Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (14 page)

Then a more immediate bone of contention was set before us. Hanson ordered me a chocolate dessert, and asked if the
FT
would run to a cigar. Surely, I said. A
garçon
was summoned.

‘I am sorry,’ said the
garçon
. ‘We have many complaints about your lordship’s cigars. Cigars no longer permitted in dining room.’

The moment is frozen in my mind. Lord Hanson’s features were corrugated with fury. The waiter, meanwhile, looked as careless as anyone might – anyone who did not know that another chunk of the Hanson conglomerate is rolled up in Imperial Tobacco. I drew an expectant breath.

‘Since when,’ hissed Hanson, ‘has this ruling been in force?’

‘Manager he decide last week, sir.’

‘Manager will be hearing from me,’ said Hanson, ominously, and
convincingly. Then, recalling his composure, he said to me: ‘You see? These minorities, like the road-wreckers, dictating to us. We have to make a stand. This place may just have lost a very esteemed customer.’

I feared we two erstwhile Vikings were thus far united on little enough, so I was glad to be able to sympathize with him on the cigar issue. We parted, in fact, on what I took to be friendly terms. ‘You must come and have lunch with me,’ said Hanson. ‘Of course,’ I said, as one does. But I hardly anticipated that while I was still settling the bill, a call would come from Hanson’s secretary, asking if I could come to lunch three days hence.

Lunch with Hanson Revisited, at his flat on the Brompton Road, deserves a brief description. It was a manly occasion, and the cuisine reflected Hanson’s robust Yorkshire virtues. A densely packed soufflé, a hearty stew of British beef and mince pies served with cuts of farmhouse cheese. Other guests included Richard Addis, the boyish new editor of the
Daily Express
, and Kenneth Baker, former home secretary, who is a non-executive director of the Hanson Company.

Cigars proliferated with impunity. Talk turned from roads (inadequacy of spending on), to education (abysmal quality of). Baker declared that teachers should spend more time in the classroom. ‘Start at seven-thirty, teach till five. None of this clocking-off in mid-afternoon. Time to end those 16-week holidays, too.’

There were puffs and clinks and grunts of agreement. Hanson basked in the convivial business of gentlemen setting the world to rights over a good meal and a smoke. And the curious illogicalities that surface on such occasions duly arose. Having comprehensively impugned the teaching profession, the gentlemen then deplored the failure of John Major to attend the funeral of the London headmaster murdered in his own playground. ‘It was a focus of national concern,’ we agreed. ‘He should have been there.’

I walked meditatively to the Tube station with another guest, Nicholas True. True is a former member of the Policy Unit at the prime minister’s office, whom Hanson is sponsoring to chronicle the post-war demise of British education. ‘The City doesn’t like his business,’ said True. ‘But he’s a good sort. Don’t you find?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But then, we were brothers in another life.’

And, I should have added, there are many ways to reach Valhalla.

16 FEBRUARY 2008

The Sudanese billionaire helped invent the mobile phone in the 1980s. Now he wants to use his fortune to promote good governance among Africa’s leaders

By William Wallis

Mo Ibrahim, one of Africa’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, doesn’t have that much in common with Johnny Depp, Madonna or Kate Moss. So I am somewhat surprised to find myself waiting for the Sudanese telecoms mogul turned philanthropist at Cipriani in Mayfair, an Italian restaurant that features regularly in the gossip columns.

There are no A-list celebrities for the waiters to pamper today. The clientele looks cosmopolitan but professional, business rather than glitz. The tables are filling up fast, so I request what passes for a sheltered corner to give my tape recorder a chance above the din of wine-fuelled deal-making.

Ibrahim calls to say he is running late. When he does arrive, he looks suave in a cravat, smelling mildly of pipe tobacco. We have met before. But his energetic, straightforward manner is as disarming as the first time. He asks after my family and, having apologized for the delay, explains his choice of restaurant. It is proximity rather than celebrity that brings us here: Cipriani is around the corner from his Portman Square offices. ‘The food is also great,’ he says. Neither of us is particularly hungry. Ibrahim professes to be on a diet and says lunch slows him down. But the menu does inspire an appetite.

Until recently, the mention of Mo Ibrahim outside the circles of telecoms buffs or African business aficionados tended to elicit the
response: ‘Mo who?’ Google him since he sold Celtel, his African mobile-phone company, for $3.4bn and he starts popping up in the company of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

This is perhaps more for the audacity – some say hubris – of his new, philanthropic mission than for the size of his fortune. Where Gates has decided to do battle with micro-organisms wreaking preventable havoc across Africa, Ibrahim is taking on a more visible, if equally pernicious, enemy of African development. After we have ordered our starters – on his advice I go for pasta, he opts for carpaccio and Parmesan – Ibrahim turns to this latest project: persuading African leaders to rule more wisely, more fairly and for shorter periods.

A decade building mobile-phone networks across the continent has convinced him that business and trade, not charity and aid, will ultimately bring prosperity to Africa. But neither tactic can succeed without a radical shift in the way the continent is governed.

‘The country is so lush, so green,’ he says, recalling a flight over Kenya before the violently disputed outcome of December’s elections. ‘How come the people here could ever be hungry? Look at these spaces, huge, endless spaces, animals, water. I came to the conclusion that unless you are ruled properly, you cannot move forward. Everything else is second. Everything.’

African leaders, Ibrahim continues, look to retirement as they would to the edge of a cliff, beyond which lies a dizzying fall towards retribution and relative poverty.

‘We don’t have financial institutions for ex-presidents to go and run, or boards of great companies. There is life after office in other parts of the world. I just read that Tony Blair was paid half a million pounds to make a speech in China. People like Blair always have a place in society, they have secure financial futures,’ he says.

Ibrahim believes he has created an attractive alternative to clinging on to power. Every year he is offering $5m of his own money to an African leader who is judged to have ruled fairly and resigned, with grace, to an elected successor.

He knows the continent too well to think that this project, which is accompanied by detailed rankings on governance standards in 48 sub-Saharan African countries, will have an immediate impact. Nor does he expect there to be a worthy winner every year. But the first benefactor
of his prize, Joachim Chissano, who led Mozambique out of civil war and through a decade of economic recovery before stepping down, gives him cause for optimism.

‘I think there’s a new breed of African leaders who are trying to do the right thing in and out of office,’ Ibrahim says. ‘I was so impressed when we couldn’t find Chissano to tell him he had won the prize. It turned out it was his birthday and he was spending it in the bush somewhere between Congo, northern Uganda and Sudan [mediating between the Ugandan government and Lord’s Resistance Army rebels].’

There follows a flurry of insightful anecdotes about some of the African leaders he knows best, interspersed with digressions into recent events – South Africa’s bitter leadership struggle, the precarious aftermath of Nigeria’s flawed elections and the war in Sudan’s Darfur province.

Ibrahim’s own background was modest. His father, a clerk, took his young son and family away from Sudan to Alexandria in Egypt, where Ibrahim spent his formative years. In those days he saw himself as a Marxist. ‘I ended up being a businessman unwittingly. I wanted to be an academic; I wanted to be like Einstein,’ he says as the waiter puts down a plate of Dover sole with artichokes in front of me, and Ibrahim tucks into monkfish dressed in capers and cornichons.

Phones were a fascination for him early on, and it was this fascination that took him in the early 1970s on an engineering scholarship to the UK, where he eventually gained a PhD, and a career that started at British Telecom. A combination of serendipity, an engineer’s eye for the transformative power of technology and a belief in Africa have kept him at the cutting edge of the telecoms business ever since.

In the 1980s he led the team of engineers at BT Cellnet that took the car phone out of the car, pioneering Britain’s first mobile-phone network. But he tired of working for such a large corporation, and with $50,000 set up his own consultancy, Mobile Systems International (MSI). This went on to design digital cellphone networks in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

At first Ibrahim says he couldn’t read a balance sheet or write a business plan. ‘So I just managed the company by cash. For six years it kept growing. The first year we made a profit of £200,000. The second year we made a profit of £500,000. Then £1.2m, then £2.5m, then £5m …’

By 2000, Ibrahim’s consultancy had 800 employees. He sold it to Marconi for $900m, and reinvested the funds into Celtel. At the time the dotcom bubble was about to burst, and the margins of IT companies were thinning. But sub-Saharan Africa, where most people had never used a phone, let alone owned one, had been overlooked by the big players, who deemed it too poor, corrupt and risky.

‘All my life I have been in this industry. Then here is a situation where you have huge unsatisfied demand for a service that doesn’t exist. You don’t have competition with fixed lines as you do in Europe. It was a no-brainer that the cellular route would be a great success in Africa.’

On cue, mobile phones have been proliferating in Africa in recent years faster than anywhere else in the world. Ibrahim believes that they contributed about 1 per cent to the nearly 6 per cent GDP African countries on average enjoyed in 2007. In the process, millions of lives have been connected and changed.

Celtel has been among the more innovative companies, penetrating rural as well as urban areas, using phones for banking and, more recently, eliminating costly roaming tariffs. But it was held back, Ibrahim says, by the reluctance of banks to lend it money: ‘The largest loan we ever had was $190m, but when MTC [of Kuwait] bought us out, they went to the same banks and won billions. This shows you what African companies are up against.’

By the time of the sale in 2005, Celtel was nonetheless operating in more than 14 African countries with 20 million-plus subscribers. At the bottom end, mobile-phone companies are competing for the same dollar that buys a square meal or a bottle of beer, Ibrahim says. But their success has helped galvanize other service industries to venture beyond the resource-driven bubble economies in which many multinationals have operated on the continent.

On that note, we both decline a tray of pastries, and opt for black coffee. Ibrahim appears one of those rare billionaires who has not let good fortune separate him from his more humble roots. Nor has his Sudanese wife, an oncologist, who ‘after we sold out said, “I don’t want diamonds or a private jet. What I really want is a state of the art hospital in Khartoum for the treatment of breast cancer.” ’

Women, he believes, are the real hope for the continent. ‘They are more honest with money and they don’t go around murdering people.’
There is a very long way still to go, he adds. But Asian demand for African commodities has brought about a turnaround in the terms on which the continent trades. Globally there is a new grasp of Africa’s potential.

‘It’s not that we are any longer hanging our hopes on some nationalist leader or supposedly benign dictator,’ he says. ‘The fact that people have access now to TV, to newspapers, to phones, and some have access to the internet, means you can no longer keep the truth from them so easily. That is another fundamental change.’

Today Ibrahim splits his time between the foundation he has created and a private equity fund. With this he hopes to replicate Celtel’s success in other sectors, investing in companies with the potential to link Africa’s fragmented markets. Some critics contend that in such a difficult business environment, Ibrahim must have bent the rules. So, I ask him, as we leave, is he not too good to be true? For the first time a hint of irritation passes across his face. But he chuckles and brushes aside the question. He has always believed in social justice, he says, and being a businessman, it turns out, is not incompatible with that. And this, as much as anything, is the lesson he wants to impart.