by Soany Pougala
25/11/2025
When it comes to the neocolonialist exploitation of Africa, there is a topic we tend to overlook: it is the matter of undeserved markets.
A basic economics course will give us an intuitive understanding of competitive markets as the fundamental unit of trade and economic development in the modern global economy. Companies compete against each other to obtain a larger share of a given market, increase their profits and expand their operations. Companies that fail to do so go bankrupt and exit the market; their rivals take a larger share and become even more resilient to market forces.
While this competition initially opposes small-scale enterprises, the winners are able to snowball their wins until they reach a level of competitiveness that rival firms are no longer able to catch up with. Those winners, now able to hog most of the market for themselves, are commonly referred to as monopolies.
No longer threatened by their competitors, monopolies are free to set higher prices uncontested. Without competition, they also feel no incentive to innovate or become more productive. This has drastic consequences for the economy as a whole, which explains the existence of antitrust laws in advanced capitalist economies.
Winning a market is no easy task, and with the internationalisation of trade, alongside the rise of key players such as China, making a firm survive in this highly competitive environment is harder than ever. Time and time again, European think tanks and observers have complained about the lack of efficiency and competitiveness of European firms as opposed to American and Chinese ones.
Less than two months ago, financial experts gathered in Frankfurt, Germany, for the SIBOS conference. The head of the Deutsche Bank, Fabrizio Campelli, lamented that Europe’s lack of competitiveness had become a structural issue (1).
Yet for former colonial powers, this is not always a problem. Unlike countries that must fend for themselves in the capitalist market jungle, neocolonial economies inherit deeply entrenched political and institutional ties with the states they once ruled.
By leveraging these ties, they gain privileged access to the severely underdeveloped markets of their former colonies, such as through concessions and monopolies granted to their corporations. These arrangements allow their national capital to accumulate without the usual pressures of competition or the risk of bankruptcy.
Take the case of France, which spent over a century establishing a colonial empire and another half a century strengthening its legacy. During the colonial period, the economy and administration of the colonies were organized to enable exploitation and resource extraction.
After independence, many presidents of the so-called newly liberated countries such as Léopold Senghor in Senegal, Félix Houphouët-Boigny in the Ivory Coast and Ahmadou Ahidjo in Cameroon were French loyalists who sought to maintain France’s dominance on the continent.
With this continued presence in the most intimate layers of the African political spheres, African political elites have for decades illicitly granted French firms with monopolies over key economic industries such as logistics and energy.
It is in this way that the Bolloré group, which in Africa started out as a cigarette manufacturer, became the largest maritime logistics empire of the continent. Without having ever produced a single boat or container, Bolloré has been granted strategic concessions in Africa, from Abidjan to Lomé, Cotonou, Freetown, Conakry, Kribi…
In exchange for handling, at a fixed cost for every boat, the processing of logistics files, Bolloré was given the exclusivity over right to entry fees, berthing fees, storage fees and handling fees of any and every ship docked in one of its African ports. In 2011, Bolloré’s activities in Africa represented 80% of its gross revenue. (2)
A monopoly not over a single country, but over an entire continent (46 countries to be exact), thanks to the initial foundation of African markets being undeservingly monopolized by a foreign firm through political arbitrage.
When in 2021, Bolloré was accused in a court of law of financing the political campaigns of presidents who not only arbitrarily awarded the firm contracts, but also unlawfully annulled contracts with other contractors to then give them over to Bolloré, the company was asked to pay a 12 million euros fine (3).
Quite a good deal, it seems, considering the African logistics branch of the group was sold in 2022 to the Swiss and Italian firm MSC for the sum of 5.7 billion euros (4), 475 times the sum of the fine. Furthermore, Bolloré is still heavily present in the continent through its television group Canal+ which is currently present in 20 African countries.
As monopolies, these foreign firms contribute nothing to local development. Their profits resemble an annuity, sustained by their ability to set fixed prices over the entire market and shielded by African elites who secure them trade privileges, tax breaks, and other illicit concessions
But not every foreign company can be a Bolloré. What happens when foreign companies still fail to turn a profit in monopoly markets? This was the case of Cameroon’s Eneo Energie.
In 2001, Cameroon privatized its national electricity company, Eneo, selling 51% of its capital to the American firm AES. Thirteen years later, the British investment fund Actis replaced the Americans, holding 56% of the company. The official justification behind privatization was to improve efficiency. Yet two decades later, only a handful of rural villages have access to electricity.
After becoming a privately owned monopoly, Eneo had little incentive to extend electrification beyond Douala and Yaoundé or to invest in productivity gains. Indeed, Cameroon lacks energy-intensive industries that consume large amounts of power. It thus seems obvious that a profit-driven private company would have solely focused on the two major cities of the country rather than on rural expansion and national development. Failure was predictable to everyone but the administration officials who claimed that privatizing Eneo would lead to the development of Cameroon.
When private companies fail elsewhere, they go bankrupt. In Africa, however, even failure gets outsourced to the colonized while the investors walk away unburdened. Just days ago, the Cameroonian state announced that it had acquired 95% of Eneo after buying Actis’s shares (5). The Cameroonian state has thus paid 78 billion FCFA (118 million euros) to acquire full ownership of a company that carries a debt of 800 billion FCFA (1.2 billion euros). Even assuming profits stay constant and debt does not increase, it would take roughly a century for Cameroonians to repay the cost of this undeserved market misadventure.
This problem is repeated with other companies. Total Energies, EDF, AirFrance, Vinci, Societe Generale, Canal+, Orange, Carrefour, have all grown in the same way, through the acquisition of unfair trade privileges at the expense of local consumers and local firms. The problem is not exclusive to France. The matter also persists with British, Belgian, German, capital… Every industrial sector of Africa has been infested by parasitic firms, aided by African governments propped-up by European countries.
Yet this advantage is a double-edged sword for European firms. On one hand, they are granted markets that they do not deserve, which allows them to accumulate enough profit to not get swallowed whole on the international market. On the other hand, their position as monopolies and how they achieved it makes them severely ill-equipped to tackle the challenges posed by ultra-competitive, ultra-productive firms forged in cutthroat domestic markets, such as Chinese firms seeking to expand overseas.
The “China threat” stems less from China flooding European markets with unbeatable products at unprecedented prices, and more from European firms relying on their ability to freely exploit third-world markets, which eliminates any need to innovate or stay competitive. The rising pressure of international trade, combined with the fear of tariff wars, now puts this model at risk. After all, a pig only feels safe in a house made of straw for as long as no wolf is in sight.
I, for one, am too cynical to believe that European governments will take this threat seriously enough to renounce their treasured neocolonial system of undeserved markets to invest more seriously in their own domestic productive forces.
One thing is for sure: The world is moving forward and if Europe chooses to stay behind in the old colonial world, it might risk dying in it.
25/11/2025
Soany Pougala
Featured image: Vincent Bolloré and his son, Cyrille Bolloré, now CEO of the group. By Eric Piermont via Bloomberg.
(1) https://flow.db.com/trade-finance/dawn-of-europes-new-trade-order
(2) https://linsoumission.fr/2025/03/27/bollore-afrique-neocolonialisme/
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