The Continent We Can’t See

Africa is experiencing a boom that extends from metals to mobile payments. Many assume that the growth is overwhelmingly in natural resources like oil, gas, and mining. Natural resources are a big part of the story. However, as figure 1–3 shows, three-fourths of the story is elsewhere.

Figure 1–3: Africa’s growth has been widespread across sectors

Source: Lions On the Move, McKinsey Global Institute, June 2010. By permission.

Data like these frame each chapter of Success in Africa. But data do not dominate. Story and character do.

Success in Africa focuses on the business leaders building the continent and the insights their careers provide. I’ve seen quantitative evidence of Africa’s growth fail to penetrate the consciousness of many, including business executives deploying global capital. Not long ago, I led a team interviewing thirty top U.S. investors, financial intermediaries, and trade experts about Africa. We asked them how many African companies they thought had $100 million in annual revenue (you will recall the actual figure is more than five hundred). The typical response was between thirty and forty.

That experience resonates with Robert Rubin, former U.S. treasury secretary and previously cochairman of Goldman Sachs. Bob has been interested in Africa since he travelled there as head of the treasury in 1998 and saw growth opportunities that have taken others the better part of the next fifteen years to recognize. He says that today, most still don’t. “I can go a year around here, ” he said, waving a hand to the thousand-odd investment banks and private equity firms visible from his current corner office in midtown New York, “and no one will bring up Africa unless I do.”

I had imagined this a uniquely American phenomenon, until I discussed it in the Mayfair section of London with Phuthuma Nhleko. Phuthuma built a telecommunication company in Africa with over $14 billion turnover and in excess of $30 billion market capitalization. He sits on the boards of two of the world’s largest companies, BP and Anglo American, both based in London. Phuthuma describes an experience a lot like Bob’s and mine:

If you watch the BBC or CNN or Fox, every day what you see about Africa is disease, problems, poverty, etc. The African middle class and its huge progress and upward mobility is virtually non-existent. This is a crazy omission and misrepresentation to the business and investing community. If you were to take a hundred American or European twenty-five-year-old fund managers and say, “Africa, ” their response will be “we’re not going to bother about that now or this is not a priority. We’ll look at other ‘emerging markets’ like Russia and China. Africa is just a big black box we don’t really understand.”

On the other hand, if you were to review Nestlé ’s, Unilever’s, or SABMiller’s financials and note where their earnings are derived from, a very material portion is earned in Africa. So, you know... one of these perspectives is missing the point.

For those wishing to see the story clearly, it may be helpful to call out some of the lenses that distort our vision of Africa today. While there are many, three seem to disable us most, and they help explain why a book on the characters and stories of Africa’s rise is so useful.

First, there’s the preconception of Africa as the embodiment of need. How many of us were compelled to eat our peas because “There are starving children in Africa? ” These warnings have a persistent impact on our adult, and even professional, perceptions of Africa. Those perceptions are reinforced by a news media that is quick to report famines but slow to cover successes. By successes I do not mean the occasional ox farmer or microenterprise doing well. They are critical to reducing poverty but of limited interest to a global business audience. I am talking about African businesses that succeed on a large scale, like the companies and individuals who populate this book.

Second, the entertainment sector has built a fortune depicting Africa as a place of happy animals and miserable people. In global entertainment, the only empowered Africans are the Lion King and Idi Amin. Nelson Mandela earned the life due a hero, but only after twenty-seven years in jail. Africans who are not animals, despots, or Nelson Mandela are portrayed as suffering under the heel of poverty, war, and disease. Recall the last two movies you saw with Africans in them. You will see what I mean.

There is a set of readers looking at these first pages who know the Africa story well. I would ask them not to stop reading just yet. Unless you are routinely speaking with African CEOs and global CEOs engaged in Africa, Success in Africa should add new insights to your own.

I hope there are also readers of this book who do not have particular interest in Africa, but are interested in what fast-growth, frontier markets look like and how they work. I write on these markets in Harvard Business Review, usually drawing on my experiences and those of extraordinary business leaders to deliver insights that are hard to get another way. If you like that, you may like what you read here.

I believe in the power of extraordinary people to tell their own story. For that reason, this book reads in part like oral history. While my views are present, I have also sought to get out of the way and let many business leaders succeeding in Africa speak for themselves.

So, for example, if you squint at figure 1–3, you will see that agriculture accounts for 12 percent of Africa’s increase in GDP and has a compound annual growth rate of 5.5 percent. No doubt many readers may have already forgotten that sentence. A better way to tell that story—the way I would want to hear it—is the way it’s told by one of Africa’s agribusiness leaders, Vimal Shah. Here’s Vimal on his core business of palm, sunflower, and related oils:

Africa’s per capita consumption is about five kilos of edible oils and fats per year, per person. The World Health Organization says that fifteen kilos is what a human body requires. Europeans eat about forty-two kilos, Americans forty-eight kilos. From five kilos, can we go down? No. We can only go up.

How can we go up? African demand is currently met from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the United States. Going forward, do those countries have enough land to feed Africa’s next billion people in the next forty years? I just came back from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. They have no more land. They have cultivated it all. If that is the case, the question is whether that production is going to happen here. And I say it is going to happen here in Africa because we have no choice. It is not because it is sexy to do it, but it is just that we’ve got no choice—we’ve got to do it.

As described in chapter 4, Vimal is doing it. His company and others are bringing commercial-scale production to Africa that is redefining how the world will feed itself.

12345678910Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: