Sifiso Dabengwa served as the CEO and president of MTN, a multi-billion-dollar mobile communications company based in South Africa — until the company failed to meet a Nigerian government-imposed deadline and was slapped with a $5.2 billion fine. Dabengwa took responsibility for the fine and promptly resigned. He is famous for remaining incredibly private and taking very few interviews. Here are 8 things you didn’t know about former MTN CEO Sifiso Dabengwa.
Dabengwa was in a long relationship with State Theatre CEO Xoliswa Ngema. They were engaged but never married. Ngema tried to lay claim to Dabengwa’s fortune as if the two had been married, arguing that the engagement ring she wore was a wedding ring, but Dabengwa’s attorneys discovered that the two were never married according to common law. Ngema withdrew her case.
After Ngema withdrew her appeal for divorce, she was served with a warrant to pay Dabengwa around $50,000. Ngema asked for a suspension on the warrant while she planned a second court case, in which again claimed she and Dabengwa had been legally married, and that she was entitled to half of his wealth. The judge didn’t see any reason for her second case to hold up in court, either.
Dabengwa earned a bachelor of science in engineering from the University of Zimbabwe, as well as an MBA from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Between receiving his first degree and his second, Dabengwa spent a few years serving as a trainee on the British Rail, and eventually on the Zimbabwe Railways.
When asked how he chose who to hire, Dabengwa used a football analogy. He said, “If a football player has not scored goals in years, would you hire him to score goals for you?” He went on to explain that people he hires must be able to work with the team, and fit the environment well. When talking about how important it is to bring new managerial methods to a company, and how each person sees different sides of an organization, he said, “If we both look at a teapot, we see different things.”
In 2015, Nigeria gave mobile operators a deadline to cut off unregistered SIM cards, believing many of these to be used for criminal activity. MTN missed the deadline, which resulted in a fine of $5.2 million. The company negotiated that fine down substantially, but Dabengwa resigned from his position as CEO. MTN has since paid Dabengwa a $1.6 million payout.
Workers on strike at MTN demanded that Dabengwa returned to his home country of Zimbabwe, claiming that he didn’t believe in giving his employees a decent, living wage. The strike came at a time of heightened xenophobia in South Africa, and strikers held signs demanding that several MTN personnel who were not from South Africa return to their native lands.
In an interview with Oxford Business Group, Dabengwa was adamant about delivering Wi-Fi to rural areas. He suggested that private sectors might need to work together with Telkom, sharing their infrastructures in order to make this happen. He also said he believes that a minimum speed requirement should be set for broadband that is expanded to rural areas.
Before working at MTN, Dabengwa sat on the management board at Eskom—the public electric utility company in South Africa. One of Dabengwa’s most notable achievements there was planning and implementing the national electrification program which increased electricity in South African households from 35 percent in 1990 to 84 percent in 2011.