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...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 2 Ursula Burns took over a company whose product was being erased by the internet, and spent $6.4bn — the largest acquisition in Xerox’s history — buying a different business to become. Six years later the group was split back in two under pressure from an activist holding roughly 15% of...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 1 Strive Masiyiwa spent five years and most of his money in court, arguing that Zimbabwe’s telephone monopoly was an assault on free speech. He won, switched on his network, and then left the country for twenty-six years. The infrastructure group he built from exile is now being tested by the...

The money hasn’t left Africa. It has simply become much harder to convince. Institutional investors are no longer asking whether the continent holds promise; they want to know how that promise is being captured, measured and converted into liquidity. Two fund managers — Anza, based in Johannesburg, and Farmties Capital — agreed to describe what...

A payments stack that clears transactions in Lagos will not necessarily clear them in Nairobi. What performs in Accra can stall in Kampala. That fragmentation is the wall most companies hit when they try to scale across the continent — and it is precisely the market Tola Mobile has chosen to occupy. The payments infrastructure...

United Bank for Africa Plc has announced that Mr. Tony O. Elumelu, CFR, Group Chairman of UBA, will retire from the Board of Directors of UBA on 21 August 2026, upon the completion of the 12-year tenure limit prescribed for Non-Executive Directors of Banks by the Central Bank of Nigeria. At its meeting held on...

When Cannes Lions welcomes a speaker, it is never simply about celebrating a career. It is about creating a dialogue on influence, leadership, and the power to shape culture. In 2026, the presence of Oprah Winfrey at the world’s largest festival of creativity is set to be one of the most anticipated highlights of the...