In September 2018, Wandji Wilfred posed an uncomfortable question: Have our billionaires betrayed us?
Not because they were rich. Not because they built factories or stadiums. But because, when it came to sharing the story behind their wealth, the silence was deafening.
That article was written in the shadow of loss. With the passing of Pa’a Kadji Defosso, an entire library of lived business knowledge vanished. Not his assets, which were inherited, registered, and accounted for. What disappeared was subtler and more valuable: judgment earned through decades of risk, failure, negotiation, betrayal, patience, and timing.
Seven years later, the question still lingers, but now we have a useful contrast.
This week’s Reuters story about Aliko Dangote offers a different model of how billionaire power can manifest in public. Dangote is not merely defending a refinery. He is publicly challenging regulators, filing petitions, naming governance failures, and forcing institutional accountability into the light. Whatever one thinks of his motives, the signal matters: wealth here is not mute. It speaks. It argues. It documents. It confronts systems that quietly bleed societies.
This matters because billionaires do not just accumulate capital. They accumulate asymmetrical experience. They see how rules bend. They learn where power hides. They understand which constraints are real and which are theater. When that knowledge is locked in private boardrooms, societies lose more than inspiration — they lose their navigational charts.
In that 2018 article, Wandji Wilfred cited Tyler Perry speaking to Trevor Noah about ownership as the key to generational wealth, echoing ideas popularized in hip-hop by Jay-Z’s ‘The Story of O.J.’ These ideas resonated because they were not guarded like state secrets. They were broadcast, repeated, debated, and refined in public.
In the United States, billionaires routinely subject their thinking to public scrutiny — through lectures, interviews, podcasts, court battles, and regulatory disputes. You can Google Warren Buffett and drown in decades of letters, quotes, mistakes, and reversals. His wealth compounds, yes — but so does the public’s access to his thinking.
Contrast that with Cameroon. Our billionaires remain largely invisible. Their origin stories are rumors. Their methods are folklore. Their failures are buried. Their advice, if any, is whispered only to heirs and trusted insiders. When they die, their companies survive — but their maps do not.
And this is where the real betrayal, if any, lies.
Societal wealth is not built by salaries alone. Jobs matter, yes. Factories matter. Football academies matter. But none of these teach a young trader to evaluate risk, a civil servant to recognize a rigged process, or a small entrepreneur to distinguish a real opportunity from a seductive trap.
We live in a skills economy now. Knowledge is abundant, but wisdom remains scarce. Billionaires sit at the rare intersection of capital, power, and long memory. When they choose silence, entire generations are left to relearn lessons the hard way — through collapse, corruption, and cycles of wasted enthusiasm.
The Dangote episode reminds us of something crucial: billionaire influence need not destabilize society. It can stabilize it by exposing institutional rot, clarifying incentives, and forcing accountability where bureaucratic language prefers fog.
Cameroon does not need noisier billionaires. It needs more legible ones.
We need them to talk about how deals really happen, when not to invest, partners who failed them, regulators who helped — and those who obstructed. We need them to talk about the myths of entrepreneurship and the uncomfortable truth that not everyone should start a company, but everyone should understand how capital actually works.
Money, as the elders say, is like a bird on a tree—if you make noise, it flies away. But knowledge is not. Knowledge multiplies when shared. Seven years later, the question has matured. The issue is no longer whether our billionaires have betrayed us.
It is whether they are willing to participate in building collective intelligence, or remain wealthy ghosts, leaving behind assets without guidance, factories without philosophy, and fortunes without maps.
We need more librarians who refuse to let the books burn as they leave.
- Norbert k. Foy