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Amb Martin Kimani and Kevin Kajiwara // Seven Aside (Live) - Nov 18, 2025 - Part 2
21 Plays7 days ago
In part two of this special doubleheader, Kit Magazine presents Amb Martin Kimani, President and CEO of The Africa Center, with Kevin Kajiwara, President of Political Risk at Teneo and host of Teneo Insights
Recorded at Frankfurt Kurnit, in lower Manhattan, on Nov 18
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Transcript
Introduction to Global Sport, Media, and Culture
00:00:11
Speaker
An animating proposition for us as a publisher and a consultancy is to shed a different light on the incredibly dynamic, rapidly evolving, deeply intertwined areas of sport, media and culture in the global context.
00:00:21
Speaker
It seems you can't go a day anymore without a headline that casts the need for this perspective and intelligence into sharp, even urgent relief.
Africa's Political and Economic Landscape
00:00:28
Speaker
Whereas our conversation with Richard Brown and Franklin Leonard, published last episode, allowed us to go inside projects with profound implications and symbolism for Africa, the industry, and beyond, the second segment of that evening gave us an opportunity to zoom out, take stock of this moment for the continent and diaspora, politically, culturally, socially, economically, and even bring things closer to home.
Meet the Speakers: Ambassador Martin Kamani and Kevin Kajiwara
00:00:48
Speaker
Here is Ambassador Martin Kamani, CEO of the Africa Center New York City, with Kevin Kajiwara, President of Political Risk at Consultancy Teneo and host of the Teneo Insights series.
00:01:05
Speaker
Well, thank you very much, Eben, for having me here.
Ambassador Kimani's Career Overview
00:01:10
Speaker
um And thank you for for sitting down. Ambassador Martin Kimani, he is, as Eben said, the president and CEO of the Africa Center here in New York City. And if you haven't been up to that beautiful building on Fifth Avenue one hundred and 109th Street, um it is as worth going up there and It's the most recently purpose-built museum on the museum mile and most recent since the Gugan, actually. And previously, as Evan mentioned, he was Kenya's ah permanent representative or ambassador to the United Nations and held a number of other
00:01:46
Speaker
ah post representing representing Kenya internationally. But he also spent time in the private sector, started early in his career at a currency hedge fund here in New York City, and also advised underwriters on political risk in London as well.
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Speaker
He is a fellow at a number of institutions of higher learning here in New York City, including SIPA up at Columbia and at NYU.
Africa's Demographic Trends and Market Potential
00:02:11
Speaker
And he's on the board of the International Rescue Committee. You really get from one end of this island to the other, ah don't you? It's good thing we're going free buses pretty soon. So, um you know, the conversation that we just had yeah is is interesting because in a way it captures a microcosm.
00:02:29
Speaker
Africa right now, where increasingly the most important natural resource is is human resources, and it also represents a giant and growing as we move through the rest of the century market as well. And I think, know, my question, my first question for you really is, you know, there's no place in a way that that seems to represent the duality of, ah you know, of opportunity as well as challenges on executing. um But let's talk about that opportunity for a second.
00:03:00
Speaker
right The population um of Europe and of the Americas is lowing off. In Asia, the population is going to top out by 2050. But the population of Africa is growing and growing fast. right Two and a half billion people by 2050, it'll be four billion by the by the turn of the century. That's 10 times the population of 40 years ago. So this is an enormous market opportunity. There's going to be a lot of buying power, buying power there.
00:03:29
Speaker
It's a young consumer base. But talk about, you know, we mentioned the 50 plus countries with enormously wildly varying spectrum of institutional capability, political stability, security, et Talk about your observation on the on the state of the continent.
Infrastructure Challenges in Africa
00:03:50
Speaker
Well, thank you, Kevin. And it's it's great being here. I could have continued listening to that conversation. an amazing conversation. And Richard, you're such a great moderator. You know, the...
00:04:04
Speaker
The compensation may be very envious of of what Rwanda is doing as a Kenyan. And i was thinking, you know, Kenya has these amazing runners. Like we win everything in sight. We sweep these things.
00:04:16
Speaker
ah But the infrastructure of running um is not yet built up on the continent. It's like we we have to leave. know, we have to leave Kenya. you have to leave the River Valley.
00:04:27
Speaker
to go make money in Germany in the New York Marathon. So I really wondered what our demographics are going to mean. Is there going to be the same appeal, the same kind of investment? Basketball and running are very different, of course.
00:04:40
Speaker
um But look, um The creation of the League in Africa is um is a recognition of the power of the demographics of the continent.
00:04:52
Speaker
Like once you grasp those demographics, the next thing you will ask is how can I be part of that journey? Because the rest of the world is... is aging or flatlining in terms of age, while Africa is just exploding upwards. And it's exploding upwards not just in numbers, but what those numbers want. They want.
00:05:12
Speaker
they They are globally minded. are technologically connected. They are ambitious. um They have access to information, and they have aspirations. They want to live the way people live in
Political Skepticism Among African Youth
00:05:24
Speaker
New York. And if your investment is packed the right way,
00:05:28
Speaker
you're going to ride up with them and hopefully them with you. I think the other part of the comp conversation that came through was the stability in Rwanda. oh Rwanda's cleanliness, its relative government effectiveness.
00:05:44
Speaker
and And that portion there is more difficult. Because while Rwanda is doing that, a lot of other countries on the continent are having a much harder time. So you have the youth population that is largely cut off from ah political structures of the day. they They're skeptical of their leaders, the the the political machinery, and the democratic experiments that have happened around Africa have not fundamentally led to...
00:06:13
Speaker
prosperity for young people. So I think there's going to be far less political stability ah because there's agitation for change and there's resistance for change by an older generation of leaders who want to play an old game.
00:06:28
Speaker
an old political game, and young people are not going to have it. And between those two,
Impact of Urbanization on Africa
00:06:33
Speaker
there's going to be an almighty clash. We've seen it in Madagascar. We've seen it in Morocco. It was in Kenya, my country, last year, going into this year as well, and it's not going to stop.
00:06:44
Speaker
In Tanzania, it's going on right now. In Sudan, the young people overthrew... an old um dictator party dictatorship.
00:06:55
Speaker
ah So I think there's going to be a lot of political Tamar, and that's going to create um a lot of instability. Meanwhile, underneath this Tamar, because it's not going to be everywhere, there going to be these islands of enormous growth and potential, such as in Rwanda.
00:07:13
Speaker
So can you expand on that just about last point, just a little bit. I mean, you know, it's extraordinary in 1950, there were 27 million people living in urban centers in, um, uh, in sub-Saharan Africa today today it is 570 million. It's estimated to be a billion by 2040. And in Kenya, um, you know, at the time of independence, I think there were 360,000 people in Nairobi, um, 4.4 million today. And two and a half million of those live in you know what would pejoratively be referred to as slums or informal settlements. So talk a little bit about the challenge of of absorbing the you know ah this number of people into the into the urban centers um and the ability to kind of you know um deliver on, as we as we saw you know as we have seen,
00:08:02
Speaker
as you just mentioned Gen Z is is agitating and not just in Africa. We've seen it yeah on almost every continent in just in the recent, in this last year.
Generational Shifts and Cultural Dynamics
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Speaker
so So talk about how you see the development, you know, somebody was inside government yourself, the deepening of institutional, um you know, strength to, and flexibility to deal to deal with this after, you know, all of the challenges that have been imposed in the post-colonial era.
00:08:31
Speaker
yeah Well, perhaps I could ah ah briefly personalize it a little bit. um The generational changes in Africa are really quite astonishing. The difference between me and my mother and her and her mother and my grandmother's mother, the changes in these generations are at a level of velocity.
00:08:52
Speaker
that is, i don't think have ever been matched in human history. And a huge part of that is urbanization. So if, it when when I would, my my grandmother passed away, and well, all my grandparents passed away, but when I would sit across from them and I'm coming from, I'm in school in New Hampshire, in University New Hampshire, and I'm sitting across from her, she would look at me so curiously, like, who's this boy?
00:09:20
Speaker
yeah Because the way I behaved, the way talked, the languages I talked were completely unlike anything she had grown up with. But we're kin and we're really close. And and a large part of my difference is really us becoming city people.
00:09:36
Speaker
and the city with its deracidating sort of um power, its ah power of connection, in a way, cutting you off from your sort of cultural roots in a way and recreating you anew.
00:09:49
Speaker
ah So this has happened throughout Africa. In fact, um the urbanization effect is so powerful that even in the rural areas, the rural areas are increasingly urban-minded. Like if you go to small towns and villages or around Africa,
00:10:04
Speaker
They're very different from the villages i grew up seeing in terms of the mentality of people. So this rapid urbanization is happening. But the question is, is there a sufficient um economic opportunity to make urbanization be part of industrialization. Because if you look at New York, and all of you will, you know you've seen films about the tenements and the, ah you know, Avenue A, B, and C, and, you know, how it was, and then it all comes up because of basically industry and, of course, unions and all that and the politics.
00:10:39
Speaker
But Africa's urbanization is not industrialization. So you're leaving your farm to go to tenement-type informal settlements where you don't have a job, right? And that then creates a form of poverty.
00:10:56
Speaker
ah Urban poverty, in a way, is far more crushing than rural poverty because when you're back home at ideal farm, you're going to eat,
00:11:07
Speaker
You're going to eat. You own something. You have some livestock. There's a whole social structure. You go to the city, you're jobless, you're alone, you're sort of cut off from these sources. So how we get economic opportunity and development and jobs for these young people is what's going to determine whether Nairobi or Kigali look like New York in 50 years time, or they continue being like really, um, uh, um, spaces of exclusion and crime and, and disaffection.
Demographic Surge and Workforce Challenges
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah. i don't think your grandmother is the only person who wonders about people from New Hampshire. I think the rest of us, but, um, You know, this this point, though, of the of the demographic surge in Africa, no matter how much opportunity is provided or, you know, how much institutional strength um is developed. I mean, the reality of it is, is that by 2030, you know, half of all new workers every year entering the global workforce are going to be in South Saharan Africa. 15 million workers a year starting coming of of job age and only 3 million, you know, formal sector jobs being created. So migration is going to continue to be an unstoppable force. And I think, you know, we can just add the further challenges of climate change and how badly that's going to impact South Saharan Africa. So we've seen
00:12:33
Speaker
that surge north. um And I think, you know, the the sort of migratory surge we've seen impact domestic politics in Europe is kind of a junior varsity version of what is likely to come. But let's talk about America. And this kind of segues into now your new work this year at the Africa Center and how, you know, with the work that you're doing two you know facilitate this cultural dialogue to, you know, to encourage the diaspora, um etc.
00:13:04
Speaker
um Clearly, in this country, there are a lot of African immigrants who have have done extraordinary things in politics. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, um as an example, to Kempe Mutombo and other other athletes, Trevor Noah in entertainment. I guess we can't really forget about Ilhan
Africa Center's Mission and Diaspora Connections
00:13:24
Speaker
either.
00:13:24
Speaker
But um But, you know, they the and then when you extend that to the first generation Americans, I mean, it's just, you know, a president of the United States is a perfect example. So tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing and how that mission is changing under your leadership at at the African Center.
00:13:43
Speaker
Oh, thank you. Well, um Africa is being is being asked to do a number of things that no one else has ever been asked to do. um One is to grow up to grow your economy the age of automation. ah So ah the phrase that keeps me up at night is, if it can be quantified, it will be automated eventually, right?
00:14:06
Speaker
So how you create economies that can take those young people and give them opportunity at a time when machines are going to be a major part of manufacturing and industry. um It's not impossible, but that's and that's ah that ladder is maybe different from the ladder China went up, maybe different from the ladder Southeast Asia went up.
00:14:28
Speaker
So how is that going to look? Second, Africa is being asked to grow in the age of sustainability. So people are far more conscious of environmental destruction and pursuit of profit.
00:14:39
Speaker
and And this manifests in actually ah minimizing and limiting Africa's ah use of its fossil fuels. um So In other words, there's going to need to be a lot of thinking and a lot of designing of new solutions in Africa.
00:14:55
Speaker
um Africa's one of Africa's great powers. So the same way America, one of America's golden eggs is the ability to draw talent from everywhere in the world. Africa's one of Africa's great powers is having this diaspora.
00:15:09
Speaker
around the world that is engaged in across industries, across occupations, and has um a growing um identification and desire to engage with Africa.
00:15:23
Speaker
That bridge that that we had in ah in the in the conversation before, The bridge of a Maasai in Toronto reaching out to Kigali, that's the bridge. Not because people here have figured out how to build those kinds of economies, but because people here have figured out a lot of different financing models and figured out a lot of ways in which you can create new forms of inclusion. I was really interested in the blacklist and just the the the genius of looking at the thing that was not made.
00:15:52
Speaker
and and allowing it. That's a form of deep inclusion work. um And so at the Africa Center, um I see our key mission of creating deeper communion between Africa and its diaspora, and broadly more with the United States, but with its diaspora foremost. And that is opportunities to co-invest in each other, opportunities to seed and join in entrepreneurialism together.
00:16:21
Speaker
Right now, we're running a big study, we which we've called... we call um commissioned with Afroxin Bank, the African Import Export Bank, on the African diaspora in the United States from a financial perspective. And to use that data to hopefully design new financial instruments for especially African migrants, African-American population, which is the biggest part of the diaspora,
00:16:48
Speaker
here in in the U.S., there's comprehensive data on on on the African-American population. But on African migrants and their children, it's sort of split up in all kinds of ways. And we're trying to understand it better. And what does that mean is how can we get more opportunity for the diaspora here to earn more money and that and and to make um sort of better economic performance. And that will lead to them uplifting their families and their countries back home. At the same time, how can we get um African-American, African-Caribbean, Afro-Latino business people to be part of business consortiums that are building in Africa? A good example is Afroximbank will lend money to an African government to build an airport.
00:17:34
Speaker
Nothing stops a across a sort of African-American group that was part of the JFK building. ah putting together bid and accompanying Afregs and bank to invest in Africa because we're looking for new sources of financing.
00:17:49
Speaker
So we approach this from a cultural um connection point of view, but on top of belonging and having conversations with each other, we want to layer investment in each other.
00:18:02
Speaker
So I have two final questions for you because I'm cognizant of the fact the only thing standing between all of these people at the bar is you. So, um And, you know, one of the things that you and I share is is this interest in geopolitics, my daily business. And um so I wanted to sort of end on that note. um Going back to Africa for a moment, you know, the colonial era is obviously over.
Global Powers in Africa: US and China
00:18:27
Speaker
However,
00:18:28
Speaker
the great powers continue to circle. Um, the United States, Russia, China, increasingly the Gulf States as well. How are, you know, how are the, how are the governments, uh, societies trying to deal with that now? Because obviously,
00:18:46
Speaker
um these these are These are powerful countries that have a lot of money, um in in many cases, Russian case, weapons and security issues as well. um But how are they going to make it work for Africa and Africans this time as but as opposed to just a take?
00:19:03
Speaker
Yeah, well... um I like to think that the world's most important job is political engineers. ah Everything we're standing in this magnificent office, basketball in Africa, all of it is dependent on political engineers. That's what Kagame is. He's a political engineer who has, with his with his party, have engineered,
00:19:27
Speaker
um a country and a government, a way that that government works. ah They've engineered its incentives and its structures. And right now, because of the fiscal pressures of many African governments and this sort of um great great contest that's unfolding between China and the United States, your kind of your form of political engineering is going to get tested a lot ah because the powers that be are not holding back in terms of norms and ethics. they It's about power and it's about taking what you can um despite what anyone in front of you saying.
00:20:05
Speaker
So it's not that different from what it was before, but before it was mannered. Now you you smash and grab. And the strength of your political engineering is what will keep you going.
00:20:17
Speaker
A lot of African states are poorly engineered because they essentially just inherited colonial structures, put a bit of paint on it, and tried a few democratic experiments, but did not do the sort of deep foundational work, which unfortunately Rwanda did because of a genocide, as opposed to evolving it intellectually.
00:20:39
Speaker
ah So I think you see um China, the United States are being joined by so smaller powers, but they're surging into Africa from the Middle East.
00:20:51
Speaker
ah The Turks, the Emiratis, the Saudis, everyone is trying to find some foothold. And there's nothing abnormal about that. But unfortunately, where they're trying to find a foothold, they're finding a lot of cracks in those structures. And so rather than that being a surge of investment that strengthens Africa, it's a surge of investment into instability, which is often investment in militias, investment in security forces and conflict.
00:21:21
Speaker
And so that's meeting Africa at a very, very vulnerable point. But I don't want to end with bad news. I don't want to end, want make this like a dark thing and I don't give sort of false hope.
00:21:34
Speaker
But I do think there's extraordinary ingenuity that has grown in Africa over time to understand the things we need to do to re-engineer our societies. And a lot of young Africans actually understand this really well. I learned this last year in Kenya. I had always thought young Kenyans were apolitical.
Africa's Geopolitical Approach at the UN
00:21:53
Speaker
then it turns out they're intensely political and intensely attentive, and they have ideas about what to do about our condition. So I think we're going to have different forms of experimentation within what will look like chaos, what the New York Times will probably report as chaos, but you need to dig deeper than that.
00:22:13
Speaker
And what you're going to find from the bottom is new forms of inventing new political structures that are equal to them the moment. Finally, I wanted to just to ask you, you know, when you came to my attention, when you gave one of the most extraordinary and I would say brave speeches at the United Nations during your time there as ambassador, um and it was a speech that was one of the great champions of sovereignty and you spoke out against Russia.
00:22:42
Speaker
um And you made a very interesting assertion that at the when colonial era ended in Africa, the lines were drawn haphazardly in many ways and separated ethnic and linguistic and religious groups and so on so forth.
00:23:01
Speaker
But collectively, the continent came to the decision to move forward. If you were going to try to rearrange on those you know along those ethnic or religious lines or what have you, you would still be at war today. So you decided to look forward and that you respected the lines.
00:23:19
Speaker
Extraordinarily, you gave that speech two days before Russia invaded Ukraine. So talk a little bit about... What prompted you to make that speech at that time? the response, and you know for those of you who remember, it went absolutely viral at the time.
00:23:34
Speaker
Yeah, well, thank you. um Well, that that speech, which my American friends were extremely happy about, I kept reminding them, I was talking about you as well. But my precise line was that, you know, that there have been these mighty blows against multilateralism, and this was only the latest one.
00:23:53
Speaker
And there'd been others before by other powerful members of the international community. ah But without, because I don't know, I know we don't have time and I don't want to get it for pedantic lecture. but The very first thing of what Africa is, what did not start with Africans.
00:24:08
Speaker
It started with Romans and then colonialists took it out. The idea of Africa did not start with Africans. It started as oppression and being conquered and being colonized and our people being trafficked, kidnapped and then enslaved.
00:24:27
Speaker
so um Africa rose, the concept, the African that I am, arose as a reaction and a resistance to that. And out of that sort of pan-Africanist idea, a new sort of sense of self started arising.
00:24:44
Speaker
yeah That an African is not a Zulu. A Zulu is in Africa, but an African is a political project. And a lot of that political project was born in the diaspora. It was, you know, the first pan-Africanists were...
00:24:58
Speaker
The Blyden families, Sierra Leone, the United States, Marcus Garvey, and that whole tape from the late 19th century. So all this to say that by the time Africans, oh, and a very quick little detail.
00:25:15
Speaker
This year is 80 years since the founding of the UN, n which was signed into being in San Francisco in October 24th, 1945. October twenty one 1945 in Manchester, W.E.B. Du Bois and Mrs. Garvey and George Podmore and we're meeting.
00:25:36
Speaker
And we're very conscious that there was something happening in San Francisco. And their claim was together, whether we're from Jamaica, from the United States, from Africa, we are going to come together to demand our independence and our freedom.
00:25:51
Speaker
And that that is the Africa that came to independence in nineteen in the 1960s. And these guys had incredible, or somebody spoke about the hopefulness and optimism of Africa.
00:26:05
Speaker
Africa weirdly has been this way for decades now because nineteen sixty s is just the surge of optimism. And they come up with this incredible wisdom that these borders we live under are completely nonsensical.
00:26:21
Speaker
They were made in London. They were made in Berlin. berlin But what do we do? we we don't We're not able to go backwards because we've sort of been put into these strange units now.
00:26:33
Speaker
um And so there are people like in Tanzania, like Nyerere, saying, well, Tanzania's independence should be delayed so that Kenya can be independent so that we can become one.
00:26:45
Speaker
So they come up with the idea that our solution is really to unite the whole continent. under this ah new idea of Africa that's less than a century old. And we're going to hold to these borders and we're going to observe international law because we don't want to change the borders through war.
00:27:05
Speaker
We want to change the borders through integration. And so if you look at the 50s, 60s, 70s when African countries are getting their independence, there are no wars based on on on these territories. There are one or two in the Horn of Africa, in Somalia.
00:27:21
Speaker
um But this is incredible wisdom. it's It's a mentality of growth and inclusion and integration, which is very different from the mentality of Putin and his friends of reaching and smash and and take what you want.
00:27:35
Speaker
And so I was trying to remind the world that ah that Africa has had extraordinary geopolitical wisdom and patience, that the African idea of unity is a world civilizing idea.
00:27:50
Speaker
We are trying to create a new form of civilization, which is not a civilization of purity, of who is greater, of supremacy, but a civilization of inclusion of thousands of languages and and hundreds of political and cultural associations and and and thinking.
00:28:09
Speaker
And this is a new form of civilization in the world that has never been done before. And that's what Africa has aspired to do. So in the height of this drama of invasion of one superpower to of Ukraine, I thought to say that speech, and I wasn't saying it really to Ukrainians or to Russians, I was really saying it to Kenyans and to Africans, to say you have to remember as you watch this British grab for power that you're much better than this.
00:28:45
Speaker
That's a fantastic way to end. Resistance in Memory, Visions of Sudan, presented by the Africa Center in new York City's Harlem, is a poignant, provocative examination of Sudan's quote-unquote forgotten yet ever-present crisis, told through over 40 images by Sudanese photographers, some of whom still residing in the country.
00:29:03
Speaker
The exhibition is on now through March 22, 2026. Visit theafricacenter.org for location and hours. This interview was recorded at Frankfurt Kernet in Lower Manhattan on November eighteenth See the previous episode of Seven Aside for the earlier segment from the evening's program. Producer Richard Brown, director of Origin, the story of the Basketball Africa League, with The Blacklist's Franklin Leonard.
00:29:26
Speaker
With thanks once again to our partners, Frankfort Kernett and the Africa Center, and to our speakers, our guests in the audience, and you, our listeners here, this is Eben Howell signing off for KIT Magazine and Studio Santiago.