If you are interested in how to become a billionaire in south africa , you are not alone. A lot of people are curious about how to become a billionaire in africa. There are many ideas out there on the internet about how to be a billionaire, but it seems that no one has actually written down their experiences. I figured that I’d solve the problem by writing my own blog post about this topic.
How to become a billionaire in south africa is an interesting read for anyone interested in becoming a billionaire. You have probably heard of all the people whose wealth has been accumulated from being part of the financial services industry, and this article will enlighten you on how you can be a part of this lucrative industry.
Seriously. The internet is only now arriving, and — with a billion people on the continent still mostly offline — there exists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build the next Zyngas, eBays and Groupons for a huge untapped local market. You need only look at the map of huge broadband fibreoptic cables currently being laid on both east and west coasts, from Djibouti to Dakar, to understand how quickly and ambitiously an entire continent is being connected. It’s like being back in 1995 again, and realising there might just be a market for an online bookshop or auction website.
Don’t take my word for it: David Cameron is so keen to give British entrepreneurs a foothold that he recently took a high-level delegation of corporate CEOs to Nigeria and South Africa to highlight “one of the greatest economic opportunities on the planet”. The trip — featuring the bosses of firms such as Barclays and Bombardier, Vodafone and Virgin Atlantic — was hailed by Downing Street as “a historic visit to a continent with a trillion dollar economy and the potential, according to the IMF, to grow faster than Brazil over the next five years”. Much of that growth will come from startups that bring the mobile internet to businesses and consumers who have until now been offline. That’s why Cameron’s team invited along the British founders of red-hot mobile-money business Monitise, a clever text-messaging system called FrontlineSMS — and your own Digital Life columnist with his trusty notebook.
It was, admittedly, a surreal four-day schedule — taking in South Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria and South Africa — that, at the last moment, was squeezed to just two days and two countries (well, there was the small matter of a domestic phone-hacking crisis to distract the PM’s attention). But that was long enough to get a sense of the extraordinary opportunities — at a time when McKinsey and Ernst & Young are forecasting that $150 billion will flow into Africa by 2015, and that consumer spending will reach $1.4 trillion by 2020. No wonder Helios Investment Partners could recently raise a $900 million fund specifically targeting the continent.
So where could you make your own tech-based millions? A few obvious markets primed for explosive growth:
Mobile money
Who needs banks if you can use your mobile to send and receive cash? More than a quarter of Kenya’s GDP now passes through a phone-to-phone network called M-Pesa, and in Uganda MTN MobileMoney has almost two million users. As Cameron put it in a speech to Lagos Business School, “Today, mobile banking systems mean we can cut out middlemen and make a direct impact on the lives of small farmers who can produce more food, feed their families, sell more food at the market and in turn buy more seed.”
E-commerce
You don’t need a smartphone, let alone a PC, to shop online. The American startup SlimTrader runs a service called MoBiashara, which lets African consumers shop by mobile on basic cellphones. And there are half a billion of those in Africa.
Business directories
The British startup entrepreneur Stefan Magdalinski — formerly of UpMyStreet and Moo.com — moved to Cape Town a couple of years ago to run a bunch of firms for international media group MIH, including a Kenyan business directory, Mocality, that gave many companies their first online presence. Why? Because he wanted to be where the action was.
Health
Not only do mobile phones turn into blood-pressure monitors and ultrasound devices that can connect rural communities. They can also detect counterfeit medicines: the startup mPedigree works with pharmaceutical companies to let patients text codes on packs of antimalarials to receive confirmation that they’re genuine.
Leapfrog tech
If a tiny fraction of, say, Zimbabweans have access to the “big” internet, then why not make the internet accessible via SMS on their 2G phones? That’s what Econet Wireless Zimbabwe is offering its five million mobile phone subscribers, turning their handsets into virtual smartphones with tech from ForgetMeNot Africa that turns emails and chats into text messages.
Now insert your own big idea here, and book your air ticket.
Sure, Africa still faces huge hurdles — in South Africa, 11 million people live below the poverty line, and almost 6 million have HIV; in Nigeria, 110 million out of a population of 158 million live on less than £1 a day. But when one telco alone, Bharti Airtel, recently announced $13 billion in African revenue last year, you know it’s time to abandon our traditional assumptions.
As Cameron said in Lagos, “Which continent has six of the ten fastest growing economies in the world?… Africa is transforming in a way no-one thought possible 20 years ago…and suddenly a whole new future seems within reach.”
Become a politician
“Politicians own private jets in Africa”
When it comes to wealth, Donald Trump can humbly take a back seat when compared to many African politicians. In Africa, there still isn’t an activity that generates as many millionaires and billionaires as politics. Literally overnight, someone can secure generational wealth via an election win or a nomination.
People often don’t have an idea of the African political leaders’ wealth until a corruption scandal is revealed in the media. Political players in Africa have so much money that when someone is elected or nominated, close friends and family members celebrate as if they’ve just closed a lifetime business deal.
Politicians are not considered in popular wealth rankings. If they were though, the first 100 would certainly be all Africans. Most African politicians are also involved in business activities, so it becomes a chicken-and-egg situation. They used politics to create companies or their business activities channeled them into politics? It’s a gray area.
People like to tout Aliko Dangote as the wealthiest man in Africa. In an ethical sense, maybe. Realistically speaking though, he’s not. Politicians are
Work in a state entity
In Africa, particularly, state entities are intimately tied with politics, but it’s worthwhile isolating them for the purpose of this article.
State entities often pay modest salaries in Africa, especially for lower-ranking employees. Nevertheless, many people who work in the public administration own assets that even top workers in the private sector can only dream of: luxurious vehicles, real estate abroad, fancy vacations, etc. Parastatal employees own it all.
Yes, this is perhaps due to embezzlement and mismanagement, but you’d be surprised that many managers in state entities are able to become famously wealthy because there are many loopholes in the law. Due to years of experience, they’re able to tap into loopholes in regulations and can “legally” become very wealthy.
Small anecdote: sometimes in April 2017, media outlets reported a financial crime jackpot in Nigeria. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria discovered US$ 43M in cash in an empty Lagos apartment. Yes, that is forty-three million United States dollars in cash. Who did the apartment belong to? The wife of the Nigerian spy chief at the time (Nigeria’s equivalent of the FBI boss). According to him, the money was being stored in the apartment for the spy agency’s covert operations.
Work in multilateral organizations and large NGOs
Perhaps, this isn’t unique to Africa, but large NGOs and multilateral organizations tend to pay decent money. Due to the significant income gap in Africa though and the relatively lower cost of living in most of the countries, decent money becomes very good money.
I personally know people who could care less about the development of the African youth, education, or any development issue for that matter, yet they work in organizations dedicated to development. Why do they do it? These organizations pay a lot more than most private sector firms do in Africa and they offer terrific benefits and perks to their employees.
True story: I know a tech entrepreneur in an African country and we met for coffee. He told me how he tried to convince a mutual friend — who resigned from a company— to join him so they could grow his firm. He candidly said: “when she told me the salary a development institution offered her, I really would have abandoned my company if I were offered the same job.”
Conclusion:
You’ve probably heard about the amazing wealth that is created in Africa and what a great place it is to do business, especially if you invested 10 years ago. There is literally billions of dollars’ worth of gold and diamonds under South Africa alone, not to mention the other countries.