Ask most people what holds back solar in Africa and they will name the technology, the sunlight or the price of a panel. Dr Abdul-Qoyyum Olanrewaju, who has spent nine years selling into African energy markets, names none of those.

In his account the hardware is almost never the failure point. What fails is everything arranged around it. The lead time that slipped by eleven weeks and cost an installer the customer. The warranty that turned out to have no claims process anyone on the continent could actually use. The distributor who took delivery of a container and was not heard from again. The financier who wanted a manufacturer name he recognised and did not find one on the datasheet.

Olanrewaju was appointed Senior Sales and Business Development Manager for Africa at TCL Solar in 2026, making him the manufacturer’s representative across the continent. The route he took to that desk is unusual, and it explains a good deal about how he approaches the job.

Starting at the unglamorous end

Olanrewaju did not enter solar through solar. He entered through industrial sales.

In 2019 he joined the Simba Group in Lagos in business development, working in a market where the customer has usually been disappointed before. Imported equipment that failed early. Replacement parts that took months and sometimes never arrived. Warranties that existed on paper with no mechanism behind them.

He describes that period as the one that reframed what he thought he was selling. The hardware, in his view, is a commodity that anyone can quote a price on. What is scarce is a supplier who will give an honest delivery date and who will still answer the phone in year three when something goes wrong. Trust, in other words, is the actual product.

That is a common enough sentiment in sales. What is less common is having spent the four years afterwards in the part of the business where those promises are either kept or broken.

The distribution years

In 2021 Olanrewaju moved to Zpower Impex, where he spent four years on the import and distribution side. The education there was logistical rather than commercial.

Letters of credit. Port clearance at Apapa. What happens to a shipment when the paperwork carries a single wrong digit. How a two week delay at the port becomes a two month delay for the installer waiting at the other end, who then loses the job to a competitor who quoted a longer lead time and delivered sooner.

Anyone intending to sell solar into Africa at volume, he argues, needs to understand that layer before quoting anything at all. Suppliers who do not understand it quote lead times they cannot meet, and in a market this closely networked they generally only get to do that once.

It is a view formed from having been the person waiting at the port rather than the person issuing the estimate from several thousand miles away.

Crossing to the manufacturer’s side

In 2025 Olanrewaju joined LONGi Solar to run business development across Africa, sitting for the first time on the manufacturer’s side of the table.

From the distribution side, he says, a manufacturer looks like a wall. Requests go in, something eventually comes back, and the terms are not open to discussion. Seen from the inside the picture was different. The manufacturer had capacity and wanted the volume. What it lacked was any reliable read on African demand, so the continent was treated as a spot market: sell what happens to be available, take the order, move on to the next one.

The consequences of that approach are visible across the sector. Supply arrives inconsistently. Local stock does not exist. Technical support is remote and slow. Distributors cannot plan a year ahead because nobody is able to tell them what they will be able to source.

His conclusion from that period is the argument he now makes repeatedly. Africa does not need cheaper panels. It needs a manufacturer willing to treat it as a market to be built rather than a market to be cleared into.

The three things that decide whether a project gets built

Across a business to business pipeline he has built past 300 million dollars, Olanrewaju says the same three factors have determined the outcome of almost every deal he has worked on.

Bankability, which is not the same as quality

A financier assessing a project is not asking whether the module is good. They are asking whether they can recover if it is not. That means they want a manufacturer with a real balance sheet, a record of projects that have been financed before, and reasonable confidence that the entity will still exist in fifteen years to honour a warranty.

The practical effect is that a technically excellent module from a company nobody has heard of is harder to finance than an ordinary module from a company everybody has. Olanrewaju regards this as unfair to good smaller manufacturers and does not expect it to change.

Lead times that can go into a contract

Developers, in his experience, do not need speed. They need accuracy.

A twelve week lead time hit every single time is worth more than an eight week lead time hit half the time, because the eight week figure gets written into an engineering, procurement and construction contract with financial penalties attached to it. He says he would rather lose a deal on an honest lead time than win it on an optimistic one, because the second option costs both the customer and everybody that customer talks to afterwards.

Somebody who answers the phone

This sounds minor. It is, according to Olanrewaju, the single most frequent complaint he hears about foreign suppliers operating in African markets.

A distributor in Accra with a technical question at nine in the morning should not be waiting three days for an answer from a time zone eight hours ahead. Having a representative physically on the continent, in his framing, is not a courtesy extended to the market. It is the difference between a supply relationship and a series of unconnected transactions.

Why West Africa, and why Nigeria first

Olanrewaju concentrates on West Africa, with Nigeria as the focus, on a continent where South Africa has the more mature solar market. He gives two reasons.

The first is that Nigerian demand is not speculative. It already exists, expensively, in the form of diesel generation. Every commercial building running a generator is already paying for electricity at a rate that makes solar and storage the cheaper option on any honest comparison. The work is not creating a market. It is converting one that is already spending heavily.

The second reason is structural. Nigeria functions as a bridgehead rather than an endpoint. Distribution built in Lagos transfers to Accra, Abidjan, Dakar and Douala with far less adaptation than moving between regions requires, because the commercial logic is similar and the trading relationships already run along those routes.

This is the reasoning behind his description of Nigeria as the powerhouse for market penetration across the region rather than as a market considered in isolation. East and Southern Africa, he says, are not being ignored. They are being sequenced.

The TCL appointment

TCL Solar was the world’s largest producer of solar grade silicon wafers in 2024, with more than 190 GW of wafer capacity, roughly nineteen percent of global supply. It holds over 1,900 solar patents supported by more than 1,400 research and development specialists, and sits inside TCL Technology, a Fortune Global 500 group. The business traces back to a semiconductor factory founded in 1958.

Asked what made the role worth taking, Olanrewaju does not lead with the scale. He points instead to what the scale arrived attached to, which was a decision to build actual distribution on the continent rather than continue shipping into it opportunistically.

His description of the job is deliberately narrow. He is the direct line between partners on the continent and a manufacturer with the capacity to serve them. That means matching the right module and storage technology to each market, standing behind warranty and performance commitments locally, and building distribution arrangements that outlast a single shipment.

He appears comfortable with how unglamorous that sounds. Nine years, he says, has taught him that the continent has had no shortage of people promising to transform African energy. What it is short of is people who will quote an honest lead time and then hit it.

What Olanrewaju says buyers should ask any supplier

Whoever they ultimately buy from, he recommends putting five questions to any module supplier before committing to anything.

1. Who is your representative on this continent, and what time zone are they in?
2. What is your lead time, and what happens contractually if you miss it?
3. Which projects in my region have been financed using your modules?
4. How is a warranty claim actually processed from here, step by step?
5. What is your local stock position, and how often is it replenished?

A supplier who answers all five clearly, in his view, is worth more than one who is two cents cheaper per watt. He has watched enough projects fail on the answers to be confident of it.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Dr Abdul-Qoyyum Olanrewaju?

He is Senior Sales and Business Development Manager for Africa at TCL Solar, the manufacturer’s representative across the continent. He has nine years in business development across African energy and industrial markets, has built a business to business pipeline past 300 million dollars, and previously ran Africa business development for LONGi Solar. He studied at the University of Manchester and is based in Lekki, Lagos.

What does a TCL Solar Africa representative actually do?

The role covers four areas. Appointing and supporting country and regional distributors. Supplying modules and storage to projects from commercial rooftops through to utility scale plants. Providing a local route for warranty and performance claims. Advising developers and financiers entering new African markets.

Which markets does he cover?

The whole continent, with West Africa as the current focus and Nigeria as the primary market for regional penetration. East and Southern African enquiries are handled through the same desk.

How is he contacted?

Distribution, project supply, market entry and speaking enquiries all reach the same desk through the contact form on this site, or directly at sales@dr-abdul.com and +234 707 309 7857. Replies typically come within two working days.