Yemisi Izuora
Sahara Group has urged African governments, investors and industry leaders to accelerate intra African investment as a critical lever for industrialisation, stressing that the continent’s growth challenge is no longer about ideas or endowment, but about execution at scale.
Speaking at the African Refiners and Distributors Association (ARDA) Week, currently underway in Cape Town, Temitope Shonubi, Executive Director, Sahara Group, said Africa must deliberately shift from fragmented national approaches to a continent-wide investment mindset, anchored in partnership, value creation and local capital mobilisation.
“Africa’s challenges are well understood. What matters now is defining and committing to the path forward,” Shonubi said. “The gap between where Africa is and where it could be was built. That means it can also be unbuilt.”
Shonubi explained that Sahara Group’s approach is guided by its T.R.I.P.S framework – Transform, Reform, Inform, Perform and Success, an execution focused model shaped by the company’s three decades of operating across Africa’s energy value chain.
He said Africa must first transform the narrative that frames the continent as an aid recipient rather than an investment partner. He noted that despite foreign direct investment into Africa surpassing official development assistance in recent years, perception continues to inflate the continent’s cost of capital by two to three times over, discouraging long term investment. According to him, “Industrial value chains cannot scale on 54 rulebooks and dozens of currencies, every border reset erodes competitiveness and discourages investment.”
The framework, he added, also provides a pathway for policy reform to unlock intra African trade, which currently accounts for just about 15 percent of total trade, and to address fragmented regulations, multiple currencies and uneven implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) that continue to stall the continent’s industrial ambition.
“Africa is not short of opportunity. What we lack is alignment – of policy, capital, skills, and execution,” Shonubi said. “Investment has already overtaken aid in scale, but not in mindset. Until Africa speaks to itself and the world as a credible investment destination, capital will remain cautious.”
A central pillar of the TRIPS approach, he noted, is informing and equipping Africa’s workforce, shifting education and training away from legacy systems that prepare graduates for consumption economies rather than value creation. With more than four fifths of Africa’s workforce operating informally, skills development aligned directly to industrial demand remains essential if the continent is to move from exporting raw materials to processing and manufacturing at home.
The final test, Shonubi said, is performance, delivering infrastructure at scale, particularly in energy, where over 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. Drawing from Sahara Group’s investments across power generation, distribution, and downstream energy, including 2.7GW of installed generation capacity and electricity supply to over 1.5 million households, he emphasised that execution must follow advocacy.
“One company is not enough,” he said. “Each stakeholder owns a letter. Governments must reform, industry must perform, investors must back long-term assets, and Africans must invest in Africa.”
He urged ARDA members, policymakers, financiers, and operators to treat TRIPS not as a concept, but as a collective contract that prioritises intra African investment, regional scale and sustained execution as the foundation for Africa’s next growth phase.