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...

A Franco-Congolese actress trained in Paris, directed by France’s leading stage and screen names, has worked for a Central African production exactly once — on a self-financed film whose technical shortcomings its own director attributes to the absence of funding. The numbers. Two of eleven Central African states operate a film support fund. Regional seed...

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...