Rwanda

The mineshaft is dark, the air humid and starved of oxygen. I follow Marcus Edwards-Jones out of the muddy tunnel towards a window of light and at last we emerge into the evening. The sun is going down over Rwanda’s green hills, dotted with banana groves and eucalyptus stands, with a river snaking away into the distance. Around us are men carting away lumps of rock, which on close inspection are streaked with veins of a black metal called tantalum, a high-value mineral used in the manufacture of mobile phones, nuclear reactors and spaceships.

‘I’ve never seen a deposit like this,’ says Marcus. ‘It’s all been worth it.’ I first met  Marcus in Oxford in 1985. We said hello on the stairs at a Piers Gaveston party, both of us dressed in togas. Soon after that I returned to Africa to be a correspondent, while he went into the City to work in brokerage firms. I ended up covering a string of wars, as he migrated from analysing European equities to the things that have provided him with momentum ever since – giving advice on how to raise investment for hydrocarbons and minerals in the world’s frontier markets. ‘My life has been one long busman’s holiday, visiting places others don’t want to,’ he says as we wander down the muddy track from the mine we have just visited together. This may be a new project and I brought him here because I love Rwanda and the economic transformation that has happened since the genocide I reported on in 1994. When I compare my years as a journalist with his career in finance, I sense we were looking for similar things.

During our conversation I work out that Marcus has done business in 19 different African countries, most of them dangerous or frontier markets that no investment bankers would dare to see. What he loves most is taking projects in hydrocarbons and mining from concept stage, dreams really, to listing on the stock market. ‘It’s not really about the money, more about being proved right that we’ve gone into a place like Central Asia or Africa. When it pays off it is very satisfying, but of course one has to kiss a number of frogs before you find a prince.’ I suppose his job is to sell a vision of how to make the seemingly impossible make sense to an investor. Is the project a good thing? What are the risks and are we going to make money? Along the way, he has had a string of successes that have been very profitable and at the same time the projects have created wealth, jobs and hope in the host countries.

Marcus has established a film studio in Uzbekistan, researched iron exports from North Korea, raised money for coal in Bangladesh. A decade ago I was trying to promote investment in Somalia and Marcus was the only person I could persuade to travel with me to Mogadishu. He came because he was interested to see what it was like, but several years before he had already helped raise money for oil exploration in the country’s northern Puntland region, right in the middle of a civil war. He’s backed hydrocarbons in Kamchatka, platinum in South Africa, diamonds in Sierra Leone and copper in Katanga. He’s ridden a wave of tectonic shifts in the world’s economy since the 1990s, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, the rise of China and more recently the shift in interest towards the critical metals needed for renewables and green energy. ‘You can make money where others dare not go. When people decide it’s safe, that may be the time to sell and move on to the next project.’

At home in England, his stamping ground is Mayfair or the apple orchards of Nottinghamshire where he lives with his lovely wife Suzannah. When I’m out of the long grass of Africa he will take me for long lunches at his London club, where we catch up on our adventures over Montrachet and oysters. I guess his love of horse racing, casting the fly and stalking on the island of Jura can only be trumped by the next trip to meet the Polisario rebels of Western Sahara or a project in Algeria. A man like Marcus is exactly what the continent of Africa needs, with western investment being preferable to Chinese or Russian money. He has the adventurous spirit that many British people in business have lost for the world beyond Dover.