Nice write up Ngozi. Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective as an African founder. We owe ourselves and the upcoming founder class the responsibility of publicly discussing, engaging and telling these stories from our respective perspectives. I intend to also do a medium post later this week to respond mainly to the “technical” aspects of the Jumia missive.

My perspective regarding the angle from which you are responding is this: being an African founder and player in the ecosystem — a “local local” one , I will come back to that in a bit— this indeed is no longer a secret. It is an accepted fact even among the investor class themselves, as was publicly confirmed last week at one of this their conferences. The “secret” has now been upgraded to an accepted FACT by even the foreign investing class => https://twitter.com/maxbayen/status/933976639964434434.

My main contribution to your post is that this issue plays out very well in Nigeria as well, contrary to your suggestion which I’ve highlighted above. The game in Nigeria is however played at a more nuanced level, which has 3 layers: foreign-foreign, foreign-local, local-local. The foreign-foreign layer in the preceding maps to what your entire article talks about as is in full glare in Kenya but to a lesser degree in Nigeria. In Nigeria, the dichotomy is mainly on the level of foreign-local and local-local. A foreign-local, i.e. a local founder who has had some measure of “foreignness” imbued on him/her by virtue of foreign domicile, foreign education, foreign career, foreign professional experience or even foreign accent, has the same privilege that is the basis of your response to the Jumia missive conferred on them when it comes to this same issue compared to their local-local compatriots that are local-born, local-domiciled, local-educated, local career, local professional experience or local accent. Apply this more nuanced principle, similarly as you did for your Kenyan list of startups, to the list of Nigerian startups in the portion of your post that I highlighted and this becomes apparent. And I can add quite a lot more Nigerian startups to your list, if by any chance it is not apparent enough. Now, this is changing, as the other perspective too is in Kenya. However, it is changing at such a ridiculously slow rate that the network effects of the issue you were addressing in your post will eventually crowd it out and perpetuate the default scenario, especially when the ecosystem develops to the level where successful financial exit outcomes become more frequent.

I had previously indicated on my Twitter TL (https://twitter.com/docolumide/status/825845106595024897) that the way to solve this in Nigeria for the purpose of institutionalizing a much more vibrant local tech ecosystem that benefits Nigeria and Nigerian is via government policy. That is how InterSwitch, the only local-local tech “unicorn” in Nigeria, had a chance to get built by local-locals. (Mitchel used to be very fond of saying InterSwitch is PROUDLY Nigerian — purely local-local Nigerian founded, purely local-local Nigerian funded, purely run by Nigerian “local-locals” and solving a purely Nigerian problem in a uniquely Nigerian way, albeit to global standards.) We as founders in this nascent industry need to come together — as founders — and up our game in constituting a common front of policy advocacy to help with influencing the enactment of such/similar policies that enabled/allowed InterSwitch a chance to thrive as a local champion. Until our “monied-class” have serious skin in this game as they ended up having, by virtue of policy that pushed their hands to put their own skin in InterSwitch’s game, the best of the opportunities in funding, networks and talent, will continue to elude local founders/startups and the bulk of the benefits (financial and otherwise) won’t end up in the pockets of folks with an invested interest in Nigeria. There would not have been an InterSwitch as we now know it without such! Interswitch and the other 1998-2000 class of epayment startups got a LOT — repeat, LOTS and LOTS — of enablement and protection via “Chinese” policies by government, the banking industry and the regulator, to allow them take root, develop and compete against the MasterCards, Visas, FirstDatas, Euronets of this world and the much more developed, funded and stronger foreign epayment third party processors (TPPs) ventures from Lebanon, Egypt and South Africa, once these smelt blood and came rushing for that blood in the then nascent epayments space of Nigeria. InterSwitch, and the other epayment startups, at that time jointly took this policy engagement so very much seriously TOGETHER, being smart in knowing that their respective survival depended on it. I was there.