Cameroonian HKS student contributes to reform of sub-Saharan Africa’s corporate laws
by Junius O. Williams

An editorial in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Africa Policy Journal describes 2015 as “the year of the African entrepreneur.” Over the past few decades, investment in African companies has continued to skyrocket. Enterprises in once dire markets persistently prove their ability to generate returns for shareholders, despite myriad political and social challenges. However, entrepreneurial ventures only achieve sustainability when the public sector establishes business regulations, enforces them, and ensures that they do not become corrupted by politics; such is the challenge many African governments face.

Jacques Jonathan Nyemb strives to bridge this gap. Nyemb, a former associate at international law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, and originally from Cameroon, is a first-year MPA candidate at Harvard Kennedy School. He hopes to build efficient corporate legal and regulatory practices in sub-Saharan Africa that will better align public and private interests to increase flows of domestic and international capital.

Having served for three years as the youngest expert on a team commissioned by the World Bank to revise corporate laws in West and Central Africa, and as the former Secretary-General of the African Business Lawyers’ Club, Nyemb’s expertise is far-reaching. He reviewed the governing treaty of L’Organization pour L’Harmonisation en Afrique du Droit des Affaires (Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa), or OHADA. Francophone African countries, seeking to establish a regional framework for common challenges in corporate law, founded the organization in 1997. The OHADA treatise allows member states to standardize agreements on capital regulation, corporate governance, and preferential equity on a regional basis. However, as Nyemb noted in a recent interview with the Center for African Studies, the global business and investment landscape has changed since OHADA’s inception. In a 2014 report for the International Financial Law Review, he wrote, “When the OHADA corporate law was adopted in the late 1990s, the lawmakers had not anticipated that private equity would one day become the key provider of finance for African local companies.”

Progressively, the nature of capital accrual and financial instrumentation has changed in Africa. As a result, there is even greater need for skilled lawyers, like Nyemb, to bolster regulatory structures, negotiate fair deals, and understand the fine print of corporate law. He envisions a system whereby governments make doing business in their respective countries attractive to both global and domestic investors. Along with building an efficient financial sector and capital markets, he highlights “fostering and scaling SME’s” (small and medium enterprises) as one of the main ways African countries can encourage local entrepreneurship and create a more business friendly climate.

Yet Nyemb identifies several challenges to expanding competitive regulatory systems for entrepreneurship in under-resourced African countries. Legal practitioners often lack adequate information to innovate corporate regulations and learn from best practices, while deeply entrenched cultures of bureaucracy have inefficiently duplicated rules within the same country. As a result, states often lack capacity to provide alternative dispute resolution and arbitration for SMEs, let alone institutional memory to build sound legal structures. Most of all, though, Jacques Nyemb suggests that poor investment in human capital greatly hinders the development of sustainable corporate regulation in Africa.

This is the intersection between his professional and personal goals: to establish efficient business laws and to train the next generation of Africa’s leaders. In 2010, Nyemb founded Oser l’Afrique (Dare Africa), an organization that connects young leaders and entrepreneurs from across Africa to build what he calls “the Davos of the African youth.” His organization, comprised mainly of Francophone Africans, pairs aspiring leaders with senior mentors, and attempts to break the barriers of national borders by hosting several pan-African symposia each year.

Though educated in Europe, where he earned a law degree from the London School of Economics and a master’s degree from Université Panthéon-Assas, Jacques Nyemb fully intends to return to Cameroon after completing his studies in the United States. “The idea was always to go back to the place where I could bring some sort of change,” he said. In his home country, he hopes to start a consultancy for firms and governments in need of corporate regulatory and arbitration advice. Fundamentally, Nyemb’s goal is one of a public servant, a mindset he says requires “bringing back to the community.”