Feature
| Entrepreneurship
Elumelu: Private Sector
Can Transform Africa
14 •
The Lion King
• April - June 2015
What is the drive behind this initiative
and what is your motivation?
Let’s go back a bit, I am a proponent
of Africapitalism, which is private sec-
tor participation in the development
of Africa. And what is private sector?
Private sector is all about entrepre-
neurs. So, we need to keep the stock
of private sector entrepreneurs. We
should not see the current private
sector leaders as the best or the only
crop that Africa can offer. So, for me,
looking at ones history and one’s past,
I was born in Africa, I work in Africa
and created some wealth in the con-
tinent, both for myself and people
who believed in me at a time. So, I
thought we should institutionalise this
luck by creating similar opportunities
for others that have ideas, we should
encourage people to succeed, realis-
ing that ultimately, as they succeed,
their success becomes a collective
success for Africa. This is because if
you link their success to the doctrine of
Africapitalism – which means the pri-
vate sector has a role to play in Africa
by investing in key sectors and helping
to stabilise the society.
Do you see all the entrepreneurs com-
ing up with successful businesses and
what success rate do you expect?
How many do I think would succeed? I
wish I am God to tell how many would
succeed. But you know, we want to
give people equal opportunity to suc-
ceed. We are a lot more interested
in process because we think the right
process would deliver the expected
outcome. And so, that is why we
did 12 weeks of training, which we
took very serious. We have appointed
mentors helping these entrepreneurs
because we have seen that capi-
tal is not the only factor you need
for success in entrepreneurship. You
need capital, but equally important,
you need training and mentoring, you
need the right ecosystem that would
pre-dispose your ideas to success. So,
we think there is significant level of
success here. But success to us is not
just defined as how much dollars you
make, but also how you are able to
address these other issues on the con-
tinent. So, we may have an entrepre-
neur who started with $10,000 and 10
years down the line, you have helped
to employ 100 people and you have
not gone bankrupt, that is good and
its success, but we also want to see
future United Bank for Africa come out
of this initiative, we want to see future
Transcorp come out of this initiative,
we want to have our own Bill Gates or
Steve Jobs come out of this initiative.
So, success is going to be broadly
defined by us and we hope that in 5
to 10 years’ time would all look back
and be proud of it.
What is the time frame for this pro-
gramme?
The tenure is 10 years in the first
instance. After 10 years, we would
reappraise and take further decision.
But you might ask yourself, why 10
years? By the training I have, things
should be measurable and so we
need to come up with certain
defined yardsticks for assessing
success rate. Firstly, we said 1,000
people per year for 10 years.
We believe that in 10 years
we would have created sig-
nificant revenue for businesses
that would spring up from this.
The TEF also wants to be able
to help in creating significant
employment in the continent
and we are quite ambitious
about it. So, these are mea-
surable yardsticks and at the
end of the first 10 years, we
would look at the journey in
the past 10 years, what we
have achieved, did we have
success rates and what we
need to do to improve on
it. So what we are doing
is equipping these entre-
Founder, Tony Elumelu Foundation, Mr. Tony Elumelu, spoke to select journalists about the $100 million
Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Programme as well as a two-day boot camp planned for the first 1,000
African entrepreneurs. This was first published in the Thisday Newspaper edition of June 29, 2015.
preneurs through the TEEP. Some
do ask what $10,000 would do to an
entrepreneur. But that is to prove your
concept. We are taking the risk and
we are preparing your company for
the big investors coming ahead.
In choosing these lucky entrepreneurs,
did you consider the environment they
came from and in doing this, did you
establish contact with governments of
the countries they are from and don’t
you think the harsh operating environ-
men t
is going to be a chal-
lenge to them?
Let me say that
I actually just
thought about
informing the
countries or
the host coun-
tries as we
were speak-
ing.
We
d i d
