The Constraint Is Never the One in the Headline

Majoring on the minor

In May, China removed tariffs on goods from 53 African countries, and for about two weeks my feed was a standing ovation. A cornerstone for African development. A new era of trade. The first major economy to do it.

Here is the number that was available to anyone who went looking: before this policy, roughly 70% of African exports to China already entered duty-free. Another 22% faced tariffs under 5%. So we effectively celebrated the removal of a barrier that, for nine out of ten goods, did not exist.

And while we were celebrating, the 2025 trade data landed: Africa’s deficit with China widened by around 64% to a record $102 billion. The gap everyone assumed the policy would close was accelerating in the opposite direction, sadly.

I have stopped being surprised by this type of data because I see it every week, just usually on a Cap Table instead of a customs schedule.

I said this in a recent conversation with 500 Global ahead of VC Unlocked at Stanford: African startups do not fail in isolation. They fail inside systems that are drifting. We back payments companies without mapping what happens when the gateway bank freezes settlement. We back logistics companies without asking which port chokepoint kills the model. We back healthtech without interrogating the public infrastructure it quietly leans on.

The continent is not short of great products. It is short of capital that understands the systems those products live inside.

The tariff story is the same failure, scaled up to a continent. Everyone watched the variable that moved. Almost nobody asked what had to remain true in the system for that variable to matter. For zero tariffs to rebalance anything, African exporters need processing capacity, the ability to clear China’s sanitary and regulatory standards, and the muscle to compete inside an unfamiliar market. None of that changed on 1 May. All of it was the actual constraint the whole time.

Which means the celebration was aimed at the wrong thing. Not because the policy is bad but because access without the capacity to use is not leverage. It is just a press release.

This is why my most recent podcast conversation with Zahra Baitie-Boateng stayed with me. Zahra has spent her entire career inside the Africa-China relationship. She founded the first Africa Week ever held in Beijing, with no mandate and nobody’s permission, then spent seven years building Africa’s Business Heroes into a pan-African institution. When I asked her the question everyone dances around - is this relationship becoming more balanced, or is people-to-people exchange a soft layer over a structural imbalance nobody wants to name?, she did not reach for diplomacy.

She reached for precision. China is not one actor: the government, state-owned enterprises, private companies, and entrepreneurs are running different agendas, and if you cannot tell them apart you cannot negotiate with any of them. Africa is not one market either. And the deficit does not close in Beijing, it closes when there is enough value-adding capacity on our side of the table to convert access into exports that are not raw materials.

That is the discipline I keep arguing investors need. She has been applying it to geopolitics for fifteen years.

So here is the question I left the conversation with, and the one I will leave you with: we are very good at demanding better terms. Who is doing the unglamorous work of building the capacity to use the terms we already have?

The full conversation goes deeper than I can here, including a line about strategy that I have not stopped thinking about since we stopped recording. Listen to the full conversation here - https://pod.link/the-grinders-table/episode/OTAzODFiMmEtZWVhYy00Mzk2LTk4YjgtZTZhOGVkMTI5MmVk