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...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 10 At end-June 2025, Nedbank carried its 21.2% of Ecobank Transnational at R1.8bn against a market value of R1.9bn. It sold the block four months later for $100m — roughly R1.8bn. The headline that a Cameroonian financier bought for a fifth of what the seller paid is arithmetically true and analytically...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 9 Africa holds roughly 15% of the world’s people and attracts about 1% of global venture funding. Within that 1%, four anglophone markets — Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa — absorb the overwhelming majority, and female founders take a fraction of what remains. Fatoumata Bâ built a fund around both gaps...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 8 In 2013, Fast Company appended an editor’s note to its profile of Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu. It removed a claim that soleRebels was the world’s only Fair Trade-certified footwear company, and noted the brand was no longer carried by Urban Outfitters. Thirteen years later, the uncorrected version is still the one...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 7 A tenure cap moves a person. It does not necessarily move power. On 21 August, Nigeria’s twelve-year limit on non-executive directors ends Tony Elumelu’s chairmanship of UBA — the second time the same central bank has removed him from the same bank. His successor is the former group chief executive...