JEREMIE MUAMBA DINKOLOBO: A RISING ENTREPRENEUR AND AN INSPIRATION FOR THE AFRICAN YOUTH

Africa currently is moving decisively toward its transformation and development. For instance, awareness is growing on the part of the African Union Commission and other pan-African role players that young entrepreneurs are pivotal to the achievement of a prosperous, integrated continent as the future we want to see. Jeremie Muamba Dinkolobo has arisen to the occasion to address this challenge of the need of an asserted African youth entrepreneurship. He is a young entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Rolihlahla Agriculture Microfinance Project Ltd (RAMP LTD); and he is based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His ascension in the business community is dazzlingly awesome, in two aspects. On the one hand, it is meteoric because of the magnitude of his achievements within a short timeframe—RAMP LTD being founded merely on the 17^th of June 2013. And, on the other hand, it is innovative: RAMP LTD is venturing in a highly yielding, yet unchartered business region of agribusiness development microfinance, driven by a firm, realistic prospect of becoming the spearhead of a booming pro-poor agriculture microfinance industry in South Africa, and a major player in the pan-African struggle for poverty eradication, full employment, and food security in Africa, and a pollution-free global environment. Verily, as we are celebrating today the African Youth, Jeremie Muamba is its inspiration. The following lines are shedding light on his identity, the nature and values of RAMP LTD, his company, and his foresight on the economic future of our beloved continent.

1. JEREMIE MUAMBA’S CURRICULUM VITAE

Born on the 13^thOctober 1986, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mr Jeremie Muamba Dinkolobo holds an honour’s degree in economics from the Catholic University of Congo, and is pursuing a master’s in the same field at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. This degree has given him the edge, providing him the skill to work in the Congo successively as a customer service operative at Tech Mahindra, a back-up operative at Airtel, and most importantly, a junior official at the Commercial Bank of Congo. Furthermore, his skill in the field of economics got sharpened with his higher education in South Africa, leading him to the creation of RAMP LTD.

Besides, Mr Dinkolobo’s swift, steadfast rise on the business scene is underpinned by his spiritual capital: he is a devoted Christian, enjoying a rich experience of selfless commitment for his brethren, especially as a church youth leader. This spiritual capital—summarised in faith in God and in Africa’s huge potential, the love of the neighbour, and the hope of the advent of our continent as a world hegemonic bloc—bred within him an inextinguishable passion to empower the poor through RAMP LTD’s microcredit schemes, and therefore drove him to confidently establishing his business in South Africa’s ever-shunned enterprise development microcredit sector.

Thanks to these human and spiritual capitals, Mr Dinkolobo’s success has been irreversible and impressively fast. The idea of founding RAMP LTD germinated in his mind on the 17^th of June 2013, before participating in the Third Global Conference on Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Security and Climate Change, held in Johannesburg, on 3-5 December 2013. And, given that it is innovative and attractive, the idea got powerful enough to open doors to the Congolese-born young entrepreneur. He was invited and duly took part in the IFPRI 2020 Conference on Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 15-17 May 2014.

If Johannesburg was the catalyst, Addis Ababa was the watershed in the evolution of the project. Thanks to its concept of resilience, the Conference equipped the new-born RAMP LTD in upgrading the positing of theories, issues and strategies in both the business management training of its prospective client agribusiness owners and workshop and internship programmes of its prospective senior and junior executives and employees. For, since this MFI combines profit and social development of the poor, these educative programmes are requisites prior both to hiring employees and awarding loans to clients. Lastly, not long afterward, along with two executives, Mr Noah Ben Adam (RAMP LTD COO), and Ms LindokuhleNkosi (RAMP LTD CIO), Mr Dinkolobo participated in the High-Level Food Security Partners’ Meeting, which was organised by the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) in Pretoria, on the 29^th of May 2014, against the backdrop of the celebration of the Africa Day by enhancing strategic partnerships for collective action toward a continent-wide development. This development meeting equipped RAMP LTD with the knowledge of the realities of farming, land availability, weather, climate change, and governmental role in South Africa for ulterior responsible agribusiness microfinance undertakings.

2. NATURE OF ROLIHLAHLA AGRICULTURE MICROFINANCE PROJECT LTD

RAMP LTD is a pan-African climate-smart agribusiness development microfinance institution (MFI). It is registered as a public company and is based in Johannesburg, RSA. In its capacity as the assistant of the government of South Africa, and of other African countries thereafter, it has the vision to end poverty, blatant social inequalities, and hunger, and to reverse climate change by 2050, within the framework of the triptych of sustainable development: economic growth, social justice, and a pollution-free environment. Thus it is a partner of the United Nations: it contributes to the successful attainment of its Millennium Development Goals; its initial activities undertaken during this year rime with the world body’s proclamation of 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming; and in 2010, at the occasion of the launch of the U.N. Second Decade for Poverty-Eradication, the world body acknowledged microfinance as a major strategy of poverty eradication and development. By the same token, RAMP LTD contributes to the successful attainment of the African Union’s development objectives, which are spelt out in the NEPAD, against the backdrop of the proclamation by the continental ruling body of 2014 as the Year of Agriculture and Food Security. Thus it assists the government in the fulfilment of the national development agenda in South Africa and thereafter other African nations.

Furthermore, RAMP LTD stands out amongst the business community. It has a mission that lies in its two-fold vocation: social and economic. On the one hand, its social vocation consists in its microcredit programmes being aimed at empowering at a low cost the poor not only by enabling them to take control of their lives through entrepreneurship, but also to meet basic needs: food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, and transport. On the other hand, its economic vocation consists in its triple role of custody, midwifery and husbandry of small business community.

First, RAMP LTD is a ‘custodian’, building a new market in the underdeveloped enterprise development microcredit sector, and striving to guarantee fair trade locally, nationwide, and worldwide for the growth of its client microenterprises and SMEs. Second, it is a ‘midwife’, assisting to the birth and mushrooming of agricultural microenterprises and SMEs by awarding small loans as start-up capital to poor households. And third, its ‘husbandry’ role consists in training the clients in business management so that they grow their businesses and reimburse with interest the loan; in getting their businesses insured; in negotiating with the state for granting land to the clients; and in providing them with information on market trends toward a responsible decision making. Subsequently, RAMP LTD’s developmental policy is the third way toward a more humane capitalism, the one that empowers the marginalised and, simultaneously, jettisons the imperfections of the state and the market.

Lastly, to mark 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming, RAMP LTD is about to undertake a series of microcredit programmes across South Africa and thereafter the rest of the continent, targeting poor families as the main beneficiaries of these programmes.

3. VALUES OF ROLIHLAHLA AGRICULTURE MICROFINANCE PROJECT LTD

RAMP LTD is confident that its socioeconomic programmes are going to be successful because this public company is grounded and animated by a particular ethos, which consists of inter alia the values hereafter:

(a) Ubuntu, which implies the idea of humanity as a cornerstone of African ethics, and teaches that I am human only in relation to another human and the rest of the human race. Therefore, financially empowering the poor equals positively answering a genuinely humane plea inasmuch as one’s not fully human if one’s an isle of wealth in the midst of a sea of poverty;

(b) Positive non-conformism, which is expressed through the name Rolihlahla (meaning in Xhosa the one who brings in trouble) and implies that the organisation is shaking the poor in their comfort zone of misery and is giving them wings to get out of mediocrity and to fly towards social elevation and prosperity. This value also connotes that the organisation brings change in the African microcredit sector (the South African in particular), emphasizing the shift from the mainstream microcredit for consumption (which favours the middle class) to the microcredit for the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to be driven by the poor;

(c) Entrepreneurship, which is a pillar in the creation of the wealth of nations in industrialised world and the uppermost strategy to promote amidst Africa’s poor in order to eradicate poverty, social inequalities and hunger in the continent, and to reverse global warming; and

(d) Family, which is the cell of the nation and the uppermost guarantor of its future inasmuch as it is the primary framework wherein the child’s normal physical and psychological development is guaranteed. Hence, family is the unit that is preferred by the RAMP LTD to allocate credit to.

4. FORESIGHT OF THE FUTURE OF AFRICA’S ECONOMY

RAMP LTD foresees the take-off of the economic development of Africa as a bloc in a near future. Indeed, reports show a steadfast growth in many African economies which enjoy sound fundamentals: peace, political stability, reliable infrastructure, democracy and the rule of law, and an environment that is attractive to FDIs. The main challenge is to maintain these fundamentals in advancing economies and to lay them down in the less developed ones. To address this challenge, strategies should be implemented at both regional and sub-regional levels.

On the one hand, at the regional level, the establishment of the continental institutions (African Union, NEPAD, etc.) should be accompanied by the elaboration and championing of a pan-African culture (having as components the elevation of African Renaissance as Africa’s official political ideal; the teaching of the indigenous values of Ubuntu, fertility and freedom; the appropriation of foreign cultural contribution, in terms of sustainable research and innovation, intellectual property and marketing, private entrepreneurship, etc.; and the celebration of the achievements of our heroes) as the ideological factor that bonds together African peoples from the grassroots living forces to the African Union structures, the building of transcontinental infrastructures, and by the latter’s means, the networking of civil societies toward the fight for the abovementioned fundamentals and other pan-African causes beside the governments, especially while facing imperialistic pressures from the world major powers. RAMP LTD thus lauds the Grand Inga Hydropower Project, which recently was signed by the governments of South Africa and Congo-Kinshasa to provide electricity to the entire continent in order to speed up industrialisation. We need many more continental infrastructural projects of such magnitude.

On the other hand, at the sub-regional level, blocs should be consolidated around the traditional giants: Egypt (for the North Africa bloc), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Central Africa bloc), South Africa (Southern Africa bloc), Nigeria (West Africa bloc), and Kenya (East Africa bloc), and trade barriers should be shattered within, and gradually between, them to speed up economic integration. Furthermore, the sub-regional blocs should be so much institutionally developed as frameworks wherein entrepreneurial spirit is widespread through sponsoring efforts such as enterprise development MFIs, and accountability is genuine thanks to the consolidation of the rule of law, the rise of a new breed of leaders (the elect ones), and the vibrancy of civil society movements. We can, and we are determined to, materialise all these developmental requisites during our lifetime.