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...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 6 Every Cameroonian exporter who negotiates a letter of credit, writes “FOB Douala” into a contract, or signs an arbitration clause is applying rules drafted by the International Chamber of Commerce. Those rules are texts, written by people, in rooms, and revised on a schedule. Until June 2026 no African woman...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 5 Africa’s largest technology exit is usually reported as $682m. The figure adds a payment that was made to one that may never be, and excludes the stake the buyer already held. What actually happened is more instructive than the headline: a Tunisian mathematician came home from a comfortable European career,...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 4 Infrastructure is a rent asset. Airports, ports and power grids earn their returns from the absence of a substitute, not from competitive advantage — which is exactly why long-horizon capital wants them, and exactly why a weak regulator turns a partnership into a transfer of pricing power. Adebayo Ogunlesi built...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 3 Central African economies pay better for trading than for making. Importing a container requires working capital and a licence; building the factory requires energy, a supply chain, trained labour and capital you cannot get back if you are wrong. Célestin Tawamba trained as a financier, spent a decade pricing exactly...