Safaricom Ethiopia loses CEO as Soussa’s time comes to an end
June 21st 2023
- Anwar Soussa to exit at the end of July, with no replacement yet named.
- Former Vodacom DRC MD has been at the helm since launch, overseeing speedy growth at the Ethiopian operator.
Safaricom Telecommunications Ethiopia (STE) will lose Anwar Soussa, its first Chief Executive, at the end of next month. STE is yet to announce a replacement for Soussa.
He joined in July 2021 when the operator was first established, marking Ethiopia’s first new market entrant after the state permitted mobile licences.
At the time, Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub said that an “immediate priority” in appointing Soussa was to have a strong team in place to drive towards a target of connecting 100 million Africans by 2025. In a statement this afternoon, STE referred to his appointment as merely a “secondment” which is due to expire on 31 July.
Soussa is a Greek national who started his career at Orascom Telecom in Egypt before taking up senior executive posts in the Central African Republic and Zimbabwe. A stint at Digicel Papua New Guinea was followed by time at Bharti Airtel in Chad and Uganda, before he moved to Vodacom DRC as Managing Director in 2017. It is not clear where Soussa’s next step will be, but his previous Vodacom DRC post has been filled by Khalil Al Americani since August 2021.
Soussa’s exit comes a few months after another top-level change at STE, which Pedro Rabacal, Chief Technology & Information Officer, exited in February. He was replaced by James Matai (albeit with the edited title of Chief Technology Officer) at the time, who became the first new face on the senior management team since the 2021 launch.
During his tenure, STE has launched its consumer and enterprise mobile services and quickly amassed over four million customers. The mobile network now reaches a quarter of the country’s population across more than 50 localities, despite substantial delays to the rollout programme amidst civil war, associated sanctions, a weakened Ethiopian birr, and various difficulties negotiating with incumbent rival, Ethio Telecom.
Among the more recent successes Soussa has overseen is in laying the groundwork for mobile money services in the country. STE was handed only the second m-money payments licence, and will launch M-PESA services in the coming months. It will be the second m-money platform in Ethiopia after state-owned Ethio Telecom’s Telebirr.
Earlier this month he saw the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation take a minority stake in STE, in which delivered foreign investment protection guarantees seeking to lower the risk of any future investments.
Back