Our #MCM is Ralph Tendai Mupita, who is a Zimbabwe-born engineer, businessman, and corporate executive. His appointment as Group President and chief executive of MTN Group with effect from 1 September 2020 was announced on 19 August 2020 by MTN, Africa’s biggest mobile operator by subscriber count. Prior to that he served as the MTN Group’s chief financial officer from April 2017 until August 2020.

A graduate of Harvard Business School, Mupita became MTN CFO in 2017 after nearly two decades at South African insurer Old Mutual Ltd. His journey to the top of Africa’s biggest telecoms company started in a completely different field — civil engineering.

Mupita was born in Goromonzi, Zimbabwe, on 11 April 1972 and grew up in the small town of Mutare. He attended Mutare Junior School and then Churchill School and Plumtree School for his middle school and high school education.

In a YouTube interview with Dr Nik Eberl, Mupita said his dream career as a child was to go to the Moon. Mupita’s father was a teacher, and his mother a nurse, which meant that money was a slight impediment to such a grand ambition. “I wanted to be an astronaut. But sometime when I was about ten or eleven years old, someone told me ‘No, Africans don’t go to the moon’,” Mupita said. “It was hard to listen to that person, but I did, and here I am today.”

In a subsequent interview, Mupita explained that the tough conversation made him think about the impact of limited means on people growing up in small towns. That ultimately made him more curious about what was possible if a person tried to push the boundaries. Mupita said he did not grow up with a TV in the house, but he and his siblings had plenty of books to read, which sat well with his father’s view that education was of critical importance. However, he also enjoyed sports, performing well in athletics and obtaining national school colours for Zimbabwean cricket while also performing well in athletics. His sports skills afforded him scholarships through middle school and high school, which were completed at Churchill School and Plumtree School, respectively.

Mupita’s time in South Africa began with his studies for a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Initially, he had no plans to come to the country and wanted to venture into academics in the United Kingdom. A girl he was very interested in said she was coming to South Africa, which encouraged him to make the move. “I kind of abandoned the idea to follow her. But she never rocks up in South Africa,” he laughed.

The decision to study civil engineering was partially because two of his uncles had also worked in the field. His parents did not have money to pay for his education, but he studied through a scholarship from Haw & Inglis. After obtaining his qualification, Mupita worked as a staff civil engineer at the company in Cape Town from 1996 to 1999.

Towards the end of that time, he began itching to move on and try something that would challenge him in a new space of “discomfort”. “I was feeling the learning curve was flattening,” Mupita said. “I operate best when there is an edge, a bit of tension, and a little bit of uncertainty in myself.” “When I feel too sure [of myself], I think it’s a very dangerous place, because you get hubris and you make assumptions and errors.”

His time at the firm taught him one important thing he wanted to continue doing — problem-solving. He returned to UCT to study a Master of Business Administration in 2000, with a scholarship from Old Mutual. In 2001, Mupita joined the company, where he would go on to serve in various senior roles — including Director of Strategy and Director of Retail for High Net-worth & Affluent customers.

In February 2012, he was appointed as the Old Mutual Emerging Markets CEO, a position he held until January 2017. Three months later, he began his career at MTN Group as chief financial officer. That offer came during a coffee with MTN executive chairman at the time, Phuthuma Nhleko. Mupita was not certain about the proposition as he had little experience in telecoms and did not have the traditional qualifications.

As was the case when he left civil engineering, Mupita again saw an opportunity to learn. “I don’t think I was a brilliant technical CFO, probably was a very bad one,” Mupita said.

“But I think I brought the disciplines of capital management and finance strategy because I played strategy roles before.”  He would serve in this capacity until August 2020, when he replaced Rob Shuter as MTN Group CEO.

In recent years, Mupita has guided MTN through significant challenges in its two biggest markets, Nigeria and South Africa. In Nigeria, the company’s finances have been hard-hit by the devaluation of the Naira and run-ins with egregious tax claims. In South Africa, load-shedding and little economic growth have negatively impacted MTN and other mobile networks.

Mupita believes that mobile networks need to reinvent themselves in two ways. Firstly, they should see their connectivity as a more open platform for other companies to run their services, similar to how fibre network operators sell their capacity to Internet service providers. Secondly, Mupita believes mobile networks should see themselves as part of the ecosystem of online services like streaming and should leverage their large subscribers to reach customers with their own offerings.

Ralph Mupita is married to Makole Mupita, a chartered accountant who is the proprietor and principal at Mahlako A Phahla Investments (Pty) Limited, established in 2009. He has four children.