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William Elong The news wasn’t big enough to excite international media, but it was an exciting development this year in  Cameroon  when Will&Brothers, a local engineering and consulting company, unveiled the first-ever drone made in Cameroon. “It’s the pride of the country,” exclaimed Ms Minette Libom Li Likeng, the country’s minister of telecommunications and postal services, who attended the unveiling. Last year,  Forbes  magazine named Will&Brothers founder William Elong, 25, one of the most promising Africans under 30. Elong, who describes himself as a “big dreamer and overachiever”, at 20 years was the youngest-ever graduate of the Economic Warfare School in Paris. He is better known in his country for his Drone Africa venture, a commercial imagery service used by the tourism and agricultural industries in Cameroon. “Our countries spend huge sums of money on contracting satellite imagery companies to address their geographical mapping needs,...

Lagos, Nigeria Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria, is a source of mixed emotions for its more than 20 million inhabitants. Many come to the city from the hinterland to pursue their dreams. Some succeed, some do not. But all suffer one grief or another from the city’s punishing traffic jams, noise pollution from ubiquitous standby-generators, and so on. Despite its shortcomings, Lagos is a city of great potential. With a gross domestic product (GDP) of about US$136bn in 2017, the city is already acclaimed to have the seventh-largest GDP in Africa. (The state government believes it is the fifth-largest in Africa and aspires to become the third-largest by 2020, three years from now.) Additionally, the Lagos economy is estimated to constitute about a third of Nigeria’s output and certainly earns the highest annual tax revenue of all 36 federal states and the federal capital territory; which is in excess of $1bn. Lagos leads Nigeria on a number of other metrics. It has the high...