Oramah: An Afro-optimist’s Big Wager

Obiora Onyeaso

The future is bright – Benedict Oramah, president of Afreximbank, believes that a leap in intra-African trade and frictionless payments across borders will unleash unprecedented growth on the continent.

2023. What a year it was for Africa.

The continent served international news organisations with regular fare of distressing news.

Although Africa is made up of 54 countries, border distinctions shrink in significance when news feeds are constantly flooded with bad news.

Differences between Morocco and Guinea Ecuatorial, or Côte d’Ivoire and Djibouti matter little to cable TV viewers served a steady fare of crises from the same general source. Africa is Africa.

For media consumers, news about military coups, currency devaluation, famine, economic slump, insurgencies, public health crises, disputed elections, violent extremism, galloping inflation, social unrest, mass migration of professional talent, human trafficking, and unsustainable heavy foreign debt repayments constitute a buffet of myth about an area covering 30.37 million square kilometers.  

From the angle of direct and portfolio investors, perennial problems of corporate governance, regulation, compliance, and timely access to foreign exchange for capital repatriation tightened their grip on Africa’s promise.

Bright spots such as a young population with Western lifestyle aspirations, huge market size, and under penetration in a number of sectors are met with pessimism.

Speaking of Africa’s youthful population, its startup ecosystem which had drawn global interest suffered a funding crunch from US and European venture capital.  

The reversal of interest seen from 2020 to 2022 led to the failure of many of Africa’s marquee startups and scaleups.

As if to hasten a race to the exit, the World Bank published a report in October warning that “the risks for another lost decade are real” for Africa.

The eighties are considered as the continent’s first lost decade.

Titled “Africa’s Pulse: Delivering Growth to People through Better Jobs”, the report cautioned that “Sub-Saharan Africa’s economic outlook remains bleak amid an elusive growth recovery… rising instability, weak growth in the region’s largest economies, and lingering uncertainty in the global economy are dragging down growth prospects in the region.”

Taken at face value, the prognosis could not be more discouraging.

But one man takes a different view.

He is Prof. Benedict Okey Oramah, president of African Export-Import Bank.

From where he stands, a half empty glass is still half full.

Things may be less than cheering but he clings stubbornly to his faith in Africa’s potential.  

And he has the numbers to prove it.

Thirty years after the Bank started operations it can boast of being the most impactful pan-African institutional brand. The African Development Bank (AfDB) and African Union (AU) occupy second and third places respectively.

Uncontented, the restless spirit in him wants to do more.

No one would ascribe to him the label of star-gazer.

It would be impossible to rise to the top of international banking in a multilateral institution over a three-decade long career with an airy-fairy attitude.

Rising to the top of a large, highly competitive organisation like Afreximbank presupposes that Oramah has maintained his wits about him throughout his career.

As his Nigerian countrymen often say in pidgin English, “im mind dey dia”, which can be translated to mean a person who keeps his eye on the ball.

He is nothing if not a realist.

In person, he is charming, even disarming. Long-time staffers of Afreximbank say that he genuinely enjoys people.

He could easily swap his dark suits for the worn tweed jacket of a university don lost in thought while walking around on a university campus and still remain in character.

Describing his management style, he told Forbes Africa that: “In running the bank, you do a lot of intellectual work; I have brought a lot of my learnings in making decisions and championing initiatives. Our decision-making processes are held up by theoretical underpinnings. When you do something that is knee-jerk and cannot rationalize in theory, then you are going into uncharted waters and anything can happen. We subject our decisions to theoretical questions. You have to rationalize it first. If it passes that test, then nothing can go wrong.”

On a serious note, it does not require a stretch of the imagination to see him holding his own in a conversation with Nobel Prize winners in Economic Sciences, on one end of the table, and the cerebral fringe of hedge fund managers like Ray Dalio, Jim Simons, Stanley Druckenmiller, and Nassim Taleb on the other.

He would be right at home with that crowd.

A concomitant is that Oramah has the natural stubbornness of scholars who hold fast to an argument unless and until a superior one is made by the other side. Facts and logic, not sentiments, define his worldview. 

Academic tendences aside, looks can be deceiving.

Oramah is as grounded in the wiles of diplomacy as he is in the intricacies of complex loan negotiations. He often says that the bank runs on entrepreneurial principles. In recent years, the Bank has dared to go where the risk is when the return fits its mission.

For someone who clocks tens of thousands of air miles every month, he is incredibly hands-on in the bank’s day-to-day operations.

At any given time, he has multiple high priority projects in the works. Every single one enjoys his full attention.

To hear him speak is to leave with the unmistakable impression that he has something of a prophet in him.

It is hard to dispute the view of one bank executive in Lagos who said that “Oramah possesses a Nehemiah Complex. The man does not retreat when faced with an obstacle. He’s in a race against time to change the African narrative in trade and commerce while delivering a decent profit for the bank.”

For context, Nehemiah was a former Hebrew servant of the Persian king. Hebrews had been held in captivity in Persia for several generations. Many had resigned to their faith. Nehemiah dreamt different. He dedicated his life to leading his people to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem against giant odds.  

There is one big difference. Oramah interest lies in tearing down walls and not building them up. The walls in question are of a different kind: borders and payments drag between African countries.

The Anambra-born banker who has all the bona fides of a Davos man is a fervent believer that abysmal trade volumes between African countries are a major drag on the continent’s ability to reach escape velocity from poverty.

Not to be mistaken as exclusionary to trade with partners outside Africa, the Bank strategy document states that it strives for “consistent expansion and diversification of African trade so as to rapidly increase Africa’s share of global trade.”

Since 2020, Oramah has extended this pan-African vision of free trade to embrace members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).

His intellectual lineage can be traced back to Independence-era leaders like Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah as well as the pioneer visionaries of Afreximbank like Dr Babacar Ndiaye, and Dr. Christopher Edordu.

Properly speaking, it is more of an ideology that has evolved to fit in to current world realities. The ideology holds that boosting intra-African trade is the key to African development and unity.

Unlike in the sixties and seventies, this time around the objective is rooted in market-driven economics as opposed to the socialist-inclined policies that put politics before balance sheets.  

Herein lies a tension in Oramah’s intellectual makeup. He subscribes to pro-market views but still retains a healthy commitment to the foundational views of a socially-inclusive development model and independent path for Africa.

Oramah knows how a thing or two about how to adapt an objective to circumstances on the ground.  This mission-mindset has served him well in convincing African heads of state, central bank governors, commercial bankers, industrialists, media owners and Middle Africa – the broad spectrum of SMEs that provide 80 per cent of jobs – to view AfCFTA and Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) with favour.

The banker’s tireless evangelism of these two planks for African prosperity have, little by little, won initial skeptics over. His second mission has been to, “touch the pain points of African countries.”

In an interview granted Forbes Africa at the end of last year he said that he owes his success to “making African countries feel that we are touching their pain points. If the bank continues to operate this way to deal with the pain points of the continent, it will continue to receive support from the continent.”

His home country, Nigeria, presents an interesting case of how Afreximbank provides pain point relief to struggling economies.

The country is wrestling with an economic crisis brought on by poor economic management under former President Muhammadu Buhari, and before him, decades of kicking the can of reforms down the road.

To stem the slide, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu with whom Oramah appears to enjoy a chummy relationship, has instituted a slate of reforms that have hit citizens and businesses hard in the gut.

Committed to easing the pain in Africa’s largest economy, Afreximbank released a US$2.25 billion foreign exchange support facility to the federal government.

You already know what they say about a faithful friend in need.

Flying to the rescue is something that the bank has done with increasing frequency since the COVID pandemic.

On its push for free trade, Afreximbank has provided fair priced financing for industrialisation and export development projects as well as trade finance support to local banks.

Some of the deals inked in 2023 were those with Arab Contractors, Alphaden Energy & Oilfield, ARISE Integrated Industrial Platforms, Azikel Petroleum, Central Africa Building Society, Elsewedy Electric, Exodus & Co., Gemcorp Holdings, Great Horn Investment Holding, Ndar Energies, Niche Cocoa Industries, Oando, Plot Enterprise Ghana, Springfield Exploration and Production Limited, and Trident OGX Congo.

His triangulation of an African free trade area, seamless payments across Africa, and export-oriented financing have pulled the bank into what he admits are “uncharted waters”.

An African Film Fund of US$1 billion scheduled for launch in 2024 falls squarely within that unplumbed space.

Ten years ago, nobody would have thought that Afreximbank would be backing Africa’s promising but risky film industry.

Look no further for a man who is not afraid to tread where angels dread.

If pessimists choose to cite the World Bank report as basis for their mark down, Oramah can point to the publications by Afreximbank’s own research department that present alternative conclusions to those quick to short Africa.

Outside the bank’s own research, Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) takes a sanguine view of Africa’s outlook in 2024.

Readers of “Africa outlook 2024: Strong growth amid heated elections and financial woes,” will discover nuggets of hope in the midst of malaise.

The authors write that “We forecast that Africa will be the world’s second-fastest-growing major region in 2024, just behind Asia, which will be propelled by China and India. Almost all African states will post a positive growth story… Indeed, twelve of the world’s twenty fastest-growing economies in 2024 will be in Africa, and African real GDP is forecast to grow by 3.2% in 2024, up from 2.6% in 2023.”

Oramah might be on to something after all. His decision to go long Africa may turn out to be the killer bet of this century.

It was Warren Buffett, a legendary US investor, who once said “be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy only when others are fearful.”

Therefore, it was fitting that to cap a year of achievements, he was selected as Forbes Africa magazine’s 2023 Person of The Year.

Fittingly, Oramah dedicated the award to the team at Afreximbank who, in his words, constitute “a movement” executing on the Bank’s mandate.

He confesses that without them his grand plans to free up intra-African trade from legacy barriers would not have recorded the modest successes they have.

All said, the big bets that Oramah is placing with Afreximbank’s reputation and credit rating on Africa’s future are bold but not reckless.

Africa needs more punters like him.