By the reticent standards of Africa’s corporate titans, the 51-year-old is comfortable in the limelight. IN SOME WAYS Mo Dewji is an anomaly. The charismatic tycoon is currently the only billionaire in east Africa, and the youngest on the continent. Mr Dewji readily gives interviews, including recently to The Economist. He posts frequently to over 2m followers on X.
In 2022 McKinsey counted 345 companies with revenues over $1bn. (There are only 26 more today.) According to the latest Africa Wealth Report, an annual overview of the continent’s private wealth, 25 of Africa’s 28 billionaires today hail from four of its five biggest economies.
“It is very hard to build a billion-dollar business if you are not in Nigeria, South Africa or Egypt,” says Mr Leke. (The fourth is Morocco.) The attention paid to Mr Dangote reflects the fact that big industrial firms like his are still a rarity in Africa.
Mr Dangote’s rise was aided by ties to Nigeria’s former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, whose government introduced policies that favoured his cement, sugar and rice businesses over foreign competitors.
“Africans came very late to the capital accumulation party,” notes John Ngumi, a Kenyan investment banker. “I can’t think of any major industrialist that doesn’t have access to government and policy,” says Freda Yawson of the Africa Centre for Economic Transformation, a think-tank in Ghana. Foreign capital, he says, is seen as the politically safer bet.
Even fewer such firms are owned by black Africans. In east Africa many of the biggest firms are owned by families of Asian origin, like Mr Dewji’s in Tanzania. In west Africa some of the wealthiest industrialists have Lebanese roots, among them the Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury . Trading networks built by Asian and Lebanese families under colonial rule gave them a headstart. In Tanzania, which was run by socialists until the 1980s, black Africans are only now catching up. Success often hinges on cosy relationships with officials. Mr Rabiu is known to be close to the current president, Bola Tinubu. Mr Dewji used to be an MP for Tanzania’s ruling party. Politics remains the biggest challenge. In a new book on Rwanda’s economic development, Pritish Behuria of the University of Manchester argues that the government’s distrust of homegrown capitalists helps explain why the country has produced so few big firms of its own.
