For Magatte Wade, connecting the dots is easy: The people of Africa are poor. They’re poor because they have no money. They have no money because they have no jobs. They have no jobs because there are no companies to employ them. There are no companies because the governments make it impossible to start one.
Bureaucracy and Corruption
According to Wade, it’s impossible for an entrepreneur to start a business there because of endless bureaucracy and corruption.An example of bureaucracy she gives is in the Republic of the Congo, where there are 18 separate documents to import or export anything, and each document needs to be notarized, with each signature costing $500.
“In Eritrea, it takes 13 procedures, 84 days, and 21 percent of the average income per capita along with 94 percent of average income per capita in paid-in capital to start a legal business,” Wade told The Epoch Times.
She sees “corruption on almost every level,” as a result of “bad laws, too many laws, and senseless laws.”
“Even to get your passport, you have to bribe people,” she said.
This lethal combination leads to the death of local businesses before they even start.
For decades, the World Bank Group assembled its “Doing Business Index Ranking,” which ranked the ease of doing business in countries, worldwide. In 2017, New Zealand was at the top of the list and the U.S. was sixth.
But just about every one of the 50 or so countries in Africa was at the bottom, with Wade’s homeland of Senegal clocking in at 140.
“All but only five sub-Saharan, African countries are less friendly to business than socialist countries like Nicaragua and Bolivia,” Wade said in a video on her website.
She said the World Bank Group no longer amasses the rankings because, to her dismay, China and other nations had been bribing officials for better positions.
The rankings “really kept our leaders on their toes, and now we have nothing to keep them accountable,” she said. “Absolutely nothing.”
Since there are no opportunities in Africa, many people attempt to migrate to Europe in hopes of finding jobs.
Many times, this is done via the Atlantic Ocean, but small, overcrowded boats often lead to mass deaths at sea. The land route can also be perilous, with migrants captured in Libya and then sold into slavery, often for a few hundred dollars per person.
Unfair Branding
Wade believes Africa has been unfairly branded in three ways: “safari,” “tribal,” and “pity.” When Westerners think of Africa, they think of these stereotypes and never consider it as a competitor in 21st-century trade.An example of the West’s pity is there’s a popular, California-based shoe manufacturer who, at one time, donated to Africa one pair of shoes for every pair it sold.
While it sounds like a noble gesture, in Wade’s point of view, it hurt the people of Africa more than it helped. No one would buy shoes from African manufacturers and the incentive to start a shoe company there was snuffed.
Entrepreneurship
Wade feels that people who live anywhere but in the West perceive they have a “cultural inferiority,” that whatever they eat, drink or wear is not as good as what comes out of Europe or the United States.However, she feels that given the opportunity, there would be enough African entrepreneurs to step up and create enough businesses to make a difference, especially if their products (or ingredients in their products) were indigenous to Africa.
Wade has already done this. Her first company, Adina, was founded in 2004 and manufactured hibiscus and ginger beverages.
“It was a viable business to make for many different reasons but especially on the cultural side,” she said.
Until the start of Adina, Africa only sold raw ingredients as commodities to the West, but Wade believes Adina was the first African company to manufacture on the continent a complete consumer product that was marketed to the West.
Adina was bought out by Pepsi in 2007 and Wade left in 2009.
Wade’s second company, Skin Is Skin, currently manufactures lip balms at her lab in Senegal. She uses shea butter, which is indigenous to Africa, and the lip balms are sold in the United States at Whole Foods Markets.
The lab was built from scratch and employs 12 people. At a separate location, Wade has a school for the children of her employees, free of charge.
She has a third company in the works, for skincare products, scheduled to launch this fall.
Not only does Wade have a legal, functioning business in Africa, but her actions have also brought about some changes for the better.
In what she describes as a “diplomatic incident,” Wade publicly criticized the president of Senegal’s policies on businesses.
The Heart of the Cheetah
Wade has an upcoming book called “The Heart of the Cheetah.” While she admits with this title she’s guilty of “safari branding,” she said she chose it for a reason.Ghanaian economist George Ayittey, whom Wade considers her “intellectual father,” used to speak of two types of Africans: hippos and cheetahs. The hippos are the old-school, corrupt bureaucrats who move slowly and nothing changes, and the cheetahs are the fast-running, modern movers-and-shakers who are going to get things done.
“It was cheeky on my part to do that,” said Wade.
She considers herself one of the cheetahs—“the ones who are going to change the continent,” she said, paraphrasing Ayittey.
As cheetahs, “we’re not going to wait for anybody to solve anything for us,” she said. “And a cheetah runs through leaps and bounds.”
