Cameroonian billionaire Paul Fokam has not set foot in the country where his bank dominates

Cameroonian law in 1986 required any new bank to have the state holding at least 35% of its capital. Paul Fokam wanted a bank with no public money in it at all.

He got a meeting with President Paul Biya that September, and he got the exemption.

The bank he founded on the back of it is now the largest in Cameroon, and its founder has not set foot in the country for years.

Lending to people banks would not touch

What Fokam built the business on was the savings of people the banking system ignored.

Cameroonian banks in the 1980s lent to oil companies, timber concessions and the state. Fokam's argument was that the money sitting in villages and informal markets was real money, and that the traders, farmers and artisans holding it were creditworthy if you understood how they operated.

He was a doctor of management sciences rather than a career banker, which is part of why he saw it differently.

The bank opened as Caisse Commune d'Épargne et d'Investissement in 1987 and later became Afriland First Bank.

The cooperatives

The part of it Fokam has been proudest of is not the bank.

MC², standing for Mutuelles Communautaires de Croissance, are self-managed microfinance cooperatives that Afriland partners rather than owns. Villages run them themselves, mobilising local savings and lending into agriculture, trade and craft work, including in the informal sector, with the bank providing the technical framework and access to the wider financial system.

It became the largest microfinance network in Cameroon.

He also founded a private university in Yaoundé, the PKFokam Institute of Excellence, where he has taught management himself, and he has written several books. He built businesses in insurance, leasing and travel alongside the bank.

Seven countries and a Swiss holding

Afriland First Group now operates across seven countries, running from Uganda to Benin and taking in South Sudan, and its Ivorian subsidiary grew its balance sheet 28.5% last year.

The holding company sits in Switzerland.

That has drawn repeated criticism from the Bank of Central African States, the regional central bank, which has objected to a Cameroonian banking group being controlled from outside its jurisdiction. Fokam has kept it there regardless.

He is from Baham in the Bamiléké highlands of western Cameroon, and he is known for keeping his distance even from his own. He stays clear of the groupe social du 30, the informal gathering of Bamiléké business and administrative figures that recruits by co-optation in the manner of an English club, and Cameroonian coverage describes him as cultivating solitude while having built a network across politics and business without equal in forty years.

Losing Equatorial Guinea

The most profitable thing he owned outside Cameroon is gone.

CCEI Bank Guinée Équatoriale held about 70% of the Equatorial Guinean banking market for two decades, well ahead of Société Générale. Afriland First Group owned 53% of it and its Cameroonian subsidiary a further 13%.

The state bought both stakes out. The transaction concluded in July 2020 and completed in January 2021, valued at roughly 30 billion CFA francs, or about €44.7 million, and it made the government the majority shareholder.

Jeune Afrique reported that relations between Fokam and President Teodoro Obiang Nguema had deteriorated for some time beforehand.

Pushed out of his own chairmanship

He also lost the chairmanship of the Cameroonian bank he founded.

Jean Paulin Fonkoua replaced him at Afriland First Bank Cameroon, a man who had joined the predecessor institution eighteen years earlier and risen through the group. The official explanation was that Fokam was stepping back to concentrate on the group's international development and his research.

Jeune Afrique reported that the departure was forced, following a report by the Central African Banking Commission that identified governance problems at the bank.

His nephew Célestin Guela Simo now runs the Cameroonian subsidiary, having directed it from behind the scenes for years before taking the role formally.

The accusations

The group's Congolese operation has attracted the heaviest scrutiny.

Afriland First Bank CD has been at the centre of allegations concerning the movement of money through the Democratic Republic of Congo, in a matter connected to the Israeli businessman Dan Gertler, who has been under American sanctions since 2017 over his mining dealings there. Jeune Afrique described accusations flying from all sides.

Its portrait of Fokam this week is framed as a discreet pioneer between pan-African ambition and what it calls grey areas.

The sons

He is preparing to hand over, and he is doing it within the family.

Two sons are being positioned to take the group on, Valéry Fokam Kammogne and Christian Fogaing Kammogne, both trained as engineers in what Jeune Afrique describes as a deliberate line of engineer-bosses. Fokam is relying on the Cameroonian bank as the base from which the family grows the business elsewhere on the continent.

He is around 77.

The rival

The contest that will define the succession is with a Gabonese bank.

BGFIBank, founded by Henri-Claude Oyima, operates across the whole six-country Central African monetary zone, while Afriland dominates the single largest economy in it. Guy Gweth, who heads the Centre africain de veille et d'intelligence économique, has called the two of them two faces of African financial power.

Afriland is moving into the zone directly. A regulatory change gives a bank licensed in one member state the right to open branches in the others, and the group is targeting Congo, Chad and the Central African Republic, without having said whether it will buy existing banks or build new ones.

It has also gone into Guinea in partnership with the state to create the country's first national investment bank, and Togo's president Faure Gnassingbé received Fokam in Lomé in November 2024.

The bank he was told he could not build without the government now expands by making governments its partners.