‘Africa should have confidence in her companies’

Cameroon AFRICANS should have confidence that African companies are good enough to compete with overseas entities, a Cameroonian oil refinery official has advised.

Ms Erica Ekandje, the head of crude oil department at Societe Nationale De Raffinage (SONARA), a refinery company in Cameroon, said this colonial mentality limited growth in Africa.

“We must move away from this unproductive colonial mentality of thinking that African investments are not good enough to compete with overseas entities because that is what is limiting our growth,” Ms Ekandje said.

Briefing reporters on the operations of SONARA refinery in which the Cameroonian government has major shareholding, Ms Ekandje said the partnership between her company and Sahara Energy was an example of the immense potential that African companies had when they embraced each other.

“Refinery companies which are State-owned always have chal- lenges with financing and so the partnership with Sahara has been some sort of a win-win business venture whereby they supply us with crude oil on a long term payment basis like 120 days after delivery.

“We are in this business together and they happen to be our main product suppliers of crude oil because in 2017 alone, they supplied us with 56 per cent of crude oil to the refinery. The challenge we have is a colonial mentality where the continent feels African companies cannot manage to operate at the desired level,”she said.

She said people only believed that African firms could do well after knowing that Sahara also owned big businesses in Geneva, Dubai and Singapore.

And Sahara Energy trade specialist in Cameroon Mosunmade Omofolarin said the company would continue working towards actualizing the entrepreneurial African dream where African investments complemented each other. Mr. Omofolarin said Sahara was not spreading its tentacles across Africa to simply reap from its investments but to empower fellow Africans.