Everyone Wants Africa. The Question Is Whether Africa Is Building For Itself.
The world's two largest economies are fighting over the continent. A Nairobi investor quietly asked the harder question.
The US and China are no longer debating Africa’s potential. They are competing for it.
China just announced zero-tariff access to 53 African countries, effective May 2026. The US is scrambling to keep AGOA alive under a president who has shown no particular loyalty to multilateral trade arrangements. Gulf sovereign wealth funds are circling. Critical minerals, cobalt, lithium, copper, have become the new oil, and Africa is sitting on the largest reserves of several of them.
By every external signal, 2026 is the year the world finally takes Africa seriously.
But here is the uncomfortable question nobody in those trade negotiations is asking:
When the dust settles on this geopolitical scramble, who inside Africa is actually positioned to capture the value?
This is not a rhetorical question. It has an answer, and the answer is complicated.
The Question Nobody in the Trade Negotiations Is Asking
I spent 35 minutes last week talking to Florent “Flo” Nduwayezu, a Nairobi-based investor who has been inside the East African ecosystem long enough to have formed strong, data-backed opinions. What struck me most was not his contrarianism, it was the specific nature of his concerns.
His argument about talent is worth sitting with. Kenya deployed close to $900M in venture capital last year. To generate reasonable returns on that capital, you need significant exits. To produce those exits, you need companies of real scale. Companies of real scale, particularly the lean, tech-enabled kind that VC models are built around, require deep engineering capability concentrated in one place. Flo’s question: does that pool of 500 world-class engineers actually exist in Kenya right now, at the quality and concentration the model demands?
I pushed back. My view is that the talent exists — the gap is seniority, not raw ability, and the diaspora represents an enormous, untapped reserve. But his underlying point stands: the Silicon Valley VC model was built on a specific infrastructure of talent density that most African markets have not yet fully developed. Importing the model without the infrastructure is a bet, not a strategy.
The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
Then there is the capital misallocation problem and this is the one that does not get enough attention in polite ecosystem conversation.
Around KES 6 trillion of Kenyan bank deposits are sitting in government bonds. Banks are earning attractive, risk-free returns while 44 million SMEs across the continent struggle to access basic debt financing. This is not a fintech problem. It is not an alternative financing instrument problem. It is a structural incentive problem and solving it requires policy, not product.
Which brings me to the point I want to make clearly, and will stand behind if you challenge me with data:
Africa is the only continent in history being asked to leapfrog its industrial phase at the exact moment the world’s two largest economies are flooding it with cheap manufactured goods and competing for its raw resources.
China redirecting subsidised exports to the Global South following US tariffs is not generosity. It is market strategy. And an Africa that skips manufacturing — jumping straight from agriculture to services to AI — is an Africa that builds its future on foundations it does not own and data it does not control.
This is precisely what makes Flo’s SaaS argument more than a product debate. His point, that African SMEs never truly adopted SaaS and that AI agents will finish what structural barriers started, connects to a larger question about who owns the interface layer of Africa’s digital economy. If it is OpenAI and Anthropic building the tools, and Western or Chinese platforms owning the distribution, then Africa’s role is again as a market, not a builder.
Bullish on the Opportunity. Honest About the Gaps.
The antidote is not pessimism. Flo is not pessimistic. He is still writing cheques. I am still deploying capital across the continent. The antidote is clarity about what needs to be built before the external interest becomes extraction.
Distribution. Talent concentration. Regulatory environments that attract and retain builders. Capital that actually circulates through the real economy.
The world is bullish on Africa in 2026. The more important question is whether Africa is building on its own terms or just becoming the most attractive prize in a room full of other people’s interests.
I got into all of this with Flo on The Grinders Table this week - SaaS, AI agents, the talent math, impact investing distortions, and why he thinks he might eventually have to go into politics. If you want the unfiltered version, the full episode is live now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
If this landed with you, share it with one person who is thinking seriously about where Africa is headed and forward this newsletter to them. The conversation needs more honest voices in it.
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