Karl Miller calls Africa “the final geopolitical chessboard,” and he’s helping some of the West’s largest companies take some risk out of the moves they make on its challenging terrain.

Miller is chairman of NEAH Global Energy Solutions, a Dubai-based holding company incorporated in 2012 to provide integrated risk-management services to oil and gas, mining and manufacturing concerns doing business in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Working remotely from Wilmington, he oversees more than 500 GES employees who keep private- and public-sector clients out of harm’s way.

Miller is no stranger to risk. A former government securities trader for Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase), commodities trader and international energy executive, the New Orleans native was among a growing group of investors in infrastructure who more than a decade ago began viewing Africa as a long-dormant market with huge upside potential.

From 2008 to 2013, Chinese investments across the continent surged from $7 billion to $26 billion, according to data from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. As Miller and some of his counterparts watched the Chinese gain access to coveted commodities and clinched deals to build roads and railways in exchange for much-needed capital, they understood that the West would have to play catch-up.

“The Chinese became the lenders of first resort in Africa,” Miller said during a recent sit-down at a Wilmington coffee shop.

With the GES business model “designed to serve the Western-based economy,” he said, “We don’t do business with any Chinese firms.”

Established in 2014, NEAH GES Africa, a subsidiary, provides on-the-ground, in-the-air and technological risk-mitigation services to its clients through a comprehensive reinsurance wrap. The firm is also an authorized vendor for the U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development and United Nations.

“Without insurance, the deal doesn’t go anywhere,” Miller said, alluding to a wide variety of risks posed when doing business on a continent that he describes as “resource-rich and service-company poor.”

Specific risk-management services provided include vulnerability assessments, intelligence support, security systems and a 24/7 control center; integrated facilities management; frontier medical services and emergency response; aviation services for oil and gas fields, cargo shipments and evacuation airlifts; construction and management of power-generating facilities; and technology solutions such as IT networks, biometrics and satellite communications.

GES first negotiates coverage with insurance carriers based on overall project risk and the risk management protocols that the firm will put in place. Underwriting reinsurance coverage keyed to GES protocols gives the carrier comfort that losses will be minimal, Miller said. The company then prices the cost of its services for the client, incorporating the insurance premium.

Risks can vary greatly from country to country, Miller explained.

In Nigeria – once considered a rising star on the continent but now tarnished a bit from a commodities slump, internal strife and troublesome governance – GES has a policy of working only with medium- to-large multinational oil and gas, mining and manufacturing companies there that “pay for services on time, honor their contracts and have already obtained governmental permits to operate,” he said.

Other countries in the GES footprint include South Africa, Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, Botswana and Mozambique, each with its own set of opportunities and challenges.

There is a “huge demand” for services such as the ones provided by GES, said Paul Taylor, an officer for the U.S. Commercial Service who was posted in China and Ghana before transferring to the service’s Raleigh office in 2016.

As U.S. businesses continue to seek out viable investments in Africa, Taylor said, they will “almost always” have to utilize the support of risk-mitigation services.

“There’s a relatively small pool of them,” he noted.

Taylor conceded that U.S. companies are playing catch-up in Africa given the fact that the Chinese entered a number of markets that Western firms initially shunned and are now “a decade or more ahead of us.”

“It’s going to be extremely difficult for a Western company to come in and pick up the pieces” if a Chinese deal is being renegotiated, he believes.

Yet market opportunities abound.

With a growing middle class and an expanding consumer base (34 percent of the continent now earns $2- $20 daily, according to the African Development Bank Group), Africa has been luring fresh capital.

Private equity funds invested $8.1 billion in African companies in 2014, according to the African Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. One-fourth of all PE dollars from 2007 to 2014 were invested in telecom enterprises while 15 percent went into consumer discretionary items, the group reported.

While capital-raising is likely to slow in 2016 due to investor exit strategies, “Africa’s positive demographic trends mean that PE investment is likely to remain targeted at consumer-driven sectors over the medium term,” the association stated.

Miller stresses that, going forward, the GES platform is designed to provide risk-management services to all types of enterprises.

“GES will be positioned to support the middle-market economies as they develop, which include warehousing, distribution hubs, large retail shopping centers, malls,” he said.

“There’s going to be more opportunities for GES with your everyday business person,” believes Shirreef Loza, an international trade specialist at U.S. Commercial Service in Raleigh, saying he wouldn’t be surprised to see the use of risk-mitigation services in Africa become “as ordinary as getting a visa.”

“You’re hoping you don’t ever have to use them,” Loza said. “It’s piece of mind, it’s insurance.”
 

GES also focuses on rhino protection

Karl Miller, the Wilmington-based chairman of NEAH Global Energy Solutions, a holding company that offers risk-management services to oil and gas, mining and manufacturing companies working in Africa, doesn’t just want to protect business assets.
 
He’s also looking out for the continent’s dwindling population of rhinos.
 
Founded in 2015, the GES Africa Conservation Fund, a nonprofit, reflects Miller’s wish to see South Africa’s world-famous Kruger National Park and nearby private game reserves get the upper hand on poachers hired by criminal syndicates who sell the animals’ prized horns into Asian markets.
 
The fund helps bankroll the hiring, training and deployment of armed rangers to confront and deter intruders who cross the Mozambique border in order to infiltrate the reserves, said Kelly McLintock, head of global business development for GES, which also donates some in-kind services to reserve owners.
 
Anti-poaching teams consist of at least 80 rangers trained to use technology such as live thermal feeds from rifle scopes, backed by thermal-image satellite tracking and helicopters, McLintock said via email.
 
“We specifically design and deploy technologies to empower our on-the-ground teams and birds in the sky,” he said, calling technology “the cornerstone of our war and a massive differentiator.”
 
Images beamed to a control room manned around the clock serve as an early warning system and are supplemented by a network of informers, he added.
 
The conservation fund currently protects about 1,700 southern white rhinos – about 8 percent of the world’s total crash – and no rhino has been lost on any GES-managed reserve over the past year, McLintock said.
 
Although South Africa has now experienced its first decrease in rhino poaching since 2007 (1,175 of the animals were harvested in 2015), more are being lost each year than born, and the number of rhinos killed in neighboring countries has increased dramatically.
 
With a seemingly insatiable demand in China and Vietnam for rhino horn – thought to address ailments including cancer, fever, hangovers and hallucinations – the syndicates keep many poverty-stricken Mozambicans busy trudging up to 25 miles in heavy bush at night, some armed with AK-47s, hoping to penetrate Kruger or another reserve to take down the animals.
 
“Rhino horn is more expensive than cocaine and gold. The borders in Africa have been porous to say the least, and rife corruption of officials hasn’t helped,” laments McLintock, a native South African. “The South African legal system’s wheels of justice move slower than a sloth in hibernation,” he added, with some poachers slipping back over the border to hunt again.
 
The GES Africa Conservation Fund (gesafricafund.co.za) is engaged in a $500,000 drive to support its anti-poaching helicopter operation, which the game reserves cannot afford on their own. Miller, who takes no compensation as GES chairman, said his firm also intends to hire development officers who will find “core sponsors” to engage in sustainable underwriting.