[Interview] Siviwe Ngcingwana, Founder, Signet Seal Group, South Africa
Siviwe Ngcingwana is the founder and CEO of Signet Seal Group, a diversified Pan-African company with growing interest across various sectors among them agriculture, renewable energy, mining, trading and deal brokering.
He will be speaking at the Future Foods Conference on opportunities that AfCFTA will offer and the challenges that lay in it based on his experience in it thus far as he seeks to unlock the AfCFTA for SMMEs across Africa.
Tell us about Signet Seal Group
Signet Seal Group is a diversified Pan-African solutions driven group with growing interest across several sectors and industries including hospitality, travel & tourism, renewable energy, agriculture, property development, mining and physical commodity trading and deal brokering.
Headquartered in Africa's richest square mile of Sandton, South Africa, it is set right in the epicentre of the pulse of the African economy and continues to grow its footprint throughout the continent.
Signet Seal is on a mission to garner support, collaboration, partnerships and investment in its aim to bring dignity back to Africa by empowering its people to be economically active and proficient; by capacitating them to use the full potential of their African natural resources (land & community) to achieve success and prosperity both individually and collectively. With its global network of partners and associates, it is well positioned to continue to pursue and achieve its ambitions to play its part in making Africa an economic super power and hub of opportunities.
What in your opinion are the opportunities for entrepreneurs in the AfCFTA space? How should they leverage the trade pact?
The AfCFTA is constituted of what is the largest continent and the single biggest trade block in the world. Together with its current population of over 1.7 billion mainly youth population, it is the youngest population in the world; the fact that it remains still under development and under industrialized; and holding 90% of all mineral resources on the planet and 60% of all the world's arable land, it is without question the sleeping industrial giant of the world once it is optimally industrialized and the AfCFTA fully operationalized. The AfCFTA is without doubt the rise of the dawn that is the African Renaissance and Africa taking its rightful place as the world's next superpower; unless of course we miss the opportunity to take full advantage of it as the single biggest opportunity to emancipate, liberate and establish Africa to its rightful place in the global community.
You are one of the speakers in the Future Foods Conference. How crucial is the Conference and why should people attend?
As I mentioned above, we hold 60% of the world's arable land - enough to feed and be the breadbasket of the entire globe; the DRC alone has sufficient arable land to feed our entire continent! If the global community is serious about food security and eradicating hunger the world over, then this is where we out to be having this exact conversation - around Africans, with Africans. There is no future foods conversation without Africa; not only participants, but leading this conversation and as its champion.
As a speaker, what subjects will you be covering?
My topic is about the opportunity that is the AfCFTA - the challenges that lay in it based on my experience in it thus far as I seek to unlock the AfCFTA for SMMEs across Africa.
Why do they matter for entrepreneurs in the continent?
Most entrepreneurs in Africa, as in any other economy are the majority and backbone of the economy. Without the enabling and capacitating of SMMEs to participate and thrive in the AfCFTA through intra-African trade, travel and industrialization, the AfCFTA is a nonstarter and Africa will doomed remain relegated to doldrums that it has remained in since its imposed inheritance of colonial legacy.
What is your company’s growth strategy for 2022 and beyond?
Simply to unlock trade finance that will enable Signet Seal Group to enhance intra-African trade and travel by empowering SMMEs across Africa to fully participate, take full advantage of and have equal equitable share opportunity in the full economic potential of the untapped African economy for the benefit of Africa and its African people for many generations to come.
Any closing remarks
Africa needs a new breed of young innovative leaders that is representative of its populous and who do not possess a mentality of serving their colonial masters.
We need African solutions for Africa, by Africans, that will definitively dismantle all colonial legacies that are still inherent and systemic throughout Africa. Africa needs to wake up to the fact that their time is now, and that it may never come again if we miss it now.
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