BY SIFISO NHLABATSI
MBABANE- Prime Minister Russell Mmiso Dlamini has challenged African governments, financial institutions, investors and entrepreneurs to believe in the continent’s potential strongly enough to invest in African people and African enterprises.
The Prime Minister made the call during the Africa Oil Week (AOW) Energy Summit in Accra, Ghana, where he argued that Africa’s development would require a deliberate mobilisation of African capital behind African businesses.
He said indigenous ownership could not depend solely on conventional commercial lending, particularly because African operators often faced higher financing costs, imported technology and constrained balance sheets.
According to the Prime Minister, Africa needed to mobilise its own savings for its own development.
He identified pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, development finance institutions and capital markets as important sources of funding that could support African investment.
He said instruments such as blended finance, infrastructure bonds, credit enhancement, sovereign guarantees and deeper local-currency capital markets could help unlock investment.
Dlamini said governments also had an important role to play by making projects bankable.
This, he said, could be achieved through transparent procurement systems and sound off-take arrangements without governments assuming every investment risk.
“African capital must increasingly finance African development, and African development must in turn grow African capital,” he said.
The Prime Minister said the continent could not proclaim an era of indigenous operators while maintaining systems that left African companies at a disadvantage.
He called for transparent local-content regimes, easier access to capital and markets, support for technology acquisition and strategic public procurement.
Such interventions, he said, should not be used to protect inefficient companies but to help build globally competitive African industrial champions.
Dlamini said the State should know when to regulate, facilitate and invest, particularly where strategic public intervention could de-risk priority projects and attract private capital.
He also urged investors to look beyond short-term commercial returns and consider the wider developmental value of investment.
Investment, he said, should leave behind jobs, skills, research capacity and indigenous companies capable of eventually becoming equal commercial partners.
For the Prime Minister, technology was as important as capital.
He warned that capital without technology could merely finance continued dependency because much of the equipment powering Africa’s energy economy was still designed and manufactured elsewhere.
Every major investment, he said, should leave behind more than infrastructure.
It should also transfer knowledge, develop skills, support research partnerships and create opportunities for local manufacturing.
Dlamini said Africa already possessed one of the most abundant energy resources in the world — sunlight, but needed to develop ownership of the technologies required to convert that resource into prosperity.
He called for greater investment in African universities and centres of excellence to ensure that research and innovation were directed towards solving African problems.
The Prime Minister also told investors attending the summit that Eswatini was open to credible partnerships in generation, transmission, storage, petroleum infrastructure and emerging technologies.
He said the country wanted investment that created enduring value rather than simply establishing projects and repatriating benefits.
Dlamini’s message was ultimately centred on ownership.
He said Africa needed to move away from a model where its people participated mainly as employees or consumers while ownership and control remained elsewhere.
The continent, he said, needed to build businesses capable of competing globally and retaining a greater share of the value generated from its natural resources.
“We must power, we must finance, we must industrialise and believe in Africa enough to invest in Africans,” Dlamini said.
He challenged delegates to turn the indigenous-operator agenda into economic reality rather than allowing it to remain a subject discussed at conferences.
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(Courtesy Pic)
