Introducing MISA

There is a pattern in Africa, one I have seen play out again and again. Capital arrives, takes what it came for, and leaves. The returns go home. The continent is treated as a transaction.

MISA is built on the opposite conviction. The best returns in Africa come to those who stay.

We know this because we’ve been operating in Africa for over 30 years. My father, Michael Hacking, built Mocoh, our oil trading business, from the ground up, trade by trade and relationship by relationship, one brick at a time, keeping our capital invested when others extracted profits. I have seen this as CEO of the MISA Group as we diversify our activities across countries and sectors, redistributing capital from today’s profit centres to those of tomorrow, building for the future needs of our customers and the communities we serve.

Look at what stands in front of us. Africa holds some of the world’s great endowments of energy and resources: hydrocarbons, critical minerals, and more sun, wind and hydro than the continent could ever use. Alongside them sits the youngest and fastest-growing population on earth. The supply is there. The demand is there, for energy and everything it makes possible. What’s missing is the infrastructure and capital to bridge the two. Africa will be built. The only question is who stands alongside Africans while they build it.

So what do we actually do? We trade and supply physical energy and base oils across African markets through Mocoh, the business the group was built on, with operations on the ground in over 20 African countries and the trade finance and logistics to move product across them. We sell fuel and lubricants directly to customers in Ghana through our downstream distribution business, MISA Energy. We develop and generate power, weighted toward renewables, through Modaso. And through Bioscape in Nigeria, we turn agricultural waste into biofuels and biomass feedstock, investing across the supply chain to source, process and sell it.

These are foundational sectors, the kind an economy is built on. We don’t spread ourselves thin across them. We take high-conviction, concentrated positions, and we mean to scale every one of these businesses across the continent. We run all of it to an institutional standard: independent boards, audited reporting, real risk discipline. That is what serious third-party capital requires, and what we demand of ourselves regardless.

Everything we do serves one thesis: provide the energy and resources that best meet our customers’ needs, today and tomorrow. Today that is often molecules. Tomorrow it is electrification, more electrons than molecules. We intend to deliver both.

None of it works in a neat circle. Africa rarely does. More often the relationship comes first and the opportunity follows, and being present, properly present, is what opens the doors capital alone never will.

One belief on this continent runs older than any market: a person is a person through other people. Ubuntu. You are who you are because of those around you. We take it seriously as a way of doing business. We measure our worth by what we build with the people we work beside, over years, which is why we’re family-owned, with no fund timetable and no exit clock, patient enough to hold a position for as long as the opportunity asks. It is also why we give back in the communities where we operate, through MC2H, which backs children’s education across fifteen local grassroots partners in Ghana and Nigeria, and AWE, which works in conservation, anchored by its Chewore project in Zimbabwe.

When the world turns to Africa, we will already be here. We never left.