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Tony Elumelu told an audience on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly that aid programmes cannot build industries, and that Africa's economic transformation has to be funded by private capital raised and deployed on the continent.
He was speaking at the Darryl G. Behrman Lecture on Africa Policy, in a session moderated by Michael Froman, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, covering Africa's place in the global economy, entrepreneurship, energy security and the future of relations with the United States.
Aid can provide short-term relief, the Heirs Holdings chairman said, but it cannot create sustainable industries or substitute for domestic capital being put to work.
His central complaint was about how Africa is priced. Treating the continent as a single high-risk entity, he said, ignores the economic activity across 54 separate countries, and investors who co-invest alongside credible local partners who understand their markets can find some of the highest returns available anywhere.
What he asked for was structural. Elumelu called on foreign venture capital firms, pension funds and development finance institutions to work directly with African financial institutions to fund infrastructure and the trade corridors that carry goods between African countries.
On young Africans he was blunter. Elumelu described youth entrepreneurs as a pillar of continental security and said tackling unemployment among them is urgent, both to reduce irregular migration and to prevent social instability.
His own foundation has committed $100 million to that. The Tony Elumelu Foundation gives $5,000 of non-refundable seed capital alongside business training, which he argued can generate jobs in rural and urban communities alike, and he urged philanthropies, multilateral agencies and corporations to help scale small businesses run by young people.
Energy came next. More than 600 million Africans still have no reliable electricity, he said, which makes conversations about industrial growth or digital transformation difficult, and he argued Africa should be allowed to use its natural gas as a transition fuel to power industry and stabilise grids while building renewable capacity.
On trade he supported the African Growth and Opportunity Act while arguing that future arrangements should look harder at what it costs to make African products and get them to American buyers. As the African Continental Free Trade Area gains momentum, he said, bilateral deals should prioritise supply chain integration, domestic manufacturing and the removal of regulatory bottlenecks that obstruct trade between African countries.
He closed on why any of it should matter outside Africa. "Poverty anywhere remains a direct threat to economic peace and security everywhere," he said.
Elumelu chairs Heirs Holdings, United Bank for Africa and Transcorp, and has spent more than a decade arguing for what he calls Africapitalism, the idea that the private sector rather than donors should drive the continent's development.
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