July - September 2016 •
The Lion King
• 7
WHEN IT COMES TO AFRICA, WE WANT MORE |
BUSINESS
our continent. And ALL in Africa!
I have been very successful in these
sectors using an economic philoso-
phy I developed called Africapitalism.
Africapitalism advocates long-term
investment in strategic sectors that
generate both economic dividends
for investors and social dividends for
society.
So, I am a successful Africapitalist
today, but I started out just like one of
those young men and women in the
clip you just saw of the beneficiaries
of the Tony Elumelu Foundation’s $100
million Entrepreneurship Program.
The continent of Africa has given
me so much! And I understand and
embrace the responsibility to GIVE
BACK to the continent by PAYING IT
FORWARD and creating more Tony
Elumelus to help transform Africa.
Through the Tony Elumelu Foundation’s
$100 million Entrepreneurship Program,
we seek to INSTITUTIONALISE LUCK and
DEMOCRATISE OPPORTUNITY by giv-
ing every budding or aspiring African
entrepreneur the chance to benefit
from it. It is open to all African citizens,
regardless of age, gender, nationality
or commercial sector.
We are training, mentoring and seed-
ing 10,000 African business over the
10 years, creating 1 million new jobs
and $10 billion in additional revenue
across Africa in an effort to ignite the
economic transformation of Africa.
These entrepreneurs will achieve
financial success while creating
home-grown solutions to local prob-
lems in core areas such as food, edu-
cation, health, water and sanitation,
delivering African solutions to African
problems. Or, in other words help-
ing, to implement the Sustainable
Development Goals from the private
sector.
This is the story I want to tell about Africa.
This is the new narrative of Africa. I
travel all over the world, preaching
that Africa is “OPPORTUNITY.”
U.S. policy towards Africa has largely
and steadily been improving since the
late 1990s. Looking back, from the
1960’s through most of the 1980s, U.S.
Foreign policy towards Africa focused
on supporting despots in the Cold
War alliances and then, following the
collapse of the Soviet empire, wrote
Africa off completely in the 1990s.
However, during his second term in the
late 90s, President Clinton began to
engage with the continent and even
came on a state visit to sub-Saharan
Africa, something no U.S. President
had done in almost two decades.
It was also in the final year of the
Clinton presidency that the Africa
Growth and Opportunity Act was
passed, which helped to lay the foun-
dation for a new US-Africa relation-
ship; one based not on humanitar-
ian assistance, but on partnership for
mutual economic benefit – and one
that allows entrepreneurship to be the
engine of social development.
President George W. Bush built on
this with the AGOA renewals and
enhancements and the creation of
the Millennium Challenge Account
which was a multi-billion dollar pro-
gramme to incentivise African coun-
tries to embrace democratic reforms
and govern justly, in return for US assis-
tance to develop their infrastructure
and commercial sectors.
President Barack Obama upheld the
previous initiatives and created the
Feed the Future Global Food Security
programme to boost agriculture in 20
countries, a sector that delivers 3 times
the development gains as any other
investment in development and of
course, he created the Power Africa
initiative, which seeks to expand
access to electricity for the 600 mil-
lion African who lack access to power
today, through public and private
sector partnerships, an agenda that
Senator Coons championed to pre-
serve, through passage of the Electrify
Africa Act in the U.S. Senate.
And it had leveraged nearly $150
billion in private capital to address
this critical development issues. That
is what I call “Shared Purpose,” a key
characteristic of Africapitalism.
And I know that if we get power right
in Africa, it will unlock millions of new
jobs and economic growth in multiple
sectors by reducing the cost of doing
business and attracting new invest-
ments.
So, U.S. policy towards Africa over the
last two decades has been improving,
regardless of which party has held the
presidency.
As you go into your presidential elec-
tions this year, I urge Americans to
ensure that the candidates and new
Administration seek to build on this
progress. Both candidates are promis-
ing change in key policy areas, espe-
cially in the foreign policy arena. But I
want to say to you today, that SOME
THINGS DON’T NEED TO CHANGE!
What they need is to be expanded
and scaled up. In other words, we
need MORE U.S. engagement in Africa
through mutually beneficial trade and
investment.
We also need more security coop-
eration that protects both Americans
and Africans from the undesirable ele-
ments of this world.
And, very importantly, we need to
work in “Shared Purpose” on complex
solutions to complex challenges in
Africa. So when you meet, write, call
and email your political candidates
and representatives, of all races, and
the elected President in November,
tell them that when it comes to Africa,
you want “More.”
By “More”, I mean more engagement,
more positively impactful policies and
more development and commercial
investment in Africa.
I am an unashamed optimist and
I believe that working together, in
“Shared Purpose” we can help usher
in economic transformation that will
catapult Africa into a strong region-
al player in the 21st century global
economy.
Tony O. Elumelu, CON, Chairman, UBA and
Founder of the Tony Elumelu Foundation
delivered this speech at the Opportunity Africa
Conference organised by Senator Christopher
Coons in the US on 16 September 2016.
L-R: Elumelu and Senator
Chris Coons at the annual
‘Opportunity Africa’ Conference
in Wilmington, Delaware
hosted by Senator Coons
