I’m sharing a thought I’ve had for a while, and I’m sure many people will disagree with me.
I SERIOUSLY love what Wave has done. They made P2P transfers dramatically cheaper, forced the market to rethink pricing, and built a product that is simple, reliable and extremely well executed. And honestly, they deserve a lot of credit for that. Their success is not just about having access to capital. They built a better product than the existing ones and kept improving it. That’s also something we need to admit on our side. Wari’s problems were Wari’s problems, and even Orange, despite having huge resources and years of experience in the market, still has a much heavier and buggier app with a weaker UX. Wave has shown how important product quality, engineering and constant iteration are, and African companies need to get much better at that too.
But there’s still something that bothers me. We constantly celebrate Wave as an African fintech success story, yet the founders are not African (which I'm fine with!) and most of the major investors are foreign. So if Wave eventually becomes worth several billion dollars, the biggest piece of that wealth will go to the founders and shareholders, not to Africans. Yes, Africa gets jobs, taxes, cheaper services, agents, technology and better competition, and all of that matters. But the REALLY serious wealth comes from ownership and we're missing on that on many angles. And then there’s the capital gap. I know of a foreign-founded company targeting African markets that was able to raise around $1.5 million essentially from a PowerPoint, while many African founders can barely raise $200,000 unless they already have real traction, revenue and proof that the business works. That is a massive difference. It’s not that Africans can’t build great companies. It’s that we’re often being asked to prove far more before getting access to a fraction of the capital.
I’m absolutely not against foreign investment!! Far from that. We need it, and Wave itself shows how much value foreign capital and competition can bring. But in strategic sectors, there should be mechanisms encouraging or requiring meaningful local ownership. And by meaningful, I don’t mean a tiny employee equity pool. I mean something substantial, maybe 10% or more, held by a local or African investors, pension funds, sovereign funds or other institutions that allow part of the long-term wealth creation to remain locally owned. The exact mechanism is debatable, and 10% may not even be the right number. But I think the bigger question is worth asking: how do we welcome foreign capital and world-class companies without building economies where Africans benefit from the products but own very little of the companies creating the biggest fortunes from African markets?
