THE QUESTION EVERY AFRICAN BUILDER FACES
Sooner or later, every founder who builds something valuable in Africa reaches the same fork, and how they take it decides more about the continent's value-capture than any policy paper. You have built a brand or a business the world now wants to own. Do you sell it — to the multinational with the balance sheet and the global distribution — or do you find a way to keep, and even widen, the ownership at home? This is not an abstract question. It is a decision real people make with real consequences, and this report reads it through two of them who answered it in opposite directions, in their own words.
Monique Rodriguez sold Mielle Organics — the natural-hair brand she built from a personal blog into a category leader — to Procter & Gamble, and defended it as the smart move. Aliko Dangote, having built the continent's largest refinery, is doing the opposite: refusing to sell more of it to the state oil company and instead opening its ownership to millions of ordinary Nigerians. Sell up, or open out. Both are legitimate; both retain some things and export others; and the difference between them is the whole value-capture argument, made concrete.