Africa Works?

(Opinion/Analysis) Strive Masiyiwa’s early battle to establish Econet Wireless against Zimbabwe’s entrenched state telecom monopoly remains one of the most iconic examples of entrepreneurial defiance on the African continent. It’s often celebrated as a landmark in market liberalization and a triumph of private ingenuity over public stagnation. But fast forward nearly three decades, and the landscape tells a more complicated story. Econet is no longer the underdog. Today, it occupies a dominant, arguably monopolistic, position in Zimbabwe’s telecom and mobile money markets. That evolution demands closer scrutiny—not only of Econet's business practices, but also of the regulatory frameworks and institutional decisions that may have helped shape, protect, or challenge its dominance. To make sense of this trajectory, we examine it through the philosophical lens of Ayn Rand’s free-market ideals. According to Rand, enduring monopolies rarely stem from market excellence alone; more often,...