We hear a lot about Pan-Africanism. About unity, about lifting each other up, about the collective rise of the continent. It sounds beautiful. But let’s be honest for a moment—does it actually exist in the business world, or is it just a nice slogan we trot out at conferences?
A Nigerian entrepreneur named Abraham recently laid this bare in a way that stings because it feels true. His experience, shared candidly, is one that too many founders know intimately. He started his company with an idea, a plan, and what he called “potential.” He approached potential partners—fellow Africans—looking for collaboration, looking for that initial push to get the wheels turning. Their response was brutally dismissive: “We don’t partner with potential. We want returns.”
So he left. He bootstrapped. He bled. He scraped together whatever resources he could and built something from nothing, entirely on his own. And then, the moment he started gaining traction—the moment visibility and momentum shifted his way—those same partners came calling. Suddenly, they wanted meetings. Suddenly, they were interested.
Here is the uncomfortable truth Abraham forces us to confront: in Africa, we do not support the dreamer; we support the winner. We do not invest in the artist painting the canvas; we buy the painting after it’s already famous. If you are building something and you expect a fellow Nigerian or a fellow African to give you that crucial leg-up simply because you share a passport or a skin color, the joke, as he puts it, is on you.
Is this harsh? Absolutely. Is it unfair? Completely. But is it untrue? Look around. Look at the trajectory of every major success story on this continent. The funding, the media buzz, the networking opportunities—they almost always arrive after the entrepreneur has already scaled the mountain alone. Support appears not as a tool to help you succeed, but as a reward for having already done so.
We can try to justify this by pointing to economic instability, or the trauma of scarcity, or the fear of losing money in volatile markets. It is rational to be risk-averse when you have seen generations lose everything. But rationality has a cost. By refusing to back potential, we are starving our own ecosystem of the very oxygen it needs to grow. We are telling our brightest minds: succeed first, and then we will believe in you. The irony is that if they have already succeeded, they no longer need your belief.
Abraham doesn’t mince words, and neither should we. This mindset is bad. Not because investors are evil, but because it breeds a culture of isolation where founders must fake success or burn out trying to achieve it before anyone will take a chance on them. We become a continent of spectators, cheering loudly for the champions we never helped to train.
Perhaps the real failure here isn’t a lack of capital. It’s a lack of courage. If we truly want a new Africa, we have to learn to see the value in the architect while the building is still just a sketch on a napkin. Because if we only show up for the victory party, we cannot claim to have been part of the race.
