Cement, sugar, fertiliser and now the continent’s biggest refinery. Africa’s wealthiest industrialist has built an empire on import substitution. Central Africa is one of the markets he has not yet conquered. Aliko Dangote’s method has been consistent for three decades: identify a product Africa imports in volume, build capacity at a scale that changes the...

She brought the World Trade Organization to Cameroon and left without a declaration. For the woman who runs global trade rules, the Yaoundé conference was both a personal achievement and a demonstration of how little consensus is left. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala became the WTO’s Director-General in March 2021, the first woman and the first African to...

The largest refinery in Africa sits 600 kilometres from Douala by sea. Central Africa imports nearly all its refined fuel. On paper, the match is obvious. In practice, almost nothing has changed. Since the fire that crippled Cameroon’s SONARA refinery in 2019, the country has imported refined products. Chad refines a modest volume at Djarmaya....

Six months apart, the same regulator issued two decisions about two Cameroonian microfinance institutions placed under supervision in the same wave. One got a liquidator. The other got its keys back. The variable that separates them is not capital, and it is not credit risk. It is who sits at the head of the boardroom...

Commercial Bank Cameroun spent seven years under provisional administration. NFC Bank spent twelve. IDEV never came out at all. On 11 September 2026, NOFIA S.A. walked out after twelve months. The interesting question is not whether that is impressive. It is why it worked — and whether it holds. At a glance InstitutionNouvelle Financière Africaine...

United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc has announced the appointment of Mr. Emmanuel N. Nnorom as Group Chairman, ushering in a new chapter of strategic leadership for one of Africa’s leading financial institutions. The appointment brings to the helm a highly accomplished corporate leader whose distinguished career spans more than four decades across banking, finance,...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 14, and last Nigeria’s central bank caps non-executive tenure at twelve years, expressly to stop founders entrenching themselves atop the institutions they built. In 2026 the rule removed both of them: Jim Ovia from Zenith Bank on 5 May, Tony Elumelu from UBA on 21 August. In the months around his...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 13 A career built abroad is portable until the day it has to come home. Tidjane Thiam became the first Black chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, then the first African to run a major global bank. In April 2025 an Abidjan court struck him from Côte d’Ivoire’s electoral roll,...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 11 A founder’s biography is not a legal defence, and a legal file is not a verdict. Mohed Altrad does not know what day he was born; he picked 9 March with his children. From a Bedouin tribe near Raqqa to 65,000 employees in more than fifty countries and a fortune...