Capital Needs Confidence: Why Africa's Next Investment Fight Is About Plumbing

Africa does not lack projects or ambition. It often lacks the payment records, data and systems that let a lender trust that a project will be paid for. That is the argument behind a series of conference appearances this autumn by Richard Simanga Ngwenya, head of the Honeybadger Family Office and founder of Nisela Capital.

He will speak at Africa Energy Week and the Africa Tech Festival in Cape Town, and at the Connected Banking Summit in Johannesburg. The panels cover energy, banking and technology, but in his view they raise the same question: whether Africa has the "financial and digital plumbing" to turn promising businesses into ones that can attract capital.

Three panels, one theme
Energy (Africa Energy Week, 15 October). The panel is titled "Solving the Offtaker Confidence Problem in AfricaIs Digital Infrastructure a Viable, Bankable Solution?" It asks whether digital payments, AI-based credit and risk assessment, cloud data platforms, interoperable energy systems and smart metering can close the confidence gap between developers, financiers, utilities, governments and end users.

Banking (Connected Banking Summit, Johannesburg, 14 October). "Payments Modernization & Real-Time Rails in Southern Africa" looks at how banks, fintechs and regulators are responding to demand for faster, interoperable payment systems.

Mr Ngwenya speaks as Executive Chair of Wynk Group, whose WynkPay platform serves merchants dealing with fragmented payments and reconciliation.
Technology (Africa Tech Festival, Cape Town, 17 November). "The Invisible Fintech" turns to the systems behind digital finance: payment rails, APIs, identity and compliance, settlement and data.

"Capital needs confidence, and businesses need systems that actually work," Mr Ngwenya says.
The offtaker problem, explained
In power projects, an "offtaker" is the buyer of the electricity, often a state-owned utility.

If the utility pays late or not at all, the project cannot repay its lenders, and the project may never be financed. Historically, many independent power projects relied on sovereign or government support for a state utility's payment obligations.

That support is harder to obtain today. A Haynes Boone summary of a September project-finance panel notes that governments are increasingly reluctant to promise help if a project cannot service its debts, so state utilities are instead used to assign their strongest credit profiles.

Legal analysts at CMS argue that moving to private offtake changes the risk without removing it, and that bankability does not begin and end with a guarantee.

This is where Mr Ngwenya's argument has weight. If real-time payment data, smart metering and credit analytics give lenders better visibility of who pays, when and how much, perceived risk can fall, and so can the cost of capital. "Perceived risk decides whether capital shows up at all," he says. The need is large, since about 565 million people in Africa still live without electricity.

What the data can and cannot do
There are limits worth stating plainly:
Visibility is not solvency. A smart meter can show that customers are not paying or that a utility is losing power to theft. It cannot make a financially weak utility strong. Tariffs that cover costs, collection discipline and governance reform still matter.
Data needs trust. AI-based credit scoring and shared data platforms raise questions about privacy, bias and who owns the information.
Interoperability is political. Real-time payment rails across borders require regulators to agree on standards, as Africa's pan-African payment initiatives have shown.
Invisible does not mean unaccountable. The infrastructure behind fintech, including identity, compliance and settlement, needs oversight because a failure there affects millions of users.

What it means for Ghana and West Africa
Honeybadger says its initial investment focus is Southern and West Africa. For Ghana, the themes are familiar: utilities that struggle to collect, merchants who depend on mobile money and fragmented payment tools, and fintechs that need reliable identity, compliance and settlement systems.

If investors want to back that "unseen" layer, Ghanaian regulators and companies should make themselves ready by publishing clear rules, improving data quality and building credible track records. The Bank of Ghana's recent move to let importers pay Chinese suppliers from cedi accounts shows how much payment infrastructure can shift trade, a point I discussed recently.

Mustapha Bature Sallama
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Analysis,
International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding. (USIP)
[email protected]
+233555275880

References
APO Group for Honeybadger Family Office, "Honeybadger Family Office Head Richard Simanga Ngwenya to Speak at Africa Energy Week, Connected Banking Summit and Africa Tech Festival," Johannesburg, 7 October 2026 (press release supplied).

Sihle Bulose (CMS South Africa), "Africa's energy future will be built on bankability not guarantees alone," 28 September 2026: https://africa.com/business/africas-energy-future-will-be-built-on-bankability-not-guarantees-alone

Haynes Boone, "Financing Africa's Infrastructure Future: Key Takeaways from the IPFA Future Leaders Panel," 30 September 2026: https://www.haynesboone.com/news/alerts/financing-africas-infrastructure-future-key-takeaways-from-ipfa-future-leaders-panel