It is not every day you watch very smart people deliberately contradict themselves, but if you were at the 3i Africa Summit in Accra earlier this month, you might have seen it happen.
Premier Oiwoh is the chief executive officer of the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), Nigeria’s largest payment switch, which moves almost every naira between Nigerian banks. On the second day of the summit, which the Bank of Ghana convenes each year, he said something you rarely hear from someone in his position. He had grown tired, he said, of conferences like this one. They promise solutions that never arrive.
Panels at conferences are essentially formulaic in this sense: organisers put four or five decision-makers on stage, add a respected field moderator, and, for 30 or 40 minutes, work through a series of questions. Then the session ends, the room applauds, and little appears to change.
Oiwoh’s panel was about stitching African countries into a single financial bloc, modelled on how money moves across the European Union. Africans have tried and are still trying. PAPSS, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, already exists, but a borderless African payment rail still feels as distant as it did five years ago.
