Accra’s central business district, located at Ring Road, is popular with start-ups because everyone walks past it, from tourists to townsfolk. This doesn’t count for much if Ghana’s economy continues to stumble.
Felix Oppong runs a small printing business in this bustling area. He has a staff of five who serve around 10 companies, mainly from the telecommunications and financial sectors.
The company prints posters, fliers, banners and office documents. In the past year, Oppong has lost two of his biggest clients, telecoms giant, MTN, and Fidelity Bank, due to power cuts, known here as dumsor. He has also had to increase his prices to break even.
“Our business has really taken a hit, the dumsor situation right now means we cannot service a lot of the orders we get from clients. We are relying on the generator every day to make sure we can meet demands and the cost of petrol is very high as well,” says Oppong.
“We cannot continue running the business like this. Our clients are complaining about the increase in prices and I had to sack three staff, there have been at least two petrol shortages last year which meant we had to close our business for a week and that is when we lost MTN.”
Ahead of elections on November 7, the Ghanaian economy is facing several challenges. Once a shining light of economic prosperity, the country, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is now experiencing a decline in growth from 8% in 2012 to 3.5% in 2015. The current woes are largely due to the protracted energy dilemma and what many industry experts believe to be poor macro-economic management.
With elections coming, a restrictive IMF program has been implemented to prevent previous bouts of excessive spending. The organization has disbursed a third installment of $116 million, which amount to a total of $900 million over three years, to aid economic recovery in the West African country. Consequently, Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation is forecast to rise to 8.7% in 2016, up from 8.3% in 2015.
Franklin Cudjoe, the Founder and CEO of IMANI Center for Policy and Education, a leading think-tank in Ghana, says the plight of the Ghanaian economy is not specific to one sector.
“I would say all the industries in the country are having some challenges, all emanating from production costs that have gone high over the last couple of years. One of the sources of the high production cost for almost all the industries is because of the energy challenge that we have,” he says.
“If you take it on a per capita basis, the cost of energy, for instance, has tripled over the past few years alone and that significantly affects the budget for food. The disposable income for the household has significantly been reduced. The Ghanaian economy has also suffered from the global shocks because most of our products depend on them and there has been plummeting oil prices. Cocoa production also hasn’t quite matched this, not to mention a decline in gold as well.”
Cudjoe says the country’s woes are also self-inflicted. Ghana is borrowing more money but, according to some experts, these funds are not utilized well. The currency, according to Reuters estimates, has plummeted by around 20%, with a corresponding total external debt of $24.3 billion in 2015.
“Austerity measures being used at the moment are all fiscal and based on levying tax on everything. The government has incurred so much debt and the only way it can service those debts is to increase taxes. There is no sensible government that will be seen introducing taxes in an election year, but it seems the only way the economy can sustain itself… because, quite frankly, the coffers are empty,” says Cudjoe.
Nigeria’s fiscal challenges have also led to the country banning some imports, which significantly affected Ghana’s agricultural sector. Farming contributes around 19.9% to the economy, according to the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS).
“This also has a way of affecting our balances. It is similar to 2005 where Nigeria banned close to 93 products from Ghana and I think we are seeing echoes of that sentiment again. I don’t think it is right to erect barriers, especially with both countries belonging to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which is supposed to lead to deeper economic integration,” says Cudjoe.
He, however, believes that the services sector, together with technology, will drive growth in Ghana. According to GSS figures, the sector contributes a whopping 50.2% to the economy.
“Ghana at the moment is doing $900 million a month, that is 24 million transactions, in mobile money. Ninety nine percent of these transactions are peer to peer, which simply means one takes and transfers money to the other. We are so far away from creating a cash-lite economy in Ghana, which is what mobile money is supposed to do. So we sat down and looked at how to create a platform that enables us to use the mobile money for retail payments. Zeepay’s idea is to be able to move from predominantly peer-to-peer transactions into retail payments as well,” says Andrew Takyi-Appiah, Co-founder of Zeepay, a mobile payments company.
He has, so far, invested just over $500,000 in his new venture and is hoping the growth in the Ghanaian services sector will help boost his mobile app service. Takyi-Appiah’s major challenge in scaling his business is the lack of funds. Financial institutions, who are traditionally apprehensive about lending to start-ups, have taken an even tougher approach to mitigate risk against bad debts. The government, however, has set up the Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund (GIIF), to provide resources and attract investment. But Cudjoe says the approach of the government in implementing this leaves little to be desired.
“I know for a fact that the Ghana infrastructure fund that is being set up is being funded by the country’s oil money as seed capital, instead of using private funding from abroad. You ask yourself if this is the most prudent way of utilizing resources in an austere economy. I don’t really believe that austerity measures are the [solution] but I think the way we are going about it is to use the tax to solve it, and I think taxation is the last measure you want to resort to in a time like this,” he says.
As voters prepare to make their mark, the Ghanaian economy is on shaky ground. Business in the country is still firmly in the grips of the energy crisis, which has reduced output from the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, while increasing production costs.
The recent growth in the economy has achieved certain goals – such as reducing poverty – but ballooning costs and debt has left many wondering if Ghana’s progress is about to be stunted.

The Coffers Are Empty

It was a golden path walked by the young Dare Okoudjou growing up in Benin. He came from a good family, a teacher father and nurse mother; he wanted for little and was able to study in Europe.
More than a decade ago, as a final year student for a Master’s in telecommunications engineering in Paris, Okoudjou had companies hounding him with lucrative job offers.
Engineering led him to New York and a job as an intern in the autumn of 1998. He was 22 years old.
“In those six months in New York, I realized I wanted to be part of a bigger plan, a bigger picture. There were a lot of offers from companies, such as Ericsson and Alcatel, but I didn’t like it there,” says Okoudjou.
The salaries in telecommunications were high and engineers were sought after, but the thought of working in the United States, far from Africa, terrified Okoudjou.
“Nineteen ninety nine was the boom of the dotcom. I was one of the first people who knew the stuff. At that time, a lot people had not heard about internet in Africa, I was an engineer of it,” says Okoudjou.
Instead, he accepted a job as a consultant in telecommunications and media at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in Paris in 1999 hoping it would lead home. He says the French were doing a lot of work in Africa. His first project was to launch a mobile network in Morocco. This was fortuitous. When Okoudjou finished school, at the top of the class in Benin, he went to an engineering scholarship in Morocco, for two years.
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“At PwC, I met great people from different backgrounds but which I related to. We knew we were fortunate to be there. They were sensitive to the world around them. We shared the sense of responsibility towards the larger community. Then there was a lady who created a link between PwC and the world of NGOs,” says Okoudjou.
In 2001, he quit and joined an NGO in the north of Tanzania. The NGO looked after 30,000 people in a refugee camp in the highly populated Nyanga district.
“That was the time I heard the call of Africa. I felt I needed to do something more helpful to the people than sending money now and then to my parents,” he says.
“African people were going there [Europe] out of desperation, I was not. I was in quest of greatness. I wanted to be the best. I really enjoyed my years in Paris.”
In Tanzania, Okoudjou realized the hidden side of what he calls the business of NGOs. He regrets that the camps turned out businesses that compete to serve people but with no intention to liberate them. Their business was to keep people in the camps as long as they could, he laments.
“No offence to the [NGO] people, some people had great hearts. They wanted to help somehow but that very personal need to help translated into a situation which will maintain thousands of people in the same situation for a long time. The refugees were not allowed to work, as a result they would sell what was donated to them to the working villagers,” says Okoudjou.
“Trade business is better, it provides the right incentives. There are no hidden agendas. The whole NGO business has hidden motives, so I left the NGOs after two months and went back to PwC and later enrolled for an MBA in 2005.”
In 2005, the former Minister of Finance in South Africa, Trevor Manuel, addressed Okoudjou’s MBA classmates in Paris about opportunities that his country had. The idea of setting up in Johannesburg was born.
The following year, Okoudjou joined MTN in Johannesburg and worked in the mobile financial services section, also known as mobile money. This position allowed Okoudjou to travel Africa.
“When I was in Paris in August 2005, there was a small article about MTN mobile money. I knew then that was what I was looking for because it had all the elements. It’s about technology and I love technology. I knew money transfer inside out. We were students in France and people in Benin sent us money. When I was in France I sent money to Benin, but there were always people trying to rip us off. That’s when I wrote to MTN and said I wanted to come and work for them. By the end of 2008, I realized I wanted my own thing and that was mobile money transfer,” says Okoudjou.
It took Okoudjou six months to raise $500,000 and start his own money transfer company, with three people, in Johannesburg. This was a similar business that he managed for three years at MTN. For the next three years Mobile Financial Services Africa won plump contracts with cellphone networks. They grew from one branch in South Africa to more than 10 on the continent. Then disaster struck. The $2 million, raised by the end of 2011, dried up overnight.
“In May last year, it was so hard, I struggled paying salaries, I couldn’t pay my home electricity bill, and they cut it off. I am from Benin, I took it on the chin. We cooked outside on an open fire. I turned it into something fun for my kids,” says Okoudjou.
By June, despite the increasing pressure to salvage the sinking business, Okoudjou says he turned away several offers to sell a portion of the business, or form partnerships. The deals didn’t feel right.
Okoudjou forged ahead trying to save his business. He opened more branches and tried soliciting credible shareholders.
On a hot Friday evening in November, it got worse. Okoudjou’s flight at Abidjan International Airport, back to South Africa, was delayed for six hours. He had flown in to open a branch in Côte d’Ivoire even though his business was bleeding back home. While at the airport, a security company called to tell Okoudjou his house in Johannesburg had been broken into.
“I could hear my children crying. My wife was not there with them. I couldn’t reach her on her phone and I was sitting in that Abidjan airport without money and helpless. I have been trying to do this business for five years, but I failed. I drove this [business] to the ground, there’s nothing I could do… And I remembered I read somewhere: ‘There’s always a way. There must be a way,’” he says.
Okoudjou says in that moment of despair at the airport he took out a piece of paper and wrote all the things he should try and people he should call in the next month to plead for a lifeline.
His father Pierre-Claver Okoudjou is a retired philosophy teacher and a prolific French essay writer in Benin. He says at that lonely moment in Abidjan he took inspiration from his father’s essays.
For a month, Okoudjou worked hard to find investors to save his business. Now, it is safe with 10 shareholders and 20 employees on the continent.
“We are not completely out of the woods, we still have a mountain to climb,” he says.
That is the philosophy that emerges from the scars of a worst day when you suffer the tears of your children from far away.

“I Could Hear My Children Crying”

Getting Africa out of the development woods will require more than technology and telecommunications. After decades of lost trading opportunities, Africa needs a new trading lens. Personal and institutional initiatives to close the lacuna between ‘extant realities’ and development ideals is desperately needed.
New advanced technologies, progressive policies and new investment models to integrate economic and political systems would certainly help. Africa must open up its markets to African customers. We need to build new factories, generate energy solutions and open up trade corridors across the vast continent.
Intra-Africa tourism barely exists and intra-Africa trade is low, between 10 and 12% of total trade. Trade within Africa needs to surpass trade between Africa and the rest of the world. West Africa now accounts for 40% of the total African, Caribbean and Pacific trade with the European Union.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) region accounts for about 45% of Africa’s trade with the rest of the world. In East Africa, Kenya’s top 10 export markets are Uganda, Tanzania, Netherlands, the United States (US), Britain, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, UAE, South Sudan and Egypt. The five African countries here account for more than 30% of Kenya’s total exports. Kenya’s tea makers are yet to make a serious push into Nigeria, Africa’s largest market.
Ethiopia, Rwanda and Burundi produce excellent Arabica coffee. Most of it ends up in North America and Europe. You will search very hard to find East African produce in stores between Dakar and Douala. European coffee brands however abound.
Africa is largely disconnected from itself due to its poor infrastructure, restrictive immigration policies, corruption, failure to formalize informal trade, and unclear customs and immigration rules. Fresh facts emerging, however, suggest it is improving slightly. Data for 2013/14 shows that intra-African finance is a significant source of foreign investment in low and middle-income countries such as Burundi (79%), Namibia (42%), Rwanda (62%), South Sudan (64%) and Uganda (45%).
National and regional policy frameworks need to be strengthened and harmonized. This is a job for governments, companies and citizens alike.
Easing trade barriers would help. Building on a current system which allows citizens visa-free access to other West African countries for 90 days, the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is planning to launch a biometric identity card in 2016. It will be a digital identification card, travel document, and residence and work permit. This biometric passport is expected to resolve the regulatory bottlenecks that penalize local businesses at the expense of their international competitors.
Similar integration plans in other regional economic blocs also exist, aimed at reducing the expense and stress of traveling and trading across Africa.
Kinshasa and Brazzaville are only divided by the Congo River, yet a return ferry ticket cost the equivalent of $40, more than 40% of the average monthly wage for a Kinshasa resident. It costs less to move a container of maize from the flood plains of the Mississippi, US, to Dakar in Senegal, than it is to take the same harvest from Dakar to Tema in southern Ghana.
An ongoing diplomatic détente between Accra and Nairobi seems poised to attenuate these issues.
Puzzled by the poor levels of trade between Ghana and Kenya, Leah Nduati Lee, a Kenyan married to a Ghanaian, organized the very first Kenya Trade Expo in the Ghanaian capital last November. The three-day event smoothed trade relations between the two regional giants, building on the seven agreements signed in 2014 by President John Dramani Mahama and President Uhuru Kenyatta, to consolidate existing economic and trade ties, and deepen institutional cooperation in the energy, ICT, trade, tourism, transport, agriculture and education sectors.
According to Kenya’s Export Promotion Council, the country’s exports to Ghana were worth KSh479 million (around $4.7 million) in 2014, while imports from Ghana were worth KSh369 million ($3.6 million).
During the expo, Kenya’s envoy to West Africa, Ambassador Tom Amolo, said that consensus building between Africa governments to tackle integration issues is beginning to happen.
“Kenya is fully open for business,” says Amolo. “Our investment promotion frameworks continue to foment long lasting networks and commercial alliances between the business communities in East and West Africa… Deepening and broadening integration is essential for Africa’s inclusive development.”
The momentum between the gateway economies across Africa needs to be sustained.

TRADE WINDS  MusT Blow

Agriculture has become an increasingly crucial issue for African governments. Poor infrastructure and lack of long-term finance have been fingered as the culprits blocking Africa’s path to food security.
Africa’s last decade belonged to telecommunications. To achieve meaningful development, the next decade must witness massive investment and progress in the education, healthcare, electricity, water, road, rail and air transport sectors. This means economic diversification, urban decongestion and its economic gains, namely, rural development, inclusive growth, innovation, heightened productivity and spiraling employment.
Solid infrastructure will boost knowledge and agro-produce exchange between African nations.
Beyond infrastructure development and food security concerns, expanding food production will also have a positive impact on local and regional labor markets, as more people are absorbed into the agribusiness value chain.
Small scale farms produce 80% of the food consumed across Africa. Consequently, the agribusiness value chain is a short one, delivering little value to national economies. According to the African Export-Import Bank, Africa’s global share of food processing is less than 20%.
The paucity of processing, trading and retail mechanisms has restricted Africa’s agribusiness sector to the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid. The current practice of just cultivating-to-sell restricts the value chain to a primary commodity-level activity. Service providers involved in input supplies (seeds, fertilizers, machinery), packaging, exporting, transportation, processing, and converting basic produce into finished goods are urgently needed to extend the value chain. De-risking the sector might also require the establishment of public and private-sector initiatives which enable farms and agro-allied concerns to access bio- and agro-technology, financial credit and risk assurance.
According to the World Bank, Africa’s agriculture sector could be worth $1 trillion by 2030 if infrastructure and financing challenges are overcome.
Slightly over 60% of all the uncultivated arable land in the world is in Africa. In Nigeria, only 40% of its 84 million hectares of arable land is cultivated. These productivity gaps can become Africa’s competitive edge.
Coming out of the 23rd AU Summit of Heads of State and Government in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, last July, African leaders adopted the Malabo Declaration, reinforcing a decade-old commitment (the 2003 Maputo Declaration) to end hunger and cut poverty in half by 2025.
To meet this lofty goal, the leaders reaffirmed their resolve to devote at least 10% of their national budgets to agricultural development. Only 10 countries have so far met this target. The Malabo Declaration raises the bar of focus and commitment to smallholder farmers and rural communities across the continent, says One.org, a campaigning and advocacy group which helped to galvanize pan-African and global support for the pact.
Africa’s leaders however stopped short of agreeing on a common formula for measuring the 10% target. Whichever way one looks at this matter, the key point is that the local and international appetite for Africa’s agribusiness sector has picked up.
Embedded in the declaration are a set of risk management and strategic corporate social objectives namely, operationalization of the African Investment Bank; increased support for intra-regional trade; adoption of climate-resilient farming strategies; responsible private sector investment; youth inclusion and employment targets; and mutual accountability for results.
Hopefully, Africa’s next decade will be fruitful. Ethiopia, South Africa and Kenya seem well adjusted to the nuances of commercial and small-scale farming, producing and exporting excellent quality coffee, wine, citrus, vegetables, tea and flowers.
In Nigeria, an     Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) has transformed a once comatose sector into an engine of growth. Food imports declined from $19 billion in 2011 to $4.35 billion in 2013; bank lending to the sector as a share of total loans has also risen from 0.7% to 6% within two years. Over $4 billion private sector investment commitments has also been attracted to Nigerian agriculture over the last three years.
Earlier this year, Aliko Dangote, president of Dangote Industries, reached out to Kenya for agro-expertise. The Kenyans initially hesitated, pointing at Boko Haram and Ebola as the reasons why they feared coming to West Africa. But when they were offered a remuneration package that was too sweet to refuse, they accepted the challenge. They are now supporting Dangote’s sugarcane fields in Nigeria.
Money talks and agriculture is a multi-billion dollar business.

YOU CAN GROW MONEY  AFTER ALL

If you are somewhere in Africa with a cell phone signal right now, one man’s job is done. If you’re without one, the same man promises to hook you up .This is at the heart of the business of Issam Darwish, the Lebanese-Nigerian who grew up in war and rose from a desk job to become one of Africa’s powerful telecom tycoons.
When he got his first job, he was so poor, that his boss had to lend him $8,000 to buy a car so he could get to work. From creating billing systems for a handful of dollars a week to leading a telecommunications infrastructure company in Africa—Darwish is now a man with a wealth of $200 million as valued by the FORBES wealth unit in the United States. He has walked a long road and you believe him when he says he has a lot longer to walk yet.
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Ambitious, maybe, but this is the hallmark of a driven, self-taught entrepreneur who once dreamt about winning the Nobel Prize for physics in Oslo when he was a teenager.
Darwish is a bubble of energy, one who hates the rigidity of business suits, yet wears one well. As he goes down memory lane while in his corner office in Lagos, he is as sharp and eloquent as a business man, yet as relaxed and witty as a next door neighbor.
It’s a story that began in Beirut in Lebanon. This is where Darwish was born on the cusp of the brutal civil war that was to tear the country apart. He was born to a fairly wealthy family, but with no silver spoon in his mouth.
In the turmoil of civil war, Darwish’s father lost everything. The family believed education was the way out. His father took two jobs and his mother did embroidery work to keep their children in private schools in Lebanon. Darwish senior encouraged his children to read and rewarded them for finishing books.
Luckily, young Darwish was an inquisitive bright spark. He nurtured an interest in electromagnetic fields, quantum mechanics and relativity.
“I was always the best in my school. I graduated from the best university—The American University of Beirut in Lebanon—and I wanted to do physics, I loved the sciences. When I did my SATs (the standardized tests for college admission in the United States), my grades were so high the dean of engineering called and encouraged me to do engineering instead. So, I opted for computer and communications engineering. I was among the first set of engineers who graduated from that program with distinction, barely aged 21,” says Darwish.
<div id="attachment_2503" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2503" class="size-medium wp-image-2503" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/120724-300-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Lagos Nigeria, July 2012: IHS tower sites Photograph by Mike Goldwater</div>
“I also understood the value of money at an early stage in life. During the war, I remember my father would give me some money before I left for school [and] I’d have to decide whether I would use that money to eat at school or to take the bus back home. I had to make a decision between the two every day.”
Darwish is thankful for these realities.
“As a young person growing up in a war-torn area, our minds were cultured, but not our existence. You’d hear the fighting, see people die, you can’t go to school for weeks because fights have broken out, you experience the effects of war firsthand and you begin to appreciate the basic things in life, like electricity, water, fresh air and ultimately life,” he says.
By 1992, he was armed with an engineering qualification and a desire for more. Darwish toyed with the idea of furthering his studies with a Master’s degree in the United States (US). As he applied, he looked for ways to occupy himself.
As luck would have it, a group of Lebanese businessmen returned to Beirut with a partnership with MCI—one of the largest telecoms carriers in the world back then. They wanted to set up a network in Lebanon and offered Darwish the job of creating a billing system.
“I joined the team. While I was there, there was also a satellite station present and I was fascinated with this. I’d work on the billing system during the day and come back at night, with the permission of the CEO, just to learn more about how it works. That was my first hands-on experience in telecoms. In a short space of time, I could now operate the station by myself.”
Soon, Darwish was managing the satellite systems at MCI. He played an instrumental role in setting up the first Lebanese mobile network, after a GSM licence was won, in his role as network manager for Libancell—now called MTC Touch.
Darwish may be Lebanese by birth, but he is a true Lagosian at heart. His Nigerian citizenship is expected to come through this year and has already been awarded a chieftaincy title, ‘The Adimula of Erin Ile’ by the traditional king, in Kwara State, northern Nigeria. He knows how to navigate the streets, from Victoria Island to Lekki, with his eyes closed; he can even hold his own in pidgin—the informal lingua franca spoken in Nigeria and parts of West Africa.
“Lebanon is where I come from but Lagos is home. When I’m away, anywhere in the world, I think about Lagos more than I think about Lebanon. This is where I became a man; this is where I’ve lost money, made money, made friends. Most of my friends are Nigerians. This is home for me.”
The call of Lagos came many years ago. Following a streak of successful network set-ups in his region, investors approached Darwish to set up a mobile network up in Nigeria; things weren’t going too well with the license holders and they needed someone to sort it out. This coincided with another offer from Britain, but Darwish plumped for Nigeria.
In 1998, he brought in around 40 expatriates and trained at least 500 Nigerians in technical, billing, sales and marketing in his role as deputy managing director of Motophone, Nigeria’s first GSM operator.
“We created a network in six cities, together with Motorola and Ericsson. We started selling, we had thousands of people coming to our points of sale, people started buying… the license was soon revoked however, due to transitions in political structure that affected the financial commitments made by the license holders. This lasted five or six months. We settled our liabilities and left things there.”
This was an unpleasant setback in a difficult market. In those days, infrastructure was thin on the ground. It had 400,000 fixed telephone lines and a mere 2,000 to 3,000 cell phones. Telecommunications was mostly for the rich; power supply was sporadic, security was a problem, the ports were in chaos and diesel shortages could go on for weeks.
“Every logistical aspect was a nightmare but we found a way to set things up. We had to import generators, there was also a lack of skilled manpower—most of the skilled Nigerians were out of the country working overseas,” he says.
In 2001, the Nigerian government privatized telecommunications and auctioned the licenses. There was then a need to build sites to power these networks. This was a big break for Darwish and gave birth to the leading telecoms infrastructure company, which he co-founded—IHS.
“We had built some sites in the past. My partner, brother and I decided to invest some money in this and build a few sites. In the beginning, I had to borrow money from my father. My partner invested and we borrowed some money from the banks with an interest rate of 24%. It was staggering but that was our seed capital. We, however, made very good margins because we delivered on time and delivered quality. Motorola gave us our first contract and we learnt a lot from these guys. Soon, we started running the management of the sites as well, the business moved into site management, which was recurring.”
The cost of setting up these towers back then, was between $250,000 and $300,000. Today, they range between $150,000 and $250,000. To cover itself, a country like Nigeria requires around 20,000 of these sites. Power and security, or the lack of them, are thorns in Darwish’s side. Each tower needs at least two generators, automatic transfer switches, regulators, a massive supply chain to make sure diesel is bought at the right price and quality. This alone costs around $3,000 to $4,000 a month.
IHS currently has around 4,000 towers in Nigeria and more than 10,000 across Africa, with operations in Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, South Sudan and recently, Zambia and Rwanda. It is working on tripling that number.
The rapid growth in demand wasn’t expected in the early years. It meant, when Nigeria tried to catch up, there was a mushrooming of towers.
“In Lebanon for instance, when we started with the GSM networks, people thought we’d have 50,000 subscribers in three years. We had 350,000 by the end of the first year. In Nigeria, people thought about a million subscribers; by the time they started selling, they realized everyone wanted a phone line. They started setting the towers up everywhere without the right planning. All the service providers were just scrambling to have these towers everywhere, so this was a good period for us,” says Darwish.
In the US, the mobile industry was built on the idea of sharing towers and competitors became partners to lower their costs. This wasn’t the case in Africa. Darwish’s team had to convince operators it was the way.
“The idea of sharing didn’t even exist back then. They all had the capital and the sites, but the management of the site was a headache. They started pushing the management aspect to us. We started pushing the idea of sharing. By 2008 and 2009, with the financial crisis, output became low, capital became scarce and people started thinking differently and sharing became an attractive idea. It was more innovative and valuable,” he says.
Darwish is impressed with the booming growth of the telecommunications sector in Africa and sees voice calls becoming obsolete.
“The future is the smartphone; this is a fact. Africa has not caught up yet because the operators need to invest the capital to ensure that the tablet gets cheaper and cheaper. Africa won’t progress technologically without the smartphone and tablet playing a key role. The continent has not been able to build the kind of infrastructure it requires to satisfy the penetration levels in voice and broadband that it requires. The average age of the population in Nigeria, for instance, is about 22 to 23. It is a young population with a burgeoning middle class. This massive consumer market is being created and growing in size and this enables us to experience the great growth pattern and the need to satisfy and cater for this group,” says Darwish.
On his work with IHS, he says: “This is not a sexy business—it is a hardcore, roll up your sleeves, be an engineer, jump into the mess, see how to fix it, be patient and connect with the grassroots type of business and I love every bit of it. You’re not going to find a lot of engineers who are also good businessmen.”
In 2009, IHS was listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange and over the past year has raised more than $1 billion of  capital equity from the likes of the IFC, the sovereign wealth fund of the South Korean government—the country’s first deal in Africa—and Investec in South Africa. In December, IHS acquired new towers in Rwanda and Zambia, through MTN.
Darwish is looking at more than just telecommunications and has an eye for investment in real estate in the US, Beirut and Dubai.
He is currently involved in setting up incubator programs for aspiring tech entrepreneurs to develop a content platform. Everything from social networking, mobile money, music and fashion using digital information is his new area of interest.
“Content is another area I’m investing in. I’ve created a team to look into this. The more power I create on the broadband side, the more relevant the content will become.”
Darwish is also engaged in community upliftment.
“I like to see things being built. Improving the quality of people’s lives is what ultimately drives me. As long as this is your drive, you’ll always be successful and this is why anything I invest in must be something that involves the transformation of people’s lives.”
Darwish has founded other companies in the US and Middle East, including Vorex—a software provider for small enterprises in the US.
Darwish credits a handful of names that inspired him to become a successful tycoon.
He says he learnt a great deal from Raphael Udeogu, the former managing director of Motorola in Nigeria, about proper corporate governance processes, systems and operations. Bashir El-Rufai taught him about having faith in people and the value of goodwill. He also refers to his partner, William Saad, and his brother, Mo Darwish, as strong pillars that have been highly instrumental to the growth and sustenance of IHS from the beginning.
“When we started IHS, we set a goal to be the leading tower infrastructure service provider on the continent in 13 years. We were young and passionate, and it is due to Issam’s passion, leadership, wisdom and skills in all areas of management, engineering, finance and relationship management… that we were able to achieve all we have,” says Saad.
IHS, with an average monthly turnover of $28 million and which now employs people of 19 different nationalities, has ambitious plans to become the largest tower leasing operator on the continent.
“We’ll be investing heavily in Nigeria this year. We invested roughly $1 billion last year, in Nigeria, Cameroon and Ivory Coast in building our sites and buying from operators. This year, we’ll probably invest more than $850 million and are also looking at Zambia, Rwanda, Senegal and Guinea. I want to drive IHS and content to the next level.”
Through war, education, bureaucracy and new terrains, Darwish has emerged as a formidable warrior in the telecommunications industry and has ambitious plans to push the envelope even further.

Bus Or Food?  The First Crossroad On The Path To Being A Millionaire

The Royal Bafokeng Nation in north west South Africa has an estimated worth of more than R40 billion ($3.76 billion), with stakes in platinum mining, telecommunications and shares in the Rand Merchant Bank Holdings. It listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 2011.
But, many on the ground claim this vast wealth is not trickling down to the people; that millions have been wasted on white elephant projects. At the sharp end of this discontent is Luka in Action, a group representing youth in Bafokeng.
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The group is based in Luka, a village lying 10 kilometers north of Rustenburg in the North West province. The youth say the Bafokeng administration has failed to deliver on promises of employment, despite its vast wealth. These days, Luka, once a fertile farmland with livestock, resembles a township dotted with shebeens and youth hanging around on street corners.
Luka in Action claims it has companies; Sediba Sa Kwena, involved in renewable energy and Refetogile Moral Regeneration, which seeks to train ex-offenders, which are yet to get off the ground because there is no money.
The youth claim the money was wasted on sports development programs involving a team of Brazilian football coaches. They say, without their knowledge, the Brazilian team called Samba was brought in to train coaches and young players. After a five year contract, little has happened.
“Those Brazilians have come and gone with millions of rands but there’s nothing to show why they were here except t-shirts and soccer balls they handed out. If they can pay the Brazilians for doing nothing, surely they have funds to sponsor our projects,” says youth representative Otlile Thlapane.
In Luka village there is a state-of-the-art youth center, equipped with computers and games, as well as a radio station paid for by the Royal Bafokeng, but it is not working amid claims of mismanagement.
The youth further complain that the nearby mines, where the money comes from, are damaging their village. Blasting creates cracks in houses and underground vibrations, pollution and water shortages are the order of the day.
“The influx of migrant workers with their families had turned Luka to a slum township. Each year, locals erect dwellings to rent out. Our water supply is overused and the municipal refuse truck cannot manage. These people are causing stress to the limited resources, even clinics are not managing well because the mines are not providing adequate resources to their employees,” claims Thlapane.
“Royal Bafokeng Administration people have their individual agendas, they do not represent us, and worse, they don’t know their jobs.”
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“Kgosi Lerou Tshekedi Molotlegi [the king of Bafokeng] desires the best for the Bafokeng community, making sure that we are getting the right education and we become employable, but the administration entrusted with implementing that is failing him,” says Thlapane.
He says the surrounding mines have encouraged many youth to drop out of school and go underground for low wages.
“We are the richest nation with seventeen mining shafts but we have nothing to show for that,” says Thlapane.
The youth in the 29 villages around Luka say their frustrations with the Royal Bafokeng Administration and mining company Impala Platinum, which have shafts nearby, have led to people taking the law into their own hands.
Twenty-six-year-old Kelebogile Diale, who is a partner with Thlapane in Sediba Sa Kwena, says there are three pending court cases implicating the community in arson and malicious damage to property, public violence and intimidation.
On an overcast summer’s day, FORBES AFRICA went in search of answers at the Royal Marang Hotel, in Rustenburg, a four-star hotel owned by the Royal Bafokeng. Here we met Kgosana Mojalefa Mogono, a headman in Mogono village and businessman, dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt. The 36-year-old speaks for the older generation on behalf of the Royal Bafokeng.
“The youth’s claim about unemployment is valid but we are doing our best to have more youth trained and skilled so that they could be employable in the future,” says Mogono.
“The sense of entitlement is really killing our youth. Lack of communication has led to wrong perceptions that there’s nothing happening.”
“Bafokeng youth know where to get information but they choose to be ignorant and go around spreading lies. There are more non-Bafokeng people who have come to pursue jobs in the mines and they are the ones making the noise,” says Mogono.
“In our programs we align ourselves with youth because we have aging community leaders and in the next 10 years the Royal Bafokeng will be run by them. The nation will be shooting itself in the foot if they ignore youth.”
Mogono and Ditebogo Diale, a Luka resident and Mogono’s cousin, say Luka in Action’s claims that the nation spent R400 million ($37.6 million) on the soccer development project are ridiculous. They say the project budget could not have been far from the similar National Basketball Association project that cost the nation R10 million ($940,000).
Mogono says renting out houses to mine workers had been discouraged by Molotlegi. He says it is draining resources allocated to Bafokeng subjects.
Mogono says the Bafokeng Administration, which is independent from Rustenburg Municipality, conducts its own census and all the Bafokeng have proof of residences so they could get employment priority. But, outsiders manipulate the system.
“Unfortunately Kgosi cannot willy-nilly chase people off the Bafokeng land. It’s unconstitutional, but the government needs to create employment where these people come from,” Diale says.
Mogona says the Bafokeng Education Institute, which oversees a nursing college, a management school, as well as hospitality and artisanship colleges, promotes skills development. In 2009, King Molotlegi launched Lebone II College, a private school that sponsors tuition fees for Bafokeng learners.
“Lebone II College is a world-class school, whose main purpose is to afford talented Bafokeng children an educational opportunity that will hopefully assist them to transcend their circumstances and achieve their true potential. As such, it is equipped with the best infrastructure and educators in South Africa,” says Mogono.
Mogono dismisses Luka in Action’s claims that the Royal Bafokeng Administration is autocratic.
“If people were following the right channels of the Royal Bafokeng Administration they would not be making such noises. These are people who don’t attend makgotla (meetings). Many of them stay in Johannesburg for a long time and they come back demanding. This is not how we do things.”
Mogono also denies claims that the local youth are not given equal opportunities of employment in the nearby Impala Platinum mines.
He says the youth don’t seem interested in the youth center facility. The center is endorsed by the Love Life youth program.
The Impala Platinum management has acknowledged they have not done much to develop the community in the past, hence they have a social labor plan that involves the building of a technical school in the Luka village this year, says Mogono.
The future for the Royal Bafokeng, the wealthiest tribe in Africa, threatens to be as complicated as it is rich.

The Sense Of Entitlement  Is Killing Our Youth

He is Africa’s king of telecommunications. He’s a frontrunner in fiber optics. And he operates the continent’s largest satellite communications business. Add fixed and enterprise networks to the mix and you get Econet Wireless Group, one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. This is the life story of a man who rose from a poor village in Zimbabwe to take a seat at the top table of world business.
As the company’s founder and executive chair, Strive Masiyiwa is writing entrepreneurial history. His Econet Group is a celebrated example of how to make it in Africa, through constant re-invention and persistent expansion into new countries and sectors. It has earned him a personal fortune of $600 million, according to FORBES.
With well over 30 million mobile customers, thousands of corporate clients and almost 6,000 employees, Econet generates an estimated $3 billion in annual revenue—and that’s probably a conservative figure.
The group has operations and investments in 17 countries, mainly on the continent, as well as in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
Communications technology is written across Masiyiwa’s heart. He already understood in the early 1990s that the opportunity to use mobile phones to drive change in Africa is enormous: the continent is the world’s fastest growing market for cellular technology.
Twenty years ago, less than 1% of Africans had a telephone. Today, the once dark continent is the talking continent, with three out of four Africans owning a cell phone. It’s one of the most phenomenal business successes in the continent’s history.
“There are more cell phones in Africa today than in Europe. More Africans access the internet via the cell phone than Europeans,” says Masiyiwa.
But Econet’s telecoms interests stretch well beyond mobile phones. Recognizing the growing need for data on top of voice services, Econet has expanded into fiber optics infrastructure.
“It’s important to move with the changes taking place in our sector. It’s no longer sufficient to just provide voice. People have increasing data requirements,” says Masiyiwa.
Econet’s British subsidiary, Liquid Telecom, now runs Africa’s longest network across 14 borders from Cape Town, via Kigali, Kampala and Nairobi all the way up to Mogadishu.
Its fiber optics customers are mainly large corporations, including mining and oil companies, internet service and mobile providers, as well as banks.
“It’s about staying ahead of the curve,” says Masiyiwa, listed by FORBES as one of the 20 most powerful African entrepreneurs in 2011.
Over the years, he has become known for having a nose for investments and to sniff them out early: African internet users—who have a growing need for data—have increased ninefold since 2003.
“There’s a tsunami of data. People talk less on their cell phones than they use data. The traditional cell phone networks can’t carry that. You just have to look post-voice,” Masiyiwa says.
To provide a visual image of this data tsunami, if you stacked up the total global data, he says, it would reach 2.5 quintillion bites. About 90% of that was generated in the last two years alone.
Econet’s fiber optic expansion through its Liquid Telecom arm is fairly aggressive, according to TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod.
“They are plugging in a very big gap that exists in Africa,” he says.
“Masiyiwa is a shrewd operator who is very connected and understands the market as well as the conditions on the ground. He knows how to operate in tough business environments and how to make the best of it.”
Diversion of investments is part of that strategy. And whatever Masiyiwa sets his mind on, he does it well. Econet operates Africa’s largest satellite communications business, provides fixed networks, enterprise networks, payment technologies to banks across the continent and has investments in insurance, Coca-Cola bottling plants, hotels and safari lodges.
Yet another arm, Econet Solar, is growing rapidly, offering products from solar lanterns to home power stations to bring lighting to off-grid communities.
It all looks like a smooth ride in hindsight. But it took Masiyiwa years of hard work, persistence and heaps of faith.
He got his first glimpse on what makes a successful entrepreneur when helping out in his mother’s furniture business in Zambia, after the family fled Zimbabwe—then called Rhodesia—in 1965 to escape Ian Smith’s regime after the declaration of independence from Britain. From the age of seven, Strive, his brother and his sister helped out in the workshop, which helped pay them through boarding school in Edinburgh.
“My mother manufactured and sold her own furniture. She was very good at it. It was a typical African family business. You are part and parcel of what goes on in it. I learnt a lot of the basics from her, including the importance of hard work,” he recalls.
Masiyiwa applies these principles to this day. Although Econet is far from a family business, it follows the ethos of his mother’s small firm: people first.
“The most important aspect of a business is its people; how you motivate them, how you keep them. Those are enduring principles,” he says.
Even though Masiyiwa had left his home country at a young age, he always longed to return to Zimbabwe. After he finished school, he planned to join the guerrillas in the armed struggle against Smith’s ruling white minority. He realized that an education might be a better tool to wage the war against injustice.
He studied engineering in Britain instead and returned in his early twenties to what is now Zimbabwe, run by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, to work for the national telephone company, ZPTC.
“I decided that it really wasn’t for me to work for an enterprise, so I started my own business. Because there were no opportunities in telecommunications, I changed sectors and started a construction firm,” Masiyiwa says.
Retrofit, his construction business, was soon snapping up lucrative government and private sector contracts throughout Zimbabwe.
“Even if you visit Harare today, there is hardly a major building that I wasn’t involved in,” says Masiyiwa.
<div id="attachment_2421" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2421" class="size-medium wp-image-2421" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Strive-Masiyiwa4-hires-300x202.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="202" />Strive Masiyiwa, Chiarman of Econet Wireless. Photographed in London this afternoon.</div>
Trained as a telecommunications engineer, Masiyiwa’s ears pricked up in the early 1990s when people started talking about mobile phones. Despite his success in construction, he decided to bet on wireless communications.
“As soon as I saw that the telecommunications sector was opening up, I began to pursue that,” he recalls.
The hitch: state-owned ZPTC had a monopoly. When he approached his former employer in 1993 with plans for a wireless joint venture, they said no, refusing him a license.
Instead of giving up, Masiyiwa thought of plan B. He came up with the idea of telecommunications as a beacon of freedom.
“Being able to talk to someone on a telephone is part of freedom of expression, I thought. That means that monopolies restrict freedom of expression,” he says of his ruse.
Thus began a five-year constitutional court battle, which brought Masiyiwa international prominence, but made him rather unpopular with his government. It was also the end of his flourishing construction business. As soon as he took on Mugabe, doors slammed in his face.
“The day we filed the case, every single contract we had with any government organization ended,” he says.
The intelligence men and the police made life even more difficult for Masiyiwa, his wife and six children.
To keep financially afloat, he eventually sold Retrofit, back then the biggest company in Zimbabwe.
“I scrambled to sell the business because it was in court against the government. When I eventually found a buyer, he said I needed to resolve the dispute first. But I couldn’t wait years, so I set up a new company, Econet, and transferred the litigation to the new company,” he says.
It was a tough time, but what made him hang in there was his irrevocable Christian faith. The constitutional battle coincided with a spiritual awakening, says Masiyiwa.
“When I was in my mid-thirties, I came across the bible and made a commitment to become a Christian and live life according to certain values,” he says.
“When you have faith, you don’t see obstacles. Knowing God was on my side, I never had a sense of struggle,” Masiyiwa, a born-again Christian, says while explaining why he never faltered despite the financial stresses and intimidation.
Masiyiwa, who grew up in a non-religious family, is now a member of a tight-knit church community.
“In fact, it was the church that carried me through. They rallied behind me in an extraordinary way,” he recalls.
Many Zimbabweans supported Masiyiwa’s case against the government. Ordinary people would walk up to him on the street to offer their solidarity, promising to never own a cell phone until he was allowed to operate in the country.
When the court eventually ruled in his favor, in December 1997, removing the monopoly, Econet shot up to become a market leader only six weeks after being licensed. Masiyiwa soon became Zimbabwe’s first US dollar millionaire.
He never forgot the support he received during this difficult time from his church and his people. Every year, Masiyiwa donates a sizable chunk of his annual income to his church. He also listed Econet’s Zimbabwean subsidiary partially on the Harare Stock Exchange—Econet otherwise remains a private business.
“When I got my license, I felt I had to give those who supported me an opportunity to be owners in my company. I wanted them to be more than just customers. So, I sold 40 percent of the subsidiary and kept the rest. I decided it was the best way to show my appreciation,” he says.
“The response was phenomenal. We have the largest and widest ownership of any company.”
Not only Zimbabweans, but people across the continent can be grateful to Masiyiwa. The case was a milestone in opening up Africa’s telecommunications sector to private capital, making mobile phones affordable.
It was also Masiyiwa’s stepping stone for creating an Africa-centered global corporation.
He launched all over the continent; from Botswana to Lesotho, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and eventually South Africa, where he relocated in 2000. Today, he lives between Johannesburg, where Econet is headquartered, and London, where his family lives.
Botswana was the first step of Masiyiwa’s expansion strategy, even before he moved to South Africa. He set up Mascom, short for Masiyiwa Communications, a consortium to launch Botswana’s first cell phone company, and won a public tender called by Botswana’s government. Shortly thereafter, he bought Lesotho’s public telephone company.
“I became known for putting consortia together, because we didn’t have a lot of our own capital. In each country, I found partners and put a strong offer together,” he says.
“To be successful as a business in telecommunications, I had to leave Zimbabwe. And that had nothing to do with politics. Zimbabwe is a small country. There was only so far I could go. Since I had a great management team in Zimbabwe, there was no need for me to hang around there.”
Masiyiwa never set foot in Zimbabwe again, but he never forgot the people he left behind. Ever the defender of freedom of expression, he made a personal loan in 2000 to the country’s then only independent newspaper, the Daily News, which was shut down by the government three years later.
His reputation as an entrepreneur who takes mobile phones to the people, and doesn’t take no for an answer, has spread.
“One day, I got a phone call from the Maori in New Zealand, who had read about my battles in Zimbabwe. They wanted me to help them to bid for an empowerment license for a mobile operator,” he says.
Since Masiyiwa likes a bit of a challenge, he packed his bags and flew to the Pacific. With the help of his battle-hardened team, he got New Zealand’s indigenous people their license. They treated him like a hero and to his pride and joy, the company, 2degrees, remains successful to this day.
Masiyiwa returned to South Africa to pursue his own ventures. He had set his sights on Kenya where the government had put the national telephone company up for tender.
“We won it, but the people who were in office had strange ideas about how to do business. After a very inappropriate proposal came through, I said ‘Thank you, but no thank you’ and called the deal off,” Masiyiwa says.
It was the beginning of his fervent crusade against corruption. Masiyiwa abandoned more than a handful of lucrative but non-transparent government tenders in Nigeria, Malawi and Cameroon.
“Dealing with corruption is simple. You walk away,” he says, claiming he has never paid a bribe and simply says no.
“It’s not the end of the world if the deal doesn’t happen. I have no regrets.”
He has to admit, however, that he was at times persecuted for his tough stand against corruption and at other times had to wait years to launch operations in a country because corrupt officials were blocking his way.
In the example of Kenya, his resolve and patience eventually paid off. A couple of years after walking away from the tender, elections replaced Kenya’s leadership.
“The new government called me and asked me to bid for another license, promising it was going to be open and transparent. I bid and won that tender and began to build a new business in Kenya, which I subsequently sold to (French mobile provider) Orange,” he says.
Instead of wasting his energy on dodgy deals, Masiyiwa poured it into staying on top of his game in Africa.
Masiyiwa is quite a visionary, who must not be underestimated in any way, says Arthur Goldstuck, director of business technology research firm World Wide Worx.
“He created a real pan-African business in a sector dominated by foreign firms and foreign investment. What makes Masiyiwa unique is his pan-African approach while also branching out elsewhere in the world. He doesn’t see Africa as a limitation. That’s very rare.”
Whoever thought Masiyiwa was just about earning top dollar couldn’t be more wrong. When he turned 50 three years ago, he decided to spend half of his time promoting entrepreneurship and social development in Africa, with projects ranging from health to education and agriculture.
“While I’m still interested in the growth and development of my business, I only spend half of my time on it. It was a very deliberate decision,” he says.
Among many other initiatives, Masiyiwa helped to develop a $50 tablet for disadvantaged students, which will be rolled out this year in universities and colleges in Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Lesotho. He also developed solar-powered cell phone chargers for communities without electricity and launched affordable weather-indexed insurance schemes for smallholder farmers.
But most importantly, Masiyiwa works towards making mobile telephony more affordable for the average African. Without communications technology, people are unable to become part of their country’s economic growth, he says.
Years ago, he invented the free ‘call me’ messaging service for subscribers that have run out of airtime. Econet’s latest initiative is tariff zoning based on capacity utilization so that customers in poor rural areas are charged lower tariffs than those in wealthier urban areas.
“I believe that meeting the needs of ordinary people is not mutually exclusive from being a successful, profitable business. We are in constant search for creating greater value for our customers. We are constantly developing products and services that break the barrier,” he says.
Also, Masiyiwa commits considerable time to numerous charities and trusts, including the Rockefeller Foundation, AGRA, which represents smallholder farmers, the United Nations panel for sustainable energy and Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel.
He was appointed by Bill Clinton to serve the Southern African Enterprise Development Fund and sits on the boards of the Nelson Mandela Advisory Committee and Endeavor SA.
One of the most respected Universities in the United States, Morehouse College, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Junior was educated, recognized Masiyiwa’s humanitarian work and philanthropy with an honorary doctorate.
Perhaps most importantly, he supports 42,000 orphans in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Burundi through the Capernaum Trust, which he established with his wife Tsitsi.
Fellow Zimbabwean entrepreneur Tawanda Nyambirai, the founder and chief executive of TN Holdings, once called Masiyiwa an honest, generous, kind and humble man.
Together with British entrepreneur Richard Branson, Masiyiwa now also runs the Carbon War Room, an international non-profit organization, which helps entrepreneurs develop solutions to fight climate change.
“Strive is passionate about Africa gaining full economic freedom,” Branson wrote in his latest book Screw Business As Usual. He also credited Masiyiwa as one of the people responsible for the communications revolution.
No wonder Masiyiwa is often referred to as the Bill Gates of Africa—a backhanded compliment he takes in his stride.
“I thought Bill was the Strive Masiyiwa of America!” he quips.

“Dealing With Corruption Is Simple, Just Say No”

Growing up in Apartheid South Africa, examples of bravery, heroism and inspirational humanity were all around me. Some of my heroes were personal; ordinary people working quietly to overcome injustice and keep their dignity, while trying to escape poverty.
Other heroes I share with the world: Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, JB Marks, Walter and Albertina Sisulu.
But my greatest hero of all was my mother – widowed with three children, living in a poor Cape Flats community. She showed me every day that our circumstances need not define us, and how important it is to balance strength and determination with love, kindness and humanity. My mother showed me how to be brave.
My heroes shaped the value system that defines who I am today – values such as equality and equity, diversity and inclusivity, freedom and responsibility, hope and faith for the future.
I believe that social and economic justice must prevail. I believe in the importance of remaining grounded and humble. And I believe in my ability to achieve anything I set my mind to.
My first chance to test these values came when I was thrust into the minefield of labor negotiations at the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
As a union, we had to succeed, because the work we were doing impacted on the lives of hundreds of thousands of black mineworkers. And they were depending on us to safeguard their livelihoods and improve their lives.
Working at the NUM taught me a great deal and laid the foundation for my future in the corporate world. In order to do my job – negotiating increased wages and improved conditions of employment – I had to master all of the issues, irrespective of their complexity.
I learnt that success lies in finding the balance between legitimate business imperatives and our broader, human responsibility to make a positive, sustainable contribution to society.
Naturally, the issues we dealt with were emotionally charged. We had to negotiate professionally and responsibly, navigating the inevitable trade-offs, to ensure that mineworkers’ lives improved while the company made money. Afterwards, we needed to explain the issues and solutions to our members in an accessible way.
The nature of the challenge led to three important lessons.
First, learn fearlessly. Follow that old piece of advice: when others sleep, you read. Secondly, never think that you know everything; have the humility and courage to keep asking until you understand. Do not be afraid to make mistakes.
And thirdly, you only really understand something when you can explain it, in simple terms, in less than three minutes.
These lessons guided me when I moved from the negotiating table to the boardroom table. As an executive director at Johnnic, which at the time was an industrial conglomerate, I represented the unions and the black business consortium.
I also had the opportunity to play a leading role in the negotiation of a number of transactions that ultimately led to Johnnic’s makeover as a focused media, entertainment and telecommunications group. One of these contracts resulted in the reverse-listing of MTN Holdings through M-Cell Limited, and the subsequent transformation of the mobile operator into one of the pre-eminent black-empowered companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
At MTN, I became aware of the inc-
redible impact that information and communications technology can have on people’s lives. Access to information and the ability to communicate makes us masters of our own destinies, empowered to uplift families, communities, businesses, and ultim-ately, the societies in which we live.
The statistics speak for themselves. According to the World Bank, for every 10% increase in broadband penetration, there is a 2-3% increase in employment and a 1.38 percentage point increase in gross domestic product.
This realization, and the freedom that I felt after achieving my objectives at MTN, inspired me to establish Smile Communications.
An African telecommunications operator, Smile has a presence in Tanzania, Uganda, the DRC and Nigeria.
Our mission is testimony to what I have learnt: To deliver affordable, high-quality and easy-to-use broadband access and communication services across Africa, using low-cost, innovative business models and technologies.
Although my journey is – hopefully – nowhere near its end, I suspect that some of the most important lessons still lie ahead. Every day, when I step into the office, I feel that in some small way I am making a contribution to changing the world for the better. That sense of mission makes every problem surmountable and every victory more meaningful.

Making a difference: Irene Charnley’s journey in the corporate world

Observing Mitchell Elegbe, the founder and chief executive of Interswitch, it’s hard to believe that his first encounter with an automated teller machine (ATM) left him feeling intimidated.
Before he led the technological development of Nigeria’s financial sector by pioneering transaction switching among Nigeria’s financial institutions, his card was seized by an ATM on his first attempt at using the machine.
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The incident occurred while he was an expatriate in Scotland, at a time when technological innovations like the ATM did not exist in Nigeria.
Elegbe developed the idea to create the system infrastructure that would enable electronic payments in Nigeria while working at his first job where he was involved in a project to implement SWIFT—the network for global interbank financial telecommunication—for Nigerian banks.
He quietly nurtured the vision to establish an electronic payment system in Nigeria while charting a course for his fledgling career. On his return to Nigeria, Elegbe was employed by Telnet, a telecommunications company he had worked for before he moved abroad. He successfully pitched the idea of the transaction switch to his boss and was authorized to execute it, but the process did not go according to plan.
“I started by trying to sell the software for switching to traditional players. Most of them were not interested. I thought if I created an organization that would buy the software, I could meet my targets.”
“We would get some other person to run that organization because I could see it was going to be a very viable business. So I went about creating Interswitch.”
Elegbe and his team were able to get the assistance of Accenture in establishing the company. This was instrumental in getting local banks to put down a portion of the start-up capital. However, they faced a challenge with finding an experienced CEO to run the company.
“All the CEO’s we could get were expatriates and what they wanted to earn was more than the entire capital of the company. Somebody in Accenture said ‘Mitchell it was your idea, why don’t you go run it.’ For the first time I thought about it. I had just left school; I would say I became CEO of Interswitch four years after I finished NYSC (compulsory national service) and I didn’t really have a lot of experience. But somehow the shareholders and my former company were willing to take that risk.”
Despite the fact that the company was built on his idea, Elegbe began life at Interswitch as an employee with no shareholding. His priority was not ownership of the company, but rather to see out the execution of what he believed was a brilliant idea.
“I wasn’t fixated on being the one to run it, neither was I fixated on having a majority shareholding or even having any shareholding. I was just happy to see the idea blossom, and that my company, Telnet, got the value that I had promised would be created if they went in this direction.”
Elegbe’s stellar leadership of the company eventually earned him and his team stakes in the enterprise. With the benefit of hindsight, he is convinced that his decision to forgo ownership of the company at inception was the correct and had a significant impact on the company’s stable growth in its early days.
“I was willing to let go of the whole business and I think it was one of the best decisions we took because from day one Interswitch was never run like a typical one-man business. A formal structure was in place; the vision being delivered meant more to us than how much money we were going to make from the business.”
In 2004, Interswitch won a gold medal for innovation at the Computerworld Honors, an international award program which recognizes individuals and organizations whose achievements in ICT have impacted society. Before receiving the award, the company had seven local banks on its network. Thereafter, the number increased to 13, and the first set of non-banks, including an ATM consortium and Globacom, a mobile telecommunications provider, were added. Today, the company has almost all Nigerian banks and 11,000 ATMs on its network.
Eight years after it was set up, Interswitch’s shareholders reached a decision to tweak the ownership model of the company. With the company valued at over $170 million, a private equity deal was structured and two-thirds of the company was sold to a consortium.
The equity injection bolstered Interswitch’s balance sheet and paved the way for it to begin realizing its ambition for the continent, which was soon reflected by its acquisition of Bankom, Uganda’s leading transaction switching company. Elegbe points out that an expansion across Africa is a no brainer.
“You see a lot of players in Africa transcending more than one country and if you want to remain relevant you need to be able to provide a similar service. In Nigeria we do business with large organizations that have aspirations to expand to other countries. We discovered that the infrastructure they use in Nigeria to make payments seamless for their customers is not available in other countries. Interswitch sees that as an opportunity to tap into,” he says.
“Southern Africa is quite developed and so chances are that any payment infrastructure you need to have in those markets already exists. But in West, Central and East Africa, there is still room for development, so we felt we should begin to spread our tentacles across these regions.”
Elegbe believes there are significant opportunities for the integration of the financial systems of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, despite the differences in technology and the states of readiness of the markets.
“Opportunities are huge, but they vary from country to country. Not all countries are at the same state of readiness, so even though country A could be bigger in terms of opportunity, country B may be more ready, despite being smaller. For example, we have a joint venture with the Central Bank of The Gambia and some other banks to replicate a national payment infrastructure in that country with Interswitch acting as management contractors. Gambia is not a very big country but it was ready. The central bank was very focused and wanted this to happen,” says Elegbe.
While agreeing that there is significant scope for growth on the continent, he recognizes that there are challenges for payment switches in markets that lack the volumes required to achieve profitability solely based on the market factors.
“Payment is a game of volumes. So you have what I call a chicken and egg situation; you need the infrastructure to see the volumes to sustain itself. No serious shareholder will want to invest in the market where in two to three years they will not begin to see some returns on their money. Unfortunately, some markets cannot give you that return within this period,” he says.
“We are now looking at a concept where Interswitch needs to be able to approach certain donor agencies to make a case for payments in Africa to be handled from a not-for-profit perspective based on the developmental impact of payments. There is a strong argument for organizations that make money available for social projects to consider payment as a social project worthy of grants to grow payments in some of these countries.”
Nonetheless, Elegbe is confident that prospects are bright for the business across the continent.
“There is no market in Africa today where if you have a first mover advantage you won’t do well as a payment switch. The opportunities are huge.”

Spreading Tentacles Across Africa

Celestin Rwabukumba is the fresh-faced father of the Rwanda Stock Exchange. Every morning he breezes into work in Kigali with business in his head and the fragile future of one of Africa’s newest stock exchanges in his hands.
“As a country, the sky is the limit,” he says.
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At the age of 39, Rwabukumba must be one of the youngest stock exchange leaders in the world.  Despite his tender years, in business at least, Rwabukumba has every justification to call himself the sage of stock trading in Rwanda. His story is as remarkable as that of the tiny exchange.
Rwabukumba is a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. He lost most of his family, including his father, who died in the 100 days of madness that claimed more than 800,000 lives. Like many in Rwanda, he is reluctant to dwell on the horrors that visited upon his family and I do not have the heart to ask him.
What is clear is that Rwabukumba fled his country to the United States where he studied at the University of Buffalo, near New York, and earned a degree in economics. He became a stockbroker in New York and worked on Wall Street.
In 2004, came the call from home and Rwabukumba returned to Rwanda to work on a project to set up capital markets. It bore fruit in 2008, when Rwanda set up a rudimentary over-the-counter exchange, with a whiteboard and marker pens that you only see in schools these days.
On January 3, 2011, the Rwanda Stock Exchange was born in the brand new high-rise building that towers over Kigali. The building itself, is a symbol of the triumph of capital over disaster.
“For many Rwandans, like me, it has made us stronger as a nation. We are a resilient people ready to fight for a better future,” says Rwabukumba.
The RSE may be a speck on the African capital landscape, but it is growing in strength. It must be one of the few exchanges on earth where you can list the listings in one short sentence: NMG, a cross listing from Kenya; KCB, a Kenyan bank; Bralirwa, a brewery in Rwanda and the Bank of Kigali.
Trading is growing slowly; the marker pens are still there. The exchange plans to go electronic in December.
Every day the traders, in their bright red jackets, write out trades that it would take merely seconds for other African exchanges to notch up. In 2011, the RSE traded an average of $131,000 a day; in 2013 this has more than doubled to $292,000.
“My dream is for a big telecommunications company, like MTN, to list here. That would bring more capital and confidence to our market here,” Rwabukumba says.
Rwanda appears far from short of confidence as it emerges from the kind of hell that it has taken other countries in Africa decades to recover from. For the last 10 years, a time when the economies of the world struggled, Rwanda’s economy has grown by an average of 8.2%, according to finance minister Claver Gatete.
“This year, we are predicting 7.5% at the very minimum,” says Gatete.
Gatete, a former ambassador to London and head of the National Bank of Rwanda, took the job of guiding his country’s economy in February.  He says the key to success is the country’s stability and its prudent economic policy that has made it the third easiest place to do business in Africa. The country has fast internet and a will to do business. Credit card giant Visa gave Rwanda a vote of confidence by choosing the country for one of its credit card programs.
“We have come a long way, we have reached the bottom, the only way to go up is to make sure we take ownership of the growth of our economy and sustain it,” says Gatete.
You can register a company in Kigali in six hours and move your money in and out freely. Inflation, in the years after the genocide, was as high as 65%, now it is down to single figures.
Rwanda is also pushing forward the East Africa Community, the trading bloc of one of the fastest growing regions in the world. It has helped speed up trade across it by removing cloying weighbridges and bureaucracy; at the same time bringing in ICT to reduce clearing times.
Corruption is low and the country’s president Paul Kagame has built strong institutions in Rwanda to ensure it doesn’t get a foothold. In many ways the erudite and pragmatic Kagame, who talks like a CEO, has worked hard to shape the country into Rwanda Inc. It was he who encouraged many skilled Rwandans to return home and it is he who sees toughness as the only way to run his country. Legend has it that Kagame has appeared in person in government offices to fire corrupt officials.
“I don’t know about that, but he can fire you across the table in a meeting,” chuckles one of the Kigali inner circle.
When Rwanda struggled to sell its low quality coffee, Kagame brought in a team of United States agronomists to work out how the country could turn it into super-premium grade for export. Commodities, including tea and coffee, now make up more than three quarters of export earnings.
The streets of Kigali are clean and without potholes. Every month, Rwandans, including the president, take a few hours out of their day to clean and repair their neighborhood. Crime is also low among a people who appear exceedingly weary of conflict.
This dedication to order and business reflects on the Kigali skyline. The so-called land of a thousand hills is well on the way to becoming the land of a thousand cranes. The capital, once smashed and littered with dead, is rebuilding from the ground floor upwards. I have been traveling to Kigali since 2005 and was heartened to see new hotels, a sign that strong investment is on the way and accommodation prices could soon be on the way down.  I also saw one of the hotels had a lucky red Chinese lantern hanging from the scaffolding.
The rise from the ashes by the economy of Rwanda has been a remarkable story, but there are problems too. There is a lack of skills and the country’s small coffers are likely to struggle to buy all of the resources and equipment needed for a growing economy. Most of Rwanda’s 45 million people crowd onto scarce land and live from subsistence farming.
Maybe the biggest threat to the investor-friendly stability that Rwanda is trying to build comes from outside its borders. In the unstable eastern region of Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, insurgents fight a running war. A number of donors cut off aid this year after accusing Rwanda of supporting the M23 rebels in the DRC. Rwanda denies this strongly. Gatete hopes private money will replace lost donor funds.
“Rwanda believes that in order to succeed peace is very, very crucial, that is why, when it comes to the DRC, we are the first to support the peace, and we believe that a solution is a regional solution working with the DRC government,” says Gatete, when asked by FORBES AFRICA about the allegations.
At home, many in Kigali say opposition is discouraged, to say the least. Two Rwandan journalists emerged from prison in August after completing a three-year jail term for what the courts called divisionism, genocide denial, defamation and incitement to violence. The two had written a series of articles critical of the government.
“The whole world is not homogenous. We cannot cut and paste democracy for something to look good. It has to work for us. We do not have the kind of democracy where we have a politician saying one thing and then the next day the opposition goes on the radio to say it is wrong. We have a parliament where all members can give constructive ideas,” says Vincent Karega, Rwanda’s ambassador to South Africa.
There is also the question of who will lead Rwanda when Kagame completes his term in 2017.
For the future, Rwanda is banking on ICT and the services industry. Kagame has studied the Asian Tigers and wants to make Rwanda the Singapore of Africa. The country has invested in hundreds of schools and colleges in an attempt to train a workforce capable of making this dream happen.
Many African countries could take a leaf out of Rwanda’s book when it comes to building an economy. True, Rwanda is a small country where it is easier to carry out sweeping changes among a people who are steeled to suffer for a better future by the violence and upheaval that befell their forebears. Taking that into account, there is no reason why many other African nations could not equally take advantage of the free market forces that Rwanda is unfettering by welcoming investors, fighting corruption and speeding up the internet.
Looking ahead, could there be a problem if the government in Rwanda feels it has lost control of its country to wealthy foreign investors? Unlikely, while this generation of politicians rule the roost.
“We want that,” says Gatete, “We need the private sector to be with us to build our economy… This is inclusive of the economic growth that is touching the lives of everybody and everyone is seeing the benefits of what the government is doing.”
It appears Rwanda Inc. is likely to be open for business for a long time to come.

Rwanda Inc. Rules In The Land Of A Thousand Cranes

Njeri Rionge and Joe Mucheru, her then colleague, traveled around the most remote parts of Kenya in 1999 to research the demand for telecommunications. They found that rural communities, alive to the value of the mobile phone, represented the mass market potential for a technology that was relatively nascent in the region.
They reported back to their employer, Interconnect, that the country had a huge latent demand for information. This was well before the massive undersea cables brought broadband capacity to Africa’s east coast; well before the privatization of the crumbling national telecoms operators injected life into the moribund sector and well before the world had woken up to the potential of Africa’s appetite for technology.
Interconnect did not share their view. The two found an angel investor the following year and created Wananchi Online. It was the region’s first internet service provider to offer ‘triple play’—a new concept that combined internet, television and telephone down a single line.
The process of acquiring licenses became tangled as the company refused to slip brown envelopes into their bids. This culminated in an episode that demonstrated Rionge’s mettle. As they waited for approvals, 17 men arrived at her office with the intention of extorting a bribe. Intimidated, she told them, at length, of the need for Kenyans to do business the right way, to work with integrity. After 15 minutes, one said in Swahili, “She doesn’t get it”. They left empty-handed.
More than a decade later, Rionge and Mucheru stand among the founding members of what may be Africa’s most vibrant technology scene. Today, Nairobi is the center of a thriving community of entrepreneurs, incubators and venture capitalists; driven, first by the massive expansion and innovation in the mobile telecoms sector and then by the arrival of undersea fiber optic cables which deliver international data connectivity. Kenya has exported world-leading technology products—most famously the M-Pesa mobile money transfer system—to the rest of the world. The country has moved fast, but if anything, she says, things have gone too slowly.
“We did have a very big vision for the industry. 2000 to 2004 was an amazing time for us and we were constantly ahead of our time. A lot of the stuff we were talking about then is just now happening,” says Rionge.
Infrastructure, policy and knowledge and “understanding what this internet beast, at the time, was really about” has held back the industry.
“Today things are really different. People get it. People have moved on from thinking about connectivity to thinking about what’s going to be on the bandwidth.”
In August, IBM opened its first African research center in the city, the latest blue chip company to put its weight behind the ‘Silicon Savannah’. As the hype around Nairobi increases, Rionge warns that many entrepreneurs are struggling to take the step from great ideas to commercial businesses. That, she says, will take the community to the next level.
So many “techies” lack the commercial skills and acumen to make their ideas saleable. Rionge and her colleagues turned Wananchi into the region’s largest internet service provider, before she moved on to a senior role at the part-privatizing national phone company, Telkom Kenya. “The likes of Safaricom, the Telkoms, any of the big guys, the CEOs or the strategists need to see that there is a pool of experts or a pool of engineers who can actually develop their back office tools,” she says.
A recurring theme in her discourse is the problem of discerning noise from signal in the hype-fuelled tech space.
“You have to be careful where you’re hearing [the hype] from. If you’re hearing it from Google, they’re definitely doing it. If you’re hearing it from [business accelerator] NaiLab, it’s a different conversation. A lot of the techies I know, they’re still sitting on their grand idea and it hasn’t gone to market successfully. If you sit down, one-on-one, you can actually see it’s going somewhere. But if it’s not picked up by Google or Safaricom or Nokia, it hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still a great idea, but there’s no uptake in the market,” she says.
Today, Rionge works with and sits on the boards of a number of successful enterprises. She has also started an incubator on Ngong Road, the city’s technology cluster, to help those with ideas to take the step to becoming businesspeople. Part of her message is that technology is not an end in itself but rather an enabler of other sectors. The successes in the African technology space have been in areas that plug gaps in the infrastructure or the market—creating solutions for the specific context of the continent. M-Pesa solved the problem of moving money in a cash-based economy with little infrastructure to support it.
Africa, with as many opportunities as it has challenges, needs entrepreneurs who can use technology as an enabler in key sectors, such as agriculture, manufacturing and education, while entrepreneurs need real applications for their grand ideas.
This is sometimes where international investors and observers fail to see the true value in the Kenyan, and wider African, technology opportunity. Measuring existing and potential successes by the experience of Silicon Valley, or other developed world technology hubs, misses the point.
“There will be people who have great ideas and grand ideas on the ground. The difference, in terms of developing them and scaling them, is whether we are creating criteria that have worked in developed markets to identify them, or whether we are going to get on the ground and recreate the criteria, so that the criteria is suitable for the local environment. That’s what’s not there. Because that local idea or local criteria is not structured yet, we continue to completely miss the opportunity. So the reengineering of the mindset in terms of the approach, I think, is what needs to take place for emerging markets or Africa.”
It is for this reason that she is cautiously critical of some of the initiatives in Nairobi, which seem to focus more on attracting international capital to the country than on building the domestic opportunity. The government’s ‘Vision 2030’ lays out an ambitious plan to greatly increase the value and depth of the IT sector. It has spawned ideas such as Konza City, a proposed development backed by Kenya’s ICT Board, which is designed to give a physical home to the country’s technological talent. Rionge is skeptical.
“That’s bricks-and-mortar. The ideas, the technology phase, are not about bricks and mortar. The investments we need are not about bricks and mortar&#8230; The bricks and mortar is really for international investors, that’s all it is. The innovators and entrepreneurs need to scale up pretty much on their own through some genius way.”
For all of her reservations, however, she is optimistic. The government support may be slightly misdirected, but it is not misguided. The city is fast becoming a hub for the entire continent and the heart of a technology revolution that is made in Africa.
“Nairobi happens to be the location but when you’re there, you’re thinking Africa. And Africa is the next economic frontier. If that is the case, you want to be in Africa, you want to be investing with Africans.”

The Rionge Person  To Ask For A Bribe

Tales of entrepreneurial success are usually based on events or circumstances that define and distinguish each story. At times, these relate to the individual’s planned or fortuitous foray into a business venture; the painstaking process of building same, a bruising setback or a stroke of fate that leads to the game-changing break. The interplay of these elements is what makes each entrepreneur’s story unique, and in the case of Hakeem Belo-Osagie, the Nigerian entrepreneur and chairman of the mobile telecommunications company Etisalat, the chemistry between these elements is as vivacious as ever.
After more than a decade of running UBA and overseeing a transformation of its fortunes, Hakeem, or Keem as he is widely referred to, shifted his focus to the telecoms industry. Two prior unsuccessful attempts to obtain a license were followed by a successful third bid with the Mubadala Company of Abu Dhabi. The new player, Etisalat Nigeria, rolled out its services six years after the first mobile operator had launched in the Nigerian market. Etisalat became the fourth operator alongside MTN, Glo and Airtel.
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“I had made two attempts to get into the telecoms industry before. The first time was when we had the first bid for GSM and there I was a partner to Orascom. Four licenses were given and we were fifth, so we just missed it. With the second attempt, this time working with Orascom again to buy NITEL, we won, but we were told that our price was too low. I thank God that we were rejected because I think that it would have been very difficult managing NITEL. And then the third time, this time I was not working with Orascom, I was working with a company called Mubadala, which is one of the sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi, and this time we were successful in getting a license and that is the foundation of the company called Etisalat.”
Experts and skeptics predicted a rough ride for the company due to its late entrance into the industry. But since its commencement of commercial operations in October 2008, Etisalat has surprised with its solid growth and achievements. The newcomer had two million subscribers in its first year and gained the reputation of being the most innovative telecoms company in Nigeria. By 2011, it had 12 million subscribers, despite the intense competition in Nigeria’s telecoms sector.
As mobile penetration continues to increase in Africa’s largest telecoms market—with recent figures showing that the aggregate mobile subscriber base has surpassed 100 million—telecom infrastructure continues to mushroom across the country. Etisalat has invested more than $2 billion in building and expanding its network. Of the estimated 20,000 cell sites scattered across the country, Etisalat’s infrastructure accounted for around 15% in 2011. Belo-Osagie points out that the expansion of the company’s network will continue.
“We had some gaps in our network in the South-South and South Eastern part of Nigeria and we are now in the process of filling those gaps, right now we have something in the range of just over 4,000 base stations. We are very happy with our rollout because we think with this number of base stations we can cover the whole country. However, our objective over the next few years is to double that number and get to the range of about 8,000 base stations.”
By October, Etisalat had surpassed its target for the year of 14 million subscribers.
“What we are particularly happy about is our 3G data offering, which we think is universally accepted as the best and the fastest in the market. As a company, we are going to continue to pioneer innovative solutions as we seek to distinguish ourselves from our competitors.”
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True to his words, Etisalat is stealing a march on its competitors in the mobile banking race with its recent introduction of an innovative SIM application called ‘Easy Wallet’. The application, which comes pre-loaded on every Etisalat SIM card, encourages the adoption of mobile phone as the preferred means of conducting basic financial transactions. Belo-Osagie promises that the coming months will see more such mobile money products.
“Well, I think we are very proud of the fact that our partner Etisalat indeed won a prize for having one of the best mobile applications in the world&#8230; at the recent telecommunications conference. In addition to that, we’ve built on the strengths of Mubadala, which is a sovereign wealth fund very much in the area of finance. You will notice that many of the Nigerian directors have, at one time or another, been involved in banking. We felt that it should only be natural that we be a leader in the area in which telecoms and banking cross each other.”
Being the resolute operator that he is, Belo-Osagie wants Etisalat to rise to the second position in the industry.
“I do think though that with the correct strategy we can become the number two [telecom] company in Nigeria. We focus very much on the youth market. We focus very much on the data market and we focus very much on the quality of services. I think we are also helped by the fact that we have two very financially strong shareholders, Mubadala and Etisalat, and we have funded our rollout, so the amount of debt that we have on our books is relatively small. I believe that with the strategy that we have, especially one that has avoided a lot of changes of management which Airtel has gone through, and the depth of management we have in comparison with Glo, I think that we will eventually get to the second position in the market place.”
He describes the challenge of catching up with the market leaders as “a management and intellectual challenge,” which he enjoys. With an air of confidence that is almost palpable, he offers a concise analysis of the industry.
“Realistically, I don’t think that any company can beat MTN in Nigeria because the gap is very large between MTN and everybody else. And while I think that MTN can improve its quality of service, I think that it has a strong management; there is a real commitment to Nigeria from MTN, and they’ve also done a lot in terms of the development of local staff.”
Belo-Osagie’s childhood fantasies had nothing to do with running businesses. His early ambition was to become a mathematician. Later, while studying at a sixth form college in Wales, he developed an interest in public service and went on to study politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. He obtained a law degree at Cambridge University before undertaking the Harvard MBA program. While at Oxford, he obtained work experience as an intern at the OPEC headquarters in Vienna.
His graduation from business school would coincide with the enactment of a policy by the Nigerian government that permitted federal ministers and the president’s advisers to employ aides. Through much more than a stroke of luck, Belo-Osagie was appointed as an aide to the president’s adviser on petroleum. He would go on to hold the position for six years, despite a coup d’état that led to the arrest and incarceration of his initial boss. Following another coup, which occurred when he was getting married, he made the decision to abandon the precarious public sector to pursue opportunities in the private sector.
He set up a consulting firm which advised international companies that sought to play in Nigeria’s oil industry. The venture was a resounding success and after a few years and millions of dollars in the bank, his entrepreneurial instinct sparked the hunger for another venture. This led him to cast his attention to the financial sector and, as fate would have it, the Nigerian government decided to privatize banks established by the British, which were still under government control.
Sensing the opportunity, Belo-Osagie cashed in and acquired UBA in a landmark transaction. The consequent modernization of the bank, which he spearheaded, led the bank to remarkable achievements. The UBA acquisition would become the transaction that cemented his reputation as an astute and dogged entrepreneur.
Before the triumph with UBA, Belo-Osagie tasted his share of failure. He set up a financial services company called KMC in the early 1980s.
“We did very badly, but that failure was very useful to me because it taught me a lot about what not to do. One of the things that I believe is that setbacks are a very vital part of life because setbacks strengthen you. You learn lessons from them; you learn to be tough; you learn to be bold. Therefore learning the lessons from the failure of KMC, I, with a group of others, set up First Securities Discount House, which was a great success.”
Despite his media shyness, Belo-Osagie is well-known in business circles locally and internationally. Indeed, he maintains a good friendship with Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and energy analyst under whom he authored a special paper on the state of international oil markets, while at Harvard Business School. His calm and unassuming demeanour belies a strong intellect and an uncanny ability to spot lucrative opportunities. This is best reflected by his status as one of Africa’s wealthiest men with an estimated fortune of $400 million, which saw him at number 40 of the ‘Africa’s 40 Richest’ list in December.
When asked about recent calls urging telecoms companies to list on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, he pauses to gather his thoughts, before explaining meticulously and systematically the role that the telecoms industry will have to play in fulfilling Nigeria’s aspirations.
“One way or another, all of us telecoms are going to have to accept that we are living in a certain country, that the country has certain communal, social and national interests and we are going to have to adjust to those interests. I don’t think that the interest of the company and the interest of Nigeria necessarily have to conflict. But I think that there has got to be flexibility on both sides. And I don’t think that the telecoms companies will be successful if they have an attitude that is inflexible. So for me, sooner or later the Nigerian companies will have to list, and I honestly don’t have a problem with that at all.”
Government and telecoms companies should be discussing how the listing process should unfold, with the question being on the various policy options for listing, according to Belo-Osagie.
“Should all the companies be listed? Should it only be companies that have been in existence for a certain number of years, or companies that have reached a certain level of profitability?” he asks rhetorically.
He feels that it will be counter-productive, were government to compel the operators to list. He advises that consultation rather than fiat, should be adopted by government, so that the healthy atmosphere, which he believes the Nigerian government, and to an extent, a lot of African governments have done good to create, is sustained.
As the conversation switches to the subject of the future of Nigeria and Africa, Belo-Osagie points out that he is cautiously optimistic about Africa’s future. He believes that a lot of the growth in Nigeria and Africa stems from the dismantling of many of the barriers imposed by the over extensive state investment and participation in the economy, in African countries. In his opinion, reforms, especially those in the Nigeria, need to be stimulated. He observes further that governments have an important policy role that needs to be refined.
“No matter how effective a private sector is, it cannot generate electricity outside a set of policy measures that determine how everything works together.”
Belo-Osagie believes that a crucial factor to the performance of African economies in the next few years is the extent to which the African public sector is reinvigorated across the continent. He notes that, Africa’s success hinges on the paradox that sees governments relinquishing control in terms of administering the economy, while developing and exercising its capacity to articulate and implement policies. He expresses his concerns that the pace of the policy strengthening across Africa is not taking place fast enough. Comparing developments in Africa with Asia, he says: “Whether it is Japan, Singapore or South Korea, you will see the hand of the government that is pushing, that is encouraging, that is putting together the infrastructure, that is ensuring that a competitive system is established, you will see them in all of those areas. You will see them ensuring that things like airports, immigration, state security, all have the tools to do well in their area. The success of each of those areas is as important to the running of an economy, as is simply giving licenses to private companies”.
Outside his business ventures, the entrepreneur is a generous philanthropist. As one who had the privilege to attend prestigious universities, he is very active in supporting education. He is one of the largest donors to the African Leadership Academy, an advanced level college in South Africa, to which he has given more than $1 million. He announces with pride that the school has named part of the library after him and his wife for their contributions. Keem is also in his third term as president of the King’s College Old Boys Association, the college where he attended secondary school in Lagos in the 1960s. He also sponsors an annual scholarship, The Hakeem Belo-Osagie Scholarship, at Oxford University.
An ardent lover of jazz music and fan of Manchester United, Belo-Osagie takes a broad yet simplistic view of success.
“There is a quotation, which was adapted from something that John F. Kennedy said, defining happiness, which I think is a definition of success as well. He said it’s ‘The full use of ones talents, along lines of excellence, in the life affording one opportunity, and in the direction towards service’. I think that one thing that makes you happy or successful is to know that you are operating at the peak of your abilities. The abilities can be in the carpenter who takes great pride in his craftsmanship, making the great table. It can be the great singer, the great mathematician. ‘In a life affording you opportunity’, by that I mean that to be successful there must be the opportunities for you to exploit, and that part of the kind of society we must create is a society in which more and more people have the opportunities to develop those talents. And in the African societies that we have today, we are not doing enough of that. And then we say, ‘In the direction towards service’, which simply says that the ends, the objectives cannot be solely focused on me, me, me. So I like that definition of success or happiness because it says a lot which I think is important.”
For a person who has traveled the world and been actively involved in business for more than three decades, he clearly knows a thing or two about what success means.

Africa’s Unassuming Giant

It is one of the great economic stories of Africa. When Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975 it was one of the world’s poorest countries. Two years later, it was even poorer in the grips of a civil war which ended in 1992.
Thirty seven years after independence, the southeast African country is booming. Joana Prata Dias Teixeira Duarte, her husband, João Alberty and his cousin Miguel, are three entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of this by putting their shoulder to the wheel in the country’s grassroots growth.
The trio, of Portuguese descent, started up Sociedade Moçambicana de Participações (SMP), based in downtown Maputo, in November.
Already SMP holds stakes in several companies from construction to furniture and media to telecommunications. Mozambique is abound with investment and business opportunities. The country’s GDP is increasing and 38% of its population lives in cities, with this number growing every day. Maputo, the capital city, has a population of 1.5 million.
For the first time in decades, Maputo’s skyline is dominated by swinging construction cranes. New buildings are going up on every corner. If Mozambique needs anything more than food and water, it is bricks and mortar. This hunger to fill Mozambique’s infrastructure gap has seen a dramatic increase in foreign investment. In 2005, foreign investment in Mozambique was worth $108 million, by 2007, this figure more than trebled to $427 million. In 2010, foreign investment stood at $789 million.
This trio of spring entrepreneurs are doing their bit to contribute to this urbanization through construction company Mozago. They have built offices for Millennium bim Bank among others.
“Mozago is our money cow,” says João Alberty.
It’s not just new buildings. João believes that there is also a lucrative market in renovating buildings. This is for posterity as well as profit.
Mozago is renovating a building by the famous Portuguese architect Pancho Miranda Guedes, who designed hundreds of buildings—hotels, schools, colleges, churches, banks, restaurants and apartments—in Mozambique between 1950 and 1974.
João believes that there is a market in renovating the buildings of Guedes. The one they are working on at the moment will be a hotel. They are also renovating a warehouse in central Maputo, on the way to the airport, which will be their new headquarters.
They provide a service where there is a demand. Alongside the construction and renovation side of the business, SMP also focuses on interiors through another branch of the company—Intersection. The company specializes in office design and furniture and represents Haworth, a worldwide office furniture company. Intersection recently designed the interior of and furnished Nestlé’s new offices in downtown Maputo and will do the same for Mimmos—a nationwide chain—at the new Zimpeto shopping mall.
Mozambique’s growth and development is the company’s playground, while it is still a young company itself, it hopes to expand just as quickly. The company is also powering up and connecting the country through Antolux, which specializes in the installation of low and medium tension power networks, where they are most needed, in the provinces. Its focus also lies in telecommunication networks and solutions.
The trio sees opportunity where others might see despair. The coastal nation is often plagued by floods through tropical cyclones, which often sees the country divided and certain cities cut off. In 2000, Mozambique was declared a disaster zone that led to a major aid operation. Many towns were submerged completely and a mother was forced to give birth in a tree above the rising flood waters.
This is one of the perennial problems of Mozambique that these entrepreneurs hope to do business by easing. Many of the country’s bridges are flimsy and poorly maintained.
Edgar Cardoso Mozambique, of which SMP now has a major stake—is a company that specializes in maintenance and rehabilitation of bridges.
Then there is media. Exame Mozambique is yet another of their ventures. This Lusophone business magazine reports on the macroeconomics of the country as well as financial issues, business ventures, investments, consumption, technology and marketing. While the brand belongs to Editora Abril, a major Brazilian publisher and printing company based in São Paulo, SMP owns the project in Mozambique. This monthly magazine, which was launched in June and recently published its fourth issue, is sold in Maputo and Portugal—a large number of Portuguese nationals still seek employment in the country.
Duarte, of Portuguese descent, was born in Mozambique and is the driving force behind the magazine as regulations says media companies can be opened by Mozambican nationals only.
The Alberty cousins had visited Mozambique, from Portugal, on many occasions, before finally making it their new home.
The company sees this investment in the media as prestige to go with the building bricks and mortar.
“We have gotten really good feedback from our readers and the CEOs of companies we have featured. It is bigger than our expectations were for it in the beginning. The people here are looking for something that we offer. We use technical information and put it in a way that everyone can understand it,” says Luis Leitão, editor of Exame Mozambique.
João says that the magazine is forward looking and very deliberately chooses to cover the success of businesses.
“We are perceived by the readers and other businesses in a positive way,” he says.
As Meticais changes hands with the rise of their current enterprises, there is another new company in the making. João said it has got nothing to do with the other ventures and hinted that it is related to the beauty and wellbeing sector.
When Duarte isn’t doing business, she is trying her hand at golf. According to João, her mother’s side of the family has quite a reputation at the Maputo golf course where their trophies are on display. Duarte wants to maintain that proud tradition.
On the golf course trophies are the reward for Duarte reducing her handicap. In the business world contracts are the reward for her part in helping to rebuild the country of her birth.

Development To The  Power Of Three

Flamboyant, young, handsome, sociable and most of all: successful, beyond most people’s dreams. With his Panama hat on, sipping a drink at his rental house’s swimming pool only four steps from Luanda’s beach, Thomson-Payan looks like an actor in a gangster movie: too smooth to be true. But he’s the real deal.
Thomson-Payan owns Electrix Group which makes more than five times Thomson-Payan’s initial $200,000 investment each month. The annual turnover at Electrixtel, the telecommunications arm, is $15 million. .
“In five years, we’ve had well over 1,000% growth or between 100 and 200% growth per year.”
Electrix created its construction company, Topson SA, two years ago. Its services company, ESS, counts Schlumberger, ConocoPhillips, Trafigura and FMC among its major clients.
Thomson-Payan’s granduncle was former Colombian president Alfonso Lopez, while his father was a diplomat and a successful international entrepreneur. With a background like that, you could say he was born for success. But that’s not the whole story.
“I first came to Angola in 2007 after my friend, who lived there, told me to check it out. I was sick of working in a corporate American office. When I arrived, I was stupefied. There was so much to do.”
Thomson-Payan went to Babson College, the top entrepreneurial school in the States.
“I always knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. When I was 10, my dad told me to work for my own car. By the age of 15, I’d saved enough money by doing odd jobs. That’s when it started.”
When he was 19, Thomson-Payan moved to Shanghai and lived there for a-year-and-a-half.
“I studied Mandarin nine hours a day. Then I started an outsourcing company called China Source. We still have a three-person office there.”
China Source’s bigger clients spread the word. Suddenly, things moved forward fast.
“One day I received an email from a guy named Marcelo Claure. I had no idea who he was. It turns out this 35-year-old guy owns $7.5-billion company Brightstar—the largest mobile phone distributor in the world.”
Thomson-Payan met Claure in New York.
“He asked: ‘So where do you see yourself in five or 10 years?’ I bit my tongue and said: ‘Running my own company or running yours!’ I was 20 or 21 at the time. He gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse—to become his right-hand. I worked with him as a senior business development manager, and we grew from 35 countries to 54. We worked crazy, crazy hours. Sometimes from 7am to 4am. But it was an amazing experience and education… amazing.”
In his second year at Brightstar, Thomson-Payan started studying law at Florida International University in the evenings. Meanwhile, he was itching to start something new.
“Africa was the only part of the world that Brightstar hadn’t conquered. This continent is a difficult market to break; you have to be very hands-on here. After my visit to Angola, I raised some capital among Swiss and American investors, friends of friends. We then started Electrix.”
Electrix now has between 100 and 120 employees, 95% of them Angolan; 25 stores in Luanda, Malange and Lubango; and store-within-a-store contracts with supermarket chain Nosso Super and gas station chain Pumangol. Cellphone brands distributed by Electrix include Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel, Apple and HTC.
“In the retail industry, we’re the fastest growing mobile phone distributer and the only one with our own brand.”
Electrix sells airtime, internet, cable and satellite TV, digital cameras and computers and it’s launching a gaming division. The company buys large chunks of airtime at discount prices from Angola’s biggest cellphone players, Unitel and Movicel.
“The beautiful thing about Angola is that there’s no landline infrastructure. Mobile phones are not a luxury, literally everybody needs one,” says Thomson-Payan.
Smartphones aren’t hot in Angola. Eighty percent of Electrix’s phones are sold for under $50.
“The large majority of this country lives under the poverty line. You’ve got to fit into that market. This is one of the reasons we’ve partnered with a company and brought in our own brand, BLU, with a price range of between $12 to $250 for smart Android phones.”
Electrix understands the Angolan market. BLU has a 30-day battery.
“Imagine that, in a country with major electricity problems!”
In July, Electrix implemented electronic recharge systems that look like credit card machines.
“We sell a few $100,000 per week’s worth of Unitel and Movicel recharge cards to Pumangol and our other retail clients. But they are high-risk, because you’re basically moving cash. These machines will allow us to distribute airtime instantly without risk and minimal operations. Credit cards haven’t hit the Angolan market strongly yet.”
Competition is the drive behind these revolutionary ideas.
“Five years ago in Angola, in a business where Brightstar makes a two percent margin, we were doing 80%. Crazy! But margins have gone down a lot; competition has grown. When I started, to differentiate Electrix, I literally filled my big truck with phones and drove off to the provinces, where margins are a lot higher.”
“When the market matured, margins went down and no one wanted to drop their prices anymore. My competitors started giving clients credit. So I told my biggest clients: ‘Look. You guys have the cellphone stores. What are your main costs?’ The answer was always inventory, which for an average cellphone store can go up to $35,000 or $50,000. So I’d say: ‘I’ll put in the inventory and we’ll go 50-50 on the store and become partners.’ That meant I gave them credit, but now I owned 50% of the retail business. So I was making my margin in the wholesale, plus 50% of the retail margin and could control my debtors. As a result, we’re now the largest retailers in the Angolan cellphone industry.”
Unlike many foreigners operating in Angola, Thomson-Payan has never had an Angolan business partner.
“I suffered for two years because I didn’t have anyone to lean on, but now I don’t need to lean on anybody because all my contacts are my own.”
Thomson-Payan says the toughest aspect of doing business in Angola is the bureaucracy.
“Many people will say corruption. But there are two ways to get things done here: corruption and relationships. The second option is actually better. Let’s say you want to get your stuff out of the port quickly, so you pay someone 500 bucks. But as soon as someone else comes and pays him 550, he’s not going to give you any more love.”
“I know a guy at the port, he’s a good friend of mine. I called him from Europe because I knew he was getting married and then I brought his wife’s wedding dress over. That guy will remember that for the rest of his life—it’s a true relationship. He’ll always be there for me and I’m really there for him. I try to build genuine relationships that in the long run are so much more valuable for both of us.”
Thomson-Payan was in the right place at the right time.
“After 15 years of independence war and 27 years of civil war, Angolans need absolutely everything. They’ve got the money to pay for it, but no one here to provide it. If you’re here and can offer first-world service, the sky is the limit. Angola is a perfect storm for business.”
Electrix opened a new office in Johannesburg, South Africa in July. The company is scheduled to start operations in Mozambique in the next three months.

A Good Call

While Spain faces a 23.6% unemployment rate and a forecasted 1.7% economic decline this year, Angola is the world’s fastest growing economy of the last decade, with an impressive 12% growth forecast for 2012. Ten years after the civil war (1975-2002), Angola has risen like a phoenix from the ashes.
Few could have predicted this. Ivan Pizarro (37), along with his brother, David (43), and José María Sánchez Soler (52) opted for Angola in the middle of Spain’s construction bubble. “People lived in a Peter Pan world, they spent crazy amounts of money. Our friends called us nuts when we left,” Ivan recalls.
Eight years later, Global Telesat has been named Most Innovative Company in Africa by Spanish newspaper El Mundo, while most of the Pizarros’ friends in Spain are struggling. “Do you see this pile here? All Spanish and Portuguese applications. Most of our Spanish friends have tried to get a job at Global Telesat. We’ve hired 10 of them.”
More than that, the European economic meltdown has been advantageous for Global Telesat. “We are able to recruit Europeans we didn’t have access to before. And all the European companies fleeing to Angola need the internet.”
Global Telesat’s history began in 2003. Its founders were commissioned to build a satellite cyber cafe for the Spanish soldiers in Iraq, which they did from their parents’ garage during the Christmas holidays. “The company that commissioned us then offered us a telecommunications license in Equatorial Guinea via José María, so we rushed to create Global Telesat and flew there,” Ivan says. They “escaped” after three days.
Instead, they decided to embark on a similar adventure in Angola. Off they went, with $10,000 among the three of them plus “two very cheap, old and tired second-hand jeeps”.
“José María and I managed to find a house in the city center, which was in a really bad state. It cost $2,500 a month and needed $50,000 worth of renovations,” Ivan says. Due to investment expenses, the three only managed to cover costs during the second year. “We almost went bankrupt twice. Luanda’s incredibly high cost of living was the toughest aspect of getting started.” For Sánchez Soler, finding the appropriate local partners in Angola was the number one difficulty, before “bureaucracy and a very slow business rhythm”.
The Pizarros and Sánchez Soler started out doing a bit of everything, including fixing and selling computers and VSATs (very small aperture terminals). They briefly ran an LED display business. “It was a rough time, in a tense environment. We knew nothing and no-one, lived without furniture and worked from our sitting room for almost two years, until we could afford our current office.”
Soon, Global Telesat embarked on one international high-profile satellite internet project after the other. It created the well-publicized, first continental satellite internet connection from Morocco to Europe via the Strait of Gibraltar in 2004; connected the Spanish army in Herat and Kabul to the world-wide web in 2006; and built satellite cyber cafes for soldiers in Libreville and Kinshasa during the UN supervision of the Congo elections in 2007.
Officially registering Global Telesat in Angola was not easy. Sanchez Soler and David bought an existing, but inactive debt-free, Angolan company in 2004. It had a so-called ‘alvara’ (permit), which allows you to import and export and is “a must for every company in Angola”. Ivan points to a huge pile of documents in the cupboard behind him. “Never start a company in Angola,” he says jokingly. “You need each one of those, and each requires 20 letters to a given ministry. It takes years to complete the whole process.”
Angola ranks 168 out of 182 countries on Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index, but Ivan says Global Telesat won’t accept or pay bribes. “That has both disadvantages and advantages. We miss out on many business opportunities because of that, but at the same time, it secures lots of deals with the type of people we want to work with: embassies, NGOs and international companies and organizations.”
Judging from Global Telesat’s achievements, one might wonder exactly what opportunities it has missed out on. The company recently became the first in Angola to own a European teleport. It has the exclusive rights to RascomStar in Angola and owns RascomStar’s only European teleport. Global Telesat is also the only Angolan representative of MWEB and Israeli joint venture company SkyVision, one of the world’s leading satellite operators.
With around 50 employees, the majority of them Angolan, Global Telesat provides satellite internet and electronic security equipment to major clients, including the Cuban and Angolan governments; Angolan state oil company Sonangol; Interpol; the Angolan Immigration Service (SME); beer brands Cuca, Ekka and Nocal; Unicef; the Angolan armed forces (FAA); embassies; and international NGOs. Its annual turnover in 2011 was between $4 and $6 million. This year, it forecasts an $8 million turnover. Global Telesat has grown a steady 25% annually.
The fact that Multitel, MS Telecom, ITA and Dimension Data are Global Telesat’s main competitors is anything but a problem. “What makes doing business in Angolan telecommunications unique and fun is the fact that almost all of the competitors are friends. We even share houses sometimes,” Ivan says.
Ivan studied electro-technical engineering after specializing in telecommunications in Ireland. He accepted a job there at Dell and experienced the boom and burst of the dotcom bubble while at Dell. He then moved to Hewlett-Packard in Barcelona and various smaller IT companies before becoming project manager of Siemens Germany. For four years, he oversaw the implementation of GSM satellite stations in the Middle East, USA, China, Pakistan and Brazil. He also brings extensive satellite internet experience from some time as a political activist.
Originally a technical engineer with a telecommunica-tions specialization, David has seven years of electronic security experience at Digisoft in Spain.
Sánchez Soler studied piloting then physics in Granada. He worked as a salesman at Spain’s first private, commercial IT group, Centre de Càlcul de Sabadell, for eight years. At the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992, and together with David, he developed software to feed 20,000 people a day on behalf of the company, Jomipsa. Next, as Jomipsa’s commercial director, he dealt with more than 50 countries, including Angola, until 2003. Jomipsa designed and manufactured combat food rations for armies.
After Angola’s civil war ended in 2002, the nature of doing business with Angola changed drastically. “But Jomipsa didn’t want to invest in Angola, so I jumped out and looked for partners. In December 2003, we founded food company SPA (Societdade de Produtos Alimentares, Lda.), which we closed after internal differences.” Global Telesat was next.
What makes Global Telesat stand out, as much as its breakthroughs, is its well of remarkable stories. One example is that of its first employees.
“Our guards were constantly being harassed by Jehovah’s Witnesses or Igreja Universal members,” Ivan says. “When I came back from work one day and caught them reading these pamphlets, I got angry. ‘If you’re bored,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you something interesting to read.’ I gave them books on telecommunications and IT, and they got excited. After work, we allowed them to sell satellite internet connections and electronic security products. They decided to copy the church guys and attack in couples, which worked. They were then hired by Global Telesat.”
One of these former guards specialized in satellite internet installations, one in sales and the other in electronic security. Two of them now own their own companies.
Global Telesat is trying to make a difference in Angola. “Among other projects, we have offered hundreds of professional courses for internet installers. We may soon get support from the Ministry of Education,” says Ivan.
Global Telesat consists of a satellite internet and an electronic security department. Ivan heads the internet branch; David the security branch. Sánchez Soler, the company’s CEO, lives in Spain. All three own equal shares. It is a structure that works.
Global Telesat’s satellites are located in a ring around the earth at a distance of 38,000km from the earth. From that position, they perform a 24-hour rotation around the globe.
Monthly corporate rates for Global Telesat’s satellite internet connections start at $300 and can reach upwards of $50,000. A once-off investment starts at $3,000. “After that, the price difference with a terrestrial is not that big,” Ivan says. “Satellite internet reaches any place in Angola, including its most deserted areas and oil rigs in the middle of the sea. This is the key advantage of satellite internet over fiber-optic internet.” And prices are going down, mainly because of Global Telesat’s access to Africa’s RascomStar satellite.
“Look!” Ivan says. He hands me his mobile phone, which shows moving images of Global Telesat’s office. “What you’re seeing is being recorded right now by our camera systems and broadcast over the satellite. A simple internet connection allows me to check my premises on my iPhone. “This is a killer in Angola, because people can monitor their business without being present, even from another continent.”
Adds David: “Since the war, Angolans feel the need for more safety. That includes electronic security, which is lacking.” Global Telesat also offers automatic fire detection and extinguishing equipment.
“We had two competitors in 2004, Infortel and AfriAlarm, but their prices were double what ours were. We’re not the biggest electronic security firm in Angola, but unlike our competitors, we operate professionally according to European quality standards. We offer the best equipment available. Our surveillance cameras’ definition, for example, is up to four times sharper than those of our competitors.”
Many of Global Telesat’s electronic security systems are used to prevent labor abstinence, for instance, through fingerprint controls. At the end of the month, the fingerprints are reviewed and registered and salaries are paid accordingly.
“Apart from equipment that could, in theory, be used for spying, we also offer anti-spying equipment such as mobile phone frequency blockers or tools that can localize hidden cameras,” David says.
The Pizarros and Sánchez Soler have never regretted setting foot in Angola. “Unlike Europe, rules and regulations are no major obstacle here,” David says. “You can truly set up your business according to your wishes. Plus, Angola is a country full of companies rich in financial resources.”
“After 27 years of war, Angola offers immense room for growth and so many opportunities,” Sánchez Soler agrees. “Competition is not as high as it is in Europe. We moved to Angola at a time when hardly anyone in Spain knew Angola. We bet on Angola, and we won.”

Tag: Telecommunications

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