Bright Simmons writes:
...the overall difference in the structure of typical African economies, compared to the West, makes a big difference. The fewer resources available to regulatory and tax authorities and the smaller sizes of businesses jointly mean that when businesses make complex arrangements to rationalize their tax expenditures, their costs go up rather than down. Also, a shallower financial system makes the notion of a corporate treasury function similar to what is common in the West nearly redundant in the African setting. Higher inflation tends to discourage certain types of capital investment within a single organization but favors the parking of cash in trading affiliates. For this same reason, even "orthodox" businesses like banks that are not local outlets of multinationals maintain a wide array of subsidiaries that, considering their size (until recently, many such banks had a capitalization lower than $40 million), seems baffling. One such bank has security companies, car lots, courier firms, trading concerns, educational businesses, a golf club, and other similar operations all welded together in an unwieldy yet profitable group.More here
In a sense, African entrepreneurs run profit ecosystems rather than business units. These ecosystems interact with other ecosystems in a culturally elaborate manner that can produce extreme robustness, resilience, and flexibility.