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Morocco has overtaken South Africa as Africa’s fourth-most attractive investment destination, reflecting the North African country’s growing manufacturing base, stable economic conditions and success in attracting foreign investment, according to the latest rankings by Rand Merchant Bank (RMB).

The shift highlights how investors are weighing countries’ growth prospects and industrial capacity alongside established financial markets. South Africa retains deep capital markets and has made progress in improving energy security, but slower economic growth has weakened its position relative to Morocco.

Why Morocco is gaining ground

Morocco’s automotive industry has become a major driver of its investment appeal, helping the country establish itself as an important manufacturing hub. Its ability to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), alongside relatively stable macroeconomic conditions, has strengthened its position.

‘The country has emerged as one of Africa’s leading manufacturing hubs, particularly in automotive production, while maintaining macroeconomic stability and attracting substantial foreign direct investment,’ RMB said in its report.

Manufacturing matters because it can draw investment into factories, supply chains, logistics and skilled jobs, while generating exports beyond raw materials. Morocco’s industrial base gives investors opportunities to serve both domestic and international markets.

Its performance also shows how a country can improve its standing by building productive industries and attracting capital into sectors that support exports and economic activity.

Why South Africa lost ground

South Africa remains one of the continent’s most developed financial markets, with established institutions and a relatively sophisticated business environment. Improvements in electricity supply have also helped ease a constraint on businesses.

However, its slower economic growth has weighed on its ranking. Morocco’s rise suggests that established financial markets alone may not be enough to maintain an advantage when competing countries offer stronger manufacturing prospects and attract more investment into productive sectors.

The ranking does not mean South Africa has lost its wider economic advantages. Rather, it reflects a comparison of several factors affecting investment attractiveness.

Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire improve

Nigeria climbed seven places following reforms that included the removal of petrol subsidies and foreign exchange liberalisation. RMB said the changes had improved clarity about the country’s economic direction, although investors remain divided over the pace of recovery.

The higher ranking does not mean Nigeria’s economic problems have been resolved. Inflation, pressure on household purchasing power and high business costs remain important considerations for investors.

Côte d’Ivoire has also strengthened its position, rising from 16th place two years ago to seventh. Economic growth, infrastructure development, policy implementation and expanding hydrocarbon production have supported its progress.

Seychelles, Mauritius and Egypt retained the top three positions for the third consecutive year.

What the rankings measure

RMB assessed 31 African countries using 20 indicators grouped into four areas: economic performance and potential; market accessibility and innovation; investment climate; and social and human development.

The framework looks beyond the size of an economy or its financial markets to assess the conditions that help attract and sustain investment.

Morocco’s rise, South Africa’s decline and Nigeria’s improvement point to different factors shaping investor perceptions. Ultimately, rankings reflect relative attractiveness, while actual investment will depend on whether countries can turn their advantages into sustained growth, competitive businesses and reliable returns for investors.

Before he became the voice of a new nation, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was a schoolteacher, a writer and a man whose preference for simplicity followed him all the way to the highest office in the land. Sixty years after his death, the photographs and fragments he left behind tell a story larger than politics: of the kind of country Nigeria once imagined it might become.

There is something almost disorienting about looking at old photographs of Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

Not because the clothes are unfamiliar or because the Nigeria around him has disappeared. It is because the man in the photographs does not quite resemble what Nigerians have come to expect power to look like.

There are no dark glasses.

No enormous convoy.

No theatrical display of wealth.

No visible effort to persuade the camera that an important man has entered the room.

Instead, there is the familiar white robe, the turban, the spectacles and that slightly restrained bearing of a man who often seemed almost uncomfortable with the magnitude of the office history had handed him.

This was, after all, the Prime Minister of Africa’s most populous country.

And on October 1, 1960, it was his voice that introduced independent Nigeria to the world.

‘At last our great day has arrived,’ Balewa told the country, ‘and Nigeria is now indeed an independent sovereign nation.’

The words have survived.

So has the voice.

Measured, deliberate, unmistakably Northern Nigerian and remarkably controlled, it was a voice made for radio. Balewa’s command of spoken English and his gift for oratory would eventually earn him the famous description ‘the Golden Voice of Africa.’

But the remarkable thing about that voice is where it began.

It began not in a palace, a military barracks or one of the great political dynasties of colonial Nigeria.

It began in a classroom.

The Schoolteacher

Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was born in December 1912 in what is today Bauchi State.

His early education combined Qur’anic learning with colonial schooling before he proceeded to Katsina Higher College, one of the institutions that produced a generation of Northern Nigeria’s early educated elite.

He trained as a teacher.

That fact deserves more attention than it usually receives.

Before Balewa learned how to govern, he learned how to explain.

Before he addressed parliaments, he addressed classrooms.

Before diplomats listened to him in London, Washington, New York and Addis Ababa, children listened to him in Bauchi.

He joined Bauchi Middle School as a teacher and eventually became its headmaster. In 1945, he was among a small group of Northern Nigerian teachers selected to study at the University of London’s Institute of Education. He returned to Nigeria and worked in education before politics gradually claimed him.

Something of the schoolmaster never left him.

Listen carefully to Balewa’s surviving speeches and there is surprisingly little flamboyance. He explains. He reasons. He moves from one proposition to another.

His politics could be cautious-sometimes excessively so-but his language was rarely careless.

It is perhaps why, even now, listening to Balewa can feel like hearing another political civilisation.

The Prime Minister Who Was Also a Novelist

There is another Balewa whom political history has almost completely obscured.

The writer.

As a young man, long before independence, Balewa wrote Shaihu Umar, one of the important early works of modern Hausa prose fiction.

The story follows the extraordinary life of its title character through separation, enslavement, displacement, faith and eventual spiritual maturity. Its world is recognisably Northern Nigerian and Islamic, but its concerns-loss, fate, suffering, goodness and human endurance-are universal.

The work was later translated into English by the distinguished Hausa scholar Mervyn Hiskett.

It is an extraordinary footnote to Nigerian history.

The man who would become the country’s first Prime Minister had already imagined lives on paper before he was entrusted with millions of actual ones.

Today Nigeria tends to separate its politicians from its intellectuals, and its political culture rarely expects those who govern to possess a literary imagination. Balewa belonged to an earlier tradition in which teaching, writing, public argument and politics could still inhabit the same person.

That perhaps explains something about the precision of his language.

Words mattered to him.

And in 1960, words suddenly mattered enormously.

The Night Nigeria Became a Country

Imagine Lagos at midnight on September 30, 1960.

Union Jacks were coming down.

A new green-and-white flag was going up.

Fireworks exploded over the city. Dignitaries had arrived from across the world. Crowds filled the streets. After decades of colonial government, an enormous and complicated territory assembled by Britain was becoming a sovereign state.

And at the centre of the ceremony stood a former schoolteacher from Bauchi.

Balewa understood the symbolism.

‘Words cannot adequately express my joy and pride,’ he said, at being the Nigerian privileged to receive the constitutional instruments of independence.

But what is striking when the speech is read today is its absence of triumphalism.

There was pride, certainly.

But there was also anxiety.