Mo Ibrahim unveiled

By LIZ NG'ANG'A

MO IBRAHIM DESCRI-bes himself as “just an ordinary African boy who studied, worked hard and had a bit of luck and opportunities in between.”

While in a broad sense this description is true, it is rather modest about a man who rose from a humble background to become one of the most successful business leaders, not just in Africa, but in the world. 

Dr Ibrahim is a man of many firsts, including being one of the few people to receive a doctorate in mobile telecommunications, as far back as the 1970s. In the 1980s, he was part of a team that revolutionised the telecommunications sector by personally being involved in the launch of the first cellphone network in the world. 

Closer home, Dr Ibrahim is known for having been the first to take a bet on Africa as a potential market for mobile telephony, through Celtel International, a company he founded. 

His gamble paid handsomely. Today, Celtel International operates in 15 African countries and is regarded as one of Africa’s most successful companies. In 2005 Dr Ibrahim sold the company to MTC Kuwait for $3.4 billion, amassing a personal fortune estimated at more than $650 million. 

Out of this, he set aside $100 million, and another $400 million from his estate to found the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. He then launched the Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. It is the world’s largest in cash value, far exceeding the $1.3 million given to recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. 

The Award recognises good governance by former African heads of state will offer the winner a $5 million prize spread over 10 years, with $200,000 annually for the rest of their lives. A further $200,000 a year for 10 years for any causes of the winner’s choice.

A Sudanese, Dr Ibrahim was born in 1946 in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father worked as a cotton industry official. His early childhood, he says, was “a normal existence in a lower middle class family. 

But his father’s hard work enabled Mo to study at the University of Alexandria. After earning an engineering degree, he returned to his home country to work for the state operator, Sudan Telecom.

At the age of 26, he left for the UK to study for a PhD in mobile telecommunications at the University of Birmingham. It was probably a great foresight that led him to do research in the then obscure field, or it could have been an idea planted in his mind, back in 1966. 

In an interview with The Statesman, he narrated how, while rushing to watch Khartoum, the 1966 movie — which starred the American actor, Charlton Heston — he was captivated by the car radio of the taxi he was travelling in. “How was the driver communicating? How was the signal reaching the car without a direct overhead line?” he wondered. 

Five years later, when he embarked on his studies in the UK, these questions were still largely unanswered. His research, he recalled in an interview with another publication, Jeunne Afrique, was therefore a study of what happened when a transmitter and a receiver exchanged a radio signal and one or both move. 

“Buildings create interference. My studies dealt with drawing up equations for these interferences with a view to establishing the physical laws that govern them,” he explained. 

Upon attaining his PhD, Dr Ibrahim chose not to settle for the life of a scientist, a person who in his own words, “works for glory, who is capable of spending hours doing experiments and calculations.” 

Instead, he took up a position, in 1983, as the technical director of an in-car telephony company called Cellnet, which was created by British Telecom, and which was supposed to start operation in 1985. 

IN 1984, SOMETHING HAPPE-ned that changed the company’s course. “I was at a trade fair in the US, and Motorola’s engineers lent me a prototype mobile phone for a day, he recalls. 

“I immediately understood its potential: the telephone was no longer linked to the house, the office or the car. It belonged to an individual, to me. Sure, the handset was rather heavy and cumbersome, a bit like those walkie-talkies that you see in certain American films on the Second World War, but it offered so much more,” he told Jeunne Afrique.

Based on this insight, back in London, he worked with his bosses and colleagues to launch commercial mobile phones. This required Cellnet to completely review the network that it was in the process of installing. 

To ensure they met the market demand, Cellnet ordered 5,000 mobile phone handsets, creating the first mass production of the device. “That is how in 1985, the first mobile network in the world begun, in London,” he noted. 

Parallel to Cellnet’s efforts, a programme by the European Community had succeeded in getting all its member states to work together on the Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications. 

“Each member committed itself to using it. This approach was genuinely new. This way, the new products accessed a market of several hundred million customers in 12 countries, instead of being limited to a single country,” he says. 

At the end of the 1980s, Europe took a second decision that worked well for Dr Ibrahim: the telecom sector was opened up to competition. He had just turned 40, and “had had enough of working in a big organisation, which was too complex and too frustrating. I wanted to be my own boss and decide my own fate.” 

Luckily for him, the new players who were coming into the market as a result of the liberalisation did not have business knowledge in telecoms. 

Dr Ibrahim saw an opportunity and started to sell his services to them, advising them on how to install their networks. His first contract came from Sweden. Encouraged, he founded Mobile Systems International (MSI), with a handful of friends. A year later, he had hired 10 engineers, the number rose to 25 in 1992, and, in 2000, when he sold MSI to Marconi, it had 800 employees. 

In 1998, his consulting company transformed into a mobile telephony operator, MSI Cellular Investments (MSI- CI), which was later renamed Celtel International. By 1998 MSI-CI had offices in 17 countries. 

But, as he told The Statesman, one aspect bothered Dr Ibrahim: “I was appalled at the assumption among potential investors that Africa was a place where contracts would not be respected.” 

He told Jeune Afrique that though being African by origin made him aware of the daily difficulties in the continent. He felt the risks of doing business on the continent were being exaggerated, and that there was an enormous gap between perceptions and reality. Through discussing and arguing this idea, he decided that MSC-CI would become a mobile telephony operator in Africa.

“We said to ourselves, ‘Who’s afraid of Africa?’ and set out to do something different, to build a European-quality company with the best equipment.”

The first networks by the company were introduced in Uganda and Zambia and today, although dwarfed by Vodacom and MTN, Celtel still has its fair share of the market. 

It had more than seven million customers, 3,500 staff and 120,000 points of sale when Dr Ibrahim sold it, which probably made it an attractive deal for its current owners, MC Kuwait.

This success, Dr Ibrahim emphasises, came as a result of the company’s transparent operations. “From the outset we said to ourselves, ‘We will not pay a single dollar in bribes.’ Without transparency, there is no investment, and therefore no way to create jobs and prosperity.”

It is indeed on this premise that the Prize for Achievement in African Leadership was created. “Good governance is about “real, measurable progress in people’s lives. We need to give facts to the people so they can ask, ‘What am I getting out of my leader here?’ And having done that, we really want to celebrate the leaders who do well,” he explains. 

But while the Award has won wide acclaim from many corners, from Nelson Mandela to Bill Clinton, there have been the expected murmurs that its huge cash award could indeed be seen as a negative.

CYNICS WONDER, FOR INstance, if African leaders need to be enticed with money to practice good governance. “We need to get out of this pessimism that all African leaders are corrupt. There are some doing wonderful things and implementing the right policies. They need to be honoured,” Dr Ibrahim responds with so much passion it seems unfair to have asked the question.

“Running an African country is the toughest job in the world. And if you do manage to take five million people out of poverty, or get clean water to people or educate kids, a $5 million reward is peanuts,” he says.

To balance the picture also, he recently launched the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, a comprehensive ranking of sub-Saharan African nations, based on objective and quantifiable measurements of governance. 

“This is a tool that will hold governments accountable and frame the debate about how people are governed,” he notes, “In this regard, Africans will be setting benchmarks not only for their own continent, but also for the world.”

But Dr Ibrahim feels that one crucial component is still missing in the equation; the need for a consolidated Africa, where countries open their borders, discard the love of red tape and the preference to trade with the West rather than with each other. 

“It is a world of superpowers and we need to work together, to trade together, and to form a critical mass. Even European nations don’t want to stand alone any more; they now have the European Union,” he says. 

One question must still be asked though: Why would a person of his wealth and international status — and now a British citizen — still have such a strong interest in Africa? 

“We Africans in the diaspora, who have had the opportunity to be in the developed world, to learn skills and to build personal wealth, have a duty to Africa. We need to support the continent through various efforts such as investing in it. We have a debt to pay to our people and our families,” he says.