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. 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...