Well, I wouldn’t say we’ve faced much of a funding challenge because we are a bootstrap 46 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
company; meaning that we generate our own money and grow the business organically. But majorly, where we have the most challenge is with getting the right talent. Interestingly, that is also one of the reasons we are in business – to help businesses to also get the right talents.
started looking into grants. And I am happy to say that we have one right now. I can’t go into full details, but it is a foreign organisation that has given us a grant to expand the good work we are doing.
Tell us five essential things every aspiring digital entrepreneur needs Now, let’s talk about funding. I to have prior to starting. know you already explained that you are a bootstrap company. But The first one is commitment. do you still have any plans of raising Consistency is also very important in capital? digital marketing because in digital marketing, you don’t go to bed after Right now, we are bootstrapping. accomplishing one success. You must In the near future, we might be be consistent with it just as much as interested in talking to anyone that you need to be committed to it. I tell might be interested in investing. In the people that in order for you to stay meantime, however, we do seek out a committed and consistent, you must lot of partnerships. And recently, we be willing to make some sacrifices.
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And that’s the third essential attribute every digital entrepreneur must have. You must also be determined and believe that there is ‘gold’ in digital marketing, because there is. You must trust the hustle and be result-driven. Besides teaching people digital skills, do you also run campaigns for companies? We do, although we are very selective when it comes to who we work with. We do not want to work with too many people. So, we have our clientele and we want to keep it small like that. Another reason is that we may not even be affordable for a lot of people because of the price we charge for such services. And that’s why we do DMSI so that we can train people to be able to service those clients we do not serve.
What differentiates you from your competitors?
Well, first of all, I don’t see them as competitors. And the reason is because in this digital space, I believe there is enough opportunity for everyone.
practically, then there is no other place that can give you that in Nigeria. If you also need support in the course of your studies, you come to us.
You may not be the one to sit down and do the books, but you still need to understand how it works. Same applies to digital marketing. You must understand digital marketing so you We provide these two major things that can work effectively with your inare very essential as far as learning house digital marketer. digital marketing is concerned. And recently, we’ve added a third value; if Business owners and digital marketers you want your return on investment must also understand what we call in the form of access to the market, conversion windows. This helps you we’ve got you covered. understand how to get results when it comes to digital marketing. And, Do you have any last advice for what is the conversion window? It employers and employees as far as basically means the time it takes a complete stranger to become a paying digital marketing is concerned? customer. Understanding this helps Yes. For business owners, they must to ensure that expectations are better understand that digital marketing is managed between the employer and an essential part of their business. the employee. It’s important for them to know about digital marketing themselves even before they hire a digital marketer. It’s more like the same way CEOs are taught about finance in business schools, even though they will eventually hire an accountant.
And anyone who understands value will always make an informed decision about who to patronize. For us, we have two major values that differentiate us; if you want to learn digital marketing
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Business Trends | By Olufikayo Owoeye
Insights on Africa’s Real Estate Market According to the World Bank, Africa’s median age was 19.7 years in 2012, and it is expected to increase to 25.4 in 2050, making Africa the continent with the youngest population.
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he global megatrend relating to the ageing population and the consequent increase in the demand for retirement homes is therefore not expected to have a significant impact in Africa. This young population on the continent will drive growth in the demand for housing.
In response, African governments have continued to promote new urban development through the creation of satellite cities, to offset pressure on existing urban centres. Ambitious plan to bridge housing deficit in Nigeria
The Nigerian real estate market presents substantial opportunities as well as several specific risks for property investors. There are existing
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problems with access to finance; with a lack of long-term debt financing and an underdeveloped mortgage market (mortgage loans represent less than 1% of the nation’s GDP).
urban migration, strong economic growth, and a growing middle class. It is estimated that Nigeria has a housing deficit of 17 million houses estimated at US$363 billion. This number is expected to increase by two Cumbersome and time-consuming million houses per year at the current processes for land acquisition and population growth of 2.5% per year. ownership documentation can make acquiring land difficult, while land The World Bank estimates that 44, in urban areas is astronomically 000 mortgage loans were granted expensive. Building materials and in Nigeria between 2004 and 2010, construction costs are high in addition with an average size of US$31,500, to the huge reliance on expatriate amounting to a ratio of home loans to workers, resulting from a shortage GDP of 0.6%. Interest charges on prime of expertise in the local construction mortgage rates among commercial industry. Security considerations as a banks ranged between 15% and 25% result of local unrest should also be with maximum mortgage rates being factored into investment decisions. between 16% and 30% which, when combined with equity requirements The residential real estate market is of 10% to 20%, heavily restricts driven by the growing population in market access for low- and middleNigeria, as well as the increasing rural- income families. Lagos is considered
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to be Africa’s second most expensive of urban population growth currently exceeds the rate of development of new property market. houses. Kenya’s state-run National The industrial real estate market also Housing Corporation estimates the contributed to the growth of the total current housing shortage at 2 million real estate market in Nigeria with units. The current production of new the expansion of industrial activities. houses is estimated at 30 000 units The country currently has about per year. 25 approved free zones (schemes set up to strategically improve the Kenya’s government is currently investment climate by stimulating looking to the private sector to export-oriented business activities), address the housing deficit and in although less than half of these are 2012, it introduced new regulations to operational. allow PPPs to be used to develop new housing projects. Three PPP housing The growth in the Nigerian middle- projects for public servants totalling class population and retail activity 76, 000 units are currently in the is driving demand for warehousing development pipeline. In the private units as well as infrastructure-enabled residential market, urban developers industrial clusters and free zones. This in Kenya are currently adopting a can be attributed to manufacturers ‘high-density approach to scheme and suppliers seeking premises from design – such as apartments – and a which to meet growing consumer bigger plot ratio to make optimal use demands. of available land. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are also being promoted by the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) so that investor funds can be pooled to develop much-needed real estate assets and provide mortgages.
The REIT structure was introduced in Nigeria in 2007 and three types of REITs currently exist – equity REITs, mortgage REITs, and hybrid REITs.
Some of the REITs currently in Nigeria are Union Homes PLC, SunTrust Hybrid, UPDC, and Skye Shelter Fund. Skye Shelter Fund REIT and Union Homes Hybrid Real Estate Investment Trust were launched in 2007 and 2008 respectively. Union Homes had a market capitalisation in January 2015 of US$60 million, 128 whilst Skye Shelter had a market capitalisation of US$10.6 million. Growth in Kenya’s urban population driving demand for real estate
The growth in Kenya’s middle class has led to an increase in demand for residential real estate, and the speed 49 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
for this by having a less restrictive business environment and progressive macroeconomic policies. Strong protection of civil liberties improves Ghana’s investment attractiveness, as does the country’s developed legal and regulatory framework.
Ghana’s labour market is efficient. The country’s laws make it relatively easy to appoint or retrench employees – although it may be quite costly when severance packages are taken into account. Property rights, however, are poorly protected due to overall weakness in the rule of law.
Setting up a company in Ghana is a lengthy process that involves numerous government departments and agencies. The HFC Real Estate Investment Trust (HFC REIT) tax structure has been in existence in Ghana since 1994. Financial information for 2013 shows HFC The government has big plans and REIT held US$8 million in net assets, Kenya’s ‘Vision 2030’ provides a of which US$1.8 million was in land blueprint for future development. and property. Some initial success has already been achieved with institutional South Africa continues to attract and business reforms, which have big-ticket real estate improved the business environment. The country’s trade strategy looks South Africa has one of the most to encourage greater exports of sophisticated business environments processed goods, so there is potential in sub-Saharan Africa and relatively for growth in the manufacturing well-developed government sector. institutions. The low cost of starting a business, estimated at 0.3% of Kenya has flexible labour regulations per capita income, means that and investment laws that allow entrepreneurs and developers foreign investors to receive the same can respond quickly to developing treatment as local investors. The opportunities. The country is nation’s financial sector is considered acknowledged for its resilient and the most developed in East and Central stable banking sector. Africa, which facilitates access to debt and capital market funding. However, The tax and financial regulatory Kenya has a fairly restrictive tax climate is robust, and the tax regime regime. progressive. Special development zones introduced by the Department Ghanian government has doubled of Trade and Industry (DTI) make down on mass housing provision for tax concessions for infrastructure development in certain Ghana’s demographic profile might areas of the country, resulting in the not be as favourable as that of some formation of new industrial zones, other African countries, it makes up such as Coega, Saldanha Bay, and Dube Tradeport. South Africa introduced
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a REIT framework in 2013, and residents do not have formal savings currently, 33 REITs are listed on the accounts and are not able to obtain Johannesburg Stock Exchange. mortgages for housing consumption. Only 24 percent of adult populations, Growthpoint, with a market 15 years or older in Sub-Saharan capitalisation of US$5.6 billion as of Africa, hold an account at a formal January 2015, is South Africa’s largest financial institution. The same goes listed REIT. According to the SA REIT for 12 percent of adults in the bottom Association, the listed property 40 percent of income levels. Only 6 sector in South Africa has been the percent of adults received a loan from top performer of the four traditional a financial institution in 2014. asset classes over the past 15 years. It has outperformed equities by 6.4% Lack of savings reduces the amount of finance available for lending and bonds by 13.3% per year. institutions to develop consumer The purchasing power of Africans mortgages or other lending products. remains an issue The major source of housing The key challenge for African cities, investment is from household however, has been the comparatively savings and government investment, low growth in per‐capita income, rather than capital markets. This can which limits the resources that crowd out public investment in other households have to consume or invest important sectors such as education, in housing. At the same time across the health, and infrastructure. region, the formal channels through which quality housing is produced and The lack of credit for development financed face major constraints that finance limits investment in domestic limit access to a large share of urban construction activities that could provide housing at scale. households. Recent research finds that for households in low‐income SubSaharan Africa countries, food expenditures alone account for 50‐60 percent of total monthly expenditures, which leaves very little—and comparatively much less than in other regions—for housing or other necessities such as fuel, transportation, education or health care.
Government subsidy programs have done little to promote wide-scale housing affordability. For example, over more than 40 years, Nigeria’s Federal Housing Authority has met only 15 percent of its goal of supplying 261,000 units. An alternative subsidy program of discounted credit to developers has encouraged land speculation rather than housing production.
Sound policy interventions need to focus on improving the functionality of both the supply-side and demand-side value chains in formal and informal housing arenas.
Housing affordability will improve not only with general economic expansion and income growth but also with a housing policy that both supports the incremental improvement of informal housing conditions for the majority of people and strengthens the function of the housing sector to bring down costs and expand the reach of the formal housing sectors to lower-income groups.
in the region and their countries.
Governments have a particularly strong role to play in ensuring housing affordability through targeted investments in infrastructure for lowincome groups and through regulatory measures, to improve the function of value chains.
They should prioritize the scarce resources available for housing and invest them in the expansion of basic services (land and infrastructure) for low‐income households. Complementary to this, governments should seek to address core bottlenecks in the regulatory framework for both formal and informal housing and introduce initiatives that improve the markets for housing inputs (land, building materials, and finance) that. This will enable households in all income segments to improve their housing and move up the housing continuum.
Experience shows that governments across the region have had difficulty promoting sustainable, broadly affordable housing through a direct supply of units due to targeting problems and cost constraints. The key challenges for improving the quality of existing housing stock and expanding new housing at affordable levels are to lower the costs of inputs for housing across the entire sector, while at the same time expanding access to different types of credits needed, including commercial mortgages, and developer and secondary finance.
Enhancing institutional capacities both in government and within the capital markets will be critical. Governments and other decision‐ makers in Sub‐Saharan Africa should be equipped with a comprehensive Across the region, the majority of understanding of the housing sector 50 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Profile | By Ruth Okwumbu
The Making of Mr. Macaroni, Nigeria’s Famous Instagram Comedian-turned-activist his project before fate reared its ugly head again.
Shortly before the convocation ceremony, on the 12th of October 2017, he received a letter of expulsion from the university on the grounds of posting on social media “certain things that were offensive and put the University in bad light”. Adebayo responded that he never mentioned the name of the institution or any of her officials in his posts.
Debo Adebayo is best known by the stage name Mr Macaroni or ‘freaky freaky’ a phrase he is known to use in his skits. Though very popular for his sugar daddy and politician roles in his comedy videos, there is a lot more to Mr Macaroni than meets the eye.
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debayo was born on May 3, 1993 in Lagos state, Nigeria to a Journalistdad, and teacher-mom. He had his primary education in Lagos, and attended the Babcock University High School where he had his secondary education.
There were suggestions from different corners that the school’s action was connected to Adebayo’s activities as Student Union president in his final year. His administration had stood against the management on several occasions, fighting for student’s rights. They had also refused to give the Vice-Chancellor and Director of Student affairs the traditional awards for leadership and excellence on Student’s Appreciation day, on grounds that they did not deserve it.
where he was also admitted to study law. All seemed to be going well until he had to leave the institution, after getting into a fight with one of his lecturers. Most people would give up after this second attempt, but not Debo. He Debo Adebayo and his parents decided to try another route. sued the institution, but both parties later opted for an out-ofDebo decided to opt for Theatre court settlement and he eventually Arts this time, since it appeared graduated with a second class that fate was not dealing him good upper degree in 2018. Long before hands in his quest to be a lawyer. He Debo became a popular social sought admission at Afe Babalola media comedian, he had been University, at Ado-Ekiti, but ended up with English and Media Studies as the institution did not have an active Theatre Arts department. He Most people thought I tried sticking with this for a couple was possessed when I was of years before he decided to try jumping from one university again.
Getting a university degree was more than a little dramatic for this popular actor, activist and comedian, as he got admitted into four different universities before leaving the last with a degree. Debo first got admitted into a private university – Lead City University to read law. At this time, the activist in him hoped to make a career in the legal profession fighting for human rights. He soon to the other. I didn’t care how discovered that the university did His fourth admission came and not have accreditation for Law and this time he was admitted to long it was going to take, but withdrew. study Theatre Arts at Redeemer’s told myself I was definitely University, Osun State. He stuck it going to get a University Next stop was the Houdegbe North out the entire four years, wrote his degree. Long last, I got it. American University, Cotonou final examinations and defended
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involved in acting in short movies and soap operas. It was on the set of Face 2 Face that he took the name Mr Macaroni while playing the role of an extra, and the name stuck.
Even before this time, he had a flair for comedy, and made people around him laugh by mimicking popular figures. He recalls in an interview that one of such figures was Pastor Chris Oyakhilome whom he found inspiring. He would also mimic a lot of TV personalities, unconsciously honing what would later become a multi-million naira skill.
without stifling the activist in him. His comedy dramas and skits see him take on the role of a lecherous sugar-daddy, or a corrupt politician and this allows him to critique core issues in Africa, while entertaining the audience.
In an Instagram Live session with Samuel Akinniyi Ajiboyede, where he was a guest on Exceptional with Sam, Adebayo explained that his drama concepts try to criticize sexual and moral issues, and societal ills while subtly promoting language and culture. The content creator explained that he is conscious of his audience coming from different regions of the world, He seized every opportunity to act and so infuses different Nigerian in school dramas and eventually and African languages in his drama. got professional training from the Pencil Film and Television Since the start of his gradual rise Institute (PEFTI Film Institute), to fame, he has also featured many Lagos. He has featured in several Nigerian stars and celebrities in his short movies and soap operas, and comedy videos. What started as a recently started acting in major childhood fancy has now become movies. not only a full-time job but his springboard to fame. He played the role of Uchenna in the 2021 movie Ponzi, a Kayode Remarkably, Adebayo understands Kasum comedy movie based on his talents and has defined his actual experiences of victims of genre of comedy, as he says he has Ponzi schemes. Adebayo is also no plans to venture into standup on set of Lugard, one of the most comedy. anticipated movies produced by 3 Knights Film Production in “I can hold a crowd, I do conjunction with B5Films and MC gigs, I host events and Monomania Entertainment. The all of that but I don’t crack movie is set to hit the cinemas on jokes. I am an actor but I the 27th of August 2021. can interpret comic roles to the best of my ability. I He also recently announced on his don’t think I’m gifted when handles that he will be featuring it comes to stand-up comedy in Tunde Kelani’s new movie, like the way Basketmouth to celebrate the life and time of and Bovi are. I can say some the late Apala musician, Ayinla stuff that will make you laugh Omowura. but not stand-up comedy”.
on Saturday, February 13, 2021 where he was arrested along with some other protesters.
Tracing the money
With a huge following across social media with over 2.1 million followers on Instagram alone, Debo Macaroni qualifies as an influencer, and this gives his paid promotional posts from brands that seek his services. He also has his YouTube channel monetized, with over 200K subscribers and close to a million views on most videos.
There is also his acting career, and his MC and event host duties which fetch him some more bucks. Adebayo is certainly doing well for himself, and making money from doing what he loves.
Recognitions
He won The Future Awards Africa 2020 in the Content Creation (YouTubers, Vloggers) category. In the same 2020, he won the City People Music Award for Comedy Act of the Year. He has also been nominated into several categories for the City People Movie Awards in 2017 and 2020
An uncommon genre of Macaroni the activist comedy Adebayo brings a breath of fresh air into the comedy space with a genre of comedy that allows him to express his acting skills, 53 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
Debo always had his activist side to him from his school days but the most recent display was the OccupyLekkiTollgate protest
Photo Source: Camera Boss
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Profile | By Ruth Okwumbu
From Teenage Entrepreneur to African Business Mogul, the Story of Ashish Thakkar
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t might not be easy to understand how someone could just be turning 40 years old and already have entrepreneurial experience about two-thirds his age. This is the story of Ashish J Thakkar.
Expectedly, his parents refused to let him. Their question was - What life is there for a teenager who drops out of school going into business? Many negotiations later, they agreed to let him start his own business on the condition that he would return to school if it did not work out. At the Though of Indian descent, the Thakkars age of 15, in 1996, he dropped out of moved to the United Kingdom in 1972 school and used a loan of $5,000 to after Idi Amin enforced the expulsion start his own business. of Asians from Uganda. Ashish was then born 1981, in Leicester city. He He started a small IT shop (which spent some of his childhood at Rushey would later grow to become Mara Mead School as part of Belvoir S form Group), in a shopping mall across group until his parents decided to the street from his father’s shop relocate back to Africa – this time to in Kampala. He began importing Rwanda. computer parts from weekly trips to Dubai, even desktops as well, and Again, they were forced to leave later started offering IT services. Rwanda after two years following the Rwandan Genocide. Older Thakkar The young man was so resolute in his fled with his family to Burundi, dealings, refusing to give in to teenage before settling in Kampala, Uganda distractions that might have come as refugees. At the age of 14, Ashish his way. After recording success in was put in school to continue his IT, Ashish diversified into packaging education. As a student, the young and property development, and man had already been bitten by the later into manufacturing, real estate, entrepreneurial bug. He was selling infrastructure, asset management and computers and computer accessories agriculture. Thakkar later relocated to his friends and teachers in school. the company headquarters to Dubai, From here, he decided that he could while maintaining business operations have a life-long career in business. in Africa.
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In more ways than one, the family’s history of moving from one location to the other appears to have made Ashish into a street-wise and determined hustler, and these things played a role in the success of his business.
In a 2012 interview, Ashish insisted that a strong sense of perseverance and a great dose of positive thinking played a huge role in his achievements. After many years of success, the Mara group has also added financial services, tourism and BPO services to its list of services. Mara Group employs about 11,000 people and has a presence across several African countries. There is also Mara Phones, a part of the Mara Corporation that launched smartphone factories in Africa, which includes AfriOne smartphone factory launched in Nigeria in 2017.
Ashish remains humble in spite of his impressive achievements, as he says that all of it is still a drop in the ocean in the scheme of things. Given the early age at which Thakkar embraced entrepreneurship, it is imperative that he has learnt immense lessons in the journey.
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He recounted that when he first started business, he would make the mistake of ignoring old projects as soon as he started a new one. “That was a huge mistake. You must always keep your eyes on all the balls, no matter how small or big those ventures are” he warned.
Learning hard lessons from his own experience is one of the reasons Thakkar advocates mentorship for entrepreneurs. “If I had someone to tell me how to do things, what to do and what not to do, Mara Group would be in another place altogether – 5 years ahead I would say. So for me, the first element is mentorship and having access to a community of like-minded individuals. If you have the idea, the business plan, the team and the leadership to execute it, the funding will come more easily, but key to all this is a mentor to guide you!”
wrong. From an IPO launch price of $9.83, the stock was trading at $0.30, showing a 97% drop. Some reports and opinions say it was a function of a series of wrong decisions, some others say it had to do with a flawed operational structure from the outset and some pointed fingers at the management. Whatever the reason, the plans of the company to become a leading player in the Sub-saharan Africa banking system did not materialize as planned.
Other interests
The non-profit arm of the group is the Mara Foundation, which focuses on entrepreneurship and education of young African entrepreneurs. “I have taken my greatest lessons in business and created the Mara Foundation to help early stage entrepreneurs” Thakkar said of it.
that connects young entrepreneurs with business professionals.
Mara Foundation provides entrepreneurs with the Entrepreneur Launchpad, a business mentorship program which lasts six months. The Mara Launchpad is an innovation and enterprise center for young businesses, where entrepreneurs pay an affordable fee to access a professional office space and a community of likeminded individuals. There is also the Mara Launch Uganda Fund, which offers venture capital to start-ups and growth-stage companies.
Thakkar was appointed a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2012. He has participated in several high-capacity events including the 2014 UN Global Accelerator where he presented and worked with over 100 entrepreneurs and UN officials like Michael Dell, Barbara Bush There is no way to ascertain what and Arianna Huffington. He also Thakkar is worth at the moment, but Through this foundation, he launched participated in the US-Africa summit, this figure should run into billions of the Mara Mentor, a mobile application hosted by the White House in 2014. dollars if his several businesses are anything to go by. For Ashish Thakkar, a legacy worth being remembered for is not his wealth, but to see Africa come of age, and compete aggressively on a global scale.
A sour grape for Thakkar
In 2013, Thakkar entered a partnership with Bob Diamond (a former chief executive of Barclays) to launch Atlas Mara, a company that invests in commercial banking institutions across Africa. With a whopping $325 million in funding, the company was listed on the London Stock Exchange, but shortly afterward, the stock price went into a downward spin till it had lost 95% of its IPO price.
As at October 2020, the banking group’s share price approached the loss of 100% of its initial value and this raised the question of what went 55 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Interview By Emmanuel Abara Benson
Movie Star Enyinna Nwigwe Talks about his Career Growth and Nollywood
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A
t 38 years old, Enyinna Nwigwe has been a part of some of Nollywood’s biggest projects, including The Wedding Party, SuruL’ere and the highlyacclaimed film, Black November in which he starred alongside Oscar-winning actress Kim Bassinger and other notable greats like Akon and Vivica A. Fox. Between 2005 when his career kicked off and now, he has had more than twenty films to his credit. In this interview, he talks about his career, the Nigerian film industry, and other issues. Enjoy the conversation.
It’s nice to meet you, Sir. You are arguably one of the growing up, who I thought had a lot of similarities with biggest names in Nollywood right now. How does it the character. I made up everything else for what became feel to be a major celebrity? the character “Godstime”. Enyinna: The truth is; I don’t walk around with that in my head. I just like to live my life and be in the moment. So, ‘how it feels as a major celebrity,’ is not a question I know how to answer. But if you asked me how it feels to be Enyinna Nwigwe as a person, I’d say great!
Considering your status in the industry, do you still have to attend auditions or do the scripts just land at your desk?
Enyinna: Auditioning is standard. regardless of status. Certain directors insist on auditioning talent before picking. Through my research, I got to understand that you But then, there are ‘Closed Auditions’ for the ‘bigger’ actors never set out to become an actor. How did you go from and open auditions for general casting calls. It all depends not thinking about acting to becoming a professional on the process the production decides to run with, though most productions typically cast directly, knowing exactly actor? who they want for what role. Enyinna: You are right, I stumbled on acting. And then I fell in love with the art. I honed my craft through time; both Who are some of the best directors you’ve ever worked on the job and informally through daily living. Basically, with in the industry? common daily interactions and conscious self-development helped me to grow as an actor. Enyinna: Too many! I can’t risk listing and leaving out any one of them. The truth is that I’ve had a blessed run so far. Let’s talk about your role in Mildred Okwo’s SuruL’ere. That was your first film I ever watched and I must How do you manage fame, sir? confess, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Would you agree that Enyinna: I manage it by not thinking of it. Like I mentioned SuruL’ere is your most hilarious role yet? before “I live”. I try to stay grounded, understanding the Enyinna: It is by far the most ludicrously hilarious role illusion that is ‘Fame’. I’ve played as an actor; Yes! What is your appraisal of Nollywood? How did you get the role in SuruL’ere? Enyinna: Nollywood is growing exponentially. Currently Enyinna: I got a call out of the blue from the director reinventing and attracting international attention. There’s Mildred Okwo (Whom I’d always looked forward to so much I could say but will rather keep it optimistic and working with) She mentioned having a role for me that simple by saying we are finally ready for the world! was like nothing anyone would expect, she discussed the character with and I was instantly excited about. Any advice to your fans? That alone surprised her as she wasn’t sure what my Enyinna: Stay living in your truth always. Live life on your reaction would be. So, basically I said yes and went on terms! to develop the character using people I had encountered 59 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Trivia By | Simeon Onoja
02
01 Samsung currently holds the highest vendor market in Africa, followed Huawei - 16.86%, Apple - 14.47%, Tecno - 6.73%, Oppo - 6.49% and Infinix - 4.96%. - StatCounter.
Nigeria is Africa’s richest country with a GDP of $442.92 billion. -Statista.
03
According to a 2019 data Afrasia bank, South Africa has the largest number of high-net-worth people in Africa, with 39,200 dollar millionaires making up 28 percent of the total 140,000 in Africa. - Afrasia Bank.
05
Morrocco has the highest tourism GDP in Africa with a total of 12.93 million international arrivals in 2019 followed by South Africa which has a total of 10.23 million arrivals. - JTB Tourism Research and Consulting Co.
04 Angola has the highest GDP from Manufacturing in Africa. -TradingEconomics
09
The first domain name ever registered was symbolics.com on March 15, 1985.
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W O KN
06 Seychelles is Africa’s most developed country with an HDI of 0.801. It is rated 62 in the HDI rankings, with a 73.7-year life expectancy. - World Population Review.
07 South Africa and Mauritius have the most developed banking systems in Southern Africa and Tunis and Egypt in North Africa. - AfDB.
o Y Did
08 The Internet is 11,828 days old ( over 32 years). - Howoldistheinternet.
10 Wikipedia is downloadable. Click Here.
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11
You
OW
12
The short-range wireless technology Bluetooth was named after King Harald Bluetooth. He united Norway and Denmark.
These 9 programming languages were invented by women.
14
13 TIME Magazine named the computer the “Man of the Year” in 1982.
15
16
Emoji is derived from the Japanese words e for “image” and moji for “character,” and has no relation to the word emotion.
17
The iPod took only three years to achieve a market audience of 50 million people, but radio took 38 years and television took 13 years to reach the same audience
19 As of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide, accounting for 59.5 percent of the global population.
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The internet speed at NASA is 91GB per second.
The Nokia 1100, produced in Finland, was the best-selling mobile phone of all time. The total number of units sold was 250 million.
18
Google process approximately 63,000 search queries every second, amounting to 5.6 billion daily searches and about 2 trillion worldwide searches per year.
20 A total of 4.88 billion individuals own a smart or feature phone, accounting for 62.07 percent of the world’s population.
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Interview By Dimeji Akinloye
Nigerian Space Entrepreneur, Temidayo Oniosun on why Africa’s Space Industry May be the Next Big Thing
S
pace technology is not a thing a home-grown Nigerian young man is naturally drawn to. It is a subject that rarely comes up in any level of consciousness or national discourse. But Temidayo Oniosun is one of the very minute exceptions to that void. Seeing that many developmental problems in Africa could be solved by Space programs, Temidayo, 26, made it his life’s mission to drum local and international support for the African Space and Satellite industry.
technology, discoveries, events and political information on the African space industry. The platform was instrumental to today’s extensive coverage of the Africa’s Space category by international media such as BBC, CNN and so on. Temidayo has received many international accolades including a recognition award from the International Institute of Space Commerce for his outstanding work in the African Space sector. He recounts his entrepreneurial journey in this interview with Business Elites Africa and speaks extensively on the growth, opportunities and challenges in the Space industry.
This passion drove him to launch Space in Oniosun speaks at conferences across the Africa in 2018, an online platform which world and regularly appears on various provides market intelligence - business, media calling for more government 62 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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investment in space programs in Africa[3] and leading conversations around the African Space and satellite Industry. He also comments regularly on the African space program in various media.
A typical Nigerian kid wouldn’t choose to study Meteorology in the University. Was the course your choice or was it what the school offered you, as is the case for many others?
I kind of chose it. When I wrote the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board Examination, I wanted to study Mechanical Engineering, but my interest changed after the exam. I had shifted interest from Engineering to Space Technology but there was no course like that offered in the institution (Federal University of Technology Akure – FUTA) at the time. Meteorology was the closest thing to it, so I opted for it.
fiber is still very popular but satellite an industry that is driven by private communications also offer a lot of institutions, there is more publicity, services in Africa. there is more interest, and more investments. But there are very few You can think of navigation systems of those companies in Africa. There – GPS and the likes. And you can is also the problem of trust. Let me look at the engineering aspect of give you a few examples, Nigeria had space, we have few companies in a satellite that got, they managed the Africa that are now manufacturing PR extremely badly. satellite components that are flown on missions to the moon, space stations Now if you mention Nigeria’s Space and the likes. African countries are program people are always referring also increasing their investment in to that. There was also a time that a Space technology. Meme was flying around social media that a Nigerian astronaut was stuck in Last year, Nigeria’s space budget was Space. That’s also like a bad PR. So if over 5$0 million and this year’s budget you have an industry that has traces of passed $80 million. Altogether, Africa’s bad PR like that, when you are doing Space budget this year is almost something really cool, it’s going to be $550 million. So far, 44 satellites have difficult for people to trust it. been launched by African nations while about 114 satellites are under I remember in 2019 when Ethiopia development. In the next 4 years, the and Sudan lost their first satellite, I continent would have launched more was interviewed by BBC and when than 150 satellites. So the industry is the interview came out people were commenting that these countries are growing. very poor, should they be investing in Like you rightly pointed, little is satellite? and all sorts.
What is the current state of the Space industry in Africa? known about the Space industry in Africa. Some would say First of all, Africa has a Space industry. that’s because there is nothing I think a lot of people don’t know that. revolutionary going on in the When people talk about space, they industry. Would you agree to just think of NASA. Even when you talk that assertion?
about satellites in Nigeria, people just jokingly refer to the satellite that got The number one reason is probably because the industry is driven by the lost. government in Africa. To be honest, The industry in Africa is still at an governments in Africa are bad at early stage of development but it’s running businesses. If you think growing really fast. The majority of the of the US Space program, NASA is players are foreigners. But in recent globally known. That didn’t happen years we have seen the emergence of overnight. NASA has billions of dollars African-based companies. We have a in the budget for that is spent outreach report we are releasing soon where programs everywhere and branding. we profiled 282 companies in Africa African Space agencies don’t have an that are operating in the industry outreach budget. They don’t think value chain. about how to get the public to hear about their work. The industry is generating like $7.37 billion every year. That is projected The second thing is that, in Europe, to rise to over $10 billion by 2024. Asia, and America, the majority To visualize the application of it, you of Space programs are now being can think of satellite TV services, that driven by private companies. You are powered by satellite services. You think of the likes of SpaceX, OneWeb, can think of broadband connectivity, Virgin Galactic, etc. When you have 63 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
If the government is bad with running businesses, it also seems like African entrepreneurs do not understand the Space industry enough to invest in it. Do you think there is a knowledge gap?
That’s a good point. I think it’s a combination of all of that. There are barely Space entrepreneurs in Africa. Do we lack the skill? To be honest, probably yes. We have people that are skilled but they don’t work in the private sector.
They work for either government or they are in the Universities. So I would admit that there is a lack of capacity. We don’t really understand the technology. In Nigeria, all of that can be traced back to the Space agency. It’s not doing anything to bring in entrepreneurs like what is going on in the general tech ecosystem, where companies are coming up everyday, building awesome stuff. That’s not happening with the Space industry.
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You can literarily monitor what’s going on in northern Nigeria (the Boko Haram zone) using the satellite. We can’t use our satellite to do that but we can buy commercial satellite services that can do it. But is the government willing to do that? The answer is no. They won’t do this because of political reasons. We talk about how a lot of places in Nigeria do not have internet connectivity today, that’s a problem you can solve with satellite. We have a satellite in Nigeria that can solve that problem. Is it being used for that? Probably no.
I remember a few weeks ago, the director of Nigeria’s Space agency went on national TV to say that they need money to build a new set of satellites but the point is the ones they had, did I have had this conversation with number but the impact of those they make use of them, the truth is, no. the Space agency director in Nigeria satellites. several times. They have thousands Is there a cheaper way to do of people working in the space agency That’s a good point. It’s not about the this though? I mean can Nigeria and it’s not like they are working. number, yes. The only thing is that the rent commercial satellites from Instead of maybe running programs number shows that activities are going private companies instead of that would get entrepreneurs to on. So there is a difference between building new ones? develop this technology, they feel like the activities and the impact. Talking we’ve got thousands of people (staff) about impact, satellites are being There are different ways to do it. It that can do it. But the truth those used in Africa for various applications depends on what makes sense to a thousands of people can’t do anything. by different countries. The usage country. You can choose not to own a So there is that massive disconnect. I cuts across agriculture, disaster satellite and buy data from commercial will blame the government for that, monitoring, security, telemedicine, companies but that may not make and the people they are appointing to even education services, etc. sense in the long run because of the cost. those critical positions. Now the problem is sometimes the In 2020, your company’s report government can have a tool they can Also, sometimes when you have one estimate that African countries use to address a problem and they satellite, it may not be able to provide would have launched at least just ignore the usage of that tool. An enough service for your needs. An 110 satellites by 2024 compared example is the security situation in example is the Nigeria issue that we to the 41 at the time. One would Nigeria, and this is something I have are talking about, their best satellite think it shouldn’t be about the been saying since 2017. has a resolution of 2.5 meters. You 64 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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can’t use that to address the problem of security, that resolution is not great. But you can get a good resolution like 0.4 meters, with that you can almost see a human being and you would be able to trace people in like a forest. But the country can buy that service from commercial providers or they can decide to build a new one that can offer that service.
Do you want to highlight these So this is like some of the works we are problems? doing and it’s my way of giving back.
We’ve talked about a few of them. An example is, there are too many people working in the agency, the Nigerian space policy is outdated and there is massive corruption going on in the agency. For example, they have been trying to build an assembly and integration testing facility for probably It’s hard to think the government a decade now, with funding every year, wouldn’t have explored the and the building is just wasting away.
satellite option for the terrorism fight by now.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Let’s trace it back to the Chibok girls issue. They were kidnapped and taken to a forest, If you have a satellite up there that can trace everything going on, you can see where they are. These are basic security details that some countries take seriously. But in Africa, that’s probably like out of the box. If the Space agency works directly with the security, they can analyse the radius they suspect the girls are with satellite images. But are they doing that? No. The fundamental question is, do they actually want to solve the problem? I feel like the Nigerian government is very powerful. If they want to solve a problem, they will. But it doesn’t look like they want to solve the security problem.
As someone who has an understanding of the workings of the Space industry, what are you doing in terms of advocacy for the proper use of satellites in Africa?
First of all, we are working with a lot of government. We provide policy advisory services to different African countries. An example of this is when the new director for the Nigerian Space agency was announced, the first thing we did was to develop a brief report that details the fundamental problems that we were seeing in the space program with recommendations on how to solve them. 65 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
Your company, Space in Africa, raised pre-seed funding in 2019, what was the funding for?
We were at the very early stage then and we ran out of money. Actually, I ran out of my savings and I needed external funding. We got an investor from the US who was interested in what we were building and decided to invest. Since then, we’ve not had any The Nigerian space agency is now reason to raise money. We’re doing over 20 years and it’s extremely fine now. embarrassing that they cannot manufacture a simple nanosatellite. Why did you establish a Space And you’ve got more than 3000 people company in an environment that wake up every day and say they that barely values it? Why not work for the agency. If I was appointed run abroad where it seems you the director of the agency, the first stand a better chance? thing I’d do is probably sack everyone. You set up a company to address a South Africa space agency has only 150 problem. We saw the problems and employees and their agency is about we decided to proffer solutions, that five times more efficient than Nigeria’s. was the logic. When you speak to the top officials of the Nigerian space agency, they always To be honest, before 2018, it was brag about how they have more than worse. Now you guys are writing 100 Ph.D. holders. The question is about Space in Africa. And in the what are they doing? In fact, in the past two years I have spoken to the past, we have provided a policy brief to biggest media houses in the world – the Nigerian National Assembly on the BBC, CNN to Forbes, etc. Everyone is issue of the Nigerian Communications now trying to cover Space programs Satellite (NigComSat). in Africa. That never existed before we established the company. As we One of our recommendations to them are doing more work, there is more was that they should sell the company. interest and that’s why the industry They’ve invested more than like a is experiencing more growth. billion-dollar on that company and the company generates less than $5 A lot of businesses outside Africa million every year for them. Sadly, the are now looking at the continent for government still gives the company opportunities. We are now seeing about $10 million in the yearly budget. new startups in the ecosystem. The They’re just wasting taxpayer’s money dynamics will be very different in the on a company that is not productive. next 5 years. We have also worked with so many other Africa countries like Angola, Gabon, etc. to point them in the right direction. And it’s up to them to follow that right path. Currently, we’re working on a study with the African Union that would shape the Africa Space agency that the Union is trying to set up.
A space company in South Africa, Dragonfly, just got acquired a few months ago. So there is a massive opportunity to solve a lot of fundamental African problems with Space technology.
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be Daniel Irene Copy/Content Writer
would say Business Elite Africa (team) are utting the works of Africa in the faces of world what it means to be African. What acknowledge cultures and respect the better place. I will recommend Business to foreigners and Africans in diaspora. eful, Resilient and Rhythmic. n prints that loves creating great ads copies ogs, landing pages etc. I use my creative udience for a call to action. gital Marketing and i teach young people ir targeted audience through storytelling
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Name: Bankole Oluwaseun Oyenike Brand Name: Seun Bankole Occupation: OAP, Event Host, MC, Social Media Community Manager State: Ogun Country: Nigeria Magazine Review: Thank you for this amazing platform, it’s amazing what you’re doing with people’s stories. Brand Summary: Seun Bankole Brand is all about presenting, hosting, and rendering voice services to clients. Anything that has to do with carrying an audience along, as well as social media management and page growth. Connect with me on Instagram @seunbankole_
Full Name - Rahimat Temitope Adetunji Business / Brand name - House of rhai Occupation - Entrepreneur State - Lagos Country - Nigeria Magazine review - The magazine is extremely enlightening.
Business / Brand summary - Footies by rhai is an indigenous leather footwear and lifestyle brand for men and women committed to manufacturing quality and stylish leather goods tailored to individuals’ specific needs. Connect with us on Instagram @footiesbyrhai
Full Name: Adesuwa Oham Brand name - Derciti Limited Occupation : Interior Consulting State: Lagos Country: Nigeria Magazine review: We love how you shine the spotlight on African entrepreneurs which has helped us see that despite the limitations in Africa, it’s possible to make it as an entrepreneur in Africa.
Business / Brand summary: We specialize in the design of modern, functional, beautiful and safe spaces to suit your style, personality and budget. Connect with us on Instagram @derciti.interiors
Full Name: Alabi James Adebayo Business/Brand name: Bayo Alabi Occupation: Social Media Marketing Expert State: Oyo Country: Nigeria Magazine Review: The magazine contents are of high quality both in words and images. Not only that, the contents are really inspiring and will definitely add massive value to any entrepreneur or small business owner who reads through them. Business/Brand Summary: Bayo Alabi is a social media marketing expert who specializes in helping entrepreneurs scale and grow their businesses on social media. He is a specialist in Content Creation, Social Media Management and Social Media Paid Ads. Connect with us on Instagram @bayoalabiofficial
Special Report | By Olufikayo Owoeye
How Renewable Energy is Powering Africa’s Growth Energy is the key to development and the foundation for industrialisation. Considering Africa’s unparalleled potential for renewables, the continent’s starting point for the transformation of the energy sector is strong.
E
lectricity supply in Africa is currently lagging considerably. Most people in Sub-Saharan Africa face severe energy deficit. Less than half of the population had access to electricity in 2018. Africa is well behind the rest of the world concerning the deployment of renewable energy. In 2018, only 20 percent of the electricity generated in Africa was from renewable sources. Compared with the rest of the world, investment is low. In 2019, twothirds of all newly added energy capacity for supplying electricity worldwide was based on renewable sources.
countries, supply lags grossly behind demand. For example, Nigeria, regarded as Africa’s biggest economy, has continued to battle power outages for decades despite spending billions of Dollars in foreign loans to improve the power situation. A recent World Bank report painted a heart-wrenching picture of power conditions in Nigeria.
The Bretton Woods institution said 85 million Nigerians do not have access to grid electricity -- this represents 43% percent of the country’s population - and makes Nigeria the country with the largest energy access deficit in the world. The Washington-based institution In recent times, Africa has seen rapid economic further said businesses in Nigeria lose growth, with a corresponding increase about $29bn annually because of unreliable in energy demand. Sadly, in most African electricity. 68 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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And just like in Nigeria, there are as many as 30 countries in Africa where recurrent electricity outages and load shedding are the norms. About 600 million people in Africa do not have access to electricity, and approximately 730 million people rely on traditional uses of biomass.
However, the continent is gradually witnessing a massive deployment of renewable energy – which has led to significant cost reductions and performance improvements.
This has seen some African countries already reaping benefits from proven renewable energy technologies. Along with helping to meet energy needs in a cost-effective, secure, and environmentally sustainable manner, renewable energy has also strengthened socio-economic development. The energy mix in Africa
The energy supply gap has created an opportunity for big-ticket renewable projects to bridge the shortfall with several distributed power innovations that are smaller scale, lower cost, and quicker to market.
The African continent is endowed with large renewable energy potential, varying in types, across diverse geographic areas. Solar resources are abundant everywhere, while biomass and hydropower potential are more plentiful in the wet, forested central and southern regions. Wind resources are of the highest quality in the north, the east, and the southern regions, while geothermal energy is concentrated along the Great Rift Valley—located in East Africa. These resources, and the settings in which they exist, can point to countryspecific renewable energy solutions to fit each state’s strengths and needs.
resources. It is estimated that around 92% of technically feasible potential has not yet been developed. Central Africa has about 40% of the continent’s hydro resources, followed by East and West Africa, each having about 28% and 23% respectively (Hydropower and Dams, 2014). At the end of 2014, there was 28 GW of hydro capacity installed in Africa. This makes hydropower by far the most important renewable power generation option deployed today.
Sahelian and Tropical conditions also feature strong solar irradiation. Solar energy can be utilised at various scales, making it suitable from the household and community levels to industrial and national scale operations.
Two types of technologies exist for power generation: solar photovoltaic (PV) and CSP. The former can be universally used, in applications ranging from household systems to utility-scale, while the latter is typically a technology that performs optimally in utility-scale projects situated in the desert regions. Overall, Africa’s solar power generation potential exceeds future demand by orders of magnitude. Even the smallest countries on the continent have at least a few gigawatts of potential for either technology.
Of the resources available, the Congo River has the largest discharge of African rivers, followed by the Zambezi, the Niger, and the Nile. Hydropower resources can be utilised in several ways, depending on the size of the resource. Large-scale hydro resources are often utilised in combination with a storage dam and are suitable for the Africa’s solar PV capacity has grown exponentially in recent years but production of grid electricity. from a low base. Cumulative installed Small hydro plants, (1 MW to 10 MW capacity at the end of 2014 was 1334 capacity) may or may not incorporate megawatt (MW), more than ten times dams, while mini- (100 kW to 1 MW), larger than in 2009 (127 MW). South micro- (5 – 100 kW), and pico-hydro Africa is leading this rapid growth, (less than 5 kW) are suited to run-of- adding nearly 780 MW between 2013 river (no storage dam) installations for and 20141. Kenya has also seen sizable the provision of distributed electricity investments in solar PV, with 60 MW to areas remote from the electricity installed by 2014 (IRENA, 2015b). grid. This accelerated growth will continue, Hydropower is dependent on a as more than 14 GW of solar PV and 6 reliable supply of water, and periods GW of CSP are either announced or in of drought have a detrimental effect the pipeline (GlobalData, 2015). For on the availability of hydropower example, a single company, SkyPower, stations. The droughts in Kenya at has bilateral agreements in place to the turn of the decade resulted in install 7 GW of solar PV capacity in the extensive power outages due to a coming five years in Egypt, Kenya, and shortage in hydro capacities. Nigeria.
Solar panels are fast gaining Deployment of CSP in Africa is in popularity the earliest phase, as is the case worldwide. Four African countries, Africa has an exceptional solar Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and South resource that can be harnessed for Africa have deployed a total of six electricity generation and thermal CSP projects as of March 2015. Their applications. The desert regions installed capacity amounts to just over of North Africa and some parts of 180 MW (IRENA, 2015b). Hydropower remains the most Southern and East Africa enjoy developed on the continent particularly long sunny days with a Projects totalling 6.4 GW are underway, high intensity of irradiation. including some in Botswana, Namibia, Africa has abundant hydropower Sudan, Tunisia (GlobalData, 2015). 69 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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CSP is attractive because its efficiency increases with irradiation levels, which is not the case for solar PV where efficiency declines with rising collector temperatures. Given that the irradiation levels correspond also with the demand for air conditioning, solar CSP would reduce the need for peak capacity.
This feature is attractive in desert countries where solar irradiation is particularly strong. CSP systems offer the opportunity to store solar energy as heat, for use to generate electricity during periods of low or no sunshine. How has the continent fared in harnessing Wind as a Source of Energy?
Wind is converted into useful energy utilising wind turbines, for use either to drive electric generators or to directly power pumps and other machinery.
Countries with especially high wind quality include all those in North Africa; Niger in West Africa; Chad in north-Central Africa; Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia in Central Africa; Kenya, Uganda; Tanzania, and 70 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
Zambia in East Africa; and Lesotho, Power project is made up of 365 Malawi, South Africa, in Southern turbines, each having a capacity of Africa. 850 kilowatts. The wind industry in Africa is still small and concentrated, although substantial progress has been observed over the last ten years. In August 2017, total capacity was recorded at 4.1GW, the equivalent of four conventional nuclear power plants. This figure is slightly below the 1% mark of the cumulative global capacity according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) but still a significant increase from 1.1GW in 2011. The South African REIPPPP, launched in 2011, is mainly responsible for this marked expansion.
The Nigerian government has confirmed the completion of a 10MW Wind Farm located at Lamber Rimi in the northern state of Katsina -- which is the first of its kind in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, African countries with natural gas reserves – such as Tunisia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Mozambique – are expanding their natural gas generation capacity. For countries with viable reserves, natural gas provides cost-competitive, flexible electricity that improves the security of supply which also provides balancing power for integrating variable energy The country is by far the biggest sources. producer with more than 1.6GW of operational wind energy capacity, Natural gas is generally not subject to followed by Morocco. Egypt was at the the same financing restrictions from forefront of the industry back in the international donors, export credit 1980s and the first sizeable project it institutions, and financing institutions built was a 4-turbine wind farm with as coal is. While investing in natural gas extends the use of fossil fuels in a capacity of 400kW. electricity systems, it can also play In 2019, Africa’s largest wind farm, the a role in supporting the expansion 310-megawatt (MW) Lake Turkana of variable intermittent renewable Wind Power project, was officially energy generation as a medium-term inaugurated. Lake Turkana Wind bridge technology.
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Article | By Christian Ogbeifun
Nigeria’s Economic Decline and the Danger of Rising Seccession Agitations, Terrorism
Nigeria as a country bleeds on several fronts: economic recession, crime and homicidal waves. The nation is battered from all ends by home-grown terrorism, ethnic chauvinism, extreme Islamic fundamentalism and clamors for secession. The list is endless. Yet, it appears that the government at the centre is turning a blind eye to the monstrous williwaw before their very eyes.
N
igeria is a key regional actor in West Africa and accounts for about half of West Africa’s population, with a huge and rapidly growing population - estimated to become the third largest in the world by the end of the century.
In 2020, the Nigerian economy shrank by 1.8 per cent, driven by economic downturns of the COVID-19 crisis, its deepest decline since 1983. The external context was marked by capital outflows, intensified risk aversion, low oil prices, and shrinking foreign remittances. The country’s economy grew by 0. 5 per cent in the first quarter of 2021, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Nigeria’s GDP stands at N40 trillion (U.S $105.5 billion). Despite the reopening of the country’s land borders in December 2020, inflation is staggering at an all-time high of 18.2 per cent, in the last four years. The upward trend in inflation is largely due to the unprecedented spate of insecurity in northern Nigeria, the country’s “food basket”. Higher food prices largely caused the continuous rise in
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inflation. Accordingly, food inflation peaked at a 16-year Nigeria’s debt profile is increasingly skyrocketing. The recent loan request of N2.3 trillion approved by the high of 23 per cent in March 2021. parliament, which many have adjudged a rubber stamp In the same vein, the unemployment rate is recorded of the Presidency, has pushed the country’s debt profile at 33.3 per cent despite the country’s recovery from to an unprecedented level of $108 billion. recession in the fourth quarter of 2020, the highest level ever. And this is just the first quarter of this year. The According to the officials of the Organized Private Sector World Bank estimated an increase in the number of poor (OPS), the growing national debt is a concern, as the profile Nigerians to 90 million in 2020 from 83 million in 2019; has grown from N12.6 trillion in 2015 to N26.6 trillion this corresponds to a rise in headcount poverty ratio to in the third quarter of 2019 - an increase of 108 percent 44.1 per cent in 2020 from 40.1 per cent in 2019. With oil prices trading below the 2020 budget benchmark, President Muhammadu Buhari stated recently that the debt service commitment and recurrent spending are government has lifted 10.5 million Nigerians out of poverty beginning to crowd out capital expenditure and the in the last two years through its national social investment trajectory is not consistent with the country’s national programmes (NSIP). Data from the World Poverty Clock aspiration to build infrastructure and a competitive shows that within the two-year period referenced by economy. The capacity to service the current stock of the President, at least 10 million Nigerians slipped into debt raises serious sustainability concerns. A concern the extreme poverty, rather than come out of it, as the president Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) and claimed. The World Bank reports that in the last one year, Manufacturers Association of Nigerian(MAN), shares. seven million Nigerians have been pushed into poverty. A figure that contradicts the president’s claim. Many find the The debt service provision in the 2019 budget was a president’s claim grossly misleading, as it doesn’t reflect whooping N2 trillion whereas the total capital budget was N2.9 trillion. This implies that the debt service commitment the reality on ground. was to 70 per cent of capital budget allocation. Debt to Official figures from NBS show worsening poverty rates, revenue ratio was about 30 per cent, which is also on the with 142.2 per cent growth in food inflation and over 82.9 high pedestal. In the 2020 budget, the total revenue could million Nigerians unable to afford their daily meals. The barely cover debt service commitments and recurrent country now ranks 98th out of 107 in the Global Hunger spending. The opportunity cost of high debt service Index. commitments for the economy and nation’s citizens is very high. There’s also the exchange rate risk inherent in the exposure to mounting foreign debt, which should be a troubling kettle of fish to the country. As the naira depreciates, the burden of servicing foreign debt would intensify. This is a major problem with increasing stock of foreign debt. Also, many Nigerians are of the opinion that these foreign loans would be inevitably looted by government officials. Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) submitted that the constant flying-around, cap-in-hand, by President Buhari to borrow from all conceivable creditors from all around the world is tantamount to converting Nigeria to a beggarly economy, which is against constitutional provisions. All over the country, infrastructures are in moribund state, despite the huge funds received by the government from foreign creditors, to fix the same infrastructural challenges.
SECESSIONISTS’ THREAT
In south-east Nigeria, a separatist group, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) wants to secede. It’s leader, Nnamdi Nwannekaenyi Kanu has been arrested by the 73 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Igboho is currently on the run after operatives from the Department of State Services, in an unconventional offensive, attacked his house in the dead of night, after the government accused him of stockpiling ammunition. The group has drawn so many sympathizers, and many others believe that there wouldn’t have been an ‘Igboho’, if the government had addressed the killing of farmers, the destruction of their farm lands and commodities by armed Fulani herders, who have carried out their killing sprees with neartotal impunity in every part of the country. INSURGENCY IN THE NORTH
government from foreign soil to face trial for sedition, treasonable felony, ethnic incitement among other charges. These offences carry long jail terms and the death sentence. The proscribed group has faced ironclad response from the central government. The authority has tagged the movement a terrorist group, a sentiment the West doesn’t share. The Nigerian police has linked recent attacks on public infrastructures and security operatives to the group’s armed session, the Eastern Security Network (ESN), but the group has denied any involvement. In the same vein, a self-acclaimed activist, Sunday Igboho, has surfaced in the south-west of the country, campaigning for a ‘Yoruba Nation’, a secessionist movement of another prominent ethnic group in the country. They have threatened that elections would not be held in the western region.
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Nowhere in Nigeria is safe. Nigeria is regarded as one of the most dangerous places in the world to live in. The 2020 Global Terrorism Index identified it specifically as the third most troubled spot by terrorism. According to weekly tracking reports by the Council on Foreign Relations, in 2020 and so far in 2021, about 1,400 Nigerians have lost their lives to Islamic insurgents in northeastern Borno state and neighbouring areas.
Boko Haram, a fundamentalistinspired militia of possibly 5,000 attackers, occasionally raid neighbouring Chad and northern Cameroon, and is believed to shelter in the Sambisa forest along the Borno borders with Cameroon. Exactly why Nigerian Armed Forces of 300,000 troops and a $2 billion budget has failed to extirpate Boko Haram is not clear. Corruption in the military is allegedly a major factor, as well as inconsistent leadership from officers and politicians. It is believed that Boko Haram enjoys some amount of support from government officials. A claim made by the former Nigerian president, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, that there were Boko Haram sympathizers in his administration.
BANDITRY AND KIDNAPPING: A NEW FOUND MERCHANDISE Banditry and kidnapping have become a very lucrative economic activity in northern Nigeria. Since December 2020, at least over 1,400 students have been abducted from schools in the north, an action that has led to the closure of many public schools in the neck of the woods. Aljazeera reported that at least $18.34 million was paid to kidnappers as ransom- mostly by families and the government between June 2011 and March 2020, according to a report by SB Morgen (SBM) Intelligence, a Lagos-based political risk analysis firm.
In an article titled, ‘Nigeria Is A Failed State’, published by the Foreign Policy in May 2021 and co-authored by Robert I. Rotberg, the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Intrastate Conflict and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation, and John Campbell, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations,and a former U.S ambassador to Nigeria, these experts argued that Nigeria has become a fully failed state of critical geopolitical concern. The piece identified the trappings of failed states- lack of security, unsafe, weak rules of law, corruption, limited political participation and voice, discrimination within borders against various classes and kinds of citizens, and sparing provision of educational and medical services. The article stated that most notably of failed states, is that they’re violent. The authors opined,
‘’This designation of repeated failure is not a knee-jerk, casual labeling, using emotive and pejorative words. Instead, it is a designation informed by a body of political theories developed at the turn of the century and elaborated upon, case by case, ever since. Indeed, thoughtful Nigerians over the past decade have debated,
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often fervently, whether their state has failed. Increasingly, their consensus is that it has.’’ Nothing in this present reality conflicts with this materiality.
The motivation of these groups appears to be purely economic. And no one has been tried and prosecuted by the government, whether at subnational levels or at the centre. How these criminals abduct school children in huge hundreds without being apprehended by security operatives leaves many befuddled. Reason many adduce the Nigerian military for colluding with these bandits. Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, a prominent Muslim cleric, acting as a selfappointed middleman, engages in talks with bandits and his efforts have led to the release of 27 students abducted in March, from a forestry college in Nigeria’s Kaduna state. He stated unequivocally that the Nigerian military colludes with the bandits. The army has always denied such claims. It beats one’s imagination that the Nigerian military claims not to know the hideouts of these unscrupulous elements, and yet, the cleric interfaces with them, anytime he wants to and in the company of security operatives. Even more ridiculous is that national dailies carry stories of these criminals
demanding for vehicles, and food to feed those abducted, and threatened that if these essentials are not provided, the abductees will die of starvation.
Revisiting tax exemptions and custom duty waivers, increasing and broadening the base for excise taxes, developing a high-integrity taxpayer register, enhancing digital infrastructure, and improving onAs daunting as the mess the country time filing and payment are important finds itself in, it’s not insurmountable measures. even if it takes trenchant and far-flung measures to curb the situation. Dr. Isaac Monday Ikpor, at University Ndufu-Alike Ikwo, Ebonyi state, in his The International Monetary Fund paper, Nigeria’s Economic Problems; (IMF) says that for Nigeria to Causes And The Way Forward, accommodate young people entering suggested that the Federal government the labour market, the country will should come up with a formidable need to create at least five million economic policy that would address new jobs each year, over the next the continuous decline in the economy decade. Nigeria needs to embrace of the nation to forestall the present more open trade. Competitive policies hardship been experienced in the would help diversify the economy and country. reinvigorate growth, particularly as the African Continental Free Area This could be done using the two tools takes effect. of fiscal policy and monetary policy appropriately. He counseled that the Furthermore, a large share of revenues government should engage in more is spent on the country’s public debt restricting and controlling of foreign service payments, leaving insufficient exchange, undertake the revival of fiscal space for critical social and the country’s productive capacityinfrastructure spending and other encourage manufacturing sectors, programs that would cushion an adequate funding of the education economic downtown. The need to sector, diversify the economy , make mobilize revenues through efficiency- agricultural practice the mainstay of enhancing and progressive measures the economy, as it used to be, confront corruption head-on, amongst other is a top near-term priority. measures.
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Profile | By Victor Ejechi
Fred Fabian Ngajiro: A Famous Tanzanian Businessman Who Built a Sh4 billion Business Empire at 33
I was able to secure employment after graduation. But I quit the job and started travelling to and from South Africa in 2012 to pursue my passion It is indeed everyone’s aspiration to achieve greatness earlier, but this usually comes with a prize. In a world like ours in Africa, where numerous young people have taken to fraud and wanton lifestyles, as the only way to succeed and achieve greatness, Business Elite Africa felt the story of Fred Fabian Ngajiro from Tanzania is worthy of sharing.
W
ith over 150 youngsters working under him at the interesting age of 33 years old, the Tanzaniaborn gent has meticulously positioned himself as a Shilling billionaire and the world is ready to listen to him.
This Award-winning entrepreneur, popularly known as Fred Vunjabei, is indeed revolutionizing the Tanzanian Fashion and Entertainment industry. He is a well-respected name in the fashion and entertainment industry, not ready to give up or slow down in his hunger for success. Fred Vunjabei gained ground in the fashion business for his quality products and his use of price penetration to take over the industry in Tanzania. It has been reported that he sold his items at ridiculously low prices, hence making a killing at the market.
in other retail outlets. They say the trade name itself - which loosely translates into ‘knockdown’ or ‘throwaway’ prices - is difficult to resist. The Beginning
The celebrated Fred Vunjabel was born in Iringa Region in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania and spent his early years in Iringa. Not many know that Fred holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration at the Mzumbe University, from a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce from the University of Dar es Salaam. In an interview, he shared that, after college, he secured a Civil Service job - but due to his strong passion for doing and owning a business, he did not stay long in salaried employment.
According to some customers, Vunjabei’ “I was able to secure employment after prices are so low compared with those graduation. But I quit the job and started
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travelling to and from South Africa in with the mindset that giving people 2012 to pursue my passion,” he says. a discount might just be the thing to draw them in and attract them to When in South Africa, Fred started become your loyal customers. And new sending used mobile phones to customers mean new opportunities Tanzania for sale. for cross-sells and up-sells, meaning more revenue in the long run as well. “It was not my first time doing business. When I was pursuing my That ideology has been working for Bachelor’s degree at the University of him. Dar es Salaam, I was already selling DVD players to fellow students,” he His inspirational mentality and says. determination pushed him to open his first clothing retail outlet in Kariakoo Apart from selling used smartphones, in 2015, calling it ‘Fred Vunjabei’. He the self-made entrepreneur engaged in started with a Sh2.5 million capital. other businesses, including importing cars. Talking about the success of At that time, Fred had already left India businesses, Fabian Ngajiro says that for China where he was sourcing his he learned the ropes of doing business supplies for the shop in Tanzania. He in China, a place he stayed for some later started a fashion store company years. named ‘Vunjabei (T) Group Ltd:’ his brand tag for all of his retail shops in The young businessman who has Tanzania. achieved tremendous success has tasked himself with the responsibility Fred says he knew the idea of selling of educating the youth on how to clothes at a discount price would create their own sources of income. work because most retailers in fashion stores were selling at higher Ngajiro has been a subject of discussion prices, and he was convinced that not among business stakeholders, everyone can afford high prices. And particularly those dealing in the so this gave him a competitive edge. sale of clothes, with his strategy of incorporating entertainment in his Today, his investment is valued at commercial activities. Sh4.64 billion, which includes other reputable businesses such as the How did the brand ‘Vunjabei’ come specific Vunjabei outlets for sports and children’s wear called ‘Vunjabei about? Sports’ and ‘Vunjabei Toto. The starting point is usually tough for any business owner and that’s no Other Businesses different for Fred. The idea that led to the well-celebrated brand called Over the years, Fred has expanded his “Vunjabei” was conceived during a trip business venture into other sectors to India in 2014. and industries, just to add value to people and also solve problems. He He believes that his observation in believes that, if you solve a problem different Indian market places taught for people, you are adding value for him the trick that products that were them, and they will pay you for the sold at a discount, attracted more services you render, and that has been customers - and sold out quickly - a great philosophy to his business. compared to those that were not. Apart from fashion and the selling His business ideology was of clothes, his businesses have been straightforward. He went into business diversified into the hospitality and 77 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
entertainment industries as well. He established Vunjabei hotels and a music label called ‘Too Much Money,’ which manages several popular musicians.
Fred has already been a big influence in the music industry, engaging and investing in different events. He has worked with A-list celebrities, including Diamond Platnumz, Hamisa Mobetto, Hassan Mwakinyo and Zuchu. His record label has worked with other musicians like Baba Levo, Lady Jay Dee, Lulu Diva, Hamisa Mobetto, S2kizzy among others.
On his strategy to incorporate entertainment into his commercial activities, Fred believes that business is incomplete without entertainment, so he thinks outside the box to motivate his customers. He also believes that his drive is not only for profit but also to create job opportunities for his fellow young Tanzanians with dreams and goals to achieve.”
His goal is to sign more artists under his music label and establish a video production company which will create more employment opportunities for young people in his country. Awards and Recognitions
For those who believe that awards and recognitions prove that one is doing something right, Fred has some to his name, even though he has done so much to help people in his community without making much noise about it.
In 2019, he was nominated by Tanzania Digital Awards as ‘Best Male Entrepreneur on the Digital.’
In 2020, he was nominated by Tanzania Consumer Choice Awards as the ‘Most Preferred Upcoming Male Business Icon of the Year 2020’ in the category of Corporate /Business Professionals.
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Profile | By Joseph Olaoluwa
Cleo Anastasia Johnson’s Journey to Becoming a Hospitality and Marketing Maven
Cleo Anastasia Johnson is best known for her drive, her successful track record and commitment to mental health. But these are not enough attributes to define this hospitality and marketing maven. Nevertheless, they give you a glimpse into the foundation of everything she represents.
H
er journey in hospitality began shortly after she obtained a National Diploma in Hospitality Management from Cape Town Hotel School back in 2012. She took up job roles as a Receptionist and Management trainee at The One & Only Hotel, Cape Town and African Pride Melrose Arc Hotel, respectively. These roles served as the perfect springboard to launch her into the world of hospitality and marketing.
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Between 2012 and 2017, she worked with Marriot, Radission Blu before going on to set up Nuecleo, a consultancy firm specialising in social media and marketing strategy for hospitality & tourism businesses that lack marketing infrastructure and a presence in the digital space.
In a video interview with Renuka Methil, the Managing Editor of Forbes Africa, Cleo gave a rare insight on how she started off her own business at a
Starbucks outlet in 2017, by simply talking to a stranger.
“My journey started in 2017. I think it was in January when a certain contract was not working out. About a week later was my last day at the hotel. I thought about going out to India for some six months and just take time for myself to discover what is outside corporate. I tried monetizing a blog to make money, bored with everything else.
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“I had to register a company and establish a brand identity while I found myself at Starbucks. And there was this gentleman opposite me, who asked what I was doing. I was just registering as a freelancer trying to go overseas. He asked, what do you do? I explained that I did social media and marketing strategy. Then he replied he needed a social media manager.”
If you’re in it for the long haul, pausing is necessary,” further adding, “learn to be introspective, learn to read people and learn how to take criticism. These three things are vital for your growth.”
Cleo has admitted to suffering from imposter syndrome. In an interview with the Baby Girl Club magazine which she posted excerpts on her Instagram account, she chronicles An excited Cleo said it was her first how she overcame the constant battle business opportunity that had come of success cum failure. when she decided to go solo and was really thankful for the gentleman who She said, “I suffer from imposter pushed her onto that part, leading her syndrome all the time. Following your to cancel her India trip and opening dreams and aspirations is extremely her first digital hotel in South Africa. personal. It is great to have role models “It was an amazing experience,” she and people you look up to, but at some remarked. point, you need to understand what success and failure look like to you. Cleo, who is the recipient of several awards and recognitions, said that the “There is a lot of unlearning I had best thing for South Africa’s hospitality to do from working in a corporate industry was to get off the red-list and environment. I stopped looking observe stricter COVID-19 protocols at what I thought the end goal to save the industry. She stressed the would be and how it would look. need for travel and its importance for No journey is linear, and freeing yourself from these preconceived the hospitality industry as well. notions gives you the freedom to The 29-year-old who was honoured in explore and create.” the Business, Entrepreneurship and tourism categories of the Mall and Reacting to the honour bestowed Guardian 200 Young South Africans in on her by Forbes, she stressed that 2020 wants to revolutionise the entire it was “a humbling one,” remarking travel and hospitality business. that 2020 and 2021 were difficult and pivotal in her journey. In My aim is to change the face of the her life advocacy, she is hospitality and tourism industry, extremely grateful and not only in South Africa but on daring. the continent through commercial strategies, skills development, She says, “I love business intelligence and systems what I do and have that take into consideration the 4th a passion for it. Industrial Revolution. If something is not inspiring me Cleo has always stressed the or challenging me importance of having good mental enough, I switch health to confront life challenges gears or step back and head-on as well as having good social take on something that currency in relationships. does.”
underserved girls, while believing in the power to change the world one person at a time.
She said, “One of my proudest moments was summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro for Caring 4 Girls, a sanitary pad and sex education programme that’s part of the Imbumba Foundation. Knowing that I could stretch my body and mind under some extreme circumstances reinforced my belief that I am capable of just about anything, if I want it badly enough.” She adds, “Business is not just about profits, but what you can do to lift others up.”
In July, she launched DIGITAL MOYO, a collection of her travel photographs shot in Africa and illustrated. Anastasia Johnson is awarded the honor of one of Africa’s top 50 influential CEOs.
“Your health is your greatest asset Notwithstanding, she has and that includes your mental health. continued to give back in Learn to rest and not feel guilty for it. cash and kind, especially for 81 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Profile | By Joseph Olaoluwa
Zimbabwean Serial Entrepreneur, Shakemore Timburwa is on a mission to connect Africa with Clean Energy
In a world where many young people are increasingly engaging in questionable ventures in a desperate bid to get rich quick, Timburwa’s drive for success is wired differently, to cater for development on the African continent. The most recent honour for the Zimbabwean serial entrepreneur is being featured on Forbes’ 30 under 30 list for 2021.
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ith interests in diverse industry sectors - alternative energy, mining, real estate and manufacturing, the youthful business mogul seeks to simply be an inspiration for young entrepreneurs like himself, as showcased in a video by Forbes Africa.
“My story should act as a motivation for other young people who want to venture into business. And my story is the same, that they can make it and we have Forbes Africa to support us all the way. So I think that is how I will support other people,” he said.
He added, “Being on this list is going to create a wide range of connections which, if I am wise enough, I can turn into commerce and they will help me grow and push harder in attaining the goals and milestones that I have also set for myself.”
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Our goal is to connect the whole of Africa, Cape to Cairo dream, with clean energy.
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As an entrepreneur, he wears many hats. He generally describes himself as the founder of Energy Plus, a leading integrated energy company that specialises in Liquefied Petroleum Gas installations and bulk distribution and solar electric design and installation across Africa, but mainly the Sadc region. He is also into construction, as co-founder of PICCO Construction with long-time friend Rhinos Mautsa, as well as the owner of a gold firm, Parvaim Gold Holdings. In all of these, his passion is towards sustainable energy and that is the major motivation behind all that he seeks to achieve on the continent. He said, “Our goal is to connect the whole of Africa, Cape to Cairo dream, with clean energy. I will say, the drive and inspiration came from where I had grown up. I grew up in a place called Dangamvura in Zimbabwe. Entire community lived on fossil fuels as their source of energy and lighting. The whole idea was very disturbing to me. I felt there needed to be a change, something that can be done to preserve the environment because there were high levels of energy poverty. The load shedding was just too high and electricity was always out. People would go and cut down trees. It was just catastrophic. Henceforth, I decided to find a way to solve it.”
Childhood
Timburwa’s entrepreneurial drive did not just start out of the blues. Exeleon Magazine reports that it began during his college days. His dream of bagging a Diploma in Diesel Plant Fitting Mechanics from Mutare Poly Technical College was cut short by an energy crisis in his hometown, Dangamvura. These occurrences served as the base for his enthusiasm in energy, its impact on Zimbabwe and Africa on a larger scale. His research on LPG and solar panels led him on this journey 83 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
with strong influences from Google founders Larry Page and Sergy Brin, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Strive Masiyiwa, Johann Rupert, amongst others.
Shakemore believes his success, dreams and aspirations are priceless and cannot be placed a price tag on.
This makes him a strong canvasser of Africa’s development. His recent The motivation for his gold firm is to words on ZBCTV’s Economic Forum create value within a reasonable time- programme is enough pointer to this. frame, one that will stand the test of In his words, “As long as Africa does time. not recognise how powerful it is as a “Parvaim Gold is a full-fledged continent (not as a country), we are mining company vested in mining never going to be a part of the global and financing. It works to link foreign story. The change that Africa needs mining assets and investors to should predominantly come within different local mining interests,,” he Africa. There is no one who loves said. Africa more than Africans. If anyone is not in Africa and they want to do “Through the company, we invest in something for Africa, you must know development and production stage that they are exploiting something mining companies, as well as products that you may not be able to see now.” and services that serve the mining sector, ‘’ he explained. This string of businesses is in addition to Infinity Farm Fresh, a firm designed to make customers get high-quality fruits and vegetables produced and distributed within the highest health standards, affordable for the average man.
These amazing feats have brought him many accolades like the Global Chamber of Business Leaders (GCBL) Young Business Leaders Programme which he was recently inducted into and the Institute of Corporate Directors of Zimbabwe (ICDZ)’s 40 Most Influential Under 40.
His mentor, Dr James Makamba had this to say about him:
“28-year-old businessman and Chief Executive Officer of Parvaim Gold Holdings, Shacky Timburwa is an example of a young trailblazer who made a name for himself in 2020. He has been recognised by various prestigious institutions, including Forbes and the Pan-African Youth Foundation. I hope 2021 will have better revelations for all of us.”
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Interview By Simeon Onoja
Evans Akanno: Building Thriving Brands Against All Odds
Evans Akanno, 31, grew up in Africa’s commercial hub, Lagos, Nigeria. He found his passion for technological design whilst interning at the Nigerian Petroleum Resources (NNPC - NipeX) in 2008.
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fter graduating in 2010 with a BSc in Industrial Chemistry from Imo State University, it was Evans against the unemployment plague ravaging the nation. In a move to earn from his passion, he started designing profile photos for people to use on their Blackberry Messenger (BBM), charging as little as N400 ($0.97). This endeavour foretold Evans’ potential to do great things in the entrepreneurial world.
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Evans was on a path to launch several businesses, but the corporate world also had its doors wide open to him. He got a job as a brand and social media strategist with Jumia Nigeria in 2012 and worked with Konga in 2013 as a Creative Strategist. However, his entrepreneurial zeal still outshone these vibrant workplaces.
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In 2015, Evans founded Cregital, a digital solutions company that designs and builds websites and digital platforms for businesses across Africa. He bootstrapped the business with just $1,600 and has grown it into a multi-award winning brand.
As a way of giving back to his local community, Evans launched the ‘Act of Random Kindness’ (ARK) in 2018, Cregital’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative. According to ARK, its first move on the 12th of December 2018 saw over 5000 people receive gifts. The success of the initiative inspired Evans to make it an annual event reaching people everywhere. In the same year, he co-founded Farmkart Foods - an agric-tech platform that promotes investments in agriculture.
In 2019, Akanno co-founded another startup, Disha Technology Systems which helps startups and SMEs create one-page websites on their phones, giving their businesses instant online presence. A crucial move in this part of the world where several small businesses struggle with the cost of hiring web developers to meet their needs for a website. The platform also builds digital tools and templates that help designers, developers, content creators, and agencies work faster and smarter.
Over the years Evans has received several awards - 2018 Nigeria Technology Awards as the Tech Young Achiever of the Year, 2016 Future Awards Africa Prize for Creative Professional, Forbes named Akanno as 2019 Forbes Africa 30 under 30 in the technology category, he was also listed among the “100 Most Influential Young Nigerians” in 2019 by Avance Media, among others.
What inspired you to launch What’s your favourite part of Cregital? being an entrepreneur? After graduating with a second class degree in Industrial Chemistry in 2010, I suffered for some time, under the youth unemployment problem in Nigeria. Choosing not to be a victim of the system, I turned to my creative talent in graphic design. In 2012, I launched Evans Akanno Creative Agency, worked full time in e-commerce for 2 yearsthen rebranded the agency to Cregital in 2015.
Freedom and flexibility is the best part of being an entrepreneur. I love that I can have my siesta at 2:30 pm on a cool afternoon and effectively create time for the things and people I love.
What’s your advice for entrepreneurs who have the odds stacked against them?
Being an entrepreneur is really hard but if you believe you can, then you can. See challenges as an opportunity What was it like bootstrapping to learn, spend wisely, hope for the the company? best but prepare for the worst, know when to pivot if the plan isn’t working. I had saved about 600k from freelance projects and started out with How do you relieve stress? registering Cregital, then got a small office in Surulere, Lagos. I grew the I watch movies online or at the company solely on revenue, ensuring cinemas, travel; time at the beach or we had enough to meet payroll and have a good laugh with family and other obligations. By telling stories friends. on social media and delivering quality websites, we got popular in the industry and this has helped us to consistently have clients over the years.
What are some of the ways you’ll recommend for early-stage entrepreneurs and freelancers to gain clients? Tell a good story about the passion and process of your work and then deliver the best work you possibly can with every client.
What can we expect from Cregital in the future?
My career path is ever-evolving. In the near future, I will spend more time automating the work I have done at Cregital into very easy apps that empower everyone else to create and Business Elites Africa sat with this grow their businesses online without techpreneur, to discuss his journey knowing how to design or code. so far, the future of Cregital, and more.
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Profile | By Emmanuel Abara Benson
Slum2School Founder, Orondaam Otto, is Giving Less-Privileged Kids Hope for the Future
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ccording to Unicef, Nigeria accounts for more than one in five out-of-school children anywhere in the world. Official figures by the Federal Ministry of Education put the number of out-of-school children in the country at a whopping 10.1 million as at Q1 2021. Now, this is a serious problem, one that the government doesn’t quite seem to be giving the much needed attention. But thanks to organisations like Slum2School, all hope is not lost. Founded in 2012 by Orondaam Otto, Slum2School describes itself as a leading volunteer-driven organisation that is committed to empowering underserved Nigerian children with quality education. It 86 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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will surprise you to know that Orondaam had to put aside a prospective medical career to focus on saving the children. Let’s tell you all about that, starting with the incidents that culminated in changing the course of his life forever.
How it all began
In 2012, Orondaam Otto was a 25-year-old serving his fatherland in Lagos as part of the compulsory one-year National Youth Service Corp (NYSC). Two years earlier, he had graduated from the University of Port Harcourt with a degree in Medical Sciences and Human Anatomy. To his parents and close friends, he was well on his way to having a fulfilling professional career. Even Orondaam thought so too himself, until one day when he stumbled on a BBC documentary on Makoko, a notorious slum that is conspicuously located on the Lagos Lagoon. He later recalled his reaction after watching the documentary.
“There was a documentary I watched on the BBC called ‘Welcome to Lagos’ and it depicted Nigeria in a negative way, which hurt me so much. I asked myself, ‘why would the BBC do a documentary showcasing Lagos and the only place that was appropriate for them to show was a slum in Makoko?’”
wanted to do what national service is really about – being able to serve my community and making an impact, instead of staying in the bank and making lots of money. I began working with young girls who were ex-sex workers. Within about three weeks we were able to get about 140 of them back into school. We raised close to N1 million ($2,800).” With that money raised, Orondaam reached out to schools in slums like Makoko and offered them assistance. Ever since then, he has continued to raise millions of naira from different donors to support education in different underserved communities around Lagos and other parts of Nigeria. Thanks to him, thousands of less privileged children have received scholarships to study for their primary and secondary education. And for this, we recognize and salute him for the good work he’s been doing.
Visiting Makoko and Finding himself
Not long after he saw the documentary, he soon found himself facing the slum one day as he commuted along the Third Mainland Bridge. Now, for those who aren’t quite familiar with Lagos, the Third Mainland Bridge extends across the Lagos Lagoon, connecting Lagos Island with the Mainland. While on the bridge, one could look down into this Makoko slum. It stretches almost the full length of the bridge. And quite honestly, it is an eyesore; an unfortunate display of poverty. It is, therefore, not surprising why Orondaam was instantly enthralled by the place. And before long, he visited the place. Here, he described what he saw: “One evening, I was going over the third mainland bridge and sighted this community and realized it was actually the community I saw in that documentary. I made plans to visit this place in person and I was stunned. I saw school children without clothes on. I observed that many kids were not in school, either, though this was a school day. The images haunted me and I realized there was something I could do about this situation.”
Following his visit to Makoko, Orondaam decided to resign from the company where he was posted for his NYSC. As he rightly pointed out to those who questioned his decision, “I 87 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Profile | By Bimbola Bankole
Simbarashe Mhuriro Overcame Depression, Suicide Attempt Before Becoming a Celebrated Entrepreneur in Zimbabwe
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n early 2015, Simbarashe Mhuriro, now 35, had a big idea to provide an alternative, eco-friendly, and cheaper electricity option for SMEs in Zimbabwe and by extension, the whole of Africa. He was convinced that the electricity problem on the continent is enormous and would almost guarantee any business that has the solutions a sustainable Return on Investment (ROI). Therefore, he started Oxygen Africa, an independent power production and renewable energy development company specialising in both utility-scale and commercial scale / rooftop power plant projects. The company’s first outing was a 50mw rooftop solar project with Old Mutual Property, the largest property investment managers in Zimbabwe. Simbarashe invested all his life savings on his company’s first project. He did not only lose all this money, but also became homeless, depressed, and attempted suicide.
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“It’s 12 midnight, I’m standing on a railway track… And I’m thinking, I want to take my own life. I’ve got nothing else to live for. Then, I meet this old guy who talks me out of it, and who convinces me that it’s not worth it, that there is a lot more to life,” Simba recounted. After the suicide attempt, he went back home and found an old MoU his company had signed with Old Mutual Plc., a Pan-African banking group and Zimbabwe’s largest property investment managers. The MoU, which allows Energy Africa to install solar on buildings owned by the multinational, had failed due to unfavourable terms and conditions. Simba decided to try again and re-pitch the project to Old mutual. According to him, this was his last shot. And Simba resolves to revisit and do it, this time, on his own terms. On the morning he planned to set out for the pitch, he encountered a challenge. All he had on him was the exact amount he had calculated would transport him from his city in Mondera, to Old Mutual headquarters located 9km from Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. He found out as he hit the road that the price of transport had gone up. He was, however, consoled that he would go to his friend whose office was nearby and get the balance for his transport fare but unfortunately, the friend was not in the office.
Faced with what seemed like a do-ordie situation, Simba was left with no option but to get to Harare with the 89 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
money in his pocket and walk the rest of the distance (9km) to Old Mutual HQ. At the pitch, he assured and convinced Old Mutual that he would take on the financial risk to install a 3.2mw solar on their buildings, a project that would cost $5USD million.
solar photovoltaic rooftop project on buildings owned by Old Mutual.
At the 19th edition of the World Festival of Youth and Students in Russia, which was organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), a United Nations-recognized international youth non-governmental organization, President Vladimir Putin endorsed and commended Simba for the impressive work he doing doing with solar energy in Africa.
With the size of a company like Old Mutual, bureaucratic procedures were tough as it took several months before the multinational reached back to Simba. The company changed the commercial terms in the MoU and issued a letter of interest to Oxygen His company, Oxygen, has received Africa, leaving it with the headache of support from Zimbabwe’s Ministry financing the project. of Energy and Power Development, National Project Status from the Simba swung into action and started Ministry of Finance and Economic shopping for financiers. Luckily, his Development, and a Climate Action friend bought him a plane ticket to Endorsement from the country’s South Africa where he pitched his Ministry of Environment, Water and idea to Absa Group Limited, a South Climate for driving and championing African-based financial services United Nations Sustainable group, offering personal and business Development Goals. banking, credit cards, corporate and investment banking, Simba is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future His pitch went well but there was a Council on Entrepreneurship for problem again, a good one this time. 2018 – 2019 and the Shared Value All he needed for the project was Africa Initiative’s Africa Council of 8. $5USD million, which Absa said was He has been awarded the prestigious too small. The minimum the Group Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellowship could loan out was $20USD million. by the African Leadership Institute This means the project had to be and Oxford University’s Said Business worth at least $20 million before Absa School. could back it. Then, Simba went back to Old Mutual with a new proposal The dogged entrepreneur has also of 20mw and proof of funding. After played an advisory role as part of the several discussions, the multinational expert working groups on renewable accepted the proposal and granted energy, innovation, entrepreneurship, Oxygen Africa the contract to install and SME development for Pan African solar panels on its entire property projects run by the African Union portfolio – 216 buildings. Commission, European Union, and World Health Organisation Africa The symbiotic relationship between Region. Simba’s company and old Mutual opened more doors of opportunity In both 2016 and 2018, Forbes for him in ways he never imagined. In magazine named Simba as one 2019, the African Development Bank of Africa’s 30 most promising (AfDB)-managed sustainable energy inspirational young entrepreneurs. fund for Africa (SEFA) approved He was also recognized by the Africa a US$ 1.2million grant to Oxygen Youth Awards as one of the 100 Most Energy to support the 20mw off-grid Influential Young Africans of the year.
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Interview By Simeon Onoja
Gil Sperling: A Techpreneur Driving Innovations in Africa’s Property Industry
Gil Sperling is the co-founder and co-CEO of Flow, a proptech company that taps into the largest social media platforms to match people with suitable properties in South Africa.
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t ech whiz, Sperling launched his entrepreneurial career as one of three founding partners of Popimedia, one of Africa’s biggest adtech and performance marketing companies. The business is one of Facebook’s largest marketing partners. Having attained a major milestone in the adtech ecosystem, Gil turned to his next interest, the property industry. He couldn’t overlook the slow pace of technological advancement in this industry. And so he and his co-founder Daniel Levy launched Flow, a proprietary technology which empowers estate agents, tenants and landlords.
Business Elites Africa caught up with Gil on the future of Flow, proptech in Africa and a lot more.
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What is Flow? Flow’s a prop-tech marketing platform which helps real estate agencies and property developers to automate their marketing on Facebook and Instagram. We learnt through our experience that it’s very complicated and difficult to run Facebook campaigns effectively, especially within the property and real estate sectors which are highly fragmented.
The property tech industry generally involves some of the biggest transactions for any one of us. Whether it’s your monthly rent, which is generally a third of your income, or buying a home, which you do once every 10 years. It is a massive transaction, and a basic human need, especially when we’re talking about your home. That’s why we thought, let us see if we can create an impact.
It really puts people in survival mode. Out of necessity, we had to adapt. And that’s what a lot of the industries did. Fortunately, there was a big leapfrog effect where a lot of technologies that would have taken way longer to adapt got adapted far quicker, bypassing a lot of existing legacy technologies.
People got way more used to viewing apartments through videos and walkthroughs, on WhatsApp, signing What would you say is the leases and making purchases on their Think of a real estate company that has biggest challenge right now in phones. many branches. Each branch has many South Africa’s Property Tech? agents with their respective property How would you advise earlylistings. It’ll be near impossible for The biggest challenge right now is stage entrepreneurs to raise someone to create hundreds of ads for the old generation of landlords or funds? those listings on social media. This is property developers which isn’t where we come in. We’ve automated compatible with how consumers It’s hard work to be an entrepreneur. That’s for sure! But my experience has the process so the property industry behave and engage. been about staying focused and adding can easily use social media platforms That incompatibility is the biggest to my personal growth every day. to reach buyers and tenants. challenge - How do these property You’re generally inventing something What was it like funding the agencies, estate agents and developers that people don’t know they need or platform? actually engage and communicate with want. the millennials and generation Z of During my time at Popimedia, which today who are used to certain modes And there are a lot of naysayers out was Facebook’s largest partner in of engagement, such as social media there, a lot of rejections and punches Africa, we built a technology that and so on. These property transactions that you take on a daily basis, and automated the marketing for big also require a tremendous amount that’s where it’s hard. My advice would businesses like Unilever, Nestle and of trust because of the value of the be that if you focus and have a strong BMW. We also did some work in the transactions usually involved. conviction in what you’re doing; property industry. When we sold solving a big problem, stay focused Popimedia, we started exploring Flow entered the market in the on the long term. Any failures and other areas where we could impact middle of the pandemic, what hardships along the way are actually the world. was that like? signals of what you’re doing wrong, what you should fix and how you can From our insights into these different Out of the ashes rises the Phoenix! We learn. industries and how they market launched in the early days as a rental themselves, we realized that there’s rewards platform where tenants got How do you relieve stress? a gap in the property sector that rewarded by landlords for being better witnesses the least innovation in tenants; paying rent on time and so on. I like to do things that help me get terms of technology. And part of the vision was to extend perspective. The reason is, once I see that to enable tenants to find better a bigger picture, anything that I’m You may have heard of fintech, homes and landlords. stressing about becomes minuscule agritech and health tech. But proptech and easier to deal with. I like to laugh is the least progressed and one of That’s when we launched Search, it a lot. I like to watch comedy, which the most valuable sectors. This slow was the home finding part of our really is stress relief. I like to travel, pace is because it is old, archaic and platform, which would have glued that also gives me a lot of perspective. fragmented. But we decided to give it everything together. And we launched a go and unlock value for people and it two weeks before the hard lockdown I’m an embodied person. So I do a lot how they live, how they find their in South Africa. So obviously that was of breathing, gym and meditation. It property; how they engage and the quite a challenge because the industry really helps me to reconnect on a daily trust that they have in the ecosystem. completely shut down. basis. 91 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Interview By Emmanuel Abara Benson
Dimeji Falana Discusses Edtech and what Foreign Investors Look out for in African Startups gave me a lot of boost and helped me to realize that I could actually do so much with the skill in terms of making money. So, I started doing exactly that.
One of the first major gigs I did afterwards was NTA’s animated logo design. Again, I used PowerPoint to design that logo. Then, I started looking at what other systems I could work with. I began looking into Excel and soon learnt how to add two cells to arrive at a factor or an answer. That gave me the knowledge of logic. And fortunately for me, the lecturers in school taught us a bit of programming. Alongside my budding career, I kept practicing with my Excel. That’s how the whole thing started. And here I am today. Tell us how you went from designing and coding to owning an edtech startup.
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imeji Falana was in his first year at the university when he realized he could become a successful tech entrepreneur. Following this realisation, he dedicated time, energy and resources to honing his coding and design skills. About a decade later, his edtech startup, Edves, is playing a huge role in revolutionising the education system in Nigeria and across Africa. In this interview with Business Elites Africa, the young entrepreneur recounts his growth trajectory and gives important business advice to other entrepreneurs. Enjoy the conversation.
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Dimeji: As I kept working with Excel, I was also thinking of how to use Excel to build a Grade Point Average (GPA) calculator for students. And then by my second year at the university, I went on a 3-month industrial training. I was posted to Oak Computers in It’s nice to meet you, Sir. Tell us how Ogba, Lagos.During the three months your journey in tech began. I spent there, I was moved across all the departments there. This afforded Dimeji: It all started in early 2007 me the opportunity to learn so many when I was just a 100-level student at new skills. the University of Ilorin. One Saturday, while visiting with my cousin at his I was also opportune to meet a couple hostel, I remember him telling me of guys who were really good at about one of his professors who was programming. They gave me books to preparing for an inaugural lecture and read and assigned me lots of projects was in urgent need of help with his to review. Before long, I started PowerPoint presentation. I stepped in designing websites using micromedia and handled the PowerPoint for the fireworks and other tools. professor and he was very impressed. When I returned to the campus after He later told me that he had never the industrial training, I started seen a PowerPoint design and display noticing lots of website design that good before. His commendation opportunities for different student
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organisations. This was around 2008/2009. Everyone was building websites. But first, I pulled back a little so I could finish my project on Excel for the GPA calculator, using PHP to now build a proper website. When I finished that, I took it to my HOD and he was very impressed. Around this same time, I had just joined Facebook. One day while I was browsing through a Facebook page, I noticed something that said ‘Facebook. com/home.php’. Right then, it dawned on me that Facebook was actually built with PHP. It was a very unexpected discovery. And then I realised that if they used PHP to build Facebook and it was as good as it was back then, then I needed to get to the depth of PHP. That’s how I began researching more about the subject matter. I learnt C-language and began using it to build PHPs.
As at the time I was graduating, I had already built a lot of products and amassed quite a number of clients. I also had this friend who used to be very popular on campus and had a lot of friends outside of campus. One of these many friends of his was the daughter of a school proprietress in Ilorin. The young woman told my friend about the problems they were having in the school, one of which was the fact that different teachers were using different grading systems to prepare students’ results. Their accountants were struggling to keep proper documentation of tuition fee payments.
Take for instance if the fee per term is N150,000 per student and a student pays N100,000 at first to balance up later, the accountants could not keep proper account of what has been paid and what is left to be paid. Instead, they had to flip through booklets and do a lot of calculations, often making errors in the process. After hearing all these, my friend was like “okay! This is a problem that can be solved”. He then told her he would get someone 93 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
to build a software solution for the school to manage all these problems. That person was me. He assured me that this is a business opportunity and he was right.
Our approach was to make it a oneoff gig. So, we decided to charge N80,000 which right now is nothing, but back then was a huge deal for two students. We built the product for the school and everyone was excited. Unfortunately, after we deployed the product, it failed the following week. We then apologized to the client and explained that we didn’t do the requirement gathering very well. So, we did everything all over again and got it right the second time. And that was how we found ourselves in edtech.
school all the way to the end of secondary school.
Do you have any plans to expand the business and perhaps do more than what you are doing currently?
Dimeji: We had a plan to do so many things. However, in the course of participating in several accelerator programmes, understudying about 20 African countries and their actual needs for education, we took a stand to just function as an infrastructure for schools as against being a typical school. We believe that the teachers only need the capacity to do what they are supposed to do. Likewise, the parents need the capacity to do what they are supposed to do. Same thing applies to school owners and For the benefit of those who do not administrators, both public and know Edves, tell us a little bit more private. about what the company does. This model of ours was put to test Dimeji: Edves is a B2B file product during the COVID-19 pandemic. for African schools. What we do Many schools turned to Edves to be is to digitize and automate school their main infrastructure. We actually operations from student enrollment beat Google Classroom in Nigeria in all the way to graduation. Our terms of usage. The schools found it product eliminates every bottleneck easy to launch on Edves for all their associated with enrollment, payment, payment, admissions, learning and engagement with parents, generating report activities. reports and others. All of these can be handled by our technology while We have all the essential administrative teachers focus more on what’s most features/infrastructure every modern important, which is preparing lessons school needs. Between April and and having quality engagement with August last year, about 14,000 videos were recorded and shared on Edves students. by students. That’s one reason we are When a school moves from paperwork focusing mainly on building capacity to digital infrastructure, data becomes for schools. I feel like that’s more easily available and there can now needed in the education space right be better collaboration between now. parents, teachers and administrators on learners’ education. This way, the Tell us how your company generates strengths and weaknesses of students revenue. Is it the students that pay can be discovered and necessary you or the schools? interventions initiated in a timely and efficient manner. That’s what Dimeji: We charge the schools and Edves is all about. We didn’t set out that’s all. to become a typical edtech company. We just decided to focus on solving Do you think Nigeria’s education the problem of paperwork and tedious system is ready for digital operations in schools, from nursery revolution?
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Dimeji: Yes, the Nigerian education system is ready. There has already been a technological revolution that makes it possible. Virtually every household in Nigeria today has access to the internet. On this same internet, teaching and learning is happening at a steady pace. So, Nigeria cannot afford to be left behind. We are ready.
thesis only recommends investments At the time, we had 60 schools in our portfolio and they couldn’t believe how in healthtech startups. we were able to achieve that without There is another trend around any external funding. Apparently, investment that I have seen in we couldn’t have achieved that with recent years. Sometimes, investors the assistance of external investors will only invest in you if you attend because we knew very little about certain accelerator programmes. raising capital. It wasn’t until 2016 I won’t mention any names. Also, that we started looking for how to some investors will only invest in raise capital. Sometime last year, Edves raised you if you have a foreign degree some funding. Are there some more from European or North American The following year, we started doing funding rounds on the horizon? universities. Other investors look some competition before we got a out for entrepreneurs who have $50,000 grant from Switzerland. Dimeji: We are raising now. We will successfully exited a company because Eventually, we got our pre-seed round announce it very soon. they want to put money in whatever in 2018 and more fundraising since then. such entrepreneurs plan to do next. Based on your experience so far, what do you think investors look Generally, every investor wants to So, the mistake is that we did not pay out for when deciding which tech invest their money on entrepreneurs attention to learning about how to startup to invest in? who are capable of successfully raise capital. It is actually something running a company from the scratch every startup founder needs to learn. Dimeji: There are numerous theories to a certain stage before exit. And the on what investors look out for when products these founders come up with What does it take to start a deciding which startups to invest must be bankable. successful edtech startup in a place like Nigeria? in. One of these theories, which is generally accepted, posits that What are some of the biggest investors invest in founders, not mistakes you’ve made as an Dimeji: In order to become a successful necessarily the companies. These entrepreneur and what did you edtech entrepreneur, you must be an founders must be good at what they do learn from them? ‘education person’. And this does not and possess vast industry knowledge, necessarily mean going to school to a trait that will enable them to turn Dimeji: When we started, we were study education. No. But you must around the fortunes of their companies based in Ilorin and quickly got almost understand the basics of how a school and ensure profitability. So, investors all the schools in the city on our is run, and how the brain functions in basically look out for such founders system. Afterwards, we started making the course of learning. There are so and invest in them. in-roads into the Lagos market. All many edtech platforms out here today the while, we weren’t even asking with very horrible products. I know Nowadays, we see a trend whereby ourselves the important question it may look like someone is trying venture capital (VC) firms now of ‘what do investors want to see?’. to bring them down, but that is the make use of their own tailor-made We weren’t going after the investors truth. They do not even understand investment thesis when it comes with the hope of raising money so the problem they want to solve. And to deciding where to invest. These as to expand the business. Instead, That’s unfutunate. investment thesis are based on we focused too much attention on different factors such as demography solving the problems we were in the and location. There have been instances marketing to solve; selling the brand where promising fintech startups to users. in Kenya were denied investment opportunities simply because the I remember during the first investor’s Investment Thesis prohibits accelerated programme we attended, them from investing anywhere else somebody told us ‘you guys look really other than Nigeria. Another good experienced already. The traction you example is when an investor refuses guys have put forward is really crazy. to invest in a really promising edtech How did you get this?’. startup, simply because its investment 94 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Profile | By Bimbola Bankole
Thato Kgatlhane: South Africa’s Social Entrepreneur who created solar-powered school bags out of waste for poor school kids then used as a source of light at night; thereby providing light for children to do their assignments. These bags also feature reflective materials that aid visibility in darkness, which allays the fear of kids being knocked down by cars as they walk to school early in the morning. “Each bag is fitted with a solar panel that charges as the child is walking to school. When they get back home, they can use it as a light for study”, says Thato. “We are offering dignity, safety and access to light.” Simply put, Thato’s company has created one product that has ultimately solved all the identified problems these disadvantaged school kids have had to face everyday.
At 18, Thato Kgatlhanye had decided to solve multiple problems faced by many underprivileged school kids in South Africa, especially in rural communities.
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irst, safety: These poor children are forced to leave home early in the morning so they can make it to school on time. They walk as far as more than 30 minutes every day on roads that are not designed for pedestrian usage, exposing them to the danger of being hit by vehicles.
Second, these kids pack their books in shabby undignified plastic bags. Third, due to almost zero access to power supply, kids rely on candlelight to study when they get back from school, which also raises safety concerns and the question of ease of study.
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To create their product, Thato set up a sustainable manufacturing process. Each school bag is made of 20 plastic shopping bags that are up-cycled into a textile. All offcuts are used to design a signature pattern on the bags. “We’ve tried to create a company that does more with less. The indirect impact we are making is to our communities, teaching them the value in waste,” she says.
Thato sees the potential in everything. To her, there is latent possibility everywhere. Possessing a unique ability to see beyond the surface, she finds the extraordinary in the seemingly simple things. This social entrepreneur and businesswoman has taken something as ordinary as a plastic shopping bag and turned it into an innovative backpack, bringing In 2011, she and her friend, Rea dignity and hope to children across Ngwane, founded Rethaka, which South Africa and beyond. means “we are fellows”. The company recycles plastic bags and transforms She sees her bags the same way she them into solar-powered school bags. sees society. Not everyone would The school bags are charged during notice the potential in a plastic bag. the day as the kids walk to school and Thato thinks we all need to look a bit Driven by the entrepreneurship spirit she believed was inherited from her father and the empathic mind her mother embodied, Thato embarked on a mission to provide a solution that would encourage these children to safely attend school and learn effectively.
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A samplae of the Solar-powered School bags closer. According to her, we all have the potential to make an impact and create change, but it’s having that potential recognised, nurtured, and encouraged that can make all the difference. She adds, “You can start with nothing and create so much more than you can even imagine. And all it takes is the willingness to show up. If you don’t show up, it will never happen.”
in the first competition. I entered the business into the South African Breweries Foundation Innovation Awards and we came second…,” she says.
disadvantaged communities living without reliable access to electricity in Africa. The dynamic use of the invention is also timely, in the face of energy shortages in South Africa.
What sparked the recycled The school bags produced can support school bag idea? the education of many children Thato grew up in Mogwase, one of the townships near the mining town of Rustenburg, in South Africa’s North West province. Her father was a taxi owner and her mother a nurse. The idea for her school bag concept came in the second year of college when her class was tasked to find ways of doing more with nothing.
Thato Kgatlhanye studied art in high school and obtained a brand management degree at Vega School of Brand Leadership in Johannesburg. After school, she was offered an internship in New York with marketing guru Seth Godin. She decided to make a bag out of recycled plastic bags. The solar“This changed my life. It gave me a powered light idea only came after a perspective of what was possible. I conversation she had with her mother, think being in a city like New York, you where she was told to channel her start thinking of yourself as capable creativity towards helping others. of doing anything. All you have to do is make a decision on what it is you’d “My mother told me about how she like to do, and kill it,” she tells Forbes. grew up and used candles to study. If she had one candle for the week In 2016, at 22, her company had and it burned out on Wednesday, she won about $40,000 from start-up wouldn’t be able to study on Thursday competitions. With the fund, factory and Friday. That inspired the idea,” space was established, along with says Thato. a small team of women to help manufacture the product. How impactful is the invention?
living in homes without electricity, by providing them the opportunity to study after the sunsets. The rechargeable light source is a free and safe alternative to the common use of flammable and expensive kerosene lamps by those who don’t have electricity. Since the company’s opening, the bags have been distributed in over 10 South African provinces and exported to other African countries like Namibia, Niger, and Nigeria. Besides, the School Bags have an economic impact on the local community, by creating employment opportunities for low-skilled people, in particular women. The company plans to extend production to include children’s rain jackets made out of 100% recycled material.
There is also a huge impact on the environment – made from recycled plastics and PVC billboard banners, the repurposed School bags reduced “The start-up capital came from a Thato’s recycled School Bags serve waste, by recycling more than 400,000 business grant of $23,433 that I won as affordable energy in economically plastic bags in the process. 97 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Interview By Simeon Onoja
Genevieve Barnard Oni: A Healthcare Visionary Transforming Medical Diagnosis in Nigeria
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Genevieve Barnard Oni is the CFO/Co-Founder of MDaaS Global. The idea for healthtech came to her and her co-founder during their time at MIT. They wanted to make world-class medical diagnoses available to everyday people in Africa. And this desire to impact lives led to the launch of MDaaS.
enevieve is currently running an MBA/MPA dual degree programme at MIT Sloan and Harvard Kennedy School, with a major in finance and operations.
Prior to graduate school, Genevieve worked at the UN Development Program in Uganda, served as Program Manager for Babson College’s Global Healthcare Entrepreneurship program, and was Associate Director of the Kletjian Foundation, an organization working to improve global access to surgical care. She has an undergraduate degree in Public Health and African Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Business Elites Africa sat with this healthcare visionary on some crucial issues.
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What inspired the launch of MDaaS lives every single day. That was really Global? attractive to me. I also was drawn to the healthcare space because there’s a I am one of four co-founders, and I lot of interesting innovation from time think each of us has our own kind of to time. connection to this problem and some inspiration for why we wanted to And the impact of that innovation work in the healthcare space. is helping people to address health issues, helping them to live healthier, I think for me, coming out of school happier and longer lives. and thinking about what I’d want to do with my career. I really liked the idea How did you tackle funding in the of baking something impactful into early days of MDaaS? what I do every day and not working another job and saying, ‘Okay, you It all depends on how how much fund know, maybe in 10 years, I’ll get to you’re trying to raise in your seed switch into something that I feel is rounds. really impact-focused’. We started the company while we And so I felt like the healthcare space, were still students at MIT. So two of my in particular, is one area where you co-founders are also MIT graduates. could really have an impact on people’s
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I think that was really great for the early stages because when you’re on campus and have access to lots of great mentors and booster resources, it’s easier to get some kind of initial funding to test ideas out. So a lot of our early funding came from competitions on campus and different kinds of applications that we submitted, which helped to pilot our passion into the early version of MdaaS.
I’m also the CFO of the company. I love doing cash flow projections and financial modelling, looking into different potential scenarios as to what the next month or a quarter or a year might look like.
economic challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic? The past 18 months have been a period of a lot of stress and uncertainty. That’s something that we definitely experienced. So for us, you know, we did kind of experience a pretty big reduction in the number of patients we saw during all of those lockdown months.
So I think having that card in your back pocket, knowing what kind of changes I can make to my plan if we end up in a scenario where there are a lot of uncertainties or we’re not able Another place that we looked at to fundraise as quickly as we think we That was around March, April, was family and friends. Those are would, can be really helpful in every May, when movements were really the people that love you and don’t case. restricted and people were having necessarily need to know that you’re trouble getting to the hospital or going to have a million or a billion- Tell us about your new product health centre, even if they had an acute issue. We decided to pause some of dollar idea in the future, but they SentinelX our expansion plans to help kind of believe in you and believe in your passion for how you want to make the Accessing and affording maintain our cash in the bank so that world better. comprehensive diagnostic screening we could outlast the pandemic. can help people understand their That was another big place that we health better and make plans for the What has been your worst day as were able to get some of our very early future. And that’s the idea with the an entrepreneur and how did you funding from. And then we also got Sentinel X product. deal with it? some early funding from accelerator programs. So, we went through the We really wanted to democratise I think this is like a human selfTechstars program in 2018, which not access to preventive screening, preservation thing, I can’t think of any only gives you some funding but also ongoing care and support. So with single terrible day that really stands equips you with a ton of amazing tools this program, you can sign up, it has out. to help you fundraise in the future and an annual subscription fee that gives really think strategically about how to you access for the entire year. And you I think partially because your brain operate your business. get a really comprehensive diagnostic blocks those a little bit, so that you screening as soon as you sign up. can get up the next day and keep What’s your secret weapon for going. I will however say one of the maintaining cash flow for the So you kind of get that value right tough things I’ve struggled with is company? away. You work with a doctor that as an entrepreneur was uncertainty helps walk you through all of your due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but, As a business, cash obviously is the different results. We do a bunch as an entrepreneur, there’s basically king. One of our core values at MdaaS of different tests, looking at about uncertainty all the time. is to always act on data and be a very 65 different types of biomarkers. data-driven company. And then, after going through that Right. You’re creating something screening and looking at the results, that’s new and has never existed I think that is probably the biggest you work with the SentinelX team to before. And I think for me that was component of how we think about figure out actionable steps that can one of the most challenging parts cash and how we ensure that we’re address any issues that come up. of being an entrepreneur. There’s maintaining a good cash flow. We constant pressure of knowing that collect a lot of different operational And then we actually check in with you we have so many people now in our and financial data every single day at every single month to see how the plan organization that are depending on our company. And that really helps is going, where you need support, and us for their livelihoods and for their us to kind of keep a constant pulse if there’s a need for any repeat testing. family’s livelihoods, that we have a on what’s going on with our existing lot of patients and doctors that are all operations and how we’re planning How did MDaaS navigate the depending on us to continue to deliver. for the future. 99 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
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Photo Source: MDaaS I think that one of the most wonderful things about the work that we do is knowing that we are able to impact people every single day. And, that in itself is another form of pressure you have to successfully manage.
How do you relieve stress?
Soga is my co-founder as well as my husband. We both last year got really into running, especially with the COVID-19 lockdown. We were basically sitting in our living room What do you enjoy the most about 24/7 and dealing with all of the stress and uncertainty that came with the being an entrepreneur? pandemic. We found a lot of stress A lot of the things that make being an relief in running. entrepreneur really, really stressful are the things that make it really We’re part of a really wonderful run wonderful as well. group in Lagos, where we meet up with friends and go for a run. I love that So it’s two sides of one coin. I love because it’s just this time where you getting to work with my team. I love can get outside, move your body and working with my co-founders as well let your brain think about something as all of the wonderful team members. totally different. Building an organization from the ground up is extremely rewarding and We also do home brewing. We make gives you a lot of options in thinking our own beer. And so that’s something about your clients as well as what you that’s totally unrelated to the work want the future to look like for your that we do, and is really fun. organisation. 100 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
You get to experiment, you get to create something. So that’s been another great way for us to spend time together as life partners and business partners What would you say you admire most about him as a co-founder?
We’re similar in some ways, and then we are very, very different in other ways. One thing I really admire in Soga is his ability to step back and see the big picture. He’s the one who often reminds me that this is a marathon, not a sprint. And I think that part of his skill set is being able to really take a step back and find a different perspective. I think Soga is really great at finding the balance between the extremes of the work that we do.
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Interview By Simeon Onoja
Moulaye Taboure: Taking Africa’s Culture to the World via E-commerce Moulaye was one of the top 10 finalists in the Jack Ma Foundation’s Africa Business Heroes Competition which aims to support and inspire the next generation of African entrepreneurs who are helping to build a more sustainable and inclusive economy for the future. Business Elites Africa caught up with Moulaye on the state of e-commerce in Africa, fundraising for entrepreneurs, among other issues. What inspired the launch of Afrikrea?
I was inspired by the realisation that there was a platform like Etsy in the US that is mainly around handcrafts and makes billions of dollars in sales every year.
And on the other hand, you have millions of artisans and craftsmen in Africa that mostly rely on tourism to sell their products. Pretty much every country I’ve travelled to has got at least one African art museum. I began to view this as a dichotomy that didn’t make sense.
Moulaye Taboure grew up in Mali and went on to work for globally acclaimed companies like PWC and Alstom. Having gained years of experience, he returned home to Africa, and in 2015 founded Afrikrea, an e-commerce startup that enables people across the world to discover, buy, and sell African fashion, arts and craft.
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frikrea now processes over $10 million transactions in more than 150 countries. Driven by service and operational excellence, Moulaye believes that e-commerce will play a pivotal role in boosting Africa’s economy in the future.
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How come something artful in the US was making billions of dollars in sales just from one platform, while at the same time, within the African continent, you have a lot of people equally creating good products, with numerous lovers and admirers all over the world, but there was no platform. So that contradiction was what sparked the idea of Afrikrea. What was it like being among the top 10 finalists at Jack Ma’s Africa Business Heroes?
I’ve been lucky to be selected in a few competitions, but this is the one I’m most proud of. Not only because I am a fan of Jack Ma, but because of the other nine people in the competition.
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I think that the biggest assessment of the quality of a contest is when the people that are selected with you are people that you actually admire a lot. And I really think these people are all going to do great things.
e-commerce is. Ultimately, I believe that women are going to excel in our e-commerce space, and we’re pretty proud that there’s about 80% of women in our seller base. E-commerce is about service. It’s actually about being able to provide a service to the Tell us about ANKA, Afrikrea’s SaaS customer’s delight, and our African e-commerce platform? women are among one of the most experienced people in this area. ANKA is actually our resolution to the painful problem that is lurking What was it like sourcing funding in e-commerce. This problem is that in the early days of Afrikrea? you cannot sell on only one website or marketplace, and especially in It was extremely hard because no Africa, where you have the challenge one understood what we were doing. of exporting products and getting We had clients in Africa and Europe, paid, even though you’ve got potential but the business was very complex to clients outside the continent. explain to people. They felt like fashion was something frivolous, something The idea for us was really to enable that doesn’t really spark interest, like exporting and creating online FinTech and other industries do. businesses using multiple channels would you advise with one subscription, one wallet How and one dashboard. It’s affordable entrepreneurs to go about raising too because we’ve managed to make funds? it 10 euros per month. So pretty much anyone can get started and can use it My advice for them would be to swap to start selling on social media via get to know the entrepreneurs in their direct messages on WhatsApp, or sell field that are actually raising funds, and getting an understanding of what on their dedicated website. makes them special. How well would you say Africans have adopted e-commerce? I really learned the most from exchanging ideas with my peers. I believe we got pretty well on board, The best person to introduce you to obviously. There’s nothing to be an investor is an entrepreneur they ashamed of. E-commerce is hard, it’s respect. not something that happens so easily anywhere in the world. There aren’t as And they are probably also the best many users of e-commerce platforms people to help you know if what you’re here in Africa, because the trust has doing is really useful, or if there’s yet to be established. someone else that did something similar and you’re actually just One thing I believe that can make repeating a mistake that was made Africa successful in e-commerce is before. that at our core we are traders. We like to source items in high demand What’s your favourite part of being and deliver them to the consumers, an entrepreneur? irrespective of their country. My favourite part is definitely talking I believe spotting opportunities and to clients and providing solutions delivering service is something that for them. There’s nothing I find Africans excel at. And that’s what more exhilarating than when you 103 | Business Elites Africa / ISSUE 116
see someone that is already doing a business say that you actually saved them money, time and energy.
There is no better feeling, not only because you’re helpful, but it’s actually seeing them make more money and expand their teams and services. Serving other entrepreneurs is really the thing that I love the most about what we do. How do you relieve stress?
The first thing I usually do is take a step back and talk with my co-founders. I think it’s a blessing that I have cofounders with whom I can regularly share perspectives. Thankfully, due to our different viewpoints, the stress tends to go away, as long as there’s one of us that can keep calm. The second thing, is I do a lot of reading and video gaming. When I read business stories, et cetera, that’s when I get the best ideas for the company. And when you put in perspective what you do versus what Rockefeller did at the old drilling era, it really feels like your current challenge is a smaller issue compared to what those guys had to go through.
I believe sporting opportunities and delivering service is something that Africans excel at and that’s what e-commerce is. www.businesselitesafrica.com
Interview By Simeon Onoja
Oluwasoga Oni: Building Nigeria’s Most Robust Medical Diagnosis Infrastructure
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luwasoga Oni is the CEO/Co-Founder of MDaaS Global. Having lived in both the US and Nigeria, Soga has had a feel of the healthcare sectors and socioeconomic contexts of both countries.
He oversees the company’s business activities in both the US and Nigeria, with a focus on building partnerships with suppliers, hospitals and clinics, employers, and health insurance providers. Prior to the establishment of MDaaS, Oluwasoga worked as a software engineer at DELL-EMC for several years. He holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from Covenant University, a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a Masters Degree in System Design & Management from MIT.
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What inspired the launch of MDaaS Global? In the beginning, it wasn’t like ‘hey we’re going to build a big business or anything’. It was about some pain points that I wanted to solve. I was inspired by a very great class I took at MIT called, Development Ventures. It was centred around solving a problem that is very compelling and can affect a lot of people’s lives. I also grew up in a family of medical doctors and that made the whole thing a lot more personal and real to me..
What really helped more was when we got our first location in Ibadan up and running in November of 2017. We were able to start showing a lot of traction that people actually liked what we built. We saw patients every single day. Then we didn’t need to convince the investors that this is bankable. What investors wanted to see was that we had very solid unit economics, that each of our centres can do well by themselves. Very important. Once we were able to show that, we had more and more people to invest in us.
What would you say is the biggest challenge with
We wanted to improve medical diagnosis in Nigeria and the adoption of health technology in Africa? our first solution was to give the people better equipment as well as increase access. The healthcare system in Nigeria is still mostly manual. Most people don’t use a lot of tech in the operating facilities, How does MDaaS work? particularly smaller facilities in Lagos. People tend to use a lot of Electronic Medical Records (EMR). That’s the most We started selling and renting medical equipment, but later common technology people use. pivoted into building and operating diagnostic centres. We’re currently building the biggest diagnostic network But with the COVID-19 people weren’t able to go to the in the country. Right now we have seven locations and are hospital as they used to. So there was a proliferation of looking to get to 15 by early next year. By the end of next telemedicine apps or telemedicine businesses. Technology is not the end goal. It can help us achieve better healthcare year, we want to be closer to 20. outcomes for our people. But that’s not the only component. Tell us about your latest product SentinelX You know, you need to have great clinicians and facilities. I’m really excited about SentinelX because we’re building a diagnostic infrastructure to be able to deliver certain services to the people. Now that it has expanded to several locations, we can start building the services layer on top of the infrastructure. And SentinelX is the first one we’re building. It is a preventive management program that will democratize access to annual screening.
What’s your favourite part of being an entrepreneur?
I studied systems engineering. And one thing I really enjoy is deconstructing systems; understanding, analyzing and solving problems in systems. One of the things I love about what we do is that we are deconstructing the Nigerian healthcare system and are solving it in our own way.
SentinelX will run people through all the tests - liver function, kidney function, ECG, abdominal scan, blood How does Genevieve propel you as a wife and count, and a bunch of other tests. 65 biomarkers in co-founder? total, and then give you reports, compressive reports in layman terms. We’re not using any medical jargon to give She’s a pleasure to work with. One of the smartest people recommendations on areas that need improvements. I know. She’s highly detail-oriented, she does world-class work and I’m privileged to be able to work with her. Even What was it like raising funds in the early days? though we sometimes disagree on how to achieve certain things, we still find common ground. Funding at the beginning was tough, and medical equipment isn’t cheap. In the beginning, we mostly relied How do you relieve stress? on a lot of friends and family. Then we won a lot of grants. We were pitching in a lot of competitions and applying I love running with my wife. It’s something we both love for a lot of grants. We’re lucky that we won a few of these doing. I play soccer. I love listening to music and eating grants. That helped us survive in the first few years of our good food. I love making and drinking beer at home sometimes. business.
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