By WALE AKINYEMI

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Nigerian company Main One was recently acquired by a US firm for $320 million. The company founded by entrepreneur Funke Opeke has three data centres in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Ghana, while a fourth is under construction. It previously raised funding to lay a sub-sea cable stretching from Portugal to West Africa.

This adds to the growing list of Nigerian companies enjoying robust funding from without. There is also Flutterwave, which was started in Nigeria in 2016 but now headquartered in the Silicon Valley.

It's last valued at $1 billion after a $170 million Series C funding round led by New York-based Avenir Growth Capital, and hedge fund Tiger Global.

In 2020, US-based Fintech Company Stripe acquired Nigerian company Paystack for $200 million. In 2019, Visa acquired a 20 percent stake in yet another Nigerian startup called Interswitch for $200 million. These represent a new trend that is sweeping across the continent where brilliant African minds are creating great value and foreigners are quick to snap them up.

However, there is a downside.

There was a report of a Nigerian bank that had given one of its directors an unsecured loan of about $200 million. The same gentleman owes another bank about $100 million in unsecured loans.

He is “rich,” powerful and untouchable.

In 2015 a high profile Nigerian businessman breathed his last, and was eulogised for being a generous man with the Midas touch. However, news began to filter out that he owed over $250 million in unsecured loans. Elsewhere, were tales of Central Banks literally bankrolling ruling parties during elections with hundreds of millions of dollars.

Double standard

These same institutions do not fund startups because of some sort of risk they claim is involved, but have little problem pouring money into the coffers of certain people. Now multiply these examples many times over and imagine the staggering amounts of money lost as a result of this double-standard.

These startups will be behemoths in a few years. When you see the impact of companies like Facebook and Amazon on the political landscape of America and on day-to-day life, a picture of a future Africa emerges. I foresee a time these start-ups will be calling the shots in Africa to the extent of having the power to decide who will wield power.

This is a huge problem but not the scariest of what lies ahead. The bigger problem, however, is the fact that though these are African innovations, they are ending up foreign-owned.

History will judge us harshly because we had the opportunity to own our own breakthrough companies but rather than support them and fund them, we bought new fleets of unnecessary cars for state officials, lavished benefits un - heard of anywhere else in the world on legislators, presided over struggling economies yet our officials remain among the planet’s wealthiest, and our financial institutions helped polish up the glitter of old money.

There is enough innovation in Africa to transform the world without looking up to anyone. Just recognise and celebrate that which we already have. In ignoring such innovations, history will term us the sellout generation.

Wale Akinyemi is the convenor of the Street University (www.thestreetuniversity.com) and chief transformation officer, PowerTalks