“Indeed I do see great light as Africa is waking up to her need for interconnected trade amongst countries on the continent through the signing and implementation of the AfCFTA and with her vast diaspora. SOAD is definitely at the heart of spearheading and pushing the trade and innovation agenda for Africa”
H.E. Hon. Ebube Ebisike George is the Minister of Trade for the State of the African Diaspora. Here is what that means, why it matters, and what he is building for Africa and the Caribbean right now.
Crystal Cummings
There are not many people you can describe as a scientist, a futurist, a serial entrepreneur, a technologist, a development consultant, a writer and a government minister all at once. But when the government you serve represents 350 million people of African descent spread across every continent on earth, with no borders and no territory, with a constitution and a parliament and a mandate from the African Union itself, ordinary descriptors tend to fall short.
His Excellency Honourable Ebube Ebisike George is the Minister of Trade for the State of the African Diaspora, known as SOAD. He is also a Consultant to the Africa Energy Fund, a writer and speaker on technology, patent rights and African sovereignty, and a man whose thinking operates several decades ahead of most conversations happening in the rooms he walks into. He is from Imo State in Nigeria. And the thread connecting everything he does, from energy finance to smart cities to geolocation patents to Pan-African trade corridors, is one idea he has carried since childhood.
Africa is the cradle of knowledge. And the time for its return to power has arrived.
I sat down with him to understand what SOAD actually is, what he is building as Minister of Trade, and what the Africa-Caribbean connection means to a man who thinks in terms of civilisations rather than countries.
What Is the State of the African Diaspora?
Most people have never heard of SOAD. And that itself is a problem worth naming.
The State of the African Diaspora is a borderless state, headed by His Excellency Hon. Louis-Georges Tin as Prime Minister, with a full cabinet of ministers, a constitution, a parliament and ambassadors operating across the globe. It was birthed by the African Union to reinforce deep cooperation between the African continent and its diaspora, a community that according to World Bank data sends approximately $90 billion annually back to the African motherland.
When I asked him to explain SOAD to someone hearing about it for the first time, he described it plainly. “SOAD’s aim is to bridge the gap between Africa and her diaspora. SOAD was birthed by the AU to reinforce deep cooperation of all the mechanisms and partnerships which can bring the Black race to its pride of place in a world which is lacking in areas of capacity because of institutional racism and subjugation.”
Thirteen of fifteen CARICOM nations have now formally joined Afreximbank’s partnership agreement. The African Continental Free Trade Area is being implemented across 54 countries. Direct flights from Lagos to Barbados launched this month. Ghana went visa-free for all Africans on Africa Day. ACTIF2026 is coming to St. Kitts in July. All of these developments represent the same structural shift from the outside. SOAD represents it from the inside, at the level of governance, mandate and institutional architecture.
As someone who writes every week about the Africa-Caribbean connection, SOAD matters to me personally. The Caribbean is not peripheral to SOAD’s mandate. It is central to it. The people of Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, Grenada and every island in that archipelago are part of the 350 million people of African descent that SOAD was created to serve. And that means the work I do in writing about the Africa-Caribbean bridge is work that SOAD’s institutional framework exists to accelerate.
The Man Behind the Ministry
To understand why Ebube Ebisike George thinks the way he does, you have to start with his father.
“My father was a member of the Planetary Society which had Carl Sagan as President and the likes of Steven Spielberg,” he told me. “So my siblings and I were immersed in the depths of scientific thinking, technology, an ocean of books of all kinds of subject matters and a mind searching out new ways to perceive the world around us, different from the norm, in the late 1970s.”
He described watching David Attenborough’s documentaries and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos as formative experiences that set him on a lifelong path of scientific reasoning, technological aspiration and futurist thinking. He wrote officially to the Nigerian Government during the Buhari Administration in 2016, when Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu was Science and Technology Minister, to request being sent for astronaut training. That request tells you everything you need to know about the scale at which this man thinks.
His Pan-Africanism grew from books. Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu and the Biafra War. Patrice Lumumba. The works of African leaders who reinforced the need for Africa to reinvent its mindset from vulnerability to self-determination, from psychological subjugation to what he calls “resilient frontiership.” He describes the world’s current geopolitical order as multipolar, and Africa’s task as navigating that multipolarity on its own terms rather than on terms dictated by any external power.
“Africa needs to walk a new path of consciousness,” he told me, “and reinvent her political elite choices, thereby dismantling the emergence of Western puppets who subvert the will of the people for foreign interests.”
The Trade Portfolio and the Vision Behind It
As Minister of Trade for SOAD, his portfolio covers the full spectrum of what trade actually means for a people building economic sovereignty from scratch. Finance. Entrepreneurship. Government policy. Manufacturing. Energy infrastructure. Inter-African commerce. Diaspora investment.
He does not describe his work as easy. “It is a gruelling task,” he said, “because trade, finance, entrepreneurship, government policies and economic growth are all tied together and determine a people’s capacity for survival, development, resilience, productivity and competitiveness.”
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
His framing of Africa’s economic position is sober and precise. He cited figures that should be required reading for anyone working in this space: Africa’s economy represents approximately $2.83 trillion in nominal GDP, contributing roughly 3% to global GDP and accounting for about 2% of international trade, despite Africa making up nearly 19% of the world’s population. Those numbers describe the gap between Africa’s demographic weight and its economic power. And closing that gap is the work.
On the question of remittances, he described SOAD’s ambition with clarity. The organisation is working to establish its own Central Bank and coordinate financial programmes that encourage banking, GDP growth and payment channels that ensure Africa builds its own financial gateways. “SOAD is working on setting up its own Central Bank and coordinating financial programs which ensure Africa builds her own gateways and protects wealth from being plundered out of the African motherland whilst encouraging inter-African trade, manufacturing, resource processing and everything which encourages sustainable value addition on this side of the global value chain.”
His ten-year vision for the Africa-diaspora trade ecosystem? By his conservative estimates, it should be worth over $5 trillion.
It is key to note that the likes of other visionaries as Amb. Fred Harding, Amb. James Holmes Jr., Amb. Uchenna Ezeokeke, Amb. Hana Nur and Amb. Ekenedilichukwu John Felix Ajidue are on the team of advisors shaping outcomes at the SOAD Ministry of Trade which is yielding results for the Africa and diaspora collaboration(s).
Technology, Patents and the Story Most People Have Never Heard
One of the most important dimensions of Ebube Ebisike George’s work is his advocacy for African intellectual property rights and his insistence that the global technology ecosystem has systematically excluded and exploited African innovators for generations.
He speaks extensively about Eric Mathew Masaba, the founder of TEXXI, which he describes as the original concept behind what the world came to know as Uber. He points to geolocation of social networks as having made over $2 trillion for big technology companies globally, and argues that this underlying framework traces back to patent ownership that has been strategically denied its rightful holder through what he describes as the racial power structures of the technology ecosystem working in conjunction with intelligence agencies.
This is a larger argument about Africa’s relationship with global intellectual property systems. “Africa needs to bridge the gap between academia, research and development, and the commercialisation of ideas, patents and concepts,” he told me. “A people are as powerful as the patent tradition their society nurtures. This is the framework which made the West a first-world powerhouse and was replicated by the Chinese whilst maintaining their tradition and ancient religious foundation.”
He advocates for Africa to teach science and technology subjects in its indigenous languages, arguing that this would achieve what he calls the “scientification of the African mindset.” He believes Africa must develop its own educational systems, build its own manufacturing hubs, establish its own financial infrastructure and become, in his words, a “deep space faring people” by 2035, with its own microgravity habitat for research and development. The ambition is not metaphorical. He means it literally.
“Africa needs to become her own visionary guardian to protect her own interests in the racially driven committee of nations,” he told me. “This is the only meaningful pathway to sovereignty reemergence.”
The Africa Energy Fund and What It Is Building
Beyond his SOAD portfolio, Ebube Ebisike George serves as a consultant to the Africa Energy Fund, a vehicle established to bridge the finance, energy and infrastructure gaps across the continent.
He describes the AEF’s founder, His Eminence Engr. Dr. Eberechukwu Oji, as a globally respected oil and gas expert and traditional ruler who led the Renaissance Consortium in acquiring Shell’s $2.8 billion onshore assets in Nigeria before establishing the AEF. The fund operates with what he describes as a mandate and consultancy structure, working alongside seasoned international professionals including Dr. Kimberly Arrington of Conrad Global Consulting and Group USA and Paul Nelson, both based in the United States.
He was characteristically measured about specific announcements. “At the right time the necessary announcements will be made.” But he was clear about the urgency. Energy poverty, he said, is one of the key constraints on Africa’s rise. Addressing it is not optional. It is civilisational.
SOAD, the Caribbean and Why This Moment Is Different
I asked him directly whether he sees a structural shift happening in the Africa-Caribbean relationship right now. His answer was immediate and unambiguous.
“Indeed I do see great light as Africa is waking up to her need for interconnected trade amongst countries on the continent through the signing and implementation of the AfCFTA and with her vast diaspora. SOAD is definitely at the heart of spearheading and pushing the trade and innovation agenda for Africa, the Caribbean and all diasporans to work closely to build channels of trade, wealth redistribution and rapid industrialisation.”
For me personally, as a Caribbean woman living in Accra, Ghana, writing about the Africa-Caribbean connection every week, this answer lands with particular weight. SOAD is not just an African institution. It is a diaspora institution. The Caribbean is explicitly part of its mandate and its work. The direct flights. The ACTIF forums. The Afreximbank billions. The visa-free policies. The cultural exchanges. All of these are the visible infrastructure of a reconnection that SOAD exists to accelerate at the governance and policy level.
He told me that SOAD is in contact with CARICOM and Caribbean nations, ensuring through programmes and events that no part of the African diaspora is excluded from the work of what he calls “united black development.” And on the question of what Caribbean professionals bring to the Pan-African project, his answer was generous and precise. “Exchange of ideas and innovation are at the heart of Caribbean professionals contributing to Africa and the Pan-Africanist quest for shared development.”
I asked him the bonus question last. What would he say to me and to every Caribbean person of African descent about what this moment in history means for who we are and where we belong?
“We are in a new paradigm and awakening which will be AI driven. We must not be left behind in this race of technology evolution. Africa and her diaspora must define our outcomes and control as much as possible the part of the Matrix of our productivity that ensures we are self-determined to survive all possible outcomes and unintended consequences of any unforeseen happenings that becomes of the world we live in. Africa first must be a shared and lived mantra of our common necessity.”
Africa first. As a shared and lived mantra. Not a slogan. A necessity.
What He Wants You to Understand
I asked him the question I always find most revealing: what is the one thing about SOAD and his work that he most wishes more people understood?
“How we at SOAD and our partners will connect all the dots to get the vast African human element rewired for the workload ahead that determines our civilisational survival, success and competitiveness. And how the result which gets Africa working will become a tangible reality in a world where White Supremacy seems like the recurring decimal.”
And for the next generation of young Africans and diaspora youth watching what he and SOAD are building, his message was unambiguous: “The African youth is unstoppable in the future and must be united in actions and results that will sustain this dutiful aspiration. The origins of the great discoveries documented across history were contributions made by the Black race’s ancestors. This therefore means greatness, resilience and positive frontiership is in their DNA.”
Greatness in their DNA. Frontiership as inheritance. A borderless government building trade corridors, smart cities, central banking systems and civilisational architecture for 350 million people.
This is the work. And now you know the man doing it.
