It’s been a week since Rocket Internet’s Jumia debuted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The stock (so far) has been met with the type bullish exuberance only Wall Street can muster, sending the stock soaring by over 300% to a $3.2 billion valuation. Those of us in Africa’s nascent tech community who’ve been paying attention to Jumia’s rise across the continent have known this was coming. But we also knew how Jumia came to be. Jumia’s journey to what is —by all accounts— a successful IPO coalesced out of various startup experiments by German-based copy/paste factory, Rocket Internet. In a nutshell, Rocket Internet copies proven business models that are successful in America (online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, real estate websites, food ordering and delivery websites, etc.) and pastes them in emerging markets in Asia and Africa. They are so famous for their cloning prowess that there’s even an academic research paper about their business practices: E-Commerce Clones: Entrepreneurship or Intellectual Property Theft?. Jumia is a collection of these brands that were targeted at the African consumer market. If you’re resident in any of the 14 countries where Jumia has a presence, am sure you remember brands likes Lamudi and HelloFood (which I wrote about when they first launched in Uganda), and others. Rocket realized it could merge all those disparate struggling brands into one giant Swiss army knife of an African brand and present it to Wall Street. The strategy worked.
But there was a problem with how Rocket Internet shopped its new creation to Wall Street. The giant banner announcing their IPO in New York crowned Jumia as “The 1st African tech startup”. Of course I wasn’t going to let this slide. Immediately, I set out to correct this falsehood before it got too far. The best way to do that and be accurate in my rebuttal, I thought, was dive right into the evidence Jumia itself compiled against their African identity in the publicly-available Form F-1 filing at the Securities and Exchange Commission. After diving through the dense filing, I fired off a Twitter thread laying out exactly why we were falsely celebrating Jumia’s African identity:
The thread triggered a continent-wide debate about what is African and what isn’t. Despite the evidence I carefully laid out proving Jumia was, in fact, a German company, there were passioned arguments why Jumia was uniquely African while Google, Samsung, Huawei, et al weren’t African. Actually, it wasn’t even that they acknowledged that those other off-continent registered companies were not African. It was more like no matter what the evidence was on how similar Jumia’s identity is as a foreign-domiciled entity was, some people still refuse to budge from the false belief that it is an African company and should be celebrated as such.
I was particularly struck at how Iyin ‘E’ Aboyeji tried hard to sell the idea of Jumia’s Africanness. “E” of course isn’t any run of the mill keyboard bandit. He’s been part of two founding teams that launched Africa-focused tech startups, Andela (disclaimer, I serve on Andela’s Global Advisory Council) and Flutterwave. I can sum up his piece as closer to a disaffected “guys, it doesn’t really matter, let’s all just get along,” than a cogent, definitive sales pitch as to why Jumia is African. He starts out by praising what “Rocket Internet has built in Africa against all odds…” then switches to credit the Nigerian team who were working for Rocket:
However, a vocal minority of leaders and opinion makers in our tech ecosystem are saying Jumia, a company co-founded by Africans (Tunde Kehinde and Raphael Afaedor), built with African talent (including a lot of Lagos Business School, Unilag and OAU student interns), to serve an African market (14 African countries) and primarily financed by a Pan-African company (MTN) isn’t African because they are incorporated in Germany and IPO’d on the New York stock exchange.
Iyin ‘E’ Aboyeji
Which is it? Was it built by Rocket Internet or was it built by Nigerians? I suppose on the face of it, both can be true statements. But both don’t convey the same truth.
Jumia wasn’t co-founded by Tunde and Raphael – at least not in the traditional sense of how ‘E’ was a cofounder of both Andela and Flutterwave. Tunde and Raphael didn’t found the idea of Jumia and then went to Rocket Internet for funding. Rocket Internet hired Tunde and Raphael to launch Jumia in Nigeria. The confusion is deliberately caused by how Rocket Internet structures its brands. Brand leads in each of these markets are hired as cofounders. Here are several open cofounder positions listed on Rocket Internet’s website. Again, for clarity, here’s Rocket’s own words (page 44) in their Form F-1 filing (emphasis mine):
As Co-Founders of a new internet venture of Rocket Internet, you will be responsible for setting up all operations, building the team, developing the business activities and gaining market leadership. Each venture is typically led by 2 to 4 Co-Founders. As entrepreneurs they are fully responsible for their business and hold personal stakes in their venture’s equity. At the same time, they are part of our international network. They benefit from Rocket’s expertise and support in all relevant functions. Joining us will be very challenging and rewarding. You will gain the broadest experience in setting up a company. Thus, you will work as an entrepreneur, yet be part of an international team of highly motivated and talented people.
Rocket Internet
The stickiness of Tunde’s and Raphael’s cofounder narrative really tripped up a lot of people here. Let me go on record though and state that I am going to go by Rocket’s own business practices and their Form F-1 as the truth on the matter until further evidence is provided that Jumia was birthed by this Nigerian duo, rather than a creation they shepherded for Rocket Internet.
In fact, there’s not a single mention of Tunde or Raphael against 12 mentions of Sacha Poignonnec and 27(!) of Jeremy Hodara, the current-listed founders. So why are some so fixated on the Nigerian founders narrative? Jumia’s expansion across the continent wasn’t driven by the Nigerian team, it was orchestrated directly from Berlin.
‘Laolu Samuel-Biyi, one of the early hires at what was then called Kasuwa.com, writes about his experience in creating the value that would later become Jumia.
In those early days, Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec, the big bosses at Rocket would fly in, put pressure on everyone at the office, and literally march us to the Mall to show us what merchandising means.
‘Laolu Samuel-Biyi
Hmm… Where have you seen this model before?
Why are we so proud of building empires for everyone else except ourselves? Sure, some of the sweat equity we put out into the world wasn’t enumerated nor was it by choice. Our sweat equity helped build America from “sea to shining sea”. Our coltan and rare minerals power electronics for global companies. Yet we barely have enough electricity to power those same Asian electronics we purchase from Jumia Market. But, you know, let’s celebrate how our sweat equity built the value Rocket Internet gets to pocket. Let’s call it ours even though the 5000 of us pushing jobo in their warehouses don’t even own the boxes we use to ship out cheap Chinese electronics.
In spite of concrete evidence to the contrary, we hold onto the fantasy that Jumia is ours because we desperately want it to be. We need it to be ours. We need to claim something from this windfall achievement. After all, Wall Street is to startups what the Premier League is for African football players – the mantle of approval, the promised land. The pattern is that nothing African is worth claiming until it has achieved the monumental task of being accepted by Western Institutions.
A litany of musicians, actors, scientists go virtually unnoticed and unsupported continent-wide until they suddenly achieve international acclaim. Then and only then, are they worthy of praise and market (and government) support. In Uganda, professional runners don’t start getting support from government until after they’ve scratched and sacrificed their way to a first win on the international stage. Only then are piles of cash thrown at them. Houses erected. Endless stretches of land gifted. We’re post fame groupies. When they’re crowned, they are ours. When they are struggling, they’re just posing. Samuel-Biyi again, whose piece was published a few days before the JMIA IPO:
“In a few days, Jumia will be executing an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, seeking a $1.2bn valuation to officially become a unicorn. It might not be Africa-owned, but in an undeniable way, it’s Africa-built, and for that, I am proud and wish them well. For me personally, whatever the future holds for the company, I owe a lot of my personality today to my history at Jumia, and to me, it is already a success story; an African unicorn.”
‘Laolu Samuel-Biyi?
Jumia is African, only in the sense that the jollof and katogo sweat that built it, is African. The value we created however, is very much European soufflé. We’ve seen this model before. It didn’t end well for us.
But surely, there’s some good in Jumia’s presence on the continent, isn’t there? Of course there is. It’s hard to be completely pessimistic about Jumia’s presence on the continent. 5000 young Africans have a job. Sure, they are mostly low-skill jobs, but they put food on the table on a continent teeming with massive unemployment. The early builders of Jumia’s foundation have used that experience to launch their own startups. Samuel-Biyi saw a gap in the retail market while at Jumia and left to pursue it with other Jumia alums. His post mapped the whereabouts of some of those early Jumia employees and where they are now:
I had someone scour Linkedin for information about the founding team at Jumia (see spreadsheet here); what they were up to before and what they’ve been up to since, and I’m immensely respectful of what they’ve made of themselves, attributable in some part to their time at Jumia going by the trajectory. It’s no surprise at all that 33% of the earliest people have gone on to found their own companies, from Tunde and Ercin at Ace and Lidya, to Evans at Cregital to Chioma at AccountingHub to Raphael at Supermart to Wezam at PrepClass to Sanmi at All Shades Covered to Onyeka at Farmcrowdy to Michael & Moyo at Busha (also ex-SureGifts) to Ochijie at Christopher’s & Co and even Adekunle Gold in the music industry, we’re all hustling it out there.
Samuel-Biyi
I’ve always been passionate about African agency and our responsibility in using it to build the Africa we want. I’d beg that we use that energy and strength to build an Africa that we own, an Africa that contributes its collective intelligence to the human archive. In the age of globalization, African enterprises—conceived and built by African capital, ingenuity and talent—should be able to spread their wings beyond the continent. I want a future filled with those African brands expanding to Europe and the America’s and elsewhere. Why should we cede that future to building enterprises for other people? We need to stop celebrating the world getting rich off of our natural resources and human capital and embrace an Africa that uses its own resources to build its wealth.
Te end, I’ll quote E’s sentiment in another blog post of his in what appears to be his next venture, Future. Africa:
Over the next 50 years, more than half of the world’s working population will live in Africa. Our greatest challenge and opportunity will be building a future that is in Africa’s interest. We can only do this by having frank conversations in public about where we are now, how we got here, and what we need to do to build a future that works for all Africans.
Iyin ‘E’ Aboyeji
We have an immense opportunity to build an Africa that matches our interests and ambitions. Wether we’re inspired or repulsed by Jumia’s theft of identity, let’s do one thing and one thing only: build a future that all Africans can take an ownership in.
