Where Africa's Millionaires Lived in 2012: Johannesburg, Cairo, and Lagos

In August 2013, the wealth research firm New World Wealth published a snapshot of where Africa’s dollar-millionaires actually lived, and the results confirmed what most observers already suspected while still surprising many with the scale of the gap. By the end of 2012, South Africa was home to an estimated 48,800 high-net-worth individuals, more than three times the number in second-place Egypt, which had roughly 23,000, and well ahead of Nigeria’s 15,900, Kenya’s 8,400, and Angola’s 6,400. The report defined a millionaire using a standard common across the wealth-management industry: net assets of US$1 million or more, excluding the value of a person’s primary residence, a distinction that matters because it filters out ordinary homeowners in expensive markets and focuses on genuinely liquid or investable wealth.

The city-level breakdown was, if anything, more striking than the national one. Johannesburg alone accounted for an estimated 23,400 millionaires, nearly as many as the rest of the top ten African cities combined, and roughly double the total in second-ranked Cairo, which had about 12,300. Lagos came in third with approximately 9,800. South African cities dominated the list further down the table as well, with Cape Town in fourth place at around 9,000, Durban in sixth with 2,700, and Pretoria in eighth with 2,500, meaning four of the continent’s ten wealthiest cities by millionaire population were South African. New World Wealth’s data also tracked a smaller, more exclusive tier of multimillionaires, people with net assets above roughly $10 million: Johannesburg again led with 285, followed by Cairo with 145 and Lagos with 123.

Johannesburg’s dominance reflected the concentration of South Africa’s mining, finance, and corporate sectors in and around the city, particularly its Sandton district, often nicknamed Africa’s richest square mile, which houses the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the regional headquarters of most major banks and multinational firms operating on the continent. Cairo and Lagos, by contrast, drew their wealthy populations more from oil, telecommunications, real estate, and government-adjacent business interests, sectors that had produced rapid fortunes in Egypt and Nigeria over the preceding decade even as broader poverty rates in both countries remained high. The coexistence of enormous individual wealth alongside widespread poverty in cities like Lagos and Cairo drew criticism at the time from commentators who argued that millionaire counts said little about the economic wellbeing of the average resident, a point New World Wealth’s report did not attempt to address since it measured concentration of assets rather than distribution.

The 2012-13 figures represented a specific moment rather than a fixed hierarchy. New World Wealth and its successor publications, later folded into the annual Africa Wealth Report produced with Henley & Partners, have continued to track these rankings every year since, and the relative positions of South Africa, Egypt, and Nigeria at the top of the continental wealth table have generally held, even as the specific numbers and the cities challenging for third and fourth place have shifted with currency swings, capital flight, and each country’s individual economic fortunes.