Actis appoints Joel Nana Kontchou as Managing Director

It has been confirmed that senior energy industry professional, Joel Nana Kontchou, has been appointed Managing Director of AES Sonel, Cameroons public electricity dealer, whose name will soon change following the acquisition of AES Corp assets in the country’s electricity sector by the British investment fund Actis.

Mr Kontchou, currently head of Central West Africa at Schlumberger, will be replacing his compatriot Jean David Bile to beome the first CEO of the Actis era in Cameroon’s electricity sector. It is though he will officially take office on August 11.

The energy guru did almost all his classes at Schlumberger, where he joined in 1984 as an engineer. He travelled the Syrian and Indian subsidiaries as well as the Nigerian, Algerian until 1995.

From there he was promoted to Operations Manager at Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS) in Nigeria (Port Harcourt), before being transferred to the same position in the UK in 1998.

Appointed, in turn, positions of chief of staff and head of marketing and communications in various subsidiaries of Schlumberger between 1998 and 2004, Joel Nana Kontchou was then propelled to Vice President.

He held this position until 2010, when he returned to Schlumberger to become the Director General for Central and West Africa, with 2,400 employees under his direction.

This piece of furniture of Schlumberger, so to speak, arrives at the head of a company of production, transmission and distribution of electricity, whose performances are constantly being criticized by people and businesses since the privatization in 2001, of Sonel, the defunct public company in the electricity sector.