TheSundayTimesMagazineFebruary 26 2012

thelion’sroar

MovingpicturesWinning images from theWorld Press Photo awards

untaMedMelodiesWhyPJHarvey is

happy to be an outsider

Africa’s economic boom. By John Arlidge

73The Sunday Times Magazine 26.2.2012

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InnovatIon gameSaheed Adepoju,the developer ofthe Inye tabletcomputer, known asthe Afripad, in Lagos

theafricancentury

thelionkingsSaheed Adepoju is one of a new

band of entrepreneurs transforminga lost continent into an economic

powerhouse. John Arlidge reports onthe wind of change sweeping Africa

PhotograPhsby JezCoulson

The Sunday TimesMagazine 26.2.201244

theafricancentury

45The Sunday Times Magazine 26.2.2012

ear Sir, I am an entrepreneur.Just recently, I was mandatedto source a large-scaleinvestment. The total fundsrequired are more than$1,000,000. I work in Nigeria,

a country with an excellent investmentclimate. I assure you this is not a hoax ora scam.” And for once, it’s not.

The Nigerian businessman making thepitch is sitting in front of me, drinkingsickly-sweet fruit juice next to the pool at theEko Suites hotel in downtown Lagos. SaheedAdepoju is dressed in jeans and a navyPolo Ralph Lauren shirt. He sounds moreBritish than Nigerian, thanks to a spell atBournemouth University, followed by a(short) career in telemarketing and an (evenshorter) career working on the checkout atAsda. The 28-year-old needs £1m to develop aremarkable consumer product in a continentnot known for consumer products, or anyproducts for that matter. His is the first tabletcomputer designed specifically for Africa.

He flips the lid on the Inye, nicknamed the“Afripad”, which he has jointly developedwith a Chinese manufacturer and his smallteam of software pointy heads based inAbuja, the Nigerian capital. He hopes to sellthe computer and its apps — which featureeverything from Nigerian music to HIV-prevention advice in dozens of local dialects— to Nigerian consumers through anAfriApp Store. “I think like the African SteveJobs!” he laughs. He’s only half joking.

Adepoju is one of a new band of Africanentrepreneurs who are seizing theopportunities created by new technology andglobalisation to start businesses in the leastbusiness-friendly place on earth. This group,nicknamed the “lion kings”, is creatingprosperity and optimism on a scale not seensince the end of colonialism. The World Banksays Africa “could be on the brink of aneconomic takeoff, much like China was 30years ago”. Jeffrey Sachs, one of the leadingwestern experts on developing economies,says the continent could become “the surprisewinner of the coming decade”. From the Capeto Cairo, the wind of change is blowing.

Some of the new entrepreneurs are startingsmall — Africa is still the poorest place onthe planet, where most people eke out a livingon a few dollars a day and many battledisease and hunger. In the markets fromSenegal to Swaziland, new traders are settingup mini “supermarket” stalls sellingeverything from mobile-phone Sim cards andphone-credit vouchers to microscopic 30gsachets of Sunlight and Omo washing powderthat appeal to consumers with crampedhomes and cramped budgets. Sanni Irawo, 32,set up her stall in Ojuwoye market in Lagos,Africa’s biggest city. “Business used to besmall-small, but people have a bit more

money, so they are buying a bit more eachday,” she says.

Others are thinking very big. Two hoursin treacle-thick traffic and a world away fromOjuwoye market, on Victoria Island, Lagos’sbusiness district, is the office of Manz Denga.Except he’s hardly ever there. The 46-year-oldHarvard-educated banker, his assistant anddozens of permanently trilling mobile phonesare on the road, in the City of London, WallStreet, Nairobi and Kampala. “I’m setting upa £50m investment bank to fund newbusinesses across the continent,” he says, asif it were the most normal thing to wake upand do one African morning. “There’s a lotof money to be made in Africa.”

Bob Geldof, the Live Aid founder who inthe 1980s urged us to “give your f***ingmoney” to save Africa, agrees. He’sestablishing his own fund to makeinvestments of between $15m and $80min agri-businesses, financial servicesand telecommunications.

he scale and extent of Africa’seconomic boom is unprecedented —albeit from a barrel-scrapinglylow base. Over the last decade, six

of the world’s 10 fastest-growing countrieswere African. In eight of the last 10 years,Africa’s lion states have grown faster thanAsia’s tigers. The fastest-growing economyin the world last year was Ghana — at awhopping 13%, compared with barely 1% inmost European countries and just over 1% inAmerica. The International Monetary Fund(IMF) expects Africa to grow by nearly 6%this year, the same as last year, with averageincome in economic leaders such as Nigeriaexpected to triple by 2030.

If that isn’t impressive enough, howabout this for an economic indicator? Thanksto debt relief in Africa and the borrowingsplurge in Europe, many European countriesare now more indebted than Africannations. Oil-rich Angola is even lendingcash to its old colonial master, Portugal.

New African billionaires and multimillionairesare being minted at such a rate that a fewmonths ago Forbes magazine, the bible of theglobal business elite, published its inaugurallist of the “40 richest Africans”, which itcalled “a testament to the growing globalimportance of the continent”. At the top isAliko Dangote, a sugar, flour and cementmagnate based in Lagos. His net worth?$13.8 billion. Not too shabby by westernstandards. Off the chart for Africa.

What’s more, the wealth is tricklingdown. Africa now has the fastest-growingmiddle class in the world. Some 313m people,34% of the continent’s population, spend$2.20 a day, a 100% rise in less than 20years, according to the African DevelopmentBank (AfDB). By 2060, the number ofmiddle-class Africans will grow to 1.1billion(42% of the predicted population), theAfDB says. By then, those living below thepoverty line will be in the minority — 33%.As economies grow, so do business and

investment. Some African firms are now sobig they are snapping up global rivals. SouthAfrican Breweries has bought America’sMiller to become SAB Miller, the world’ssecond-largest brewer. The world’s leadingmultinationals, who 15 years ago couldscarcely find Africa on the map, are rushingto get skin in the game. America’s Walmart,the world’s biggest retailer, recently splurged$2.4billion acquiring a majority stake inSouth African grocery outfit Massmart.The US giant wants to use South Africa as aspringboard to expand across Africa, startingin Nigeria. Overall foreign investment inAfrica has grown more than sixfold in thelast decade. Investment by Chinese firmsalone has increased tenfold.

Britain, the old colonial power, isbenefiting from all the new economic activity.London-based Lonrho, which was establishedby the British tycoon “Tiny” Rowland, andwent on to become a pan-Africanconglomerate, is investing $300m in thecontinent. It is setting up a new regionalairline, Fly540, opening 50 mass-marketEasyHotels across Africa in a joint venturewith EasyGroup boss, Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, and beefing up its agriculture andfisheries business. Go to Sainsbury’s andAsda and you will find sustainably sourced,wild-caught, frozen African fish supplied bythe firm. Thanks to Lonrho, every langoustineserved in snazzy restaurants in Las Vegasnow comes from Mozambique.

Africans themselves don’t need numbersto confirm that their time is now. They canfeel it. Many who left their homeland insearch of a better life in the west are nowreturning. As the sun pierces the eye-stingingwood smoke that suffocates Lagos eachmorning, Jason Njoku, 31, arrives at hiscramped four-storey offices in the AnthonyVillage district. After graduating fromManchester University and ending up “flatbroke” in Deptford, southeast London, aftera series of business flops, he persuaded hisbest friend, a BP oil trader, to invest£100,000 in his new start-up in Lagos.

Iroko Partners, dubbed “Netflix forNollywood”, uses the internet to streamNigerian movies — the most popular on thecontinent, and the second-largest filmindustry by output after India’s Bollywood —to consumers around the world. “We have2.7m viewers in 178 countries, because theNigerian diaspora is huge,” Njoku says. Hegenerates cash from advertisers, includingCoca-Cola and L’Oréal, who buy space on thesite. He started with just one employee

Pile it highFar left: Sanni Irawosells small sachets ofOmo soap powder onhermarket stall inLagos, and otherproducts that appealto customers withtight budgets.Left: Walmart, theworld’s biggestretailer, is investingbillions in Africa’sfast-growingsupermarket sector

thewealth is tricklingdown.africanowhasthe fastest-growing

middleclass in theworld

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allpicTures:jezcoulson/insighT-visualforThesunDayTimesmagazine

Nigeria that has discouraged investment inrefining the country’s oil and encouragedindustrial-scale corruption — are graduallybeing dismantled, in spite of public opposition.

ooking out from his office overthe lagoon that separates Lagos’sVictoria Island from the chaosof the mainland, Niyi Yusuf,

managing director of the global managementconsultants Accenture in Nigeria, says thatif Africa were a company, like the ones headvises, it would have gone from a business-oriented rating of one out of 10 in 1990 to fiveout of 10 today. “By 2030, it will be nudgingeight out of 10,” he grins.

Africa’s timing is good, too. As debt-laidenwestern economies face their worst crisis sincethe 1930s, investors are looking to emergingmarkets. George Soros, one of the world’ssavviest investors, describes Africa as “one ofthe few bright spots on the gloomy globaleconomic horizon”. McKinsey says the rate ofreturn on foreign investment in Africa ishigher than any other developing region. Smallwonder private-equity firms raised $1.5billionfor projects on the continent last year.

While many macro factors are creating theconditions for growth, it is micro factors thatare generating prosperity on the ground, andthere is one that is bigger than any other:technology. Until as recently as 2005, Africareally was the lost continent, almost totallycut off. In most countries there were a handfulof ancient landline telephones. Nigeria hadonly 400,000 fixed lines in 2000, for apopulation of 160m. As recently as 2007, asingle fibre-optic cable only partly connectedsub-Saharan Africa to the world. The internetwas at dial-up speeds, if it existed at all.

Today, thanks to vast new sub-sea fibre-optic cables that run down the east and westcoasts of Africa, and millions of mobile phonemasts that are sprouting like modern baobabtrees, the continent is plugged into the worldand Africans are talking like never before.Those 400,000 landlines in Nigeria havenow become more than 60m mobile phonesubscribers and that number is rising by 1ma year. The continent is the world’s fastest-growing mobile-phone market, expanding by20% for each of the past five years, accordingto the industry consortium Groupe SpécialeMobile Association. Africans joke that thecontinent has more mobile phones thanworking toilets. Internet speeds have risen100-fold in the past few years, whileconnection costs have fallen 40-fold. Internetusage grew by 2,527% between 2000

to buy private jets and fancy homes on theCôte d’Azur than serving their people, are adying breed. A hit television advertisementin South Africa features a glum Zimbabweanpresident, Robert Mugabe, sitting all alone ata dictator’s dinner party. He reminisces about“the good old days” when he, the formerLibyan leader, Muammar Gadaffi, andUgandan tyrant Idi Amin were theunchallenged “big men” of Africa.

Outside Nigeria, many old tribal andracial divides at the top are breaking down.Kenya has a new much-lauded constitution,designed to put an end to murderous tribalconflicts. In Zambia, the vice president, GuyScott, is white: unthinkable a generation ago.

Across the continent, governments arebecoming more business-friendly, cuttingtariffs, dismantling barriers to trade andprivatising inefficient state-run firms. “If youwant to make money, you no longer have tohave your eye on a senior civil-service post.The private sector is more attractive,” saysMichael Holman, former Africa editor of theFinancial Times and leading Africa analyst.Subsidies that keep prices of goods low anddistort local economies — such as the huge andunaffordable $8billion-a-year fuel subsidy in

The Sunday TimesMagazine 26.2.201246 47The Sunday Times Magazine 26.2.2012

one year ago. There are now almost 100.Outside, on the driveway, there’s a brand newLand Rover and a whizzy VW. Njoku has notonly got the money and the cars; he’s got thegirl. By his side is the 26-year-old Nollywoodstar Mary Remmy. The media darlings aregetting married this summer. Deptford is adistant memory.

hy is Africa suddenly shaking offdecades of decline? Traditionalassets of mining and agriculture aremore valuable and more productive.

Africa has about half of the world’s golddeposits, 10% of its oil reserves, and a thirdof its diamonds, copper, platinum and “rareearth” minerals used in smartphones, tabletcomputers and flat-screen TVs. Prices for thesecommodities are strong. From 2000 to 2008around a quarter of Africa’s growth came fromhigher revenues from natural resources.Africa’s three largest oil producers, Algeria,Angola and Nigeria, earned more than$1 trillion from oil exports in the noughties,compared with $300billion in the 1990s.

Thanks to oil, Luanda, the capital ofAngola, has become the biggest and mostexpensive boom town in Africa. Flights to andfrom the city are the most profitable in theworld, per well-upholstered bum on well-upholstered seat, overtaking London to NewYork. Small wonder Angolans call theircountry “the new Dubai”. Valuable reservesof oil and gas are being discovered all thetime as on- and off-shore technology anddrilling improve. British Gas is developinga gas field off the coast of Tanzania thatgeologists think might be as large as theassets off the coast of Qatar that havecatapulted that nation from a dusty desertoutpost to the richest country on earth, withan income per head of $100,000.

The London-based firm Tullow is turningGhana into a significant oil producer.Reserves, estimated to be worth $750m a yearto the Ghanaian exchequer, were foundoffshore in 2007. Tullow’s Irish boss, AidanHeavey, says his firm generated recordrevenues of $2.3 billion last year.

Agriculture is on a tear. Rising food prices— up 50% in the last two years — mayfrustrate consumers all over the world andmake life much harder for the urban poor inAfrica, but they are encouraging farmers tocommercialise. Ethiopia, once a basket casethat could not feed its own people let aloneexport agricultural goods, is becomingsomething of a bread basket. It sold $1billionworth of coffee, sesame, wheat, maize, peas

and beans last year. Pepsico is investing inchickpea cultivation there, to use to makesmoothies for US consumers. “There’s a hugechange that is benefiting millions of people,”says Eleni Gabre-Madhin, who runsEthiopia’s Commodity Exchange, where thebig agricultural sales are made.

Africa has 60% of the world’s uncultivatedarable land. The McKinsey Global Institutepredicts agricultural output will rise from$280billion today to almost $900billionby 2030. In Nigeria, Raj Hande, who runsthe nation’s second-largest agricultureconglomerate, African Agro, says the continentis ripe for a green revolution, similar to that heexperienced in his native India. “Africa feelslike India 20 years ago,” he says.

While new global economic factors buoyAfrica, some of the old problems that haveheld it back are easing. Birth rates are

beginning to decline and the ratio of working-age people to dependants is rising. The numberof deaths from disease, notably malaria andHIV, which used to cost the continent tens ofbillions of dollars a year, is falling.

Although what passes for transport inmuch of the continent is still diabolical,infrastructure is slowly improving, largelythanks to investment from China. Kenya,Ghana, Nigeria and Mozambique, inparticular, are building thousands of miles ofnew roads and railways, oil and gas pipelinesand ports. Overall, private infrastructureinvestment has tripled since 2000.

There’s — slightly — better governance.Nigeria is battling powerful al-Qaeda-backedterrorists in the north of the country whohave killed hundreds in recent months but,as a whole, Africa is more peaceful and betterrun that at any time since the end of

colonialism. The number of major Africanconflicts has declined from 12 in the mid-1990s to just four today. The number ofdemocracies in sub-Saharan Africa has leaptfrom only three in 1989 to 23 in 2008. Since1991, African governments have been oustedat the ballot box 30 times. Between the 1960sand 1991 that only happened once. Corruptdespots, more interested in expropriating landand natural resources and using the proceeds

theafricancentury

GeorGeSoroSdeScribeSAfricAAS‘oneofthefewbriGhtSpotSontheGloomyGlobAleconomichorizon’

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SourceS: The economiST, imf

AngolA 11.1china 10.5myanmar 10.3nigeriA 8.9ethiopiA 8.4

KazaKhSTan 8.2chAd 7.9MozAMbique 7.9cambodia 7.7rwAndA 7.6

10 faSTeST-growing economieS2001-2010annuaL average gdp growTh (%)

china 9.5india 8.2ethiopiA 8.1MozAMbique7.7tAnzAniA 7.2

vieTnam 7.2congo 7.0ghAnA 7.0zAMbiA 6.9nigeriA 6.8

SourceS: The economiST, imf

2011-2015forecaST annuaL gdp growTh (%)

In glorIousTechnIcolorIroko Partners streamsNollywoodmovies to2.7m viewers worldwide.Below: promo girls sellthe fizzy drink Fayrouzin a Lagosmall

49The Sunday Times Magazine 26.2.2012

and 2011, compared with a worldaverage of 480%.

What Joe Mucheru, a seniormanager at Google in Nairobi,hails as the “lightning pace”adoption of new technology, iscreating a mini economic boomin itself. An entire district ofthe Kenyan capital has somany high-tech firms, includingGoogle itself, that it is nicknamedSilicon Savannah.

One mobile-phone company, Bharti Airtel,recently recorded annual African revenuesof $12billion. The South African mobileprovider MTN, which operates in 23 Africancountries, makes about $2m an hour inNigeria alone. Tim Parsonson, 43, a Britonwhose firm, Teraco, builds data centres forthe likes of Google across Africa, says:“You cannot overstate the importance ofnew technology. My business and countlessothers simply could not have existed evenfive years ago.”

ut the real effects of the tech boom arefelt beyond the high-tech companiesthemselves. Getting Africa onlineand on the phone has created the one

thing that the continent hassorely lacked: a consumersociety. Today, newlywealthy Africans knowabout new products, assimple as those 30g sachetsof washing powder thatSanni Irawo sells inOjuwoye market, to ones ascomplex and innovative as Saheed Adepoju’stablet computer. They can find out where toget them and how much they cost.

They can even pay for them. In Kenya,Britain’s Vodafone and its local affiliate,Safaricom, have pioneered mobile moneycontrolled via mobile phone handsets. TheM-Pesa service (M for mobile, pesa meansmoney in Swahili) allows consumers to payfor goods by transferring credits from onehandset to another, safely, in seconds. Around17m Kenyans, 41% of the population, use theirmobiles as an electronic wallet to deposit ortransfer money. The $25m they transfer viaM-Pesa is equivalent to 39% of Kenya’s GDP.By contrast, there are only 8m traditional“bricks and mortar” bank account holders inthe country. Across the continent, farmers andfishermen, who previously had scantknowledge of how to set prices and respondto market fluctuations, use mobiles to set

prices daily, using real-time informationabout harvests, catches and the weather.

McKinsey predicts African consumerspending will rise from $860billion(£550billion) in 2008 to $1.4trillion(£900billion) in 2020. The huge growth in airtravel reflects — and drives — the boom. TheInternational Civil Aviation Organizationexpects Africans to fly 8.3% more miles thisyear, making the continent one of the fastest-growing markets for air travel, behind Asiaand the Middle East. That’s why Lonrho setup Fly540, which flies from bases in Kenya,

Ghana and Angola. When the firm’s boss,Geoffrey White, established 540’s Accra hub,the Ghanaian authorities told him his werethe first new aircraft to be registered in Ghanasince the 1950s. “I asked them who were thelast guys? The Wright Brothers!” he jokes.

Global operators are adding more andmore routes into Africa to meet the booming

demand. Virgin Atlantic nowflies from London to Accra, aswell as Nairobi, Johannesburg,Cape Town and Lagos.“African flights are so full,they are among our mostprofitable,” says Virgin bossRichard Branson, who has aprivate game reserve in SouthAfrica and is backing newschemes to encourage thegrowth of small companies

across the continent. Emirates flies from itsDubai hub to almost every major capital cityon the continent, making Dubai Internationalthe unofficial airport for Africa.

To meet the needs of the newly mobileAfricans, new hotels are rising out of theruins of shacks: 10 new five-star hotels arebeing built in Lagos alone, and they can’tcome soon enough. “We’re full almost everynight of the week,” says John Grieg, aNorwegian who was lured out of retirementto run the new Radisson Blu hotel, where thecar park is full of Porsches, Mercedes andeven a brand new £400,000 Rolls-RoycePhantom convertible.

New homes are sprouting from the scrubtoo. Prices for apartments in fashionable

districts of Lagos wouldnow match those ofwestern cities.

One man who knowsbetter than most the powerof the African consumer,and how muchconsumerism has changedAfrica and will change it

further, is Thabo Mabe. He grew up inapartheid South Africa, where he worked forthe Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giantUnilever, makers of Lux soap, Lipton tea andFlora margarine. “When I was 26 I made it tooperations manager for liquid detergents at afactory in Boksburg and that was about as faras I ever thought I would get,” he recalls.Today, 22 years later, he climbs into hisbrand-new silver Toyota Land Cruiser andvisits his factories that make most of the soapand toothpaste for west Africa. “They usedto call Africa the hopeless continent. Now it’sthe place to be,” he chuckles.

It’s true. But it’s way too soon to bepopping the corks on the Veuve Clicquotchampagne bottles that Hemesh Shenoy sellsin Lagos’s new Spar supermarket he movedfrom India to open 18 months ago. While thegrowth figures are unprecedented, otherfigures remind us that Africa has a long,

Nigerian property developers are cashing in onrecord prices (above). Unilever’s ThaboMabe(below) describes Africa as ‘the place to be’

‘africanflightsaresofull,theyareamongourmostprofitable,’saysrichardbranson

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51The Sunday Times Magazine 26.2.2012

long way to go before it can claimto be much more than the mostemerging of markets. In spite of itsexplosive growth, Africa stillprovides only a tiny fraction ofworld output: 2.7%. Asia accountsfor 10 times that figure. The GDPof the entire continent —everything made there — is only$1.7 trillion, roughly equal to thatof Russia. In spite of progress inagriculture, Africa remains a netfood importer.

frica is still the poorest continenton earth. Most of its one billionpeople live on less than $2 a dayand average life expectancy in some

countries is as low as 46. Those figures takehuman form in Lagos, in the tens ofthousands of people who live on VictoriaIsland beach, next to where old Africa handDavid Frame, 59, is sinking billions into EkoAtlantic City, the biggest land reclamationproject in the world, which will create 9msquare metres of land to house all thenew business that are springing up in thecity. With only ahandful of Portaloos,for many beach-dwellersthe ocean is theirbathroom. Youcan tell by the smell.

Education may bebetter by localstandards but is woefulby international standards. No Africanuniversity makes it on to the list of theworld’s top 100. Drought and famine persistin many parts of the Horn of Africa. Between50,000 and 100,000 people, more than halfof them children under five, died of hunger inSomalia, Ethiopia and Kenya last year.

Deforestation and desertification ratesare rising, sparking conflicts over access toland and water. Some fast-growing nations,such as Equatorial Guinea, are kleptocracies,while the UN says Congo is the most “failed”state in the world. South Africa, which usedto be a model for the continent, is taintedwith corruption and there’s talk among theranks of the ruling ANC party ofnationalising land and mines, a longdiscredited policy.

In spite of all the advances in newtechnology, only 12% of Africans are regularinternet users, compared with a worldaverage of 30%. Corruption, from streetofficials to the boardroom, remains “very, very

bad across Africa,” says Kehinde Lawanson,executive director of First Bank of Nigeria.

All the new infrastructure has merelymade things difficult, instead of near-impossible. “Logistics are still a f***ingnightmare,” frowns Teraco’s Parsonson,sipping a weak, gritty espresso in the lobbyof the Southern Sun in Lagos on one of thosedays when the air conditioning is on the fritzand it’s so hot your shins feel like they aresweating. It’s not just the clogged roads, glacial

bureaucracy and over-crowded ports andairports. Basic services, such as powersupplies, are woefully inadequate, as anyonewho has flown over the continent at night canattest. Only 25% of Africans have access toelectricity. McKinsey estimates Africa needsto spend an extra $46billion a year oninfrastructure to bring it up to scratch.

And, of course, there’s the issue of security.All Nigeria’s promise could be undone ifthe radical Islamist group, Boko Haram(the name means “western education issacrilege”), carries on its murderous attackson Christian targets in the north of thecountry, scaring off new investors. Lastmonth, the group killed more than 200people in coordinated bomb attacks andshootings in the northern city of Kano.

African business has a long way to gobefore it can claim its place at the top table.A mere 20 African companies have revenuesof at least $3billion. Remarkably, for such avast, storied continent, Africa has only one

global mass-marketconsumer brand — Nando’s,the South African chickenchain. In the last 15 years,turbo-charged emergingeconomies, notably in Chinaand the Gulf, have createdglobal brands from scratch.Airlines, such as Emirates,Qatar Airways and Etihad;the Jumeirah hotel group;the mobile phone networkEtisalat and car makers such

as Shanghai Automotive, Chery and Geely arenow world players.

Africa’s new entrepreneurs know all aboutthe pitfalls. But they say the daily strugglesare a small price to pay to try to right thewrongs of the past. For the lion kingsbuilding Africa’s new lion states, the mostexciting thing about Africa’s boom is not thechance to make serious money, but ratherthe opportunity for Africans to takeresponsibility for their own continent — tobegin to build it anew.

Banker Manz Denga likes to end a day oftelephone calls to Wall Street and the City of

London by sippingginger ale on the terraceof the Oriental Hotel,built by a Chinesecompany to house thethousands of Chineseexecutives in Lagos.High above the dust anddin of west Africa’s most

populous city, where vultures soar looking tofeast on roadkill that sometimes includeshapless pedestrians, he can sense the moneyflows, the risk analysis, the data streams andfeel the optimism. History is rising.

“We Africans only have ourselves to blamefor the mess we got ourselves into. Wescrewed it up,” he says, listing the sins of thepost-colonial governments. “Lousy collectivistpolicies. Bad governance. Corruption.Kleptocracy. Genocide. Wars that killed morethrough famine and hunger than throughactual conflict.” He sips his ginger ale — witha little brandy now, because, heck, it’s gone9pm — and adds: “But everything’s differentnow. We’re fed up with being the victims ofthe world. We have the chance to put it right.This is our moment. The African century.” ■

Life is still tough formany, but thanks to Africa’sfarming boom there ismore food in themarkets

‘WE’REFEDUPWITHBEINGTHEVICTIMSOFTHEWORLD.WEHAVETHECHANCETOPUTITRIGHT.THIS ISOURMOMENT’

THEAFRICANCENTURY

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JohnArlidge recounts hisexperiences inAfrica at:thesundaytimes.co.uk/africaneconomy