African Real Assets: What Becomes Investable Over 30 Years? – Mwiya Musokotwane

Muya, as I've just said, you know, Tebe is a real asset developer and manager.

Why do you believe real assets are such a powerful investment base in Africa?

Well, In my view, real assets are the foundation for all sorts of development, whether it be industrial or energy or services.

Whatever use case an entrepreneur seeks to utilize a piece of land starts with someone who's a real asset developer taking a view, building core infrastructure required to allow an entrepreneur to do whatever it is that they do best, and then the story of that particular thesis then just flows there from.

So we see real assets as the foundational piece that is necessary to allow other people to do whatever it is they happen to be good at.

Why is that powerful or significant in an African context?

It's important in Africa because of several reasons.

One is Africa is in a process of developing.

And so inevitably, a whole lot of infrastructure needs to be built before anyone else who's an entrepreneur can make use of it and be productive.

So in a place like Africa, historically, that was the government's job.

You know, the government was the one thinking about building things like power stations or towns and settlements or roads or wastewater systems or logistics infrastructure from anything from warehouses to railways to refineries and pipelines.

All of that used to be the ambit of government.

However, governments are strained.

They don't have the capacity to do all those things and educate their citizens and provide for healthcare and so on and so forth.

And so the private has to come in and take on the role that the government historically did.

You might not be able to do this for every single thing because sometimes a piece of infrastructure has a negative economic return, but a very positive social return.

Where a positive economic return exists, the private sector can take on the role of doing those things.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is it enables entrepreneurs to do what they do best.

If you look at larger businesses in, say, Zambia, for example, where I happen to work from, companies like Zambief, they were founded in the 90s when infrastructure in this country was really derelict and the supply chains to execute their vision were going to be very large.

And these businesses then had to end up becoming every single part of the infrastructure support they needed.

They had to build out the cold chain.

They had to build out the logistics chain.

They had to build out warehousing.

And that's before they actually start doing what we're supposed to be doing, which is selling meat.