40 per cent of Africa’s non-land assets, held outside the continent- Prof. Soludo

Former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, has disclosed that about 40 per cent of Africa’s non-land assets is held outside the continent.

Soludo who made the disclosure in Abuja, at a panel discussion on the 10 years of AFC, operations at the Infrastructure Summit added that Africans must repatriate such funds to form the fulcrum on which to build a large pool of international capital for the continent’s infrastructure development needs.

Prof. Soludo, said “The Sub-Saharan Africa is just the size of Belgium in economic terms. You can imagine Belgium being divided into 54 isolated countries. Second, several studies have shown that about 40 percent of non-land private Africa’s wealth happened to be outside of Africa and the missing link, really, is creating the kind of platform to unleash African capital to be able to move across borders, to mobilise African capital”.

“Because in my view, it’s only the African capital that can form the fulcrum. If African capital doesn’t move, is it the domestic capital that will say to the foreign capital, here is the place to make money?

“So AFC is to provide that kind of platform, to mobilise African capital to move across borders where African capitals infrastructure which has been the missing link, can begin to fill in the missing dots in terms of linking this small if you like, these disarticulated Belgium’s, as it were.”

Prof. Soludo’s assessment of AFC was that the corporation has done well in the last 10 years but that “the road ahead is still long.”