An excerpt from my post-premiere press conference in Dar es Salaam where I spoke very plainly and frankly to my colleagues on the other side of the continent.
My message as always: Be utterly unapologetic about being African and backing Africa's agenda.
I like @mrstephendeng and think he's right here. African VCs didnt step up. @terraindustries shouldve been an African-backed thing. It wasnt.
But, I think there's a broader point that's getting missed. Its not just that African VCs didnt step up, it's that venture capital globally isnt stepping up or seeing the opportunity in frontier markets.
VCs keep making the same mistake in frontier markets: they suffer from outcome fallacy. They only see the future if it looks and feels like today’s developed world. If Africa can’t build jet engines yet, they conclude it can’t build anything “serious.” So they crowd into fintech rails and stablecoins and call it prudence.
But intelligent investing isn’t outcome-anchored — it’s stepwise. You don’t underwrite the jet engine. You underwrite the jet-engine-minus-10. You invest in the primitives on the road to that end state: commodified hardware, autonomy software, training stacks, tooling, local manufacturing loops. Those steps are often profitable long before the final picture looks like Boeing or Airbus.
This is why “non-consensus and right” matters. Most frontier VC is consensus and sorta-right — Sharpe-ratio obsessed, optimizing to what looks safe relative to Silicon Valley benchmarks. That might generate respectable IRR, but it misses the alpha that only exists where ecosystems are being created, not inherited.
The irony is that if you looked at Africa like an alien, you’d say security, logistics, power, and infrastructure are the obvious first markets — not the 50th payments app. Yet defence and hard-tech are avoided because investors mentally price them as “impossible,” anchored to how those sectors look in the US or EU today.
Yes, atoms are harder than bytes. Ecosystems matter. But technology is collapsing the pre-requisites: additive manufacturing, agentic software, “75% solutions,” commodified capex. You no longer need the entire Western industrial cathedral to build useful, sovereign capability. You need the right primitives and a path to local offtake.
So the real failure isn’t Africa’s risk profile — it’s investor imagination. They price frontier futures as if the only possible outcome is a bad imitation of the West. They ignore that the road itself contains high-return businesses, and that the future — in Africa and in the West — may look nothing like the present.
Watch our CEO’s 10-minute interview on @tbpn, where he discusses:
- our $11.75M round
- A multi-domain approach to Africa’s security
- Winning commercial and government contracts
- Our focus on surveillance, not kinetic systems
- Data sovereignty
If the central point of your impassioned argument against Niger's new geopolitical alignment is that "things are still bad despite the new government's promises," then are you not conceding that things were bad to begin with? Are you then saying that Niger should return to the old status quo so that things can go back to still being just as bad, but the more familiar type of bad that benefitted everyone except the Nigerien people?🤔
What precisely, are you driving at and why?
If your grouse is with the non-democracy inherent in a military government, are you then suggesting that the government of Mohammed Bazoum - which disqualified his main rival Hama Amadou from contesting the 2021 election after he came 2nd in 2016, effectively allowing Bazoum to run unopposed - was "democratic"?
It goes back to something I said in a recent video about how most of what we know as "journalism" in Sub Saharan Africa has been entirely shaped and defined for us by foreign governments, foreign intelligence agencies, and their NGO/CSO front organisations.
These guys teach us how to do the functional 40% of journalism, which includes story structure, sourcing, research, 5Ws & H, attribution, grammar, style, etc. The remaining 60%, which is the ACTUAL purpose of journalism - strategic alignments, establishment of key interests, deduction, logical reasoning, critical thinking, geopolitical influencing, etc - is not taught to Africans by these actors.
Thus, we end up with respected African practitioners with large professional egos who can only think and write within the parameters that white people have set for them. We get Nigerian reporters who write an entire 1,000-word polemic about how Niger is "worse off" than before the coup, without mentioning that the same Niger has become Africa's fastest-growing economy since the coup with 10.6% annual growth - numbers that Nigeria hasn't come close to since the 1970s.
We get African reporters who do not stop and ask themselves WHY one random country of 21 million people in the Sahel is suddenly so important to French and US governments that they are funding news outlets worldwide to simultaneously push a single narrative about Niger exactly one year after its coup. These reporters do not ask WHY it is their names and faces that must be used on these propaganda pieces and not the actual names and faces who gave the instructions.
These reporters are not capable of looking at available information and making deductions - Cameroon is one of the most poorly governed countries on earth, and Paul Biya has been president since George Weah played for Tonerre Yaoundé. He has seen George Weah go to PSG, AC Milan, Man City, birth Timothy Weah, retire, become an MP, become Liberian president, watch Timothy Weah play at a world cup, lose the next election and step down - and he is still Cameroon's president after unilaterally altering the country's constitution twice. Yet no impassioned polemic about that from AP or Carnegie Endowment. They are perfectly fine with familiar Cameroonian dictatorship, but not unfamiliar Nigerien dictatorship - WHY?
That "WHY" and the ability to find answers to it, is the difference between an actual journalist who knows 100% of his job, and a media mouthpiece who knows the functional 40% of journalism that allows foreign interests to use him as a ventriloquist dummy.
This is why BBC Media Action, RFI, AFP, VOA, etc will love to continue organising their "trainings" for African journalists forever and ever.
So that they can continue to produce unthinking African dummy reporters that will use their education and training to write DGSE and CIA propaganda articles describing Africa's best performing economy of 2024 with double-digit economic growth as a hopeless basket case that needs to go back to Mohammed fucking Bazoum.