Muhammed Jah; Millionaire without a business plan

The Gambia's Muhammed Jah clearly remembers the day, in the late 1990s, when a friend told him that he was going to the airport to pick up a consultant who was coming to teach his department a word processing application popular at the time, WordPerfect. "I said: 'How come we have a consultant coming all the way from Europe just to teach our people how to type a letter on a computer?'" Mr Jah told the BBC's series African Dream."That was funny but serious to me, and there and then I decided that I was going to start teaching people computing."

QuantumNet, the company that he set in motion with four employees, now has more than 300 information technology (IT) professionals on its payroll and, according to his estimates, is worth around £100m ($156m). For him that is no mean feat. After all, Mr Jah - whose father was a school teacher - was the first in his family to go into business.

It all started when, having finished school in The Gambia, he got a scholarship to do a diploma in Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia. He says that although the stipend was very generous, he lived frugally and saved money - including the funds he had for holiday flights home - to pay his way through university. He then read for a degree in Electronics and Communications engineering at the University of Sierra Leone.

When he returned to The Gambia he considered working as an engineer but then saw - thanks to his friend's illuminating trip to the airport - that there was an opening for computer entrepreneurs in the country. "When I finished my studies in Sierra Leone I had money left over from what I was saving in Saudi Arabia, and I also had a family loan, from an uncle of mine, but I remember I started my whole business with about $16,000 which enabled me to buy a few computers to start a training centre," Mr Jah told the BBC Africa's Victor Okhai.

"My business instinct showed me that there was an opportunity so I quickly transformed myself from pure engineering to computing which is almost the same, so I did a few courses in computing to give to my people what I had learned. "Though I don't have a PhD or a Master's degree in computing, at that time I didn't need that high level to teach people how to type or how to use Excel."

Mr Jah said that he felt he had received so much from his country that it was time to give something back. But when he started out, he did not have a business plan - "I didn't have time for that," he said. "I went straight into the business, I bought some machines, I started training people, a lot of them for free because when you teach people for free, even though they're not paying you, they'll bring you people who will pay you."

In 2006 his training centre became the QuantumNet Institute of Technology which, according to Mr Jah, is one of the biggest private institutes in The Gambia. It offers a series of IT courses, from basic to advanced levels, including a diploma programme in Computing Science and Business Management, delivered in partnership with the University of The Gambia and Saint Mary's University, in Halifax, Canada.

The firm, which was one of the West African country's internet pioneers, gradually expanded into selling products and became a distributor for companies such as Dell, Samsung, and Nokia. "Two and half years ago, I decided to move into telecom proper by investing in the first 3G mobile telecommunication company in The Gambia which is QCell," the entrepreneur said.

QuantumNet is now a group of companies which has also gone into the car business - distributing, amongst others, Mercedes-Benz. Mr Jah - who has won a number of national and international awards, including Gambian Businessman of the Year three times - says that he tries to avoid borrowing money or using credit because interest rates are usually too high, often more than 20%, so he prefers to grow the business slowly and to add products when he can afford to do so.

"If I had the finance at the right price 20 years ago, I would have probably been where I am today 10 years ago. But then, based on the type of person I am, I would rather reach my goal in 18 years than to fail in five years," he pointed out.

According to Mr Jah, the biggest risk he ever took was venturing into the internet business because at the time The Gambia only had one telecommunications company (or "telco", as people in the industry call them), the state monopoly Gamtel.

"Overnight, you have this young boy - with no money - just deciding to compete [against] that telco in delivering internet services. And, remember, the internet gateway was owned by that monopoly and I'm supposed to buy bandwidth from them and compete with them on the retail.

"But the government telco was operating on normal government working hours, from 8.30am to 4pm. For me, as a small internet service provider I was operating 24 hours and this is how we captured the clientele," he explained.

He has not only competed with the government, he has also worked with it, in both a formal and an informal capacity, as an advisor on IT issues. He sees this as part of the role of the private sector.

The Gambia now has 90% mobile phone penetration rate and a very good internet access. A new internet cable is due to reach the country in October 2012 and Mr Jah's company has bought the most private shares in this public/private partnership.
This new venture is core to QuantumNet's expansion plans as the cable will improve internet speeds in the country and make things like video conferencing easier.

Mr Jah believes there will be more opportunities for young Gambians to build businesses around the fast internet that the cable will provide. He says that when he was starting out, it was "madness" for bright graduates like himself not to seek a job with the government since most opportunities were in the public sector.

Now most young people dream of setting up their own companies. Technology has changed everything. The private sector has overtaken the public, and this is the way Mr Jah thinks it should be.He would advise young people to be disciplined, honest and hardworking. He says that the main challenges he faced at the beginning were social attitudes, like getting employees to come to work on time, to be well-organized and show good customer service skills.

He also points out that young entrepreneurs should start moderately so they can learn along the way. "Big mistakes can cost big," he says. Mr Jah, who this year is 43, speaks fondly of his younger employees. "The greatest satisfaction to me is when I start seeing my employees moving from bachelorhood to marriagehood. When we meet at our yearly family parties I feel very good because I see that, with the small steps I have taken, I've managed to change a few people's lives, and I think I can do more."

From the BBC's African Dream.

NATO's Libya blitzkrieg and the coming colonial wars

The scale of the ongoing tragedy visited on Libya by NATO and its allies is becoming horribly clearer with each passing day. Estimates of those killed so far vary, but 50,000 seems like a low estimate; indeed the British Ministry of Defense was boasting that the onslaught had killed 35,000 as early as last May. But this number is constantly growing. The destruction of the state’s forces by British, French and American blitzkrieg has left the country in a state of total anarchy – in the worst possible sense of the word. Having had nothing to unite them other than a temporary willingness to act as NATO’s foot soldiers, the former ‘rebels’ are now turning on each other. One hundred and forty seven were killed in in-fighting in Southern Libya in a single week earlier this year, and in recent weeks government buildings - including the prime ministerial compound - have come under fire by ‘rebels’ demanding cash payment for their services. $1.4billion has been paid out already - demonstrating once again that it was the forces of NATO colonialism, not Gaddafi, who were reliant on ‘mercenaries’ - but payments were suspended last month due to widespread nepotism. Corruption is becoming endemic - a further $2.5billion in oil revenues that was supposed to have been transferred to the national treasury remains unaccounted for. Libyan resources are now being jointly plundered by the oil multinationals and a handful of chosen families from amongst the country’s new elites; a classic neo-colonial stitch-up. The use of these resources for giant infrastructure projects such as the Great Manmade River, and the massive raising of living standards over the past four decades (Libyan life expectancy rose from 51 to 77 since Gaddafi came to power in 1969) sadly looks to have already become a thing of the past. But woe betide anyone who mentions that now. It was decided long ago that no supporters of Gaddafi would be allowed to stand in the upcoming elections, but recent changes have gone even further. Law 37, passed by the new NATO-imposed government last month, has created a new crime of ‘glorifying’ the former government or its leader - subject to a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Would this include a passing comment that things were better under Gaddafi? The law is cleverly vague enough to be open to interpretation. It is a recipe for institutionalized political persecution. Even more indicative of the contempt for the rule of law amongst the new government - a government, remember, which has yet to receive any semblance of popular mandate, and whose only power base remains the colonial armed forces – is Law 38. This law has now guaranteed immunity from prosecution for anyone who committed crimes aimed at ‘promoting or protecting the revolution’. Those responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Tawergha - such as Misrata’s self-proclaimed ‘brigade for the purging of black skins’ - can continue their hunting down of that cities’ refugees in the full knowledge that they have the new ‘law’ on their side. Those responsible for the massacres in Sirte and elsewhere have nothing to fear. Those involved in the widespread torture of detainees can continue without repercussions - so long as it is aimed at ‘protecting the revolution’ - i.e. maintaining NATO-TNC dictatorship. This is the reality of the new Libya: civil war, squandered resources, and societal collapse, where voicing preference for the days when Libya was prosperous and at peace is a crime, but lynching and torture is not only permitted but encouraged. Nor has the disaster remained a national one. Libya’s destabilization has already spread to Mali, prompting a coup, and huge numbers of refugees - especially amongst Libya’s large black migrant population - have fled to neighbouring countries in a desperate attempt to escape both aerial destruction and lynch mob rampage, putting further pressure on resources elsewhere. Many Libyan fighters, their work done in Libya, have now been shipped by their imperial masters to Syria to spread their sectarian violence there too. Most worrying for the African continent, however, is the forward march of AFRICOM -the US military’s African command - in the wake of the aggression against Libya. It is no coincidence that barely a month after the fall of Tripoli - and in the same month Gaddafi was murdered (October 2011) - the US announced it was sending troops to no less than four more African countries - the Central African Republic, Uganda, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. AFRICOM have now announced an unprecedented 14 major joint military exercises in African countries for 2012. The military re-conquest of Africa is rolling steadily on. None of this would have been possible whilst Gaddafi was still in power. As founder of the African Union, its biggest donor, and its one-time elected Chairman, he wielded serious influence on the continent. It was partly thanks to him that the US was forced to establish AFRICOM’s HQ in Stuttgart in Germany when it was established in February 2008, rather than in Africa itself; he offered cash and investments to African governments who rejected US requests for bases. Libya under his leadership had an estimated $150 billion of investments in Africa, and the Libyan proposal, backed with £30 billion cash, for an African Union Development Bank would have seriously reduced African financial dependence on the West. In short, Gaddafi’s Libya was the single biggest obstacle to AFRICOM penetration of the continent. Now he has gone, AFRICOM is stepping up its work. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan showed the West that wars in which their own citizens get killed are not popular; AFRICOM is designed to ensure that in the coming colonial wars against Africa, it will be Africans who do the fighting and dying, not Westerners. The forces of the African Union are to become integrated into AFRICOM under a US-led chain of command. Gaddafi would never have stood for it; that is why he had to go. And if you want a vision of Africa under AFRICOM tutelage, look no further than Libya, NATO’s model of an African state: condemned to decades of violence and trauma, and utterly incapable of either providing for its people, or contributing to regional or continental independence. The new military colonialism in Africa must not be allowed to advance another inch. By Dan Glazebrook