Introduction
Econet is ubiquitous. An average Zimbabwean resident is bound to interact with the group one way or the other, a couple or more times a day. If it is not using their mobile service Buddie, it is using their mobile offering Ecocash. Vaya Africa is making its case and the new YoMix is getting visibility across the country. In many other ways, the entity has a way of affecting one’s life and I have not been spared this experience.
Neighbors with Econet founder’s relatives
I was born a decade prior to what is predominantly known as Econet’s year of inception in the mobile network industry. Though our family never used it as our go-to service for communication for the next few years to come, perhaps because of the expensive nature of joining a mobile network at that time, and in particular Econet’s; it’s growing impact on our lives and lives of those around us quickly became visible.
What a proud feeling it was to realize that we were neighbors to Econet founders’ relatives. We shared a cordial relationship with them. This made me have a positive view of the brand and the personality of the founder whom I had never met.
My first Econet line
In the second decade of the mobile operator’s operation, I acquired my first experimental sim card with them. I had satisfactorily been using a competitor’s service, but because of the growing ease of joining any of the three main networks, I opted to try it out.
The experience wasn’t flattering at all. Mobile data was still entering the market in Zimbabwe and all the mobile operators gave a service that left a lot to be desired. Econet’s numbers didn’t help either, at least in my own experience.
The pricing didn’t appear to make sense as well. For Econet it was worse because it always seemed to me that their service never seemed to meet my requirements for a cost-effective, affordable and reliable service. At least with my other alternatives, I always knew what I would get.
As a matter of preference, I decided to stick to the competitor’s service. I happen to still be using this rival’s service as my primary cell number.
Working as a consultant for Econet’s sister organization
My most glaring experience with the group would later come when I started working for a solutions provider for one of Econet’s sister organizations. As a young, talented software developer, I would quickly become the lead contact person for the project to roll out the project’s software requirements.
The first few months looked lucrative. I associated with one of Zimbabwe’s lucrative companies. Although I never had a keen interest in who the people behind the formation were, the thoughts I had of them in the back of my mind were positive.
What struck me was the urgency with which my colleagues who worked for this sister organization seemed to have for this mother figure. She was revered, scarce and powerful. All she would say in her absence would be done in anticipation of her visit. Many colleagues adhered albeit with a feeling of it being cohesion than persuasion.
People would:
- Pray morning between 8 – 9, lunch 12 – 1 and around 4 – 5 before going home.
- Read the bible’s chapters with an aim to read the whole of it in 365 days of a year.
- Knock off at 9 PM, then travel to be dropped at home between 10 – 11:30.
Now I should be the first one to admit that I have never experienced thereafter such a great work of philanthropy in Zimbabwe, by Zimbabweans with so much perseverance. However, I think this family’s passion overcomes their rationale.
The target was that the following months were to be used to create a book containing all the beneficiaries of the philanthropic work at that time. This book would be handed to the visionary as a birthday present.
I contemplated quitting the job because of two reasons:
- I was earning far little from my contracting company than what my colleagues in the Econet sister organization were earning for the same working hours.
- I could not stand the growing fear and panic over how important it was to produce this book in time, even forsaking the Christmas back that was approaching.
Having been a senior consultant, it also meant I was a little more exposed to the inner workings of the group, at least from the angle of its sister formation. DISHONESTY, GRANDSTANDING, and VAINGLORY were occasional occurrences amongst the team members and especially by middle to top management, and they seemed to be a result of true personalities being suppressed for long in a bid to maintain a strict, word-of-mouth culture that in all honesty seemed to be aimed at satisfying ONE individual.
I quit the consulting task and the job, I could no longer reconcile the conflict of interest in defending basic human dignity and that of being loyal to the employer I was working for.
I would spend the next month in-doors, pondering on the next step I would take, with a view to earning a decent living whilst doing a job I considered dignified. An idea quite revolutionary did come up.
Deceit, arrogance & dishonesty confirmed
Capu was my self-conceived startup. A revolutionary product within the space of mobile money, it took me close to a year to come up with a product that did not depend on Econet for automating the Ecocash service, but only used AI to more efficiently achieve the tasks humans would otherwise do.
As something I had built for every mobile money service and not only the growingly popular Ecocash platform at that time, I envisaged a case where one of Ecocash’s rivals, Telecash, and OneWallet (which was not USSD at the time) would take me up and nurture me without the pressure of working with a big organization for my very first major proprietary project.
In addition to this, it was my plan to focus on the B2C aspect of Ecocash: wages, bills and bulk payments and leave out the space of P2P (C2B / C2C) transactions to other developers to gain some bit of traction and money by developing a mobile app.
After being reviewed by an up and coming tech news outlet at the time, the famous owner (in the world of tech news) encouraged me to take part in the ZOL Startup challenge of that year 2013. I initially wasn’t sure of my readiness and keenness, but it turned out pretty hopeful when the first round of startups included mine, and with a very high potential it seemed.
Quickly my doubt became the hope of taking baby steps to succeed in the murky waters of large scale software applications development through success in this challenge. I would send tails wagging as to how I achieved perceived integration into the Ecocash platform when Ecocash was at the time adamant it would not publish APIs any time soon. All this while, I was still focusing on B2C transactions.
Perplexed about how Capu intelligently automated the mobile money functionality without using Ecocash APIs, one of the judges who was also an Econet executive asked whether I had “approached Econet with this solution”. To his surprise, I hadn’t (yet), even though It would seem prudent to work with Econet, instead of trying to circumvent it. The executive did appear sincere and gave me his business card, asking me to call sometime after the challenge.
I would miss out on the prize money because of “a lack of business model around my startup in spite of it being immensely innovative”, which was a core requirement of the startup after all. However, the courtship by Econet without me approaching them seemed like more than the first prize to me. For the days to come, I cozied up to the fantasy of being incubated by and working with Econet.
I felt shivers of joy as my team and I walked into the Econet meeting/boardroom for a meeting which had culminated for us to share our technology with the Econet engineers and management.
The words, however, of one of the Econet top engineer-manager whom we had been given to assist in the initial setup of the meeting kept me enquiring. His advice was that we ought to avoid any hopes since in his words Econet had a culture of “being averse to partnering or incubating” externals for any of its product deliverables in spite of how good an idea is.
Capu’s independence from any APIs of Ecocash was bewildering to the boardroom full of engineers and managers. Whilst we had one on our team who was an older, more experienced businessman, I now feel we were full of naivety as we explained our concept to the team that seemed less apt than I thought “Econet engineers” were.
To the confirmation of this engineer/manager’s words, the first meeting would eventually become the last as he and other managers would duck our calls for the promised follow-up meetings. What would follow was a series of further promises to schedule the follow-up meeting as soon as possible.
A few weeks later, after consulting the executive who had initially asked us to approach Econet and him intervening to get some answer as to what the next step of the relationship if any would be, the reluctant answer came: “Econet was asked by the developers of the Ecocash core system not to engage third parties”.
I realized that I had made a mistake. I had turned a blind eye to an obvious drawback and potential long term demotivation that I had set out to avoid during the initial phase of my startup.
As disappointed as I was, and in spite of the lingering advice of that manager-engineer who had warned my team and I of not carrying any hope of getting any relationship with Econet, I still maintained in my mind that Econet was not at fault. A company as carefully built and big as Econet would obviously do it’s best to “avoid” fly-by-nights. They had to have a rigorous vetting system, and I was just a victim of the process. I would resort to self-marketing and my team would gain a few customers.
A couple of months later in the following year, a developer would come up with the first mobile app following the footsteps of Capu as automation of the USSD process, this time focusing on P2P transactions. It gave me hope when I read the story that this developer had occupied a space I had intentionally left for others to focus on and perhaps gain a market from when I had the chance to take it.
Like my meeting, the innovation wouldn’t last many days, as a short time into its use, the shortcode functionality of Ecocash it had a dependency on was taken down, rendering the app useless and paving way for the official Ecocash app a few weeks later. A few tech news outlets wrote about this. It became apparent that this was no longer just dissociation from potentially risky innovations by Econet, but an intent to pour water on none Econet innovation as their engineer-manager had clearly warned us initially.
As a startup in which I had put in considerable time, these developments further dampened my hope of success in that line of business and any other tech entrepreneurial adventure. I told myself I had wandered the paths of others entitled to do so, and mine was to go back to the workforce, forget about innovation, approaching other MNOs and rather focus on 9 to 5s. So I did, I buried Capu in a hatchet. To this day, it stays there.
Econet, the potential employer
I quickly got an opportunity into the world of employment as a developer again. It was a good job. The company was a leading but only growing web development services provider and introduced me to the lessons of being a startup and succeeding at it. With a couple more pioneering products with the potential of being successful in spite of existing big business around it, the few months I would be there only reignited the extreme passion I had for innovation.
Although compensating a lot, the employer strictly prohibited any form of side jobs and moonlighting whilst contracted to him in the same line of business like his. Each month that passed by added flame to the fire that already ignited in me of attempting again at innovation. Ideas rolled, but I could not execute on them.
I was trying my best to be fair to my employer and not short-change them so much that it made me sick. I would wake up and travel with a heavy heart of the mistakes I had made as a first time attempt at full-time entrepreneurship, and how I had turned a blind eye to the pitfalls of fantasizing being fairly incubated by Econet, after the torrid time I had faced being a contractor with their sister company.
The passion of making amends killed my health to the point where I had to leave my employment, giving my employer a fair shot at hiring someone fully dedicated whilst myself recuperating from the depression that had arisen because of the many thoughts of deceit, rejection, and dejection I felt since the last encounter with Econet.
It was going to be amongst my most stupid decisions to succumb again to this illness of courage, as I had given advantage again to my very fears; it is never easy to start any innovation without the comfort of a steady income for the expenses that you have to live with. I just felt that this particular job was not allowing me to do both, and if this was going to work, I needed a reset. I left, still, it was stupid as I look back now.
An interview came with Econet soon after my departure and I easily decided to go along with it. The company was paying a lot at that time as well, it was lucrative to work for Econet compared to many other companies in Zimbabwe at that time.
My routine job application some months back prior to leaving my other job had culminated in this interview. Econet needed to hire developers and testers; apparently I had applied for both jobs. When I was called, I assumed this was for the development job and went in prepared for it.
We filled out the interview attendance papers, noting that I was there for the developer job and walked into the interview room as confident as I could ever be. However, as the questions came, everything pointed the wrong direction. I have never been so blank in an interview, and I left once more disappointed. Only that this time, it was truly not Econet’s fault, but mine.
The five years that followed, I would move from development to systems’ administration, still lingering with the mind that it was futile to think about developing any relationship with Econet
The comeback
I am back with a bang. The product I am coming up with is revolutionary again. It can not be taken down and has a business model around it. It encompasses all the experience I learned from working for, with and far from Econet. It is a competition for one of Econet’s new products, but it doesn’t intimidate me anymore.
After 5 years of being subtle with innovation, healing from the bruises of the sneezes of a giant in my most infant years, when I read and hear about companies falling prey to Econet’s way of competition, the actions against Telecel when it hadn’t renewed its license, the Hwindi scuffle, Kwese’s battle with DSTV, Ownai’s attempt usurping other classifieds and many such stories of Econet looking to not only be leading but also only one in the industry it chooses to occupy, I say to myself this will never happen to me again. As an antidote to my detestable experiences and as I healed from my bruises, I vowed never to use Econet products unless when extremely necessary, I vowed never to work for Econet to avoid a conflict of interest (I wanna work for a company I align at least most of my vision and dreams with), I vowed never to confront Econet unless when absolutely necessary, and I plan not to be stopped directly or indirectly by Econet ever, to me, Econet is just an ambitious company, with ambitions of success, and like any other company it deserves the right to be what it chooses to be within the confines of the law without sabotage from bitter foes beaten at the game; till we meet again, Econet!