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State owned newspaper had a rather interesting but suspicious story when they announced that Clear mobile Limited was going to invest a whopping $1 billion into Zimbabwe mobile telephony business!
Yours truly gets very encouraged by any huge tech development, but this story in the Herald was just too good to be true, suspicious and must be well probed just like any other mere mega deals on paper.
The story screamed.
The Minister of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion, Professor Mthuli Ncube, yesterday signed a US$1 billion agreement with San Francisco-based Clear Mobitel Limited to revamp mobile operator Telecel and inject more life into NetOne, among other projects.
The deal is a culmination of talks initiated by President Mnangagwa when he met Clear Mobitel chief executive Mr Harpal Mann in the United Kingdom at King Charles III’s coronation ceremony in May 2023.
My first big problem with such screaming headlines is the amount involved, who in this day and age is investing $1 billion into a saturated mobile business and expecting to repatriate how in the current economic environment. A billion USD investment is ahuge sum of investment for capital expenditure especially against potential returns.
Zimbabwe does not support such a huge mobile penetration statistic, what kind of investment with average revenue per user would motivate a billion dollar investment.
The second issue is lack of clarity amdist the obscurity, what exactly is this amount going to be doing as part of the “investment”, are they buying stake, investing infrastructure or completely taking over the asset.
when an investor makes a memorandum of agreement, such information must be easily available and accessible so that we can simply understand the huge impact of the investment, however this was not so.
The state owned enterprises under the Mutapa investment gave us many rounds to confirm the investment, after many attempts to dig around information around this huge investment, we can confirm that neither the mobile network operators themselves, not the Mutapa investments fund had details about this investiment.
however the herald stated
The signing ceremony between Prof Ncube and Mr Mann was held yesterday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meetings here, signalling the consolidation of the process.
An initial investment of $200 million will be made, followed by $350 million and then the balance in due course
The third issue is information on the investor, there is not much convincing investment that Clear mobile Limited or Mr Harpal Mann has done in the past to really impress on his high level investment .
This is a huge investment, marred in lots of obscurity and needs more clarity for appreciation to be taken seriously.
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