African business site CP-Africa has a profile on the continent’s youngest billionaire, 31 year old Ashish Thakkar, based on a recent interview with the Wharton Business School.
Ashish’s story is fascinating one, his family have been refugees twice – once from Uganda when Idi Amin expelled the Indian population and later in Rwanda – and each time his father rebuilt the family’s fortunes from scratch.
In setting up his own business at 15 with a $6,000 loan, Ashish surprised Dubai authorities who thought his age was a misprint. 16 years later Mara Group operates in real estate, tourism, manufacturing and IT services across 24 countries, the bulk of them in Africa.
The interview is an insight into how African economies are evolving and how the continent is just as diverse as the others – it’s as foolish to lump all African nations together as it is to consider all Asian or European countries as being the same.
An important point that jumps out of Ashish’s interview are his thoughts on attracting foreign investment;
We have a huge issue in Africa with unemployment. Unfortunately, a lot of our governments think the answer is foreign direct investment. It’s not.
This is one of the mistakes governments around the world make – it’s understandable as those big foreign corporations are impressive and rich, there’s also the kudos a politician or public servant gets from being seen as a great statesman consorting with global captains of industry, this is one of the attractions in the annual World Economic Forum meetings in Davos.
As Ashish points out, attracting big corporations is not the answer to building a thriving, modern economy. It requires the locals to take action, not just in the business sector but right across the community.
Waiting for a big corporation to come along to kick start your business community is just a cargo-cult mentality which rarely works.
That cargo cult mentality is alive and well in western nations, a good recent example was the campaign to get Twitter to open an Australian office in Melbourne.
Like Facebook, Twitter’s representation down under would be a government liaison staffer who would be best located in Canberra.
Campaigning for this only made Melbourne look like a bunch of provincial hicks, the city and state is capable of much better.
The sad thing is all our governments do this when squandering money subsidising multinationals to set up offices that were going to be set up anyway. Business books are full of betrayed cities like New London, Connecticut who gave away tens of millions only to see their great corporate saviour walk away a few years later.
It’s far better for government to spend those millions reforming business regulations and taxes to make it easy for local businesses to compete with multinationals and become the global leaders of tomorrow.
As one of the few parts of the world that isn’t facing the challenges of an aging population, Africa economies are in a good position to spawn a whole generation of entrepreneurs and corporations. It will be interesting to see if Ashish Thakkar is leading that generation.