Mo Ibrahim
Mo Ibrahim took an early punt on the transformational potential of mobile phones in Africa and came out two billion dollars richer. his rise to prominence, first as an entrepreneur and then as a philanthropist, has made him one of the continent’s most sought-after voices.
Born in Sudan in 1946, Ibrahim grew up in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. he came to the UK on a scholarship and was later hired by British Telecom (BT). There, he was part of the team that pioneered Britain’s first cellular phone network.
He cuts a somewhat unlikely figure as a tycoon. He smokes a pipe, wears tweed jackets, has a mischievous chuckle and no obvious pretensions of grandeur.
Ibrahim’s best-known company was Celtel (now Zain), which he sold to Kuwait’s MTC in 2005 for $3.4bn. But Celtel owed its existence to the it consultancy that he set up in 1989 with just $50,000.
The company grew to provide design solutions to mobile phone networks around the world, before Ibrahim sold it to Marconi in 2000 for $900m. These funds helped finance his ambitions in Africa at a time when international telecoms companies saw African markets as too risky. For Ibrahim, however, investing in a market with so much pent-up demand was a “no-brainer”. Read the rest of this entry »
The most reliable route to riches in Africa once lay via politics and “public” service. No surprise, since the state in many of sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 countries controlled the principal levers of the economy in the decades following independence.
