Sam Jonah in The Economist

The sunny continent
Aug 21st 2007

From Economist.com
Africa’s optimistic businessmen

...Mr Jonah is a larger-than-life hail-fellow-well-met Ghanaian, who made his first fortune by selling Ashanti Goldfields, a Ghanaian mining company, to South Africa’s mighty AngloGold. (He jokes good-naturedly about The Economist’s somewhat sceptical coverage of his business dealings several years ago.) He is now doing well in private equity. As evidence of his bullishness, Mr Jonah is trying to raise $250m to build long-distance roads across Africa—the lack which is one of the most obvious failures in the continent’s infrastructure. His goal is to find 50 successful African business people, each willing to invest $5m in the fund, and then to use multilateral funds to leverage the money into the billions. “People in Africa, if they come together, can make a big difference,” says Mr Jonah. “What I want to do is put my money where my mouth is.”

There is increasingly a pro-African mood in the global business community nowadays, says Mr Jonah. “Access to finance is much better; now when I go to New York seeking a lot of money, I get a warm welcome.” Admittedly, much of this warmth is focused on the mining and natural-resource sectors that are Mr Jonah’s base—although, like Mr Ibrahim, he says enthusiasm is starting to spread to entrepreneurial parts of the economy. Strikingly, Alan Patricof, a veteran American venture capitalist, has reportedly been raising a venture-capital fund for Africa, and is not alone in seeing new opportunity in small and medium enterprises there.

One reason Mr Jonah is optimistic is that he regards Africa’s post-colonial difficulties as not particularly surprising or problematic. “People fail to appreciate the huge challenges African countries faced at independence,” he says. “When you think where we have come from, there has been tremendous progress.”

Moreover, much of the “help” Africa has had from outside has been of the wrong sort. By way of illustration, Mr Jonah points to three once impoverished European countries—Spain, Portugal and Greece—that might have stayed poor had they not been “rescued by their sugar daddy, the European Union.” The point, he says, is that richer European countries invested in these poor countries, “not as charity, but because they saw a win-win opportunity.” The same is now true of Africa, he argues. With a handful of headline-grabbing exceptions, “everyone in Africa is now getting their act together, with free markets and democracy.

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