Africa’s telecom boom did more than connect hundreds of millions of people. It created one of the continent’s most powerful wealth-building machines, rewarding entrepreneurs who were willing to spend heavily on licences, networks and distribution before the returns became visible.
From Nigeria’s Mike Adenuga and Egypt’s Naguib Sawiris to Zimbabwe’s Strive Masiyiwa and Sudanese-born Mo Ibrahim, some of Africa’s biggest technology fortunes were built by controlling infrastructure that millions of people had little choice but to use.
The lesson is becoming relevant again as the continent enters another infrastructure cycle, this time around fibre, data centres, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and digital payments.
The common thread is not simply technology. It is ownership of the underlying systems.
A recent analysis of African telecom fortunes found that Adenuga, Sawiris, Masiyiwa and Ibrahim built substantial wealth through telecom businesses that expanded across markets and, in some cases, were later sold or folded into larger international groups.
The model was relatively simple, although execution was anything but. Get a licence. Raise capital. Build the network. Acquire customers. Expand into other markets. Then use the scale of the network to create additional businesses.
That model worked because telecom had unusually high barriers to entry. A new operator needed regulatory approval, spectrum, towers, fibre, switching equipment, international capacity, retail distribution and enough capital to survive years of investment before the business reached scale.
Once those pieces were in place, however, the same infrastructure became a formidable competitive advantage.
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The licence was only the beginning
Mo Ibrahim saw the opportunity before many international investors did. In 1998, he founded Celtel after identifying African markets where telecommunications licences could be obtained at relatively low cost. Celtel subsequently expanded across several African countries and was sold to Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Company in 2005 for more than $3 billion.
Ibrahim later recalled that when he proposed investing in African telecoms, some executives struggled to see the opportunity. ‘I thought you were smarter than that!’ was how he recalled one executive responding to his proposal to pursue an African licence.
Mike Adenuga took a similar infrastructure-heavy approach with Globacom.
Glo launched in 2003 and challenged the existing operators with aggressive pricing. But its longer-term strategy went beyond selling mobile calls and data. The company later built Glo-1, a submarine cable linking Nigeria with international capacity, giving the operator greater control over a critical part of its connectivity chain.
That distinction matters. The largest fortunes were not necessarily created by having the cleverest telecom application. They were created by owning pieces of infrastructure through which millions of transactions, calls, messages and data sessions had to pass.
Africa is now rebuilding the rails
The opportunity is changing, but the infrastructure logic remains. Africa is moving from a mobile-phone revolution into a broader digital infrastructure cycle involving fibre networks, cloud computing, data centres, AI computing, digital identity and payment systems.
In Nigeria, the government’s $2 billion Project BRIDGE is designed to deploy 90,000 kilometres of fibre and expand the national backbone. The government says the programme is intended to address structural connectivity gaps and support wider digital economic activity.
Bosun Tijani, Nigeria’s minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, has argued that infrastructure is the foundation on which the wider digital economy must be built.
‘Infrastructure is the bedrock for most of the things we want to achieve,’ Tijani said in an interview, adding that there is no strong economy without connectivity.
At a recent Semafor event, he made the argument more directly: ‘What we do not have is meaningful connectivity,’ referring to the ability of people to actually use digital services rather than simply live within network coverage.
That distinction could determine who captures the next wave of value.
Fintech is already sitting on the telecom rails
Africa’s fintech boom illustrates the point. Mobile money, digital banking, payment applications and other financial technology companies have been able to scale because telecom networks created a distribution layer reaching deep into markets that traditional financial institutions struggled to serve.
The new businesses therefore do not need to recreate the entire telecommunications system.
They can build on top of it. That has created a different type of technology entrepreneur: one that owns the application, payment platform or customer relationship, but not necessarily the underlying infrastructure.
The next stage could shift the balance again. African fintech investors are increasingly focusing on infrastructure such as payment settlement, identity, risk and treasury systems, rather than only consumer-facing applications.
In other words, the lesson from telecom is beginning to repeat itself inside fintech.
The valuable company may not always be the app that consumers see. It may be the infrastructure underneath the app that other companies cannot easily operate without.
The telecom billionaires are moving further down the stack
Strive Masiyiwa is already an example of that transition. The entrepreneur who built his fortune through mobile telecom has expanded into fibre, cloud and data centres. His businesses are now also investing in AI infrastructure.
In September, Cassava Technologies, founded by Masiyiwa, joined Vodafone and Elsewedy Electric to develop an AI data centre in Egypt, a project expected by the Egyptian government to attract $1 billion in foreign investment.
Masiyiwa has described the move as a continuation of his infrastructure strategy. In discussing his AI expansion, he said his company is moving from mobile and broadband infrastructure into computing infrastructure because African businesses need access to those capabilities locally.
Hassanein Hiridjee, founder of Axian Group, has made a similar argument. He describes telecom networks as part of the infrastructure required for Africa’s AI ambitions because data has to move from users to data centres and then to the applications that process it.
‘There is room for everyone,’ Hiridjee said, arguing that Africa’s infrastructure gap is large enough to require both local and international capital.
The next wealth cycle may be less visible
This is where the billionaire story becomes more interesting. The next African technology fortune may not come from another consumer app with millions of downloads.
It could come from fibre routes, data centres, cloud platforms, payment infrastructure, energy systems or other networks that businesses increasingly cannot operate without.
Tony Elumelu, chairman of United Bank for Africa, has made a similar case for infrastructure as a foundation of Africa’s digital economy.
‘You can’t talk about a digital economy in Africa without fixing critical infrastructure,’ Elumelu said, pointing specifically to digital connectivity and reliable electricity.
The argument is also consistent with his broader position that infrastructure investment is essential for economic development, particularly in digital connectivity, power and logistics.
That changes the question entrepreneurs should ask. Instead of asking only what digital product Africa needs, the bigger question is what infrastructure millions of businesses will eventually depend on.
Telecom entrepreneurs answered that question two decades ago. They did not merely build businesses around the mobile revolution. They built the network through which the revolution had to pass. That created scale, recurring revenue and strategic control.
Africa’s current technology boom is creating another opportunity to build such infrastructure. The difference is that the next rails may not be visible to consumers.
They could sit underground as fibre, inside data centres as computing capacity, behind payment transactions or inside the cloud.
But if the telecom era taught Africa anything about technology wealth, it is that owning the rails can sometimes be more valuable than building the vehicle that runs on them.