It’s easy to momentarily forget about the company closures, job losses and business failures that have become all too common in Zimbabwe in the past few years when you look at the entrepreneurial success of Zimbabwean pastor, Shingi Munyeza.
Gifted with a passion for the services industry, Munyeza has shuttled from being the biggest investor in African Sun – the largest hospitality group in the country – to a new franchised restaurant venture that is thriving.
His choice to sell his stake in African Sun may appear to lack logic, especially considering that he was chief executive officer of the hotels venture for 13 years.
“There are three reasons why I exited African Sun, namely to allow for a new anchor shareholder who had deeper pockets to both invest in the company and expand the business – I did not have such deep pockets – and to allow a new management team to bring fresh ideas,” says Munyeza.
But it is the third reason that really compelled him to exit the business that runs hotels including Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and the iconic Elephant Hills Resort in Victoria Falls.
“I wanted to pursue other entrepreneurial opportunities without the limitations of a corporate office, hence why I started the current ventures and more to come.”
The idea to move into the franchised restaurant industry sprouted in Munyeza’s mind in 2008 “after seeing a niche market in this sector of hospitality” when he was still CEO of African Sun. This led to the creation in 2013 of franchised restaurant units under regional and international brands such as Mugg &amp; Bean and News Cafe.
“I funded the initial stores from personal equity and then brought in two regional banks to co-fund this through debt instruments. In total, we now have nine outlets and are working on another three over the next 12 months,” says Munyeza.
This area represents a niche market for Munyeza and he says this is for the high-end market that has been exposed to these brands in other countries, such as South Africa. The approach is to have “regional and global standards and to ensure that these are maintained at all costs”.
Munyeza appears to have done his homework and many reckon that his efforts have been aided by his vast experience in the industry.
“My worst day was my best day since I started these ventures in food franchises. It was on November 3, 2013, when we opened our first franchised store, Mugg &amp; Bean. We had such an overwhelming response from the market that we ended up closing the shop because we could not cope.”
“The worst part was we failed to deliver to customer expectation because we underestimated the demand from the market on both our service and product. It was the best day because without any above-the-line advertising the shop was continuously busy from morning ‘til we had to close at 4PM, when we should have closed at 10PM,” he says.
But being a Christian businessman, whose ventures count alcohol among the products offered, has led to critics saying his business goes against Christian principles. He, however, shrugs off the criticism, saying the business is for the greater good of the community as it employs people and offers services that are required by society.
Since he is a man of the cloth, he must know the passage in the Bible where Jesus admonishes a rich young ruler, telling his disciples: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”
“It is very possible for a rich man to enter heaven. The point is always the love of money which hinders people to heaven. Money must always resource the purpose that God gave you and in itself must never be the purpose that God gave you,” says Munyeza.
He gives examples of some of the richest men in the bible, including Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Joseph of Arimathea, as well as some the disciples during Jesus’ time. He believes that he has been predestined to be both an entrepreneur and an evangelist.
But he has not been spared the struggles of any other entrepreneur and this includes the economic hardships in Zimbabwe. But, he believes that entrepreneurs are born to emerge out of difficult situations and he explains that he has failed more than he has been successful in his entrepreneurial life.
“I have failed seven times out of the 10 times I have tried to get into ventures. I’ve always had the faith and hope to get up and try again,” says Munyeza.
At the start of each day, Munyeza reads from the Bible and prays before reviewing the previous day’s sales reports. He then moves on to digest and watch news headlines before sitting in meetings. “From there on it becomes a fight in the jungle,” he says.
It’s a fight he seems to be winning.

It Is Easy For A Rich Man To Enter Heaven After All

From the heart of the Lower Zambezi National Park hundreds of miles from a town or on the streets of Lusaka, the name Mark O’Donnell is as common in Zambia as the Victoria Falls or Mosi Beer. On the streets they call him the Mall Man; the Zambian who made his fortune building places to stay and shop. In business, he is known as a ruthless strategist who wants to make money and cannot make it fast enough.
“Zambia is a small market but it’s a growing one, at six to seven percent a year, for the past 14 years. The economy of the country has grown much bigger. We’ve been fortunate to make investments when the time was appropriate… we just wanted to build a shopping mall,” says O’Donnell.
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O’Donnell is a born and bred Zambian and has walked a meandering path to riches.  At 18, O’Donnell was selling auto parts for someone else. But he dreamed of being an entrepreneur. Times were tough in the 1980s, when private money struggled in a socialist state run under tight regulations. Strangely, at a time when there was little to buy, he thought that malls could be just what Zambia needed.
“It was very difficult to do anything in Zambia. Ninety percent of the country was controlled by the state. You would drive around in Lusaka and all you would see were queues of people lining up to buy whatever commodities were in the stores. There were a lot of hardships,” he says.
This hardship led to riots and ushered out the 27 years of power for Zambia’s president Kenneth Kaunda and its policy of control. Frederick Chiluba led his Movement for Multiparty Democracy in the elections in 1991 on a ticket of free enterprise. Despite the freeing of the economy for private business, things got worse for O’Donnell. Private business was shrinking by the day.
“In the 1990s, business was pretty bleak. We were just plain contractors at that point, and we were just trying to find work. It was almost impossible to get regular types of work, so we had to be innovative. We had to figure out how we were going to make projects. So we went and designed our own projects,” he says.
O’Donnell decided to build a mall to keep his business running. Despite his fears, the Arcades Shopping Centre was built in 2003 and brought in a number of South African franchises, putting Zambia on the map for investment.
“Many people wondered why we were building a shopping mall when the market seemed like it was struggling,” he says.
It brought fame to the farthest reaches of the country, even to the far flung bush of the Lower Zambezi National Park. Hundreds of kilometers away, Joshua Chizuwa, who has been a game ranger for more than 40 years, has heard of him.
“I used to work as a construction worker for him during breaks from the bush a long time ago. O’Donnell was as a hard businessman, ruthless in his deals. I have seen his buildings rise and Lusaka has grown from his ventures. He’s changed the face of Lusaka,” says Chizuwa.
According to Trevor Simumba, a Zambian-born managing director of the Sub-Saharan Consulting Group, within Lusaka O’Donnell is regarded as a progressive businessman who saw the liberalization policies of the MMD in the nineties as an opportunity rather than a challenge.
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“He was very helpful to me when I was starting my career in the consulting field. At one point during a very difficult career transition, Mark said to me ‘Trevor it is always darkest before dawn’. This simple but profound statement helped me through and I always tell myself that whenever I face a challenge. Zambia is privileged to have Mark doing his business in Zambia. We need more role models like this in business in Zambia,” says Simumba.
O’Donnell also went into the hotel industry. It was a failed game lodge that saw O’Donnell go big. He negotiated a deal with Africa’s largest hotel group, Protea Hotels, a chain that has been targeted by Marriott International.
The first hotel O’Donnell built was in Chingola, in northern Zambia’s rich Copperbelt Province. He says it was a disaster.
“We opened it in the same week that Anglo American pulled out of Zambia. It wasn’t the best start to a hotel chain. There was zero occupancy for a couple of years,” he says.
It has taken 13 years of fighting back to expand seven more hotels. He is currently building his eighth in Lusaka, next door to his mall.
As the largest owner of hotels in Zambia it makes sense that O’Donnell wants tourism to boom. Until recently, he has been critical of the government’s efforts to encourage visitors. Tourism currently accounts for a mere 2% of Zambia’s gross domestic product. In August, the government announced a turnaround strategy to increase this to 7% in line with neighboring Zimbabwe. It has won over O’Donnell.
“You are talking about an industry that needs to double in size over the next five to 10 years. Our current arrivals are about 900,000 a year. If we take out non-tourist visits, we are probably looking at 300,000 tourists. I think what we would like to see that number grow to about 600,000 high spending visitors. We need to increase the visit to arrivals in Zambia. That’s our first priority. To raise Zambia’s profile in the key source markets and increase interest to come into Zambia either through leisure tourism or for business travel. Certainly both components have interest,” says O’Donnell.
Tourism in Zambia is difficult. O’Donnell says a ban on Zambian aircraft by the European Union (EU) has discouraged North Americans and Europeans.
“The agents won’t book internal flights due to insurance reasons. It’s purely to do with some technicalities that the EU won’t deal with, with our civil aviation authorities,” he says.
But his greatest challenge lies with Zambia’s marketing. According to O’Donnell, 60% of wealthy foreigners in North America, Asia and Europe have never heard of Zambia.
“Our customers demand a high quality sort of product. Just because this is Africa it doesn’t mean you can’t offer top class products to the market. Zambia is generally unspoilt, an environment untouched by commercialization. In some places in Africa you would find 20 minibuses around a lion, this doesn’t happen in Zambia. You can’t compare what we have with London and New York, but you have something different,” he says.
In a city that was little more than dirt roads, O’Donnell had a dream that many struggled to envision. Where people queued for hours to get their hands on commodities he saw malls with refrigerators. Today, O’Donnell’s buildings run alongside tarred roads and Zambians are eager to see what his next dream will be.

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It Is Easy For A Rich Man To Enter Heaven After All

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