Ali Mufuruki I interviewed

Dar es Salaam. It was on the fourth floor of Infotech Place along Mwai Kibaki Road near Kawe Beach, where I conducted an interview with the late Ali Mufuruki, then chairman of Vodacom Tanzania Limited.

The interview was arranged shortly after the leading mobile operator conducted stakeholder’s annual general meeting.

As a journalist, I had met Mr Mufuruki on a number of occasions but this was my first time I was going to have one on one interview. By then I knew and respected him as one of the powerful speakers, who was not afraid of tackling any topic, notably in entrepreneurship, business and the economy in general.

It was during this interview that I came to realise the man’s extraordinary eloquence when responding to my questions.

We sat for about two hours. I didn’t want the session to end. Usually, I tend to press people to clarify answers on questions I have put to them. But it was hard to intervene when Mr Mufuruki was responding. He always answered the main question before starting to tackle possible follow-up questions.

And he had his style of answering questions. If you interject with a follow up question which needs a clarification and he weighed it to be important, he would first continue with what he was saying (if he believed that he had not made his point clear) before dwelling on the emerging question.

The way he answered the questions showed how well versed he was on the topics we were talking about. Though our interview was on the performance of Vodacom Tanzania Limited, Mr Mufuruki knew how to link his answers with what was happening in the country, on the continent and around the world, when he wanted to show why the company he was chairing decided to make a certain decision.

He knew many things that it was hard to believe that his background was on engineering. Talking to him, he was more of economist and entrepreneur than an engineer, though when he was required to talk about technical things, you could also think that I was talking to an engineer per excellence and not an economist. In short, I placed Mr Mufuruki as jack of all trades and master of all.

He was not afraid of tackling complex issues even those that could put him in collision with the authorities. I remember having asked him to explain some issues while being sceptical if he would respond to my satisfaction. I believed he would brush aside the questions by providing evasive answers. But that was not the case.

A vivid example is his response to the government’s refusal to issue a work permit to a Kenyan woman, Sylvia Mullinge, whom Vodacom Tanzania identified as a good replacement for its managing director Ian Ferrao who had decided to terminate his contract with Vodacom to pursue other things.

Given the sensitivity of the issue, I never thought Mr Mufuruki would blatantly criticise the government on the move. I thought he would circumvent the topic and provide an elusive answer. But that was not the case.

First, he expressed how Vodacom was stunned by the decision.

“As far as I am concerned, I thought it would be an easy kind of decision to make -- unfortunately it was not. We are disappointed. We haven’t had the opportunity to sit down with the Labour Commissioner and others in the government to engage with them and find out what happened, what the problem was, how we should handle this in the future,” Mufuruki said during the interview.

Though he said they respected the government decision because it was the one which had the final power to decide on the issue, Mr Mufuruki gave a number of reasons why he thought the government had erred.

First, he said it was unbecoming for Tanzania to deny a work permit to a fellow East African.

Ferrao’s unexpected decision not to renew his contract left Vodacom with little time to find his replacement. Mr Mufuruki said given the size of Vodacom Tanzania business, not everybody was fit to take over from Ferrao. So, the company had to scramble to find a replacement and luckily they have working relations with Kenya’s Safaricom from where they were able to identify Ms Mullinge as an appropriate replacement.

“We were lucky that the person who was identified (to replace Ferrao) is an East African. We have the East African Community (EAC) here, we have regional integration, we have free movement of labour and services,” he said, adding:

“So it actually never occurred to me that we would have any problem. But because we don’t know all the reasons the government based its decision upon, maybe there is something, but I don’t know.”

He also criticised the idea that Tanzanians are to run all big companies in the country.

“I can understand the clamour for wanting to have more Tanzanian CEOs running big companies in this country. But are we developing them? Where? What school in this country is producing managers of business? We are producing a lot of people with PhDs on things that I don’t know about. Where are the managers? The marketers? The engineers? To be a CEO of a telecom company, you have to have a fitting background,” he said.

“When I’m hiring a CEO, I don’t look at nationality - that is not the first thing that comes to my mind. I look at the person’s qualification. I have a responsibility to make sure that this company has the best leadership we can find. If I limit myself to a tribe, a race, a country, I would not get the best leader.”

Mr Mufuruki noted that for a country such as Tanzania that was in the nascent stages of industrialising its economy, there was nothing wrong with having foreign chief executives.

“There are a lot of foreign CEOs, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there are foreign CEOs in the UK too. There are foreign CEOs in the United States. The CEO of Microsoft (in the US) is an Indian. The CEO of Vodafone in London who is now just retiring, is Italian. So this is why I’m really surprised that in Tanzania we become so parochial when it comes to this kind of conversation,” he noted.