OP-ED - Big Money, done properly?
A well-travelled South African chartered accountant with an M&A background reckons he's seen what the African investment scene is missing. His fix for Big Money's blind spots? More Big Money.
A recent call that ran nearly two hours, with my AI notetaker whirring in the background, was spent trying to work out what's singular about the person on the other end, as per.
Robert Edwards is a South African chartered accountant who spent six years on M&A in London and quit at 35 in 2025 to travel through 21 countries. His travel diaries have yielded a self-published book I haven't found time to read, Quit Travel Grow. He patched in from Colombia, where he and his partner spend roughly half the year.
Edwards says he's stitching together a livelihood the way a growing number of capable post-corporate types do these days. The chap's juggling three fractional M&A gigs… a US dental group hunting acquisitions, a South African packaging firm raising a debt package and a UK digital-content marketplace he's raising equity for.
Alongside that, he's co-founded a prop-tech venture born of a first-hand irritation endured as a landlord, linked to the estate agent's ten percent monthly and frustration with the five or six separate bits of software that don't seem to exist in a cohesive stack just yet.
He says that he and his co-founder Luke Fowler are building an end-to-end solution currently fuelled by early-believing friends-and-family. Apparently, they’re wiring in third parties like DocuSign and BetterID for verification and are humbled at how much more tricky bank-feed integration is than it looks.
You may well have already encountered some of Edwards' reflections on the interwebs. The Witness covered his story as a life manual featuring nuggets about the shortness of life, retiring a millionaire and valuing skills over degrees. The Honest Money podcast took the financial-freedom angle. The South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) magazine claimed him for the profession. Fair play to Edwards for spinning a good yarn.
What piqued my curiosity sufficiently to jump on a call with him was his apparent commitment to ritual quasi-journalism, done in earnest.
His nose for the small stuff and sensitivity to nuance stood out, notwithstanding obvious gaps in perception and lived experience that, thankfully, he's suitably humble to.
He flags the double-pay tax of broken infrastructure that leads to an inability to rely on the state, and hence paying twice: once in tax, again for the private security, the private schooling, self-sourced utilities, the tyres you keep replacing because the roads are shot, etcetera, etcetera... He's bullish on solar and wind power offering alternative solutions to the old need for thousands of kilometres of transmission line. And the man even has a catchy one-liner worth inserting here:
“There's no point talking about AI, if you can't get goods down the street.”
Broadly, he senses, correctly, I reckon, that Big Money keeps missing the work that obviously needs doing as far as driving socioeconomic progress via a savvy investment agenda.
When I asked my magic-wand question, If you could wave it, what would you do? The man who just told me the small things matter, suddenly reached for one of the biggest levers going. He reckons presiding over a USD 20–30 billion private equity fund would be a plan. It'd be headquartered in Joburg, because it's cheaper to run than London, and focussed on opportunities in well-governed regions, East Africa mostly.
He's thinking better allocators, no rose-tinted glasses and more time on the ground by folks who know the terrain. In other words, he'd do Big Money, only, do it properly.
Andile Masuku
I pressed him on this, twice. What would your fund do that the Africa Finance Corporations (AFC) of this world aren't? Both times he came back to the skill and rationality of the people deploying the capital. However, he didn’t critique the mechanism itself.
I'm not so sure Big Money misses the small, patient, unscalable work (necessarily) because it's badly run, though. It seems pretty much built to. Think about it… Nobody goes small anymore. Nobody backs the unscalable, because it won't clear the returns bar fast enough for disciplined, returns-hungry investors, or the signalling bar prolifically enough for institutions and policymakers scored on the short-to-medium term by both capital and citizen stakeholders hankering for pristine futures.
I just don’t see how you can out-mindset a structure. But Edwards, for all his internationally-acquired ground-level insight, would bet billions that you can.
Editorial Note: A version of this opinion editorial was first published by Business Report on 25 August 2026.