Strive Masiyiwa: Connecting a continent

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We're in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare.

The year is 1990.

A man is on his knees and he's doing something he hasn't done since he was a boy.

He's praying.

He's a successful businessman and he's rich.

By the standards of his country and the time, He's very rich, and that wealth has made him a target.

Just hours earlier he was visiting an embassy in the city centre, talking up the international prospects of his company.

Now he has no idea where he is.

He had decided to return to his office on foot rather than be driven as usual, and as he'd walked down the wide streets, a vehicle had followed slowly behind him.

He'd paid it no attention.

He was immersed in his next big idea.

Only when two men rushed out, pointed guns at him, and dragged him into the van did he realize he was being kidnapped.

Now he's desperate, tears filling his eyes.

He's doing the only thing he can think of, praying to God to be set free.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad or just another billionaire?

My name is Sing Sing and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

And my name is Simon Jack and I'm the BBC's business editor.

And on this episode we have a kidnap victim billionaire.

His name is Strive Masiwa.

Zimbabwe's first billionaire made a fortune providing cell phone internet services to countries across Africa and beyond.

And his companies have laid over 100,000 kilometers of cables.

He provides internet for over 10,000 businesses and over 38 billion dollars worth of transactions have been made with his mobile money wallets.

He's been called a rebel, a maverick, and amusingly so cantankerous that if he were trapped in a bottle he would pick a fight with himself before working out how to escape the bottle.

He had some major battles in his career, not least with former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, as we'll find out.

And I love these episodes where the context is all important.

Their story mirrors, reflects, informs the period of the time.

You know, we've seen some of those.

The sweep of history is behind it.

And a lot of people may not know his name, but they'll remember this period in history.

They certainly will.

Let's go back to the very start, and we'll take Strive Masiwa from zero to his first million.

Strive was born in 1961 on the outskirts of Harare, the capital of modern-day Zimbabwe.

But back then, it was called Salisbury, and Zimbabwe was called southern Rhodesia.

And to understand Strive's story, we need to understand a little bit about this incredible period of chaos and turmoil that gripped his homeland as he was growing up.

Yes, this was the period of decolonization across the African continent.

The European powers who had carved Africa into colonies, the famous scramble for Africa back in the 19th century, they stole resources, ruled from afar, they were finally withdrawing, all being kicked out.

Each African nation had its own particular path to statehood, and Zimbabwe was one of the most complicated.

When Strive was born, he was born into what was called a self-governing British colony.

So basically it had a whites-only minority government with British backing.

But when the British began instigating majority rule in their colonies and granting them independence, that white minority refused and clung on to power.

And in 1965, they unilaterally declared independence as Rhodesia, severing ties with the UK as civil war broke out across the whole country.

This is an incredibly tumultuous time.

Opposition leaders were being imprisoned, militants were setting up bases in neighboring countries, launching attacks back into Zimbabwe.

And Strive's parents had close ties to that revolutionary movement.

So when he was just three years old, they fled north to Zambia.

Initially, Strive didn't go with them.

He instead remained to be looked after by his grandmother.

Four years later, though, he did join his parents in Zambia, but the increasingly brutal civil war at home would continue for the rest of his childhood.

And actually, Zimbabwe only really became an internationally recognized state in 1980, the same year that Robert Mugabe, one of the revolution's leaders, was elected as prime minister.

Now, Mugabe would go on to become president and would rule right up until 2017.

So he is a huge figure, towering figure in Zimbabwean history.

And he also plays a pretty big part in Strive Masiwa's story too, as we'll see.

But during his childhood, Strive Masiiwa was learning to work, cutting his teeth on business.

He says his mother, Edith, who was an entrepreneur herself, named him Strive because she wanted him to try hard at everything and she set him up in what he calls his first business when he was just a little kid.

When he asked her for pocket money, she gave him some chewing gum to sell instead, saying, you sell that, bring me the money and I'll give you another one to sell or have yourself.

I mean it's very reminiscent of some of our other billionaires.

Didn't Warren Buffett also flog stuff when he was a kid?

Exactly.

So meanwhile, while Strive was busy selling chewing gum, his dad worked in the Zambian mining industry and the family actually became rich enough to pack him off to boarding school in Scotland when he was 12.

Now, this might sound a bit random, but it makes sense.

Masiiwa's Scottish neighbours in Zambia had actually recommended the school as it was where they'd sent their own son.

And it also had lots of children with parents working for the UK Foreign Office abroad or in the army, as well as many children from Hong Kong and Africa.

But you can kind of imagine this would have come as a culture shot for Strive.

Yeah, and sure enough, Masiiwa hated it.

It was bitterly cold.

He was made to wear a kilt on Sundays.

And he recalls looking at the other boy's bare legs and thinking, this is it, I'm dead.

Maybe not the first and only time someone's thought that while wearing a kilt in the cold Scottish weather.

So when Strive finished his O-level exams, which would have been about when he was 16, he eagerly returned to Zambia hoping to fight in the war for Zimbabwe's independence.

But by then the war was nearly over and a cousin of his who ran training camps for soldiers told him that what his country really needed was young people to study abroad to learn the skills needed to rebuild their country.

So he headed back to the UK and gained a degree in electrical engineering in Cardiff in Wales.

He then worked briefly in computing in Cambridge but returned to the now independent Zimbabwe to work for the state-run phone company ZPTC and that was in 1984.

Masiyua's job there involved designing telecoms networks which was important nation-building.

Well you can't really build a nation unless you can get them to speak to each other and he earned a decent wage for that living.

He even bought a brand new car a Volkswagen Golf, which he delighted in driving around Harare.

But Strive found himself stifled by the growing bureaucracy in Zimbabwe.

So after just two years at ZPTC, he decided to follow his mother's example and set out as an entrepreneur.

That's right.

In 1986, he founded his very first company, Retrofit, which did electrical contracting for the construction industry.

And he scraped together a mega $75 in capital and went off to get a bank loan.

Now, the bank agreed only on the condition that he swapped his flashy new Volkswagen Golf for a much more modest pickup truck.

And that was probably quite a big deal for him because that meant quite a lot to him, that status symbol driving around.

So he was clearly very determined if he was prepared to sort of take those terms.

Maybe it was a test that the bank was putting him through.

And this was an interesting time to start a business in Zimbabwe.

Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party exerted a stranglehold on the country and its economy.

They actively discouraged foreign investment and there was a corrupt underbelly to a newly bloated bureaucracy that Strive had encountered at the national telecoms company to work for.

Meanwhile, many educated white Zimbabweans had fled, they took their skills out of the country, so the economy was in this odd position, you know, newly independent but pretty economically stagnant.

But the flip side of this was through the 1980s, the government spending in Zimbabwe tripled.

And, you know, they did make progress in areas like health and literacy, even if the economic results of all of this were relatively limited.

And this is when we begin to see, if you like, the beginning of Strive's entrepreneurial instincts.

You've got this stifling bureaucracy, he sees this big increase in government spending, and he figures out the way forward is to work not against or around, but with the government.

So with all this spending on infrastructure, on construction, Masaiwa knows there is going to be a need for electoral contractors.

That's the reason he founded Retrofit.

His instincts were right.

Retrofit quickly secured these big government construction contracts, and he also learned the art of raising money from banks.

You know, he even secured investment from an arm of the World Bank.

Yeah, so all of this meant that by 1990, Strive was running a burgeoning multi-million dollar business with almost 500 employees.

And in just four years, when he was 29 years old, he was named Zimbabwe's businessman of the year.

Not bad for a 29-year-old.

So we can't be too precise about his actual wealth at this point, but as the owner of a multi-million dollar business, I think we can safely say that by the early 90s, Strive Masaiwa was a millionaire.

And this is important to note: so far, he has stayed on the right side of Robert Mugabe, but this will not last long as he goes from a million to a billion.

he's a millionaire in 1990, but that's also the point when he becomes the target of the kidnappers we've talked about.

They pick him up after he leaves the Mozambique embassy and take him to a secret detention centre where he, as we've discussed, resorts to prayer.

And in one sense, his prayers are answered.

So it turns out that his kidnappers are a renegade group from Zimbabwe's own intelligence agency.

And you remember we talked about that cousin of his, the one who trained rebel soldiers but told him that he needed to go overseas, train himself up and come back to build the country.

That cousin is actually a hero of the liberation war and he now works for the president so he has contacts and so after a quick intervention from him, Strive Masiyua is free.

But for Strive, prayer also played its part.

The whole experience starts his journey to becoming a devoted Christian.

And to this day, he often posts online about his beliefs.

He credits religion as a moral guide in his future business career.

We'll see that it drives some of his philanthropic exercises.

You know what?

If prayer helped me escape a bunch of rebels from an intelligence agency, I too would convert.

Like that kind of thing when someone is in a shipwreck and they say, dear God, if you get me out of this, I'll promise to go to church every day of my life.

You get about one mile closer to shore.

Maybe I'll go three days a week.

And then as you lap up on the shore and crawl out of the sea, you say, I did it all on my own anyway.

Wow, I mean, Strive Masiwa clearly didn't think so if he's still posting about God to this day online.

But by 1993, Strive Masiwa is ready to make the next big move in his career.

He's going to get into telecoms and he plans to launch a company that he'll call Econet.

Yeah, he, along with others, has spotted the rise of mobile phones across the whole planet.

Remember, back then, cell phones are these big, bulky, luxury products, only the very rich own.

But he's been following the growth of the mobile technology industry really closely, and he predicts correctly that mobile communications is about to go through a massive revolution.

Masaiwa also watched as entrepreneurs in the US brought up cellular licenses and then partnered with these big telecoms companies like ATT to roll out the infrastructure needed to support them.

And he wants to do the exact same thing in Zimbabwe.

Yeah, but Africa at this point is not in the same position as the US.

70% of people at this time, and this is an astonishing stat, had never even heard any kind of phone ring.

Massey Iwa knows this is largely due to the problems of laying telephone lines across the continent.

He believes cell phones will enable Africa to jump a step and roll out telecoms across the whole continent.

And remember, this is his specialist subject.

He knows what he's talking about.

He's designed telecoms networks.

That was literally what he used to do at the national phone company ZPTC.

So this is 1993.

Right.

I remember in 1992

in the UK being at university, and there was a girl there whose father was very rich.

And she had the first mobile phone that most of us, well, not that most of us ever seen.

We'd seen the yuppies on the phone with their big bricks, their big motorola phones, but she had one in her college room.

And we used to go around and stare at it.

Wow.

It's giving kind of 2001 a space odyssey or chimps edition that's a lot of fun.

It's not that long ago.

I mean, it's a real testament to how quickly these industries have developed and how they've changed the world and the vast amount of wealth that's been created on the back of them.

I remember being a kid, this would have been also I think probably in the 90s, and seeing for the first time someone on a mobile phone and it was about the size of a shoe that he was pressing to his head and I remember thinking, that's weird.

Why does he have a black shoe on the side of his head?

It was a phone.

It was a mobile phone.

I'll never forget it.

So he predicts this is, you know, correctly predicts this is going to be big news.

And so he gets in touch with his old employer.

Yeah, he proposes a joint venture into cell phone networks and he's sure that they will recognize the value of this plan to Zimbabwe.

Unfortunately, however, his old bosses tell him to get lost.

They had the monopoly over telecoms and they did not want a partner.

And this will probably come back to haunt them.

They thought that mobile phones were a fad that would never take off.

Pretty frustrating.

Messi Iwa says apparently at the time, how can anyone have a monopoly over something they don't want to do?

So he makes a big decision.

He does something that he will do time and time again.

He decides to take the government to court.

Of course, this also means going up against Robert Mugabe.

And to many people, Mugabe was still a hero.

And to some extent, you know, he was still turning the country's fortunes around in the 1990s.

But Mugabe was also increasingly eroding some Zimbabweans' rights.

He had his own cabal of favourite plutocrats, rich folks around him, and Masaiwa was not one of those.

So, from the very moment that lawsuit kicked off, Mugabe went on television to accuse Masaiwa of being a CIA agent trying to overthrow the government.

Masaiwa says he became public enemy number one.

And the cost of pursuing this legal battle, I mean, basically against the state, was more than his legal fees alone.

First of all, he started losing his government construction contracts, which he had for retrofit.

Then he returned to his home to find it surrounded by police cars.

They've got intelligence agents.

They're searching his house for stuff.

The agents said they would be there for a while.

And Masaiwa said they ended up being there for three years.

Yeah, so really a campaign of what you could call intimidation.

Yeah, I mean, you know, many people at that point would say, I'll up for a quiet life.

I'm out.

I'm out.

It's not worth it.

Masaiwa persisted regardless.

So he hired a team of lawyers in New York who convinced the courts in Zimbabwe that the state's phone monopoly actually violated Zimbabweans' constitutional rights to free speech.

Interesting argument.

The courts eventually ruled 11 times in his favour, but Mugabe still still found ways to stop him from launching that telecoms company.

After one legal victory in 1995 Econet partnered with the Swedish telecoms giant Ericsson and started setting up base stations for their cell phone network but Mugabe soon stamped that out.

He forbade private cell phone operations completely with a two-year jail term for offenders so Econet had to cease operations.

Masiwa has claimed that he was put under pressure to enlist partners from the ruling elite of Zimbabwe and when he refused middlemen representing officials said he could have his telecoms license if he paid a bribe, apparently for 400,000 US dollars.

But Masaiwa consistently refused to pay any bribes.

He said, we will never stop corruption in Africa until people stand up and say no.

I've read so many stories about people who have to combat corruption in their countries.

And I always think it must be one of the most morale-sapping things to realize what you're up against.

And one of the bravest things you can possibly do to actually persist in the face of that because it must feel like you can't win.

So, you know, it's tough in some jurisdictions.

It really is and I think it takes a lot of guts to stand up and say, no, actually, I'm not going to pay that, especially if you already, as Strive Masaiwa did, have actually the money to pay it.

Yeah.

Now, those specific corruption allegations about the bribe he did not want to pay are hard to verify.

But corruption of this kind was common in Mugabe, Zimbabwe.

The government was certainly not backing down.

So the legal costs, the loss of government contracts were bringing Masayiwa close to bankruptcy.

And by now, he's also married with young children.

He's struggling to pay his employees.

His wife Sitzi said, We were so broke we couldn't even afford to give our visitors tea.

And in fact, that's the point at which he sells off his first company retrofit.

And he's also unsure as to whether to even continue with this expensive legal case.

After losing one legal judgment, he even has this, I guess you could call it a kind of sliding doors moment because a friend in America offers him this opportunity to head up the McDonald's franchise in any African country of his choice.

So he could have picked between telecoms and burgers.

And you know, McDonald's was already a really famous, profitable brand, so he could have made a lot of money from that.

He could.

But he is still motivated to keep fighting.

So he wants to improve telecoms in his country.

And he also wants to fight corruption.

So he pushes on and he cites his faith, which is, of course, born from that kidnapping and fostered by his deeply religious wife, as the thing that kept him all going through this.

His wife Sitzi prayed to God at this time saying if Strive was granted the license for his telecoms company they would help as many poor people as possible for the rest of their lives.

And in 1996 at their lowest financial ebb the couple actually start what becomes the Higher Life Foundation so that now provides scholarships to thousands of orphans and needy children as well as healthcare initiatives across Africa.

So they kind of made good on that promise.

And God seemed to hold up his end of the bargain as well because Masiiwa won his final legal appeal and the Supreme Court ordered Mugabe's government to put a cellular license out to tender, which means everyone else can bid on it.

Right, so it's no longer in the hands of a monopoly, essentially.

Still, Masaiwa hadn't really escaped the country's corruption.

Ikona didn't actually win the bidding process, so instead, the license went to a consortium called Telecel, which is backed by Robert Mugabe's nephew, Leo.

So Masaiwa heads back to court, suing for the right to see Telecel's bid.

Incredible Incredible sort of stamina to go keep going through.

The court clerks must have been like, This guy.

What now?

But he wins that.

And when he wins, he discovers that Telecel didn't even meet all the technical requirements, but Econet did.

Telecel's licence is first cancelled, but then reinstalled by the Telecom's minister.

So it's all a massive mess.

And by December 1997, even Mugabe's own vice president, Joshua Nkomo, condemns cabinet colleagues and threatens to resign.

Eventually, there is a cabinet reshuffle and Masaiwa's company Econet is granted a license for a mobile network.

So he essentially wins and Masaiwan launches that mobile network in Zimbabwe in July 1998 and within a week the company had 10,000 customers.

So really he's triumphed in the courts.

Yeah and he's doing well because you remember ZPTC, his old employers, didn't think there's any future it.

They clearly woke up and smelled the coffee and during this extended five-year legal fight that Masaiwa has been in, they've launched their own cell phone network, but yet in two months, Econet, Strive's company, they gain a 45% market share.

And sure enough, soon he decides to do what successful companies do.

He decides to float the company on the stock market.

So he floats it on the Harare Stock Exchange and he sells 40% of the company to raise about $17 million.

So his chunk is worth about 20 million.

Not bad.

And Econet had become the largest public company in Zimbabwe.

That means companies that the public can buy shares in, which is maybe not surprising when you consider how hard it was to set up a public company in Zimbabwe in the first place.

But despite that success, Masiwa soon decides to leave Zimbabwe for good.

So in March 2000, he moves to South Africa.

He has said he was keen to foster a multinational African business, but he had also been tipped off that his life was under threat from Mugabe's government.

Users of Econet services had circulated slogans supporting the opposition during a referendum in 1999.

Masaiwa had also lent money to Zimbabwe's three independent newspapers, including the notoriously anti-government Daily News, which was, by the way, later shut down by Mugabe's regime.

All this had angered the authorities.

Sympathetic security police told Masaiwa his life could be in danger, so look out.

Now it's worth reflecting at this point that Robert Mugabe ran Zimbabwe for 37 years.

And as time went on, he became less popular, he became more dictatorial and more willing to use his powers to repress his enemies.

You could say he really went from being the liberator of Zimbabwe to its tyrant.

Elections in Zimbabwe became increasingly less free, they became less fair.

And by the year 2000, for someone like Strive Masiwa, whose companies were being linked to anti-government newspapers, to anti-government users, it probably made sense for him to leave the country.

So three sort of things are going on here.

He's getting richer, richer.

His company's getting more influential and more useful in terms of, you know, communicating potentially anti-government messages.

Mugabe is becoming more dictatorial.

So all those things kind of clash in a way that is going to jeopardize his business and his life.

And I'm sure that kidnapping figured quite large in his mind as well.

So he goes to neighbouring South Africa, which offered him some major new business opportunities as well.

And he immediately started a new iteration, if you like, of his company, calling it Econet Econet Wireless International.

And in just two years, Econet Wireless was generating revenues of $300 million a year.

They'd won the tenders to run networks in eight countries, which included Botswana and Morocco.

They even spread outside of Africa, so they won tenders as far away as New Zealand and in Britain, where they set up a mobile network targeting the UK's many African expats.

Yeah, in fact, one of the key countries where Econet had won a license was Nigeria.

Now, Nigeria, compared to Zimbabwe is a burgeoning economic powerhouse.

And it's massive.

It is massive because in 2000 Zimbabwe for example had a population of 11 million.

Nigeria's was 125 million more than 10 times as big.

It's now over 200 million.

So that is a serious economy.

Masiwa here again was quick to embrace new technology.

So when he won that license in Nigeria, his Econet Wireless Nigeria became the first company there to launch what was called the Global System for Mobile communications quite a mouthful let's just call it gsm now you might not actually know what gsm is but this is basically the second generation of digital cell technology so you've heard of third fourth and fifth generations these are called 3g 4g 5g so this is back in 2001 remember and that cutting edge technology is 2G.

Yeah, I remember being a business reporter around this time in a GSM.

The G of GSM is what you hear in 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G.

Strive himself was was the first person to make a call on this new system.

In a kind of Alexander Graham Bell type moment, he rings the telecom's regulator and says, we're live!

A big moment for Strive in Nigeria, I think.

The catch is that setting up this kind of infrastructure is not cheap, right?

So each cellular tower costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And the bigger the country to create that kind of coverage network, the more this is going to cost.

So when Masiwa had set up Econet Wireless Nigeria, he'd had to get a lot of local investors on board.

His parent company actually owned only about 5% of this new company outright.

Essentially, he didn't really have real control.

He was a minority shareholder there.

And although he soon had a 35% market share in Nigeria, Econet Wireless Nigeria was also saddled with quite a lot of debt.

It was in need of more investment.

The company's directors were blaming Masaiwa for failing to get the financing that he'd promised.

Important to note this isn't the first time Masaiwa was accused of failing to get funding.

So his network in New Zealand actually took eight years to set up because of a lack of cash.

I mean, come on, 3G's rolling down the hill at you.

It's funny, though, that it's quite a normal story in those kind of entrepreneurial characters when they say, don't worry, I'll get the money.

I'll get the money.

Let's just focus on the idea.

We'll sort this out.

And, you know, this seems to be no exception.

Exactly.

Also, the Nigerian directors claim Masaiwa had abused his management contract by placing unqualified friends and relatives who are fleeing Zimbabwe's turmoil into some pretty plum, lucrative positions in the company.

So, importantly, Masaiwa denied everything.

But in October 2003, the board voted to sever all ties with their parent company and to boot Masaiwa out altogether.

And they even went as far as delisting him as a shareholder and offering his shares up for sale.

I mean, this is quite extreme, isn't it?

Can they actually do that?

I'm not sure under

modern corporate law whether you can just boot out a shareholder and just delist him.

Anyway, Masaiwa didn't believe the directors had any right to take his shares.

He claimed he did have the 150 million of financing that he'd lined up by the appointed date of 2003.

So once again, he settles in, gets in his trench for a lengthy court battle.

Yeah, and he certainly has experience of those.

I mean, his lawyers are obviously getting paid very well for this, but I'm also thinking they must be like, not this guy again.

Yeah, and once he walks in through the door, you know, you're in for a fight.

And actually, this was a very long fight because the legal dispute over this lasted for over a decade and it became very complicated.

Econet Wireless Nigeria was sold multiple times over that period.

Masaiwa, of course, tried to block those sales because he knew how they would complicate the case.

Yeah, and he blamed some of the difficulties he faced in Nigeria on his refusal to pay bribes.

He's claimed that a local state governor demanded $4.5 million

in sort of kickbacks.

And after he refused to pay, that governor pressured investors to force him out.

You know,

fairly or unfairly, Nigerian business is a sort of byword for corruption and bribes.

So, you know, this is not a difficult story to believe.

No, and actually, that governor was later arrested himself and jailed for 13 years for money laundering and fraud in Nigeria.

Masaiwa actually appeared as a prosecution witness in a related case in which the governor's own London solicitor was ordered to repay $28 million of laundered money.

Yeah, and although at one point Masaiwa was suing for $1.5 billion,

he eventually settled in 2016 for $127 million.

By that point, the company that owned Econet Nigeria was actually in business with him anyway.

So he just, you know, he'll take the win.

Yeah, he certainly did.

And that long legal case in Nigeria, even though it did hold him back there, it didn't actually stop his other business interests.

In fact, Econet was actually doing really well across the continent, once again, because of Masaiwa's embrace of new technology.

And once again, as we've come across so many times in this series, there has been no more transformative technology, no more wealth-creating technology in the 2000s than the spread of the internet, of course.

We've seen on this program, it's created many, many billionaires.

African telecoms, Titan, Strive, Masaiwa is another one of them.

So he invested early.

He bought a 60% stake in Zimbabwe's largest internet provider in 1999.

Now, that is a big number and also quite the bet because back then home internet was rare anywhere, and especially across Africa.

But Masiwa already knew it was going to change the world.

And he said that while its impact was yet to be felt in Zimbabwe, it was already accepted universally that its impact on humanity would rank with technological breakthroughs such as the printing press, the telephone, the automobile, or television.

Yeah, and of course, he wasn't wrong, and he was willing to invest to ensure that that impact was felt in Africa as well.

So, in 2009, he founded another company, Liquid Telecom, to build digital infrastructure.

By 2011 that company had spent $400 million to lay fiber optic cables linking countries in southern Africa to the World Wide Network, the World Wide Web, giving them access to broadband.

And while other telecoms companies were focusing on laying cables in big cities, Masaiwa's company saw the value in linking minor cities and towns as well.

By 2013 they had built Africa's largest fiber optic network across southern, eastern and central Africa.

A huge investment program, transformative for the continent.

A huge amount of money to put into infrastructure that benefits basically everyone, you know, and it wasn't actually just infrastructure.

So, Masiwa also provided web services that were really important.

So, in 2010, he launched EcoCash, which is a mobile money transfer service.

So, this is one of the first companies in Zimbabwe to actually introduce mobile money services.

And this is important in a country like Zimbabwe because, in some more rural parts, there was actually no access to traditional banking, no banks with bricks and mortar outposts.

So this was something that actually really changed lives.

People were able to use their money in ways that were

transfer it easily.

And it was so massive, this, because I used to be a trustee on a charity which did some work in Kenya.

And what I was amazed by was that actually in mobile banking, Africa was ahead of Europe because they didn't have that existing infrastructure of banks.

This took off really quickly, leapfrogging some of the legacy players in Europe.

So mobile banking became more advanced in parts of Africa than it was in more developed parts of the world.

But it's worth knowing that back at the start of mobile banking in Africa, it was such a new idea that people still needed some convincing.

So EcoCash actually used some quite unusual and fun methods to encourage Zimbabweans to sign up with their cash.

I love these stories.

Yeah, they hired actors to stage street fights.

One actor was pretending to steal another's money.

Then they revealed, it's all pretend.

And EcoCash's marketing message to the gather crowd was like, your money is safe because it's in my phone.

You can just imagine the big reveal with the act going, it's in my phone, guys, it's fine.

Yeah.

They also hired uni students to loudly have conversations about transferring money on their phones on buses.

So they were hoping that

an early type of influencing.

They were hoping people would kind of listen in and eavesdrop and go, oh, what's that?

They actually calculated that they would need to talk to 1.5 million people to reach a tipping point, but EcoCash did it anyway.

They also offered $1 deposited in new accounts as an incentive for people to sign up.

So they were really creative with their marketing.

Amazing.

Well, it worked because within 18 months of launching, 2.3 million Zimbabweans had signed up for the service and made $200 million worth of transactions.

That is roughly, this is a staggering number, 20% of Zimbabwe's GDP.

That's huge.

Huge.

EcoCash soon started enabling other transactions like payrolls, bill payments.

They later launched savings accounts and loans with no paperwork.

So a real suite of kind of digital banking products.

And with the growth of internet across Africa, understandably Masaiwa's companies prospered and did very well for themselves.

And sure enough, when the African business magazine Ventures Africa published its first ever African rich list in 2013, Strive Masiwa was listed as one of the continent's 55 billionaires.

They estimated his wealth to be around $1.5 billion.

So he's made it.

He is Zimbabwe's first ever billionaire.

It's been a long journey, but he's made it.

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So let's take him to beyond a billion.

Where is he now?

Well, since he became a billionaire, Strive Masaiwa's companies have continued to do well.

Both the digital infrastructure and the products he provides have spread across Africa, as they have the rest of the world.

Liquid Telecom has laid over 100,000 kilometers of cables from South Africa to Egypt at a cost of over $3.5 billion.

He's got an all-purpose communications, social media and global mobile phone banking app called Sasai.

and has been responsible for laying the foundations of South Africa's 5G network.

He recently joked that only Coca-Cola operates in more African countries than us.

That's quite the tagline.

But Masaiwa himself actually left the continent in 2010 and he moved to the UK.

So that actually meant that when they published their rich list in 2022, the UK newspaper The Sunday Times named him Britain's first black billionaire.

At the time, they estimated his wealth to be around $2.5 billion.

In recent years, Masaiwa has started focusing his efforts on philanthropy.

He sits on the boards and councils of some pretty significant institutions, Bank of America, Stanford University.

That always comes up in these stories.

Hook up by Crooks Stanford's there.

National Geographic Society, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

These are kind of blue chip, very respectable institutions.

He says that there he represents African business and humanitarian needs.

Popular figure on social media.

He's got five million Facebook followers reading his thoughts on everything from faith, philanthropy, entrepreneurship.

So, that is currently where Strive Masiwa is today.

So, it is time for us to judge him.

This is the section of the podcast where we look at our billionaires through a range of categories like wealth, villainy, philanthropy, power, and legacy, and we rate them from zero to a ten.

And then we try and figure out whether they're good, bad, or just another billionaire.

So, we start with wealth.

The highest his wealth has been estimated was $3 billion, US dollars in 2022.

One of his companies is heavily investing in data centers across Africa.

Data centers are obviously a new thing.

AI is coming.

So it's pretty likely his fortune could rise in the next few years.

Not much information on his spending, but thought to have bought a $25 million penthouse in New York in 2016.

So in terms of absolute wealth, he's low

by our standards.

And we have very high standards, it should be said, in case anybody's wondering how we could think $3 billion is not worth wealth.

Well, yeah, we've got a couple of what we call centi-billionaires out there, which are people with more than 100 billion.

But nevertheless, I think that context is important.

And coming from a former colony turned independent country, turned dictatorship, turned whatever, pretty impressive.

And given the fights he had to...

you know, go through along the way.

Yeah, he spent a lot of money on those legal fights.

And I think also, you know, if we talk about the context, he is also his country's very first billionaire, which I think boots him up the rankings somewhat.

Definitely.

So in absolute absolute terms, he's a one, but in relative terms and in context, I think he's a five or a six.

I think I would give him a six out of ten.

Okay, six it is from both of us.

Villainy, what have they done to get to the top?

Going to be tricky to get to the top without playing the game, but he seems to have been reluctant to do that.

No, he has seemed to have kept his nose fairly clean.

You know, there are those accusations that he didn't provide the financing in Nigeria and New Zealand, putting unqualified associates in positions in Econet Nigeria.

Having said that, you know, this was to help them escape Mugabe, so I don't know how much we can rank him on villainy for that.

I don't know if he scores that highly on villainy.

No, I'm not so sure either.

I mean, it's very difficult in a melting pot like Zimbabwe during the 80s, 90s, and beyond.

And I think that given that context and that environment,

I don't think he scores high on villainy at all.

No, I think I would give him maybe just even a two out of ten.

Same with me.

Two out of ten.

We're agreeing today.

That's nice.

For once.

Well, we do agree a lot.

We actually agree a lot.

What about giving back, philanthropy?

So him and his wife have actually signed the giving pledge, which is set up by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, in which billionaires vow to donate at least 50% of their wealth to charitable causes.

So that's a tick for them.

Yeah, he's got a philanthropic foundation which he founded early in his business career called Higher Life.

In fact, it was his lowest ebb in 1996.

And since then, it's helped fund the education of a quarter of a million children and mentored 70,000 young people.

He funds mentorship programs to encourage more entrepreneurs in African business.

He's also a key player in Africa's response to medical crises.

So he helped out with Africa's COVID response.

He was also asked by the African Union to assist during the 2014 Ebola crisis.

And he's also provided $10 million in cash and other assistance to 1,700 healthcare workers to urge them not to strike over eroding wages during the COVID pandemic.

We've seen richer people do less, for sure, I would say.

So I'm going to score him quite highly on this.

I'm going to give him a seven.

Oh, I feel like I'm feeling in a generous mood today, so I'm going to give him an eight out of ten.

I think the fact that he founded a philanthropic foundation

to the point where he was really worried he was going to have to crash out of business altogether says a lot about him.

Yeah.

So power, legacy, I mean, he said being an entrepreneur is not about making money, it's about being an agent for change, transformative change for our societies.

In my experience, all entrepreneurs and billionaires say it's not about the money, man.

It's about changing.

It's like changing hearts and lives.

It's about changing the world, changing people's lives.

If I get rich along the way, so be it.

But in his case, I'm a bit more tolerant of that kind of guff.

Yeah, he does seem to consistently advocate for Africa.

You know, he's on boards, he's on councils of international institutions.

You know, we've listed just a few of them.

And the thing that does impress me, though, is fighting Robert Mugabe in the courts.

Yeah, fighting Robert Mugabe in the courts under incredible pressure.

And I do believe that he had a sense of nation building for the country, saying that, you know, this is like the railroads of the 18th and 19th century.

Mobile telephones, telecommunications is going to be that great economic enabler.

And that's going to be important for this continent, like others.

So I kind of believe in that.

So I think that, you know, in the world, Power and Legacy probably doesn't score very highly.

But within Africa, first Zimbabwean billionaire.

I'm going to give him a five because he probably has quite a lot of inspirational power within Africa as well.

And you know, people do talk about the rise of Africa as an economic powerhouse of a continent, right?

Yeah.

So I actually think I would rate him higher than that.

I think I would give him even an eight out of ten because I don't think people will be talking about Africa in that way unless it had access to technology like the kind that he provided.

Okay, I'm going to give him five because if he hadn't done it, it's likely somebody else would have done.

That is true.

Okay, so

five from me, eight from you and power and legacy.

So good, bad, or just another billionaire?

This one's an easy one for me.

I think he's good.

I think to have done what he did.

in the circumstances and the context with the historical sweep of what was going on in Zimbabwe at the time, taking on Mugabe,

refusing to pay bribes in Nigeria, and yet coming out on top as the first billionaire from his country.

For me, he's a good billionaire.

It's quite a journey, isn't it?

It is a journey.

I do think also,

even though I know you said that, if he hadn't provided internet or telecoms to his country and across Africa, someone else would have done it.

The fact that he was the one who did it despite all the setbacks he encountered along the way, the legal challenges, the corruption,

he did an undisputably good good thing for his continent and I think for that, I agree.

I think he is a good billionaire.

So Strive, Missi Iwa, you are a good billionaire.

Congratulations.

So who do we have on the next episode?

Fascinating character.

At one point,

very briefly, the world's richest man.

He made some of the biggest investments ever and also some of the biggest losses.

So he's quite the gambler.

Yeah, made fortunes, lost fortunes.

At one point, lost 96% of his wealth.

Ouch.

He's known as the Bill Gates of Japan.

That is Masayoshi-son.

Look out for his episode.

Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast.

It's produced by Mark Ward with additional production by Tamsin Curry.

Paul Smith is the editor, and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins, and the commissioning editor is John Minel.

And if you enjoyed it, do tell a friend.

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