Thomas Zondo Sakala, a former Vice-President of the African Development Bank and one-time candidate for its presidency, has joined Sankofa Capital as Senior Advisor and Chair of the London-based firm’s Advisory Board for Infrastructure and Development Finance.
Mr Sakala spent 31 years at the African Development Bank, rising to Vice-President for Country and Regional Programmes, a position from which he directed the Bank’s country strategy work and its policy dialogue with African governments. His responsibilities included coordinating the preparation of country and regional strategies across the continent, and he sat on the Bank’s senior management team under President Donald Kaberuka. Over his career he worked on development projects spanning agriculture, education, health, energy and transport infrastructure, and served four years as the Bank’s country representative in Nigeria.
He left the Bank in October 2014 to stand as the Southern African Development Community’s nominee for its presidency, a contest decided in May 2015 among eight candidates that he did not win. He went on to serve as Chief Executive Officer of the Infrastructure Development Bank of Zimbabwe from 2015 until 2025, a decade in which he oversaw the domestic institution’s infrastructure financing activity.
The appointment comes as Sankofa Capital, which advises on industrial restructuring, infrastructure finance and agricultural investment across Southern Africa, deepens its bench of senior counsel with multilateral development finance experience. Veterans of Africa’s development finance institutions have increasingly moved into private advisory roles in recent years, as governments and companies across the continent look for help structuring deals that blend commercial capital with public and concessional finance. The trend reflects both the scale of Africa’s infrastructure financing gap and a growing willingness among former multilateral officials to apply their institutional knowledge to transactions outside the public sector.
In his new role, Mr Sakala will advise on Sankofa Capital’s infrastructure and development finance mandates and chair the firm’s advisory board in that area. He is expected to draw on relationships built across three decades of multilateral and development finance work, including with African governments, regional development banks and international financing partners, as the firm advises on a number of industrial and infrastructure transactions in the region.
“Institutions like the African Development Bank see restructuring and infrastructure deals long before private advisory firms typically do,” said Farai Ian Muvuti, Founder of Sankofa Capital. “Thomas has sat on the other side of the table from governments and financiers for three decades, at the Bank and then running a national development bank. That is precisely the perspective this work requires, and it is not something a firm can build quickly on its own. Having him chair our advisory board gives us a level of institutional judgment that our clients, and the counterparties we negotiate with, will recognise immediately.”
Mr Sakala holds a BSc and MSc in Economics from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and undertook research on land and agricultural transformation in post-independence Zimbabwe at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Before joining the African Development Bank, he worked as a senior research and planning officer in Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Manpower Planning and Development, where he contributed to the country’s first post-independence national manpower survey.
Sankofa Capital Ltd is a strategic advisory and investment firm headquartered in London, operating across Southern Africa and the United Kingdom, with a focus on industrial restructuring, infrastructure finance and agricultural investment.
