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IOL News
08-07-2025
- Business
- IOL News
Why this fintech founder thinks 'patient capital' is killing African investment
Ethiopia has newly liberalised its financial sector. Image: Fanuel Leul on Unsplash Last month, news broke about Kenya's KCB Group being on track to become the first foreign bank to secure entry into Ethiopia's newly liberalised financial sector. This represents a historic shift ending five decades of state control dating back to the 1974 Derg nationalisation. It's the kind of development that Bernard Laurendeau spent years laying critical groundwork for during his time embedded within Ethiopia's government machinery, though not all his efforts bore fruit. Government whispering After 15 years advising Fortune 50 clients (from Google and Cisco to UAE's Ministry of Finance), Laurendeau returned to Ethiopia in 2019 to serve as senior advisor to the jobs creation commission under the Prime Minister's office. The work wasn't always successful. For instance, a startup act he helped draft "never saw the light of day," he admits, though he declines to elaborate on why it stalled. What did emerge was his theory of "Gov-preneurship": the idea that Diaspora professionals should embed with African governments to transfer knowledge and build institutional capacity. "A lot of the leaders in Africa turned out to be very authentic, very genuine about what they're trying to do for their country, but they're lonely," he explained during a recent African Tech Roundup Podcast conversation. The timing proved fortuitous, if not entirely by design. Laurendeau had spent years watching Japanese companies struggle to decode African markets, relying on outdated World Bank data and Geneva-sourced reports. When Safaricom secured its Ethiopian telecoms licence in 2021, he found himself simultaneously building a fintech company and helping incumbent banks navigate potential mobile money disruption. This dual role raised eyebrows. "People think there was some conflict," he reflects, "but financial services sovereignty was always the goal. We needed to ensure technology transfer, knowledge transfer, and that we're really building institutions." Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. 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Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ Whether by careful positioning or fortunate circumstances, the approach appears to have yielded results. Laurendeau revealed that Arifpay is now poised to issue dividends (a rare milestone for African fintech) on the back of securing partnerships with Safaricom's M-Pesa and, more recently, local heavyweight Nib International Bank. Rather than the mobile money whitewash many feared ahead of Safaricom's (Vodafone) market entry, Ethiopia's payment landscape now features multiple players competing on service rather than regulatory capture. Capital myths But Laurendeau's most contrarian insight targets the "patient capital" narrative that dominates African investment discourse. Having relocated to Tokyo specifically to bring African market intelligence to Japanese boardrooms, he's witnessed firsthand how this positioning backfires. "Investors don't want to think long term," he proffers bluntly. "They can either invest on the stock market, whether in Tokyo or the US, and they have options. So if you tell them, 'Oh, you need to think long term,' that's not the right type of answer." Instead, his firm delivers what he calls "execution horsepower": the project management, policy design, and actionable expert insight that enables rapid decision-making. It's management consulting adapted for emerging markets, where the gap isn't capital but institutional capacity. Unglamourous wins This philosophy extends to his concept of "Gov-preneurship": embedding with governments to build the unglamourous infrastructure that makes everything else possible. Think core banking systems, Bloomberg terminals for local stock markets and payment rails that actually work. The unglamorous foundations that Silicon Valley-inspired entrepreneurs skip in their rush toward "fancy AI machine learning." "We cannot always do the fancy stuff," Laurendeau argues. "We need to do the boring stuff as well—building hospitals, infrastructure, the boring aspect of technology." It's a message that hasn't always landed well with African audiences expecting more inspirational rhetoric. But recent developments suggest the approach has merit. Ethiopia's banking liberalisation required years of policy groundwork, regulatory design, and stakeholder alignment; apparently, the kind of institutional building that Gov-preneurship enables. Quality standards The irony isn't lost on Laurendeau that he's making this argument from Tokyo, having positioned himself in the backyard of companies with 30-year track records of systematic African engagement through Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) summits. Japanese organisations bring uncompromising quality standards to everything they touch ("there's no such thing as downgrading") while creating superior knowledge transfer opportunities for African partners willing to meet those standards. "Sometimes we see all these new terms (crypto, AI, even entrepreneurship became very trendy)," he observes. "But innovation can make you lazy because it's basically pushing you to not do the mundane." Sovereignty test As KCB prepares its Ethiopian expansion and other regional banks eye similar opportunities, Laurendeau's thesis faces its ultimate test. Can African markets compete on execution quality rather than narrative sympathy? Can governments become genuine partners rather than supplicants seeking patient capital? His own trajectory offers a template for this transition. From mechanical and aerospace engineering at ENSTA France and Georgia Tech to consulting at BNP Paribas, from Silicon Valley big data analytics to Ethiopian policy design, Laurendeau has systematically positioned himself where technical expertise meets institutional need. The approach landed him everything from BBC World Service hosting gigs to Fortune 50 consulting mandates. By that token, it does appear that strategic positioning beats geographic sentiment. The bet now is whether an entire continent can make a similar transition at scale. Andile Masuku is Co-founder and Executive Producer at African Tech Roundup. Image: Supplied
The Wire
08-05-2025
- Politics
- The Wire
A Novel Once Banned in Ethiopia Sheds Light on Why the Mildest Truth Is Unpalatable Sometimes
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Top Stories A Novel Once Banned in Ethiopia Sheds Light on Why the Mildest Truth Is Unpalatable Sometimes Gautam Bhatia 13 minutes ago I read the translation of Baalu Girma's 'Oromay' with the circumstances of its publication at the back of my mind: its banning and pulping, and the persecution, abduction, and murder of its author. Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Donate now The Derg during the Ethiopian Revolution in 1974. Photo: Unknown author/Public domain (Wikimedia Commons). In 1983, the Ethiopian writer Baalu Girma published his sixth novel, Oromay. Within the week, Oromay was banned in Ethiopia, Girma was fired from his job at the Ministry of Information, and copies of the book were pulped at a sugar factory. Six months later, Girma disappeared, never to be heard from again. It is now common consensus that the writer was murdered on the instructions of the Derg regime, which ruled Ethiopia as a one-party state at the time. Oromay, Baalu Girma, translated by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu, MacLehose Press, 2025. Four decades on, Oromay – which grew to be one of the most famous and well-loved of Ethiopian novels, not least because of the circumstances around its publication, and its circulation underground through samidzat – now has an English translation, rendered from the Amharic by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu. My own interest in contemporary Ethiopia was sparked when I came across Hiwot Teffera's difficult-to-find Tower in the Sky. Tower in the Sky chronicles the rise of the left-wing student movement that toppled Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, and which was then either co-opted or violently destroyed by the Derg, the very government/regime that it helped bring to power. The events of Oromay take place a decade after Tower in the Sky: the Derg, led by former military officer and now President, Mengistu Haile Mariam, is firmly ensconced in power, and is engaged in a bitter conflict against an armed struggle aiming at the independence of Eritrea (then a province of Ethiopia). The story is set around the historical ' Red Star Campaign,' initiated by the Derg in 1982, designed to militarily stamp out the Eritrean armed struggle. For a period of a few months, the Ethiopian government was effectively moved to Asmara (now the capital of Eritrea), and the military operations conducted from there. The Red Star Campaign was unsuccessful. The Ethiopian army eventually had to retreat. The retreat severely dented the Derg regime, which would fall a decade later, with the triumph of the Eritrean War of Independence. In Oromay, fiction and reality are blurred from the outset. Its first-person narrator is Tsegaye Hailemaryam, who – just like Baalu Girma – is a senior official at the Ministry of Information, and is despatched to Asmara to run the propaganda wing of the Red Star Campaign, in support of the military operations. Specifically, he is in charge of communicating the events of the Campaign in a manner palatable to the Ethiopian public: by broadcasting from the 'frontline,' interviewing the Campaign's protagonists (including Eritrean defectors), and – more directly – jamming the rebels' radio stations, to prevent them from communicating with the public. In the process, Tsegaye finds himself sucked into the febrile and dangerous atmosphere in Asmara, a city on edge, navigating his way through military officers, spies, and double-agents. He also falls in love with Fiammetta Gilay, an Asmaran woman – a complication, as Tsegaye has a fiancee back home in Addis, awaiting his return from the Campaign. Eventually – in an early instance of embedded journalism – Tsegaye accompanies the Ethiopian army on a violent – and doomed – operation to occupy the strategically vital Peak 1702, an event that compels him to reckon with the consequences of war, and of his own part in the destruction around him. 'Words possess a charge' I read Oromay with the circumstances of its publication at the back of my mind: its banning and pulping, and the persecution, abduction, and murder of its author. I finished it bemused. Nothing in the novel seemed particularly incendiary, or something that would drive a regime to murder. Tsegaye is no rebel, defector, or even a dissenter. For much of the novel, he is indeed a regime man: not a fanatic, but a man who is broadly on board with the goals of the Red Star Campaign, and certainly not a man who questions the legitimacy of the regime he is serving. His experiences at the frontline make him question the futility of war, but scarcely radicalise him. And while, at various points in the book, questions are raised, both about the Campaign and about corruption within the Derg regime, these are raised in the course of debate and dialogue between regime officers (including Tsegaye) who are, at bottom, committed to preserving and maintaining it: an immanent critique, at the highest. Hardly something, you'd think, that would shake a regime! But then I remembered Vaclav Havel's famous speech, ' Words on Words,' where he notes how in more directly repressive or authoritarian states, words possess a salience and a charge that may be very difficult to comprehend for an outsider: more power than 'a whole train of dynamite,' in Havel's memorable words. Of course, we do not need to look to the 'designated' authoritarian States of the past and the present to understand this. Havel delivered his speech to the German Booksellers' Association, and drew a distinction between the 'considerable freedom of speech' enjoyed by the West Germans, and the repression in his own land. Now, anyone who has been keeping up with recent events will be aware that in this same Germany (now unified Germany, for better or for worse), the most innocuous speech that comes close to hinting at the truth of the State of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians has been met with bans, deplatforming, police violence, and – most recently – attempted deportation. Words, thus, can be more powerful than a whole train of dynamite just about anywhere – as long as they are wielded – in the words of Steve Salaita – 'at the point of occlusion.' Palestine was thus on my mind as I perused the secondary literature around Oromay, trying to understand what exactly was it about these mild words that had infuriated the Derg so much – to the point of killing. And it seems that what infuriated the Derg so much was precisely what infuriates the more modern-day variants of the Derg, that is, the governments of countries like Germany and the United States. Telling the truth, even in its mildest and most inoffensive form, is unpalatable when it occurs at the point of occlusion. For the Derg, thus, the success of the Red Star Campaign, and its own moral integrity, were the pillars of its legitimacy and its claim to rule. Tugging at one strand of that web, even the lightest of tugs, threatens to unravel the entire structure. And so, one does not have to be a radical or a militant to attract the wrath of a Derg: one question hinting at the truth is enough, as long as it is asked at the point of occlusion. So it was that Girma had to be murdered, and so it is that modern-day governments unleash the full range of their repressive arsenal against those who seek to tell the truth about Palestine. The Derg is long gone, but Oromay has a more lasting significance, because it tells us that the Derg is never truly gone. In some places it is better-hidden, until you find the point of occlusion, and then – as Marx wrote about the June Revolution of 1848 – it turns out that you have 'bared the head of the monster by knocking off the crown which shielded and concealed it.' And what of the novel itself? I finished Oromay in a morning and an afternoon. The novel is 400 pages long, but it is immensely readable. The narrative is linear and the events propulsive. Much like Tower in the Sky – a similar work of autobiographical fiction – Oromay avoids the peril of turning itself into a tedious, didactic sermon from a pulpit. If that were the case, its value today would be little more than that of an important historical artefact. It is, however, more than that. That said, one of Oromay's significant weaknesses is what one review calls its 'unreconstructed sexual politics.' The two women in the novel – Fiammetta Gilay and Roman Hiletework (Tsegaye's fiancee) – are almost entirely seen through Tsegaye's eyes. Fiammetta's role – and exercise of agency – does become more poignant towards the end of the novel, but this is too little and too late. For a while, I wondered if Girma was demonstrating fidelity to the actual social structures and gender relations that existed in Ethiopia/Asmara in the 1980s, without inserting his own views into the narrative, but the more the book went on, the more difficult this illusion became to sustain. I also think that there is even less of an excuse for this when you read Oromay alongside Tower in the Sky: the protagonist of Tower in the Sky is a woman (a thinly fictionalised version of Teffera herself), and although that novel's protagonist is brought into the struggle via a charismatic older male student, she discovers herself through the course of the story, and is unrecognisable by the end of it (there is, in fact, an entire scene involving a woman's prison, where women militants at the frontline of the struggle have been incarcerated). So clearly, this is not a milieu where the grammar of emancipation and liberation is unknown. Girma's depiction of his women characters is a choice, and one that renders his world a narrower, more crimped version of what it could have been. On finishing Oromay, my overwhelming emotion was that of a dimly-felt grief. Tower in the Sky is a tragic novel, a novel of death, of political unraveling, and the destruction of dreams. However, the world of Tower in the Sky is a world in which schools and university campuses are awash with dreamers, idealists, and militants (sometimes all three embodied in the same person), the horizon of another world has not yet been entirely closed off despite immense violence and repression, and there is hope for salvage out of an imminent wreckage. In Oromay, however, all that is gone. It felt hugely significant, for instance, that the novel has not a single mention of the student movement, even though 1982 is only eight years removed from 1974. The erasure feels absolute and irrevocable. If Tower in the Sky felt like an elegy that carried within it a single, chrysalis-ensconced note of a melody of resurrection, then Oromay feels like the music has, at last, died away, and all we are left with is a desolation called peace. This article first appeared on the author's blog An Enduring Romantic (stylised as 'anenduringromantic') and has been republished with permission. 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