Central Africa builds fortunes, not institutions.

On Friday July 24, 2026, four transactions were recorded on the Bourse des Valeurs Mobilières de l’Afrique Centrale. A total of 107 shares changed hands, worth FCFA 9.27 million. Five of the seven listed companies recorded no transaction at all. On the bond market, 32 listed lines, FCFA 1,228.8 billion outstanding, not a single trade.

Ten days earlier, commercial banks across the six countries of the monetary union had requested FCFA 535.5 billion in refinancing from the Bank of Central African States, more than the FCFA 500 billion made available to them. 

Hold those two facts side by side: a banking system straining for liquidity, and a market where a full trading session comes to nine million francs. 

Now consider what those four transactions produced. Nine SOCAPALM shares were enough to move the benchmark index of a market serving six countries. 

This is not a contradiction. It is the same weakness seen from two angles. Central Africa has financial resources, and it has the institutions to put them to work. What it lacks is the habit of using them to turn savings into lasting institutions. 

The financial infrastructure exists. We simply do not use it to its full potential.

On May 7, 2026, BGFI Holding listed on the BVMAC’s premium segment and transformed the scale of the exchange overnight. 

The group deserves credit for accepting the disciplines of listing and for opening its capital to the public: a wider shareholder base, continuous valuation, and greater transparency obligations to outside investors.

But look at the second number, the one that drew far less attention. Against market capitalisation of FCFA 1,807.6 billion on July 24, 2026, the listed free float, the shares genuinely available to be bought and sold, stood at FCFA 121.4 billion. More than ninety-three percent of the market’s declared value sits outside the float. 

We have built a register of ownership, not a market. 

BGFI Holding illustrates the pattern with unusual clarity. The group now represents roughly 73% of the exchange’s capitalisation, while only 3.85% of its own shares make up its listed float. Together with SOCAPALM, two companies account for some 86% of the market. Seven listed companies. Six countries. 

For comparison, the Nigerian Exchange lists more than 150 companies. The BRVM, our Francophone neighbour in West Africa, serves eight countries with some forty listed companies and a capitalisation above thirty billion dollars. Gabon’s income per head is several times Côte d’Ivoire’s. What separates their capital markets is not wealth. It is architecture. 

The industry exists. It has almost nothing to buy. 

The same bulletin that records four transactions also lists more than a dozen COSUMAF licensed asset management companies and several dozen collective investment funds: Africa Bright, ASCA, Harvest, EDC, Enko, Kori, Makeda, Elite Capital, Société Générale Capital and others publishing daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly net asset values. 

Now look at what those funds hold. Almost all of them are bond or money-market funds. The equity funds can be counted on one hand. 

This is not a failure of the asset management industry. It is a rational response to a market of seven issuers where a full session sees 107 shares change hands. 

We built a professional, regulated, capitalised investment industry, and then gave it almost nothing to buy. The constraint is not appetite. It is supply. 

What Nigeria understood 

Nigeria’s most valuable contribution to African capitalism may not be oil. It may be its capital markets. 

Dangote Cement, BUA Cement, GTCO, Zenith Bank, MTN Nigeria: all listed. 

Their founders did not merely build companies. They built financial assets the market could value continuously: assets able to attract new investors, serve as collateral for financing, make acquisitions possible, and pass between generations without dismantling the enterprise itself. 

That is one reason Nigerian groups have expanded beyond their borders while many of ours remain confined to their domestic markets. Nigerian entrepreneurs hold no monopoly on ambition. They built the instruments capable of carrying it. Capital markets did not create Nigerian entrepreneurship. They multiplied it. 

The cost of companies that die with their founders

A businessman spends thirty years building a serious enterprise, a distribution network, an industrial plant, a trading house. It employs four hundred people. It survives currency shocks, oilprice collapses and three regulatory regimes. Then he dies. Five years later, the company is a memory: divided among heirs who cannot agree, deprived of the working capital he had personally guaranteed, run by a successor chosen by birth order rather than competence. 

It had never been institutionalised. No outside shareholder positioned to demand continuity. No independent board with a succession plan. No market valuation to allow an orderly transfer. No permanent capital independent of one man’s signature at one bank. 

Bank debt cannot do what equity does. Debt must be repaid on a contractual schedule, whether or not the year was a good one; equity bears the residual risk and imposes no repayment calendar. 

And here, borrowing rarely rests on the company’s balance sheet alone, but on the founder’s personal guarantees and privately held assets. 

A region financed largely through short-term bank credit will produce able merchants and handsome private fortunes. It will struggle to produce institutions. 

The fear we do not discuss 

Beneath the structural explanations lies another, psychological one. Many entrepreneurs in the region refuse to open their capital because they confuse ownership with control. 

They believe that selling 20% of the equity means losing 20% of their decision-making power. So they decline, financing growth through retained earnings and bank overdrafts, condemning the company to grow at the pace of one man’s cash flow. 

The arithmetic says the opposite. Eighty percent of an institution that outlives you is worth more than one hundred percent of a business that closes with you. Refusing dilution does not protect a company. It caps its growth. 

The underdevelopment of capital markets is not the only explanation for Central Africa’s underperformance. Infrastructure matters. The cost of energy matters. Commercial justice, education and market fragmentation despite monetary union all matter, and some of these may weigh more heavily. 

But capital markets determine whether savings become productive investment and whether businesses become institutions and of that entire list, they receive the least attention. 

What would actually change things 

The temptation is to blame the exchange, the regulator, or the absence of investor appetite. The binding constraint is on the supply side: too few companies want to list, because too few are genuinely ready to go public. Four areas of work would change the trajectory. 

Measure the float, not capitalisation alone. A market can change scale and remain illiquid. Minimum free-float requirements, with realistic compliance deadlines rather than routine waivers, would do more for liquidity than every financial-education campaign combined. 

Mobilise institutional savings

Central African States have spent decades courting foreign investors while the region’s principal reserves of long-term capital sat within their own economies. 

Pension reserves, insurers’ technical provisions and a substantial share of financial savings remain concentrated in bank deposits, short-term placements and sovereign securities, supplying too little permanent capital to private enterprise. 

There is nothing wrong with sovereign debt; States need functioning bond markets. But no country has ever industrialised by asking the State to remain the principal borrower indefinitely. 

Make listing faster and cheaper for mid-sized companies. The current process is calibrated for large issuers. A company generating FCFA 15 billion in annual revenue bears costs and delays designed for a bank ten times its size. A properly resourced growth board, with proportionate requirements, is a solution that has already proved itself elsewhere. 

Treat governance as an asset, not a surrender

An independent director is not a spy. Audited accounts are not an admission of weakness. Outside shareholders are not intruders. They are the price of durability, and the price is modest. 

Four principles for building institutions: 

* A company that does not survive its founder has created wealth. It has not yet created an institution. 

* Free float, not capitalisation, measures whether a market is real. A listed share that never trades is a certificate, not a security.  

* Governance costs least when you do not yet need it. The time to build a board is the year before you raise capital, not the year after. 

*  The measure of a business career should be what still stands thirty years after you leave. Not the size of the estate. The size of the institution. 

None of this depends on another summit communiqué or donor programme. Some of it will require regulatory action: free-float requirements and allocation rules do not define themselves. 

But the decisive shift must come from business owners, institutional investors and the professionals who advise them, a generation in Douala, Libreville, Brazzaville, N’Djamena, Malabo and Bangui deciding that it would rather leave an institution than an inheritance. 

Four transactions. One hundred and seven shares. Six countries. We were never short of money. We were short of institutions capable of making wealth endure. 

What it lacks is the habit...money alone has never built a nation. The tragedy of Central African capitalism is not that it creates too few fortunes. It is that too few fortunes become institutions. 

By Mokom Ndzah: He is Chief Executive Officer, CEO of Stoneshed Asset Management, an asset management company licensed by COSUMAF under number COSUMAF-SGP-03/2023

This article was first published in The Guardian Post Edition No:3864 of Friday July 31, 2026