“I’m an African”: Why MTN says migration matters to South Africa’s digital future
As South Africa’s migration debate intensifies, MTN Group, Africa’s largest telco, is warning that anti-immigrant sentiment could have consequences beyond politics, affecting the movement of skills and businesses across Africa.
As South Africa’s migration debate intensifies, MTN Group, Africa’s largest telco, is warning that anti-immigrant sentiment could have consequences beyond politics, affecting the movement of skills and businesses across Africa.
The telecoms giant has built one of Africa’s largest telecommunications businesses, connecting 312.7 million customers across 19 markets in Africa and the Middle East. With most of its growth coming from outside South Africa, the company is concerned that rising hostility targeting African migrants runs counter to the regional integration on which its business depends.
The developments have resonated across MTN’s footprint. Nigeria and Ghana, its largest markets, have joined Zimbabwe, Malawi and Eswatini in evacuating citizens from South Africa after the March and March Movement, an anti-immigration activist group, issued undocumented migrants with a June 30 deadline to leave the country.
At the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation’s Winter Seminar on Thursday, which focused on migration, MTN executives made the business case for open borders. They argued that Africa’s future depends on creating economic opportunity, expanding digital connectivity and allowing skills and talent to move freely across the continent.
“If our discussion ends with the language of crisis around migration, we will have treated the symptom and missed the deeper challenge,” MTN Group President and chief executive officer (CEO) Ralph Mupita said. “People move because opportunity is unevenly distributed. The defining question is whether we can build economies in which mobility is matched by opportunity.”
The message comes as South Africa has witnessed months of attacks on foreign-owned businesses, forced evictions of migrants and growing anti-immigration rhetoric ahead of November’s local government elections.
For a company that has built its growth on connecting Africans across borders, those developments have become impossible to ignore. Mupita deliberately framed his own migration story as part of MTN’s identity.
“I also want to admit that I’m a migrant, 35 years in South Africa,” he told the audience. “I’m from Zimbabwe… My surname, Mupita, means ‘the one who moves from place to place.’” He described having relatives across Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Angola before concluding: “So that’s who I am. I’m an African.”
For Mupita, the personal story reflected MTN’s own pan-African journey.
“I happen to be an African who is a steward… of an organisation that was born in South Africa,” he said, recalling that one of Nelson Mandela, the global democracy icon’s, earliest decisions after democracy was issuing the mobile licences in September 1993 that led to MTN’s creation. Today, that company has become Africa’s largest telecommunications operator.
Its success, Mupita argued, is inseparable from Africa’s prosperity.
“The future of Africa will not be determined by the borders that separate us, but by the economic opportunities that connect us,” he said. “Governments must set predictable policy and regulations. Businesses will follow and allocate resources and capital. Together, we can build a continent where opportunity is more evenly shared, and prosperity is more widely created.”
Mcebisi Jonas, the MTN Chairman, said immigration has become a convenient political scapegoat for South Africa’s deeper economic problems. “Our markets are in Africa. Our opportunities are in Africa. Our future is in Africa,” Jonas said. “South Africa cannot present itself as open for investment while treating African workers and traders with hostility. It sends a contradictory message: Africans are welcome as customers and investors, but not as people.”
Jonas stated that removing migrants would do nothing to solve South Africa’s economic challenges. “South Africa’s economic crisis is a product of weak growth, poor governance, inadequate education outcomes, infrastructure failures and structural inequality. If every foreign national left the country tomorrow, those problems would remain,” he said.
He added that South Africa continues to lose skilled citizens through emigration while making it difficult for skilled foreigners to stay, a contradiction he believes undermines the country’s competitiveness in a technology-driven economy.
The seminar’s broader message was that migration cannot be separated from Africa’s economic transformation.
Dr Ishmael Yamson, chairman of MTN Ghana’s board, said Africa’s demographic boom will only translate into prosperity if governments invest aggressively in digital capabilities. “Africa’s future competitiveness will depend on how successfully we equip young people with digital skills, entrepreneurial skills, technical skills and leadership capabilities,” noted Yamson. “The demographic dividend must become a skills dividend.”
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