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 that risk differential, and then took the illiquid side of it. Twenty-three years on, his group runs seven plants, employs 1,500 people, holds roughly 40% of Cameroon’s flour, pasta and biscuit market, and has bought out a departing French group. He also presides over the employers’ federation that negotiates with the state — which is where the questions begin.
| Training | Executive MBA, HEC Paris; postgraduate finance, Paris-Dauphine |
| First job | Ernst & Young, early 1990s |
| La Pasta founded | 2002 — output 25 tonnes |
| Output by 2009 | 250 tonnes |
| Panzani Cameroon acquired | 2005 |
| Generic drug investment | €12m, borrowed from three Cameroonian banks |
| GICAM presidency | 2017–2023 |
| Elected GECAM president | 9 April 2024, 550 votes of 560 |
| Somdia mills acquisition | c. XAF 50bn (reported; officially undisclosed) |
| Milling capacity | 1,120 t/day, plus SGMC’s 750 t/day |
| Market share, Cameroon / Congo | ~40% / ~32% |
| Group | 7 plants, 1,500 staff, XAF 120bn revenue (2022) |
Célestin Kamanou Tawamba was built for a finance career. Postgraduate work at Paris-Dauphine, an executive MBA at HEC, a start at Ernst & Young in the early 1990s, then chief financial officer of Hazim, a Lebanese timber group operating in Cameroon. The path from there runs to partnership or a corporate finance directorship. It is safe, well paid and socially legible.
In 2002 he left it to make pasta.
The oddity is worth stating plainly, because it defines everything after. Trading is liquid; manufacturing is not. A financier knows this better than anyone — it is his professional competence to know it. Tawamba priced the difference and chose the plant anyway.
La Pasta went from 25 tonnes to 250 in seven years. In 2005 he bought Panzani’s Cameroonian subsidiary, the incumbent brand. The pattern that governs the rest of the story is already visible: grow the industrial tool, then buy the established player rather than fight it symmetrically.
The pharmaceutical bet
The real break comes in 2008–09. Tawamba takes 75% of SIPP, the local leader in intravenous solutions, and moves into generic drug manufacturing through Cinpharm. The investment: €12m, borrowed from three Cameroonian banks. He becomes the first industrialist in Central Africa to manufacture generics.
Three things in that sentence deserve a financial reader’s attention.
The funding structure first. Twelve million euros raised from domestic banks, with no anchor foreign partner, for an industry the sub-region had never operated. Cameroon’s banking system is known for its aversion to industrial risk and its preference for short commercial credit. Clearing that bar requires either an exceptional file or exceptional persuasion — and, underneath both, seven years of verifiable food-processing results serving as collateral of reputation.
Then the barrier to entry. Assembling a pasta line is an engineering problem. Manufacturing a drug is a regulatory and trust problem: standards, approvals, cold chain, auditable quality control, and prescribers willing to believe the label. This is precisely the category of goods CEMAC economies import because they assume themselves incapable of producing it. Disproving that assumption has a demonstrative value beyond the company’s own accounts.
And the doctrine. His stated aim — that every African should be able to eat and be treated for under a dollar a day — maps exactly onto the group’s two divisions. Food and health. The rare case of rhetoric and capital allocation describing the same object.
Buying the Frenchman’s exit
In October 2024, Somdia, a subsidiary of France’s Castel group, announced the sale of its wheat milling operations in Cameroon and Congo to Cadyst following a competitive tender. The deal closed on 6 August 2025, after regulatory clearance. The price was never disclosed; local financial press has reported around XAF 50bn.
Three international bidders were reportedly in the running — Seaboard of the United States, Ameropa of Switzerland, Agrial of France. A Cameroonian group won.
Industrially the effect is large: SGMC’s 750 tonnes a day of milling capacity added to Cadyst’s own 1,120, a foothold in Congo, and vertical integration both upstream into animal feed and poultry and downstream into finished goods.
The symbolic reading matters too. French corporate withdrawal from sub-Saharan Africa is much discussed and rarely resolved in favour of local capital. Here the asset went to a domestic industrialist rather than a foreign fund. That is a useful precedent, and precedents are how bankers learn to price the next one.
Three questions the story cannot skip
Food sovereignty built on imported wheat. The group’s claim to contribute to continental food sovereignty holds for processing — value added, jobs and margin stay in Cameroon. It does not hold upstream. Wheat does not grow in Cameroon; it is one of the country’s largest import lines. A move in world wheat prices or freight passes straight through to the Cameroonian consumer. Processing an imported input locally is downstream import substitution. It is valuable, arguably essential, and it is not sovereignty. The two are routinely conflated in regional debate.
Concentration. Roughly 40% of the domestic market in flour, biscuits and pasta; sub-regional leadership; a domestic competitor with materially less milling capacity. Competition regulation in the CEMAC is young and thinly resourced. The question is not whether procedure was followed — the clearances were obtained — but what happens to price formation on bread, a first-necessity good, once one operator reaches that scale. It will be asked eventually.
The two hats. Tawamba runs the country’s leading agro-industrial group while presiding over the employers’ organisation that negotiates tax, regulation and input costs with the state. Nothing unlawful or unusual in that; employers’ federations are led by working employers everywhere. It still creates a position whose neutrality can be examined.
To which is added a dispute about longevity. Re-elected to lead GICAM in 2020, he was due to step down at the end of 2023 with no third term available under the statutes. The GICAM–ECAM merger, approved in late 2023, created a new body — GECAM — and reset the clock, permitting his candidacy in April 2024. He won 98% of the vote, unopposed. Critics, including a contender for the old succession, called it a circumvention of governance rules. Supporters call it the completion of a structural reform of Central African employer representation he had pushed for years. Both readings rest on the same facts.
Read from Douala or Libreville
Heavy industry can be financed locally — after you have a record. Twelve million euros from three domestic banks for a non-existent industry is the most encouraging data point in this trajectory. It came with an entry condition: seven years of audited food-processing results. The sequence is not optional.
Financial training is an instrument, not a career. Tawamba did not stop being a financier when he became a manufacturer. He applied the analyst’s lens to real assets — buy the installed tool rather than build it, integrate vertically to capture margin, fund in local debt.
Acquisition means being ready when someone else decides to leave. The Somdia mills were not an accident of luck. Multinationals are still recentring across several of the region’s value chains; those assets will change hands. The question is who will have the balance sheet and the file ready.
Scale brings obligation, not just recognition. An operator holding 40% of a staple market stops being an ordinary private actor and becomes a variable of public policy. It will be judged on those terms.
Tomorrow: Adebayo Ogunlesi, the Nigerian banker who bought Gatwick airport and sold his fund to BlackRock.