WEF’s value all on the sidelines
For many, the meeting disappointed, but it’s what happens on the outside that matters
● Opposite the entrance to the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), where the World Economic Forum on Africa (WEF Africa) was held this week, was a giant Absa-branded dome which the banking group built for the occasion. It highlighted the point — which the great and the good who meet at the WEF often make — that the forum is less about what happens inside than outside.
The dome hosted presentations and events and provided a base for Absa’s executives to meet clients and others. But its primary intent was simply to be noticed by the participants from other African countries, who knew the old Barclays name under which the bank used to trade on the continent, and are only now getting to know the new and unfamiliar Absa brand.
With the separation from UK-based Barclays, the group is rebranding its operations in nine African countries to Absa and is seeking to grow its banking business on the continent, particularly in corporate and investment banking. The strategy behind the dome, which follows a similar branding exercise at the WEF in Davos earlier this year, is to “give a perspective of who we really are”, said Absa CEO René van Wyk.
He added that whereas up to now the bank had followed corporate SA doing business in Africa, increasingly it is a case of “Africa doing business with Africa”. The bank, which derives about 20% of its earnings from Africa, wants to take advantage of its strong relationships with non-South African clients on the continent to grow.
For Absa, as for most other participants at the forum, the one-on-one meetings on the sidelines are what matters, as is the hobnobbing in the corridors.
Where getting a meeting with a regulator or government or political leader might take months and much bureaucracy at home, it’s easy to arrange or engineer multiple such encounters at the forum. It still has “convening power”, as Victor Williams, Standard Bank’s head of corporate and investment banking, Africa regions, put it.
And for South African companies doing business across the continent, the forum’s mix makes it particularly useful — SA accounted for only 40% of business participants this year, WEF spokesperson Oliver Cann said, and there was historically high representation from China (2.7%) and the Middle East (10%).
Elsie Kanza, the head of WEF Africa, said: “WEF meetings are not conferences, they are working sessions for committed stakeholders. In this way, they are outcomeoriented rather than discursive — people only attend sessions if they want to play an active role in this process.”
But for many of those in Cape Town this year, the forum itself was a disappointment, especially so because it had been expected there would be a bit of a revival after a somewhat disastrous Durban WEF Africa in 2017, when then president Jacob Zuma’s decision to invite Robert Mugabe drove many African leaders away, and the WEF’s decision not to hold an Africa forum at all in 2018.
This year’s event was overshadowed by what happened outside — the wave of xenophobic attacks and gender-based violence that caused President Cyril Ramaphosa to cancel his appearance at one session so he could address protesters, and that drove the CEO of Nigeria’s Zenith Bank, Jim Ovia, to depart early after he was attacked on social media for his participation.
The CTICC itself was heavily barricaded after a protest outside the forum, but delegates ensconced in a new section of the complex — CTICC 2 — away from the main entrance, were able to carry on undisturbed.
Arguably, the presence of so many African business, political and civil society leaders in Cape Town helped to ensure that SA’s leaders had to respond with firm anti-xenophobic messages, such as finance minister Tito Mboweni’s call at the opening plenary on Thursday when he stood in for Ramaphosa: “We welcome all Africans who have come to this conference; we welcome all Africans who live in SA.”
Mboweni said that free trade must be accompanied by the free movement of people across Africa’s borders. Perhaps strangely, though, the new African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement, which one CEO noted was the big African story of the year, got relatively little airtime in the WEF’s formal sessions.
But Kanza said: “International business is more interested in Africa than it has been for a very long time, perhaps ever. The prospect of greater regional integration through the AfCFTA and other ways of facilitating trade would appear to be a key driver, along with the declining attractiveness of other markets around the world.”
At least one executive at the forum felt that there was no strong theme that held it all together.
The “fourth industrial revolution” narrative pushed by the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, tends to get plenty of airtime, and many of the formal sessions focused on technology and digital in one way or another. “Inclusive growth” was another buzz phrase.
But many felt that there wasn’t much of a buzz in the cavernous halls of the convention centre annexe where the forum was held. Some veterans also felt that attendance was down and there weren’t as many senior business and political leaders as in the past.
Van Wyk was the only one of SA’s big five bank CEOs who was there, for example, though there were many up-and-coming business leaders in evidence, such as the new Naspers SA CEO Phuti Mahanyele Dabengwa, and First Rand COO Mary Vilakazi, who was there as one of the WEF’s invited “Young Global Leaders”, as was banking regulator Unathi Kamlana of the Reserve Bank.
Cann said this year 41% of business participants were either chairs or CEOs, compared with 38% in 2017 and 35% in 2016, and they included several international top executives. More of the forum’s global strategic partners — 83 out of 120 — attended than at any other WEF meeting in 2019 except Davos, he said.
The WEF invites the young global leaders and global shapers who attend its forums for free, as do government leaders and the media and academics.
But the paying guests pay richly to be there — individual executives who want to attend pay $10,000 (R148,000) to join, while the WEF’s global and local corporate partners pay many multiples of that.
Whether they will be happy to continue paying for the privilege will surely depend on whether the forum can continue to offer value inside its halls, not just on the sidelines outside. Next year’s event, to be held in Addis Ababa, will be key.
International business is more interested in Africa than it has been for a very long time, perhaps ever
Elsie Kanza
Head of WEF Africa