00:00European Union has created the best common market, unified market in history.
00:07And yet, when the tariff episode came, or when they have to deal with China,
00:13they have no leverage, no negotiation space, because what they don't,
00:18they never included corporate assets as a strategic part of their growth.
00:26So you think Africa can learn from where the EU failed?
00:30So there's a playbook now.
00:31And you see, like in Europe, you have a French banking company
00:35that wants to buy an Italian banking company.
00:37Immediately, you're going to have nationalist pushback.
00:40You're going to have all sorts of things to not make it happen.
00:43In France, for example, Alstom sold itself to General Electric
00:48instead of selling itself to CMS, which is the German competitor.
00:52This is crazy for a common market.
00:55So for us, I think we have to learn from that playbook
00:58and understand that creating a common market, the CFTA, is not going to be a solution.
01:03First of all, it's still going to be a functional element of what we are trying to do in growth.
01:10But the most important thing is to create champions.
01:14Africa should have probably 30 to 40 companies that are doing above $10 billion,
01:21that have a global footprint, I'd say two or three per sector.
01:26That's what they should target.
01:27That's what we should collectively say.
01:30That's our goal.
01:31Because that's the way we can do it.
01:35So you were saying, why haven't they done it?
01:39For me, it's very simple.
01:40The vision was not there yet.
01:41So very immodestly, we're saying that we're trying to push that vision.
01:48The same way the Africa CEO Forum pushed the vision of integration
01:52and pushed to recognize private sector-led growth.
01:56So we were a big contributor to that.
01:58And I hope we're going to be a big contributor to the next step.
02:03So we're going to be a big contributor to that.
Comments