For African firms, technical leadership at the executive level is now a precondition for sustained growth — not a discretionary upgrade. That is the case I make in my Business Daily column, and it holds from Nairobi to Lagos to Johannesburg.
Consider the finance seat. No serious board today would operate without a chief financial officer, yet within living memory finance was "the accounts department" — a back-office function that recorded decisions rather than shaped them. Technology is making the same journey, compressed into a decade. The question is whether African organisations complete it before their competitors do.
The gap shows itself in three places. One, capital allocation: technology now rivals traditional capital expenditure on the balance sheets of hospitality, real estate and energy businesses alike, yet in many firms no one at the table can interrogate those investments on commercial terms. Two, risk: cyber security has become a balance-sheet exposure, priced by insurers and examined by regulators. Three, revenue: digital channels and data products are no longer experiments at the margin; they are how customers arrive.
M-PESA did not emerge from a support function. It emerged where technologists sat close to where strategy was set. That is the model: digital strategy in Kenya and across Africa succeeds when the technology voice is in the room for the decision, not summoned after it. Growth on this continent now runs through the technology seat — the firms that fill it deliberately will own the next decade.
Read the full column at Business Daily Africa