BUA founder Abdulsamad Rabiu has advocated for connecting and aligning African Markets at the ongoing CEO’s Forum held in Kigali, Rwanda. The CEO’s Forum brought together African leaders, business founders, and presidents, including President Bola Tinubu. President Tinubu led the Nigerian delegation to the opening ceremony of the African CEO’s……
BUA founder Abdulsamad Rabiu has advocated for connecting and aligning African Markets at the ongoing CEO’s Forum held in Kigali, Rwanda.
The CEO’s Forum brought together African leaders, business founders, and presidents, including President Bola Tinubu.
President Tinubu led the Nigerian delegation to the opening ceremony of the African CEO’s Forum in Kigali, Rwanda.
The President touched down at the Kigali International Airport at exactly 1:58 pm ahead of the two-day summit scheduled to be held on the 14th and 15th of May under the theme: “Scale or Fail: Why Africa Must Embrace Shared Ownership.”
Addressing the forum, Rabiu said, “Alignment does not compromise independence; rather, it strengthens economic performance. The 21st century will not reward detached brilliance but coordinated execution.
“First, infrastructure. Because no economy can be industrialised without the systems that power growth. Reliable energy, efficient ports, modern rail networks, quality roads, and digital connectivity are critical to reducing costs, improving productivity, and connecting African markets.”
Providing a summary of his address, the Africa CEO Forum indicated that the BUA Group chairman diagnosed the global economic order.
Africa CEO Forum via its official X (formerly Twitter) handle on Thursday said, “Rabiu Samad, CON, Founder and Executive Chairman of BUAgroup, opened the Africa CEO Forum 2026 with an address that set the strategic tone for the two days ahead. His diagnosis began with the world. The global economic order is being reshaped in real time, with geopolitical tensions, shifting alliances and reconfigured supply chains redefining how the planet produces and trades. In that reshaping, Africa is no longer a marginal player, and the question facing the continent has changed shape entirely. It is no longer a question of whether Africa matters. The question now is whether Africa is ready to act at scale.
“From there, his intervention crystallised into a framework of five transformations that will determine the continent’s next phase. Capital, to finance ambition. Policy, to enable execution. Infrastructure is the foundation of growth. Value addition, to unlock the full value of African resources rather than exporting them raw. And integration, to unlock the scale that no single national market can deliver on its own. Taken together, these five levers describe with unusual clarity the operational programme of a continent that intends to stop reacting to global forces and start shaping them.
“The address mapped almost exactly onto the architecture of this year’s ACF conversation, from the Mine-Power-Make logic of value chain integration to the case for pan-African capital ownership and the megaproject ambition that will define the next decade. Rabiu’s framing matters because it comes from a builder, the head of one of West Africa’s most consequential industrial groups, whose own trajectory in cement, sugar and food processing embodies precisely the value-addition discipline he was calling on the continent to embrace.”