Ubuntu in the Boardroom: Who Does Your Board Serve in Africa?

By Des H Rikhotso

For half a century, corporate governance scholars have argued over a deceptively simple question: whom does a company’s board actually serve? Milton Friedman’s answer – shareholders, full stop – dominated boardrooms from New York to London for a generation. Stewardship theorists countered that directors are custodians, not hired guns, obligated to protect an organization’s long-term health for everyone who depends on it. In much of the world, this remains an unresolved argument, litigated quarter by quarter.

Africa has quietly moved past the debate. Not by picking a side, but by fusing both into something more durable.

An Answer Written Into Law

South Africa’s King IV Report on Corporate Governance offers the clearest evidence of this shift. Unlike Anglo-American frameworks that treat stakeholder consideration as a discretionary nicety, King IV explicitly rejects pure shareholder primacy. It requires boards to report against a triple bottom line – profit, people, and planet – not as a public-relations exercise, but as a governance obligation with teeth.

This is not an isolated case of South African exceptionalism. Company law reforms across Kenya and Nigeria increasingly compel directors to weigh the interests of employees, consumers, and the environment alongside those of shareholders when making decisions. Regulators across the continent are converging on a model sometimes called “enlightened shareholder value”: a board still owes its primary duty to shareholders, but discharges that duty properly only by accounting for the wider ecosystem the company depends on.

The logic is elegant – destroy the community and you eventually destroy the customer base, the workforce, and the shareholder return along with it.

The Governance Chain Nobody Talks About

What makes the African case genuinely instructive is how firm-level and country-level governance interact. Board diversity, independence, and institutional investor oversight at the company level do not operate in a vacuum; they are shaped – and constrained – by the legal, regulatory, and political frameworks of the countries in which firms operate, as well as by informal cultural norms and behaviors that no statute can fully capture.

This interdependence matters enormously in Africa, where formal institutions are often young or unevenly enforced, and informal norms carry outsized weight. A well-governed firm operating in a weak regulatory environment does not get a pass; it inherits the burden of building trust that institutions haven’t yet supplied.

That burden shapes internationalization decisions too, forcing boards to weigh legitimate commercial expansion against the agency problems – self-dealing, poor oversight, misaligned incentives – that weak institutions can enable. Handled well, this tension creates value. Handled poorly, it destroys it, on both the shareholder ledger and the broader social one. The two are not separate scorecards; they are complementary, and increasingly, one cannot be sustained without the other.

Ubuntu as Governance Doctrine

There’s a cultural undercurrent to all this that Western frameworks struggle to translate: Ubuntu, the philosophy often rendered as “I am because we are.” It’s tempting to dismiss this as a value statement fit for a mission page, but in African boardrooms it functions as something closer to a governance doctrine. It obliges corporations to coexist with, rather than merely extract from, the communities in which they operate.

This isn’t philosophical decoration bolted onto hard-nosed commercial decisions. It’s frequently the commercial decision. Where state capacity is limited, African boards routinely find themselves filling institutional voids – building clinics, funding schools, laying down infrastructure that in other markets would be a government’s job.

This is not corporate charity; it’s corporate necessity. A company that ignores the gaps around it eventually finds those gaps swallowing its supply chain, its workforce, and its social license to operate.

Why This Should Matter Beyond Africa

None of this makes African boards uniquely virtuous. It makes them, arguably, more realistic about where value actually comes from. Climate vulnerability and social inequality are not abstractions to be managed through a sustainability committee; they are direct threats to commercial viability. That reframes ESG from a compliance checkbox into what it was probably always meant to be: risk management with a longer time horizon.

The rest of the corporate world is only now, belatedly, arriving at similar conclusions – usually after a activist-investor campaign or a reputational crisis forces the issue. African governance frameworks got there through necessity rather than epiphany, embedding stakeholder accountability into law and culture simultaneously rather than treating it as an optional overlay.

So, who does your board serve? In Africa, increasingly, the honest answer is: shareholders, by way of everyone else. It’s not a compromise between two competing theories. It’s a recognition that, in markets where institutions are still being built, the two were never really separable to begin with.

Des H Rikhotso is a seasoned C-Suite Multi-Industry (Automotive – OEM + Retail, Logistics, Oil & Gas, etc) business executive with 25+ years of Business Leadership Experience across the South, East and Western Sub-Sahara Africa Region. Based in Kampala, Uganda he serves as East Africa Region Country Director and Business Executive, driving Business Strategic Growth and Operational Excellence – contributing his Business Leadership Experience to the Region. Des has held Business Leadership roles at BMW Group Africa, Volkswagen Group Africa, Peugeot Motors South Africa, Toyota/Lexus South Africa, Lexus East Rand (Unitrans/CFAO), Nissan Group of Africa, G.U.D Holdings (Africa Exports Operations Division),The HDR Group of Companies and The Ezra Group of Companies (a Leading Uganda & East Africa Conglomerate). He holds Under-Graduate and Post-Graduate business degrees from the University of the Western Cape, Wits University (Wits Business School) and the University of South Africa.