AFRICAPITALISM (by Tony Elumelu C.F.A)

Energy and Talent have been spotted in a number of young African entrepreneurs, but what is talent without opportunity? What is ambition without a platform? An individual can be talented and driven but there will be a limit on what you can do on your own and it’s not often that a person does things by themselves. In other words, support is needed to operate with talent, drive, and energy. Capital is needed, it can be debt capital, borrowed capital or earned capital, etc.
What can we all do or individually do for those that we truly say the future of our continent belongs to? Beyond capital, the right environment is required, positive mentoring and helping a future entrepreneur with the right connections (We live in a world where meeting people or connecting is so critical), luck can also be stated as what is needed.
It is the combination of all these (Capital, development, enabling environment, and being at the right place at the right time) that gave rise to the philosophy of Africapitalism. In this 21^st Century, who but us would develop our continent? The entitlement mentality has been considered an issue for Nigerians, people colonized us, so they must also develop us, but other colonized countries have gone far and beyond in developing themselves (i.e., Singapore’s economy is constantly growing).
      Africapitalism is a call for all of us to play our own part in developing our continent in a manner that is really sustainable, but realizing that the development of our continent depends on us, the government (Create the right environment), the private sector (must find and take advantage of the available opportunities) and the public sector. Embrace investment and entrepreneurship as a calculative way to move Africa out of poverty. To help Africa create jobs, to create abundance, and prosperity. Each and everyone have a role to play in the development of Africa.

How can we achieve significant growth in Africa?
One of the biggest problems in our continent is that we don’t prioritize the young ones, we don’t think about their future. Today’s young ones become tomorrow’s future. In our continent, people often think they will be here forever, but it’s not how nature and life work. Thinking about the future of the potential entrepreneurs or managers by creating the right environment (i.e., Access to power-electricity is quite poor in Nigeria; 60% of our people don’t have access to light. Mass Transportation, having a better transport system helps the environment. Good security installed or established as well is beneficial to the environment). These are factors that need to be taken into consideration. Government should not be the only people we should reach out to; the private sectors also have roles to play as well. Our young ones (Students, MBAs, potential entrepreneurs) need to be vocal and hold our leaders accountable. Keeping quiet is one of the reasons for underdevelopment in Africa, we need to work hard to achieve a lot of improvements for our continent (Africa).