Succession is often treated as an event rather than a discipline: something that happens once, on a specific date, when a founder finally steps back and someone else steps in. Pavel Slavkov, a CEO who has watched a number of these transitions unfold, argues that this framing is exactly where most family businesses go wrong. “Succession isn’t a date,” he says. “It’s a structure, built over years. Most family businesses on this continent are building it far too late, if they’re building it at all.”
Africa’s investable wealth has now reached an estimated $2.5 trillion, and the continent is home to more than 122,000 dollar millionaires, a population expected to grow by 65 percent over the next decade. Read one way, those numbers look like an unambiguous achievement. Slavkov reads them differently. “Underneath those figures is a simple problem,” he says. “Wealth has accumulated faster than the governance structures needed to carry it forward.”
That shift was visible at the Nairobi Private Wealth Conference in July, where entrepreneurs, investors and family business leaders gathered to discuss succession planning, governance and cross-border investment strategy. Experts urged wealthy families to move from a focus on wealth creation to wealth continuity – how it is preserved, transferred responsibly, and structured to endure across generations.
Why Founders Struggle to Let Go
A recurring pattern among founders, in Slavkov’s observation, is an inability to describe, when the moment comes, who will actually run their business in ten years. Not because the question has never occurred to them, but because answering it honestly requires admitting the business has outgrown any single person’s ability to hold it together indefinitely, an admission that is harder than it sounds.
The International Finance Corporation has been direct about this. Succession, in its assessment, remains the most critical challenge facing family businesses globally, and African firms in particular are struggling to move leadership from founders to the next generation. Many of these businesses are led by founders who remain in place for twenty to thirty years, which sounds like stability until one considers what happens the day that stability ends without a plan behind it.
The Difference Between Governance and Paperwork
There is a version of governance that exists mainly on paper, a document filed away and rarely consulted, and there is a version that actually functions. The Lagos Business School’s International Family Business Conference this year pushed Nigerian family enterprises specifically on this distinction, challenging them to move beyond a survival mindset and build for something that could actually endure across generations. The theme running through that conversation was not subtle. Governance has to be functional rather than symbolic. Succession has to be structured rather than assumed. Culture, the harder thing to legislate, has to be built on purpose rather than left to chance.
Slavkov largely agrees with that framing, though he pushes back gently on the idea that this is a new problem. “It’s an old problem,” he says. “It’s just become more visible as the amounts of money involved have grown too large to leave to informal understanding.”
What Preserving Wealth Actually Requires
Family offices remain relatively rare on the continent, with an estimated 30 to 60 currently operating across Africa compared with roughly 10,000 globally. The families furthest ahead on governance, in Slavkov’s view, tend to be the ones who stopped treating wealth management as a purely financial exercise. A recent roundtable on family wealth in South Africa put it plainly: preserving wealth across generations now demands more than sound investment decisions. It demands governance structures, cross-border expertise, and long-term strategic planning, particularly as family members increasingly live, work and hold assets across multiple jurisdictions.
“Succession planning is not something you delegate to a lawyer once and forget about,” Slavkov says. “It’s closer to maintenance. You do it continuously, or you do it in a crisis.”
The pattern he points to most often is founders who build something remarkable and then treat its continuation as someone else’s problem to solve later. Later, in practice, tends to arrive faster than expected. Professionalising governance, in his view, is not a concession to formality. It is one of the few investments a family business can make that pays out specifically in the years its founder is no longer there to answer for it.
It is, by his own description, a strange kind of investment. It may also be the one that matters most in the end.
