The Repatriate Generation

By Vivienne Walt Monday, Aug. 15, 2011
    • Finbarr O'Reilly / Reuters for TIME

    Brain gain Former JPMorgan traders Patrice Backer, left, and Papa Ndiaye head a private-equity firm in Dakar, Senegal

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    The need to jump quickly at new opportunities on a fast-moving continent is a lesson Ndiaye and Asamoah say they learned in Nigeria, where the two were on a brief business trip in 2000. "We were sitting around Lagos, realizing we couldn't make a phone call because there were only 400,000 landlines and no mobile-phone service," Ndiaye says. Within four months, two mobile-phone companies opened. Today Nigeria is Africa's biggest mobile-phone market, with 83 million handsets. The friends are also eyeing countless new prospects that aim to capitalize on the needs of Africa's burgeoning middle class, including thousands of young members of the Repatriate Generation. Such people "want all sorts of things, like the newest TV and good yogurt," Asamoah says. Ndiaye says that for years in the U.S., he, Backer and Asamoah "would talk about the M&A; deals in Latin America and Asia and wonder when they would happen in Africa. We figured perhaps when we were 70 years old."

    Decades sooner than that, the three friends are riding the boom. They converged in Lisbon in June for the three-day annual meeting of the African Development Bank, a lending institution to which 53 African countries belong. When Time met with them in the suite of Ndiaye's luxury hotel to discuss their lives, they lounged in bespoke suits and ties, looking the picture of success. The men say the bank's annual meeting has become a key place to scout for deals in some of the industries in which they invest, like services for mines or food processing, and to seek new talent to work with or hire. When I tell them I have just met Helder Jardim Balsa, a 26-year-old Angolan who graduated last December from the University of California, Los Angeles, and now runs an environmental consultancy in Luanda, Angola, Ndiaye grabs a pen and asks for Balsa's number. "We're always looking," he says.

    In fact, after years of attempting to persuade skeptical young African émigrés to return home, Ndiaye, Backer and Asamoah say they are mobbed at meetings like the one in Lisbon by educated, skilled Africans seeking advice on whether to make the move. So fierce is the interest that Ndiaye says he has begun trying to tamp down the expectations of young Africans, some of whom anticipate red-carpet treatment when they arrive home. "I tell them there is no one waiting at the airport saying, 'Oh, you went to Harvard? Which ministerial post do you want?'" says Ndiaye, who earned an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school after getting his undergraduate degree at Harvard. "There are so many people now with the same DNA fighting to get ahead," he says. Despite that, the group insists that most returnees rise faster in their careers than Africans who remain in the financial industry in Europe and the U.S. And they don't doubt which option is more compelling. "This is the most exhilarating, interesting, exciting — and depressing — thing I've ever done in my life," Asamoah says.

    It's the depressing part of moving back that gives many Africans abroad pause. Despite the upbeat tone at the African Development Bank's meeting, where about 2,000 bankers and executives attended panel discussions and negotiated deals, several young Africans there told me they remain daunted by what they would face in returning home, things like the lack of finance capital, infrastructure and basic middle-class conveniences. Cheick Sanankoua, 27, a tall, lean French Malian who was raised in Ivory Coast and is in the 2012 M.B.A. class at Harvard Business School, says he has begun weighing where to go next. He is considering joining his brother in the family air-conditioning business in Mali's capital, Bamako, or working for a big company in Africa. He is also interested in joining a private-equity firm in Africa, but he says he is frustrated by the lack of venture funding. "Banks are just not helping," he says.

    Indeed, the African Development Bank's Annual Development Effectiveness Review provides a catalog of woes for business on the continent. Among them: only 10% to 12% of African trade is between African countries; the rest is with Europe and the U.S., China and other countries (much of that in commodities). Economists and aid officials argue that if Africa boosted its intraregional trade, it could better share scarce resources like power and water and vastly increase the number of customers for African businesses. Airports are overstretched and outdated. Seaports are underequipped. Roads are mostly dirt, and many are impassable. It will be decades before Africans enjoy universal access to electricity, which the developed world has long taken for granted. Despite the optimism of the Repatriate Generation, the report notes that "African business is held back by excessive and poorly designed regulation, limited access to finance and a lack of legal mechanisms for enforcing contracts and protecting property rights."

    The problems are real enough. But so far, none have forced Ndiaye, Backer or Asamoah to abandon their African careers and head back west. Like good frontier investors, they insist that those who are on the ground will snag the best opportunities first. "You cannot do this from New York or Washington and just hope for the best," says Ndiaye, who nonetheless acknowledges that life is a lot easier — if duller — in the West, without continual blackouts, bad roads and other daily logistical hurdles. "Africa is not for everyone," he says. "In fact, it's for very few people. That is part of the fun." With a generator roaring in the background, he flips open the business plan of yet another prospective entrepreneur looking to fund his dream.

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