Hilda Bujiku: Leading a great team in a great company to make the difference

As the first Tanzanian and first woman to currently head Vodacom Tanzania as acting Managing Director, Hilda Bujiku gives insights into her personal and professional growth as she settles in the new role in this exclusive interview with The Citizen. 

What would you say is your greatest success so far as a professional?

Answer: This is a bit tricky as there has been a few highlights in my professional journey but one that stands out for me is when I was seconded to Lesotho as the Finance Director, an opportunity which to date I am grateful for. Under my leadership, we managed to successfully re-structure the finance team to a modern  operation with a focus on sharping commercial, investment decisions and strengthening the core finance functions  while delivering value to our shareholders.

Have you always been clear what you wanted, and did you ever see yourself landing this role?

Naturally I am quite ambitious and I tend to know where I want to go and with that, what needs to be done to get there.

Honestly speaking having been promoted to Finance Director in January 2022, I did not expect to land the acting MD role this early, however, seeing the confidence that the Vodacom PLC board had in me gave me the boost I needed to take on the role and I must say, this may actually turn to be one of those great successes in my journey to speak of in the future – God willing.

What’s been your secret to getting here to this position in the Telcom?

No secret here – Self-awareness, self-discipline and most importantly strategic and critical thinking which comes with an open mindedness and prioritisation of personal development.

What is your inspiration, who inspires you today?

Definitely my mother – where do I start? I could spend an entire day talking about that iron lady as I like to call her but in short, as a proud primary school teacher, she instilled core values within me that I carry throughout my life – family, discipline and hard work pushing me to be best at everything that I do and her notion that “the sky is never the limit” have all made me into the person I am today.

What’s your biggest passion outside this current environment? What makes you tick when you are not working?

Outside the work environment, I am a mother, a daughter, a sister and a friend – Family is very important to me and I intentionally strive to make the best of the little time I get with my family. Keeping fit is also key in giving me the needed energy to show up and deliver well on my role. I find that my head is a lot sharper when in a fitness regime and I always tend to be a fitness advocate.

When all is said and done, I tend to enjoy and un-wind while watching some selected series and due to my competitive nature, sports really gets my blood going especially formula one, soccer and tennis – I am such a big fan!

Top company executives are always worried if they ever will leave behind a mark. Have you found your purpose yet?

My purpose has always been for a long time “live to achieve and make a difference” and it still stands. This purpose has served to guide my life’s decisions, influence my behavior and has always offered me a sense of direction.

Businesses are slowly recovering from the effects of Covid-19 pandemic. What has this experience been like at Vodacom Tanzania?

We acted very fast to manage and mitigate the risks and impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on our staff and stakeholders while ensuring alignment with national, global and Vodafone Group requirements.  For us, business did not stop. Our state of the art technologies and network ensured that remote working was possible for 80 per cent of our employees. We supported them to be productive while staying safe at home, including increasing awareness on relevant preventive measures, enhancing access to the necessary digital tools for effective communication, and supporting employees emotionally and mentally through our Employee Assistance Programme . For those who continued to work from our offices and retail shops, we provided the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE), and enhanced the sanitation and access protocols in all offices, warehouses, shops, and data centres.

A recent report by top company leaders predict telecoms will lead the way on growth in the next five years; How does Vodacom Tanzania play in this realm?  

Our role as a technology enabler is key to economic growth. I believe that we are best placed to support individuals and businesses to conduct their work in a profitable and efficient way. As a company, we have a solid growth strategy in place to ensure that we remain profitable and add value to our stakeholders.

Shade a light into Vodacom’s improvements in internet connectivity and affordability which is crucial to driving financial inclusion in the wider economy?

Basically this has been one of our priority ‘Digitising Tanzania’ and you can’t digitise a country without internet connectivity complemented by affordability. We have our own goals to ensure everyone is connected; our target is to ensure mobile broadband services reach 90 per cent of the population by December 2024. We have deliberate and concerted efforts towards this, we continue to invest in network development and improvement to deliver fast, reliable and robust internet connectivity to all Tanzanians.

We also believe that government has a role to play in this and the recent move to remove Value Added Tax (VAT) on smartphones was a welcome move to increase smartphones penetration in the country and allowing more internet users.

About mobile money interoperability, any plans to expand scope?

Definitely-yes, we continue to grow and expand our M-Pesa platform to reach more Tanzanians through innovation and partnerships stimulating economic activities and increasing financial inclusion. We have a strategy in place to grow M-Pesa as we move beyond person transfers to enhance enterprise, financial services and mobile commerce, harnessing the opportunities associated with emerging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and blockchain settlement solutions.

We have seen Vodacom also invest in new innovations such as Paisha, Afyacall, M-kulima, M-Mama and many more; how does this engagement define the future of the business?

As a company, our vision is to take Tanzania into the digital age and transform lives through technology. We honestly believe that technology and innovation has the solution for everyday challenges that society face. We have seen the impact that this innovation such as m-mama and M-Kulima are already having in critical sectors of health and agriculture respectively. The 4th Industrial Revolution is here and technology is the main driver, so as a company, we will continue to innovate and invest in technology and innovation leveraging on partnership and business models.

What is the status of Vodacom’s readiness for adoption of 5G technology and as a sector how do you ensure investment in technology will be relevant in medium to long term?

As you might know, Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) has announced the auction of 5G spectrum. There is a reason we, as the market leader, have introduced many firsts in the market and continue to do so. All I can say  is that we are very excited and look forward to a fruitful try-out of the new technology once the spectrum is made available to us. We are technically ready to test and deploy to both individual and enterprise customers.

How is Vodacom positioned to guarantee safety of its millions of subscribers from cyber security issues as the internet of things takes root in the economy?

Our customers can rest assured that as a company, we prioritise their privacy and safety while on our Network. We adhere to international and national guidelines of privacy protection and we have the best teams and systems in place to protect them from cyber-attacks.

We are so confident in our system, we even launched a bug bounty where we challenged hackers to find any threats (if any) in our system at a price and I can assure you there is none. We also understand that humans are the weak link in any system so we provide periodic mass education to our customers alerting them on different strategies used by cyber criminals to hack them.

What are you doing as an industry to ensure the skills you have today will remain relevant in years to come?

As part of Our Grow with Vodacom, we conduct various trainings because we want our staff to remain on the top while also encouraging them to sign to our own education portal -Vodafone University where they can acquire new knowledge depending on what scope they prefer.

The government is aggressively pushing business reforms aimed at attracting investments and improve ease of doing business. What positive policy reforms would you vouch for in the telecommunications industry?

We commend the government for a key reform that was brought about by the Finance Act 2022 which amended service levies applicable on Mobile Financial Services by further reducing the rates by 45 per cent, bringing down the overall reduction since the levies were originally introduced by 63 per cent.  This move means that as a company, our performance can begin to recover and through such recovery we are better equipped to continue innovating, return value to our shareholders as well as continue to invest in Tanzania. However, we are particularly encouraged by the ‘Digital Tanzania’ programme which looks to empower the entire population with ICT skills, infrastructure and enabling policies which are key ingredients to an enabling sector of telecommunications. Telecommunications enables the digitisation of agriculture, health, education, government service delivery among other key sectors of the economy. 

Comment on the proposed tax on internet services such as big tech such as Google and the impact that could have on the economy?

We support the move by the government to widen the tax base such as the recent move to include Big Tech. It should be noted that there are global guidelines by the OECD that offer ways within which entities with global domiciles can be taxed sustainably and consistently.

Industries operate within communities. How are you benefiting them and what promise do you wish to give as we wind up this interview?

It is true we work within communities, our staff live in the same community where we operate and that’s why we established a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) namely Vodacom Tanzania Foundation, which has been at the forefront in giving back to the society, sometimes by leveraging on our super network. Consider projects like m-mama which caters for pregnant mothers and neonatal, maternal and fistula project which we have partnered with CCBRT Hospital, premature babies projects which we have partnered with Doris Mollel Foundation  and the Government on the other hand, disaster management project in Lake Zone which we have partnered with Suleiman Kova Security and Disaster Management Foundation (Sukos-DMF).