Trajectories — Portrait No. 1
Strive Masiyiwa spent five years and most of his money in court, arguing that Zimbabwe’s telephone monopoly was an assault on free speech. He won, switched on his network, and then left the country for twenty-six years. The infrastructure group he built from exile is now being tested by the debt that built it.
| Fixed lines in Zimbabwe, 1993 | 14,000 (c. 0.07% of the population) |
| Length of the legal battle | 5 years |
| First commercial call | 10 July 1998 |
| Years spent outside Zimbabwe | 26 (March 2000 – February 2026) |
| Cassava fibre network | 110,000 km |
| Nvidia GPUs acquired | 12,000 |
| Moody’s rating since Nov. 2025 | Caa2 |
| Refinancing closed, April 2026 | $660m |
| Net worth (Forbes, 2026) | $2.2bn |
In 1993 Zimbabwe had about 14,000 fixed telephone lines. Fewer than one citizen in a thousand could reach one. The Posts and Telecommunications Corporation owned all of them, and also served as the regulator that issued telecommunications licences — to itself.
Strive Masiyiwa was 32, an electrical engineer who had worked for the PTC before leaving to build and sell an engineering firm. He arrived with a mobile joint venture backed by Standard Chartered Merchant Bank, structured so that the state would hold 51% and he would hold 49%. He was not asking to displace the monopoly. He was offering it control.
The PTC refused on two grounds. It held a statutory monopoly. And mobile telephony, it explained, was a passing fad.
The pivot
What happens next is the part worth studying, and it is not perseverance.
Masiyiwa first argued in the High Court that the monopoly covered fixed lines and did not extend to radio spectrum. He won. The Supreme Court reversed him. Rather than relitigate telecoms law, he changed the subject: denying citizens the means to communicate, he argued, abridged the freedom of expression the constitution guaranteed.
The manoeuvre worked because it moved the venue. On questions of industrial policy the state is sovereign and cannot lose. On fundamental rights it can.
He won on constitutional grounds in 1995. The presidency responded in 1996 by barring private cellular operations altogether. A court order that December gave the ministry weeks to end the monopoly — by tender, or by simply letting Econet switch on. A technical committee was assembled, a tender was published with remarkable speed, and in late February 1997 the licence went to a rival. More litigation followed. Econet Wireless Zimbabwe carried its first commercial call on 10 July 1998, five years after the original proposal.
Two details matter more than the chronology. Masiyiwa funded the case by selling his other assets and came close to personal bankruptcy; for five years the legal budget was the company, with no customers and no revenue. And he says he refused the bribes he was asked for. A purchased licence would have arrived within months. It would also have been revocable at the first political falling-out. A licence won by judgment is a different class of asset.
The bill
Beating the state is not the same as being forgiven by it. In March 2000, as Zimbabwe entered a decade of monetary destruction, Masiyiwa left. He settled in South Africa, then London, and did not go back for twenty-six years — until February 2026, when he addressed shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting in Harare.
He ran the country’s most profitable company from abroad for a quarter of a century.
Owning the layer
From exile he built a separate vehicle from the listed Zimbabwean company: Econet Wireless International, later Econet Global. Mascom in Botswana, operations in Nigeria that would become Airtel Nigeria, Burundi, Lesotho.
The decisive turn, though, was not more mobile licences. It was the move from operator to infrastructure owner. Liquid Intelligent Technologies laid more than 110,000 km of cross-border fibre; Africa Data Centres built carrier-neutral facilities; in November 2021 the digital assets were consolidated under a holding company, Cassava Technologies.
The current bet is compute. Cassava partnered with Nvidia, acquired 12,000 GPUs, launched its first African “AI factory” in South Africa in March 2026 with a second planned for Johannesburg, and rolled out capacity toward Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Morocco. Nvidia took an equity stake. In April 2026 a dedicated unit, Econet AI, was carved out.
The logic is unchanged since 1993: own the layer everyone else has to cross.
The other side of the ledger
The model has a price, and it surfaced in late 2025.
Moody’s cut the group to Caa2 in November, following an earlier downgrade; Fitch has it at CCC+. The agency’s finding was blunt: strip out Zimbabwean earnings and interest coverage falls below 1.0. The regional businesses, taken alone, do not generate enough to service the debt. A $620m bond was falling due in September 2026.
Two months later, Econet Wireless Zimbabwe announced its voluntary delisting from the Harare exchange. Creditors noticed for a specific reason: the Zimbabwean asset sits outside the bondholder security perimeter, so they can neither seize it nor compel dividends. They were already relying on cash flows they had no contractual claim on. Delisting removes the disclosure that let them watch.
The resolution, in April 2026, was better than expected. Liquid closed $660m of financing, including a $300m senior secured Eurobond listed on Euronext Dublin and oversubscribed 2.5 times, plus a $195m equity injection from Cassava. The September maturity was retired.
That clears the deadline. It does not clear the structure. A group spanning some twenty African markets still depends, for its ability to pay interest, on a single subsidiary in a single country with an unusually poor monetary record. Geographic spread is not the same thing as diversified risk.
The foundation
Higherlife, founded in 1996 with his wife Tsitsi during Zimbabwe’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, claims more than 400,000 beneficiaries over thirty years, chiefly through two scholarship streams — one for orphaned and vulnerable children, one for high performers — across Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Burundi and elsewhere. The figure is the foundation’s own.
It says something either way. In a country whose public education system collapsed alongside its currency, a private foundation took over a sovereign function. That is both an achievement and a symptom.
What it reads like from Douala or Libreville
Law is a strategic asset, not a cost line. Masiyiwa lost every round he fought on telecoms law and won the one he fought on constitutional law. Founders blocked by an administration sometimes have a stronger legal case than a commercial one — if they know how to reframe the dispute.
The barrier to entry is the licence, not the capital. Across the CEMAC, market access usually turns on a discretionary approval: banking, mining, telecoms, ports. A business plan that does not price the cost and duration of obtaining it is incomplete.
One cash cow is a vulnerability, whatever the fibre map says. And the personal cost is almost never quantified: five years without revenue, near-bankruptcy, then twenty-six years outside his own country. The trajectory is worth admiring. It was never comfortable, and saying otherwise would be a lie.
Tomorrow: Ursula Burns, from Xerox intern to Fortune 500 chief executive.