Why MTN's Latest Playbook is a Lesson for Every Nigerian Tech Founder

My generator just ran out of fuel, and the cold breeze coming through my window here in Jos isn't doing much to cool down my frustration with this codebase. I’ve been trying to debug a weird payment callback issue for three hours. While waiting for my local node server to restart, I saw the news about Jerry Soko being officially named the CEO of MTN Eswatini.

Instead of importing some shiny suit from London to run their African markets, MTN is moving Soko—a guy who has spent over 20 years in the trenches across Zambia, Botswana, Rwanda, and South Sudan—to lead the charge.

This isn't just a corporate press release. It is a massive lesson for those of us building products and scaling teams in Africa.

The "Shiny External Hire" Trap

In the Nigerian tech space, we love a good pedigree. We raise a seed round and immediately want to hire a VP of Product who worked at some big-name Silicon Valley firm. But then they land in Nigeria, and they don't understand why our USSD channels keep dropping, or why cash-on-delivery is still a reality in Onitsha despite all our beautiful UI designs.

It is like replacing your lead engineer—the one who has been patching up your legacy PHP codebase since day one—with a hotshot who only knows how to build greenfield projects in next-gen frameworks. The moment the server room starts sweating, the new guy is lost.

Soko has actually run the numbers and built the pipes in the real world. He stabilized the business during his seven months as acting CEO because he already knew where the pressure points were.

The Ambition 2030 Pivot

MTN isn't just a telecom company anymore. Their "Ambition 2030" plan is basically a massive software migration. They want to turn a giant telco into a fintech and digital infrastructure platform. That means APIs, identity verification, mobile money routing, and localized digital services.

If you want to transition a massive legacy system to a modern platform, you need builders who understand the existing database schema.

Soko and the other internal execs MTN is rotating—like Mitwa Ng’ambi and Abbad Reda—know exactly where the technical and operational debt is hidden. They know which regulatory walls they will hit because they’ve already hit them in Zambia or Rwanda. They don't need a six-month onboarding period to understand how internet penetration works in a landlocked nation.

Stop Overlooking Your Best Builders

We have this "No gree for anybody" energy as Nigerian builders, but sometimes we don't apply it to nurturing our own team. We suffer from high churn rates because we don't show our junior and mid-level devs a clear path to leadership.

Look at MTN's play. They promoted Mitwa Ng’ambi from CEO of Côte d’Ivoire to Group Chief People Officer. That triggered two more internal promotions. They are rotating their best people across different environments, building a pipeline of leaders who actually know the terrain.

If you are building a product in Nigeria, whether you are working out of a noisy shared desk in Gbagada or a quiet room in Akure, you have to build a pipeline. Stop looking for the external savior. Train the person who is currently fixing your CSS bugs. They might just be the one to scale your product to the rest of West Africa.

Now, back to this node server. Hopefully, it doesn't crash again.