President Buhari, Yemi Osinbajo including Cabinet Ministers and other political appointees pocketed the sum of N2.295 billion as official salaries and allowances in the last one year, Economic Confidential can report.
The breakdown is presented below.
Africa is clearly ripe with business opportunities and is home to many fast-growing companies in a variety of sectors—not just resources, but also financial services, food and agri-processing, manufacturing, telecommunications, and retail. Yet compared with other emerging regions, we find that Africa is still heavily underrepresented in both the number and size of large companies. This matters because, in any economy, large firms are the primary drivers of growth, investment, corporate tax contributions, exports, and productivity.
The reality is that South Africa is indeed Africa in this game. It hosts 49% of Africa’s largest companies. Nigeria has only 9%.
Large companies in Africa are growing faster than their peers in the rest of the world, raking in $1.4 trillion in annual profits and contributing to government taxes and higher wages, a new report finds.
The continent has 700 companies with annual revenue of more than $500 million, 400 of which generate more than $1 billion, says the new study from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). These large companies consist of both African-owned brands and foreign-based multinationals operating within the continent across a wide range of sectors.
Corporate Africa needs to step up its performance to make the most of these opportunities. The continent has 400 companies with revenue of more than $1 billion per year, and these companies are growing faster, and are more profitable in general than their global peers. Yet Africa has only 60 percent of the number of large firms one would expect if it were on a par with peer regions—and their average revenue, at $2 billion a year, is half that of large firms in Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia, for instance.
No Africa owned company is in the Fortune 500. Companies looking to grow across the continent should develop a strong position in their home market, use that as a base for expanding into markets well beyond their immediate region, adopt a long-term perspective and build the partnerships needed to sustain success over decades, and be ready to integrate what would usually be outsourced.
They should look for opportunities in six sectors that MGI finds have “white space”— wholesale and retail, food and agri-processing, health care, financial services, light manufacturing, and construction—with high growth, high profitability, and low consolidation, and invest in building and retaining talent. ?
Visa is taking on M-Pesa in Kenya. The credit card company has launched its Mvisa app that allows users to make purchases or transfer money on their cellphones in Kenya.
Mvsia users have to be connected to one of four Kenyan banks that have partnered with Visa. M-Pesa users only need an ID card and registered cell phone—they don’t have to be connected to a bank, which is one reason why the platform has become so popular.
At Heirs Holdings, we believe in, and demonstrably practice, Africapitalism as our investment strategy. Our investments across key sectors of the economy including financial services, hospitality & real estate, power, oil and gas, amongst others, reflect our commitment to engage in businesses that generate economic profits while contributing to widespread social prosperity on the African continent.
For example, our inclusive approach to banking, first through Standard Trust and now United Bank for Africa (UBA), has allowed millions of people formerly excluded from the formal financial services sector, to now own bank accounts, access capital and execute fund transfers to friends, relatives and business partners all across Africa and around the world. Just as we have done in banking, I look forward to Tenoil – our oil and gas investment arm – to impact the Nigerian energy sector through building a truly indigenous company that is fully integrated across the energy value chain.
Today, at the Millennium Jetty in Marina, Lagos, I inspected Tenoil’s readiness to sail offshore to commence the last and final lap of our first field development, and I am happy to share the remarkable progress we have accomplished on this journey. After a successful drilling campaign in 2014 that proved commercial quantities of hydrocarbons, we strategized on the best way to commence production from this our first oil and gas asset, with a minimum chance of failure.
One option was to employ the services of foreign and proven international companies to ensure that we reached the milestones we wanted to on time. However, we weighed this option against our philosophy of Africapitalism, which endears us, as Africa’s private sector, to make deliberate long term investments that lead to both economic profits and social prosperity in Africa, we chose to invest locally to develop indigenous expertise so that Africa can eventually become self-reliant on her people and their talent.
This is the philosophy behind our decision to use Nigerian oil and gas service companies to deliver our first oil and gas project. We made this decision realizing the risks involved in terms of the level of experience and availability of quality materials locally, and as such ensured that in-house at Tenoil, we have sufficient knowhow and experience to mitigate these risks.
Our experience so far demonstrates that choosing and supporting a reasonably good local company can still lead to the desired end, while being significantly cheaper. The gains from using a local company are numerous– more accessible workforce, greater cost savings, and an opportunity to invest in the next generation of African professionals. All the engineering design and fabrication of a substantial number of the equipment we intend to deploy offshore, were undertaken by two local companies, JK Orion and Compact Manifold & Energy Services (CMES), working closely together with our in-house teams. We hope that by the end of the year, all the equipment will be fully installed and ready for production to commence.
This is not to say that we have not employed any foreign expertise in our operations. Where we had to, we have augmented with foreign service providers to ensure that our equipment is best in class and fabricated to international standard. Some of the units that we intend to deploy were manufactured in the USA. At the end of the day, it is this blended combination of local ability and foreign proficiency that will take our continent to where we need to be.
Despite the handholding involved in using local contractors, it gives all of us at Tenoil great joy to witness the developmental impact of our decision to support #MadeinNigeria. It’s been a wonderful experience and we would do it all over again
Credit: Tony Elumelu