Magila: Remove the element of luck from tech business 

Dar es Salaam. We are fortunate enough to live in an era where what used to be considered a mere pastime can be so well nurtured into a successful and impactful career path. Such is the tale of Magilatech’s founder and CEO Godfrey Magila.

What was initially a pastime for him—playing games at a local internet cafe—became an avenue for him to build a multinational tech company.

“Magilatech initially started in 2011 as a purely tech company with two main activities, which are software development and cyber security,” he shares as we settle in for a chat. “As a founder, I competed in a nationwide programming competition prepared by the Tanzania Commission of Science and Technology and emerged as one of the winners. One of the awards was mentorship from the Dar Teknohama Business Incubator (DTBi).”

At the time, Mr Magila was still a student, and he barely met the requirements needed to qualify for the competition, but as luck would have it, there he was, an accounting student with an intense love of computers, competing against some of the most brilliant, young, tech-savvy minds at the time.

His secret weapons were passion and pure luck, and the Nanenane Hackathon championship was the open door he needed to begin to fully understand the arsenal he had hidden in his brain. After winning the competition and taking up the mentorship, he was encouraged to open a company.

“I was not a business person at all; I was just a winner who was passionate about technology, especially cyber security and programming. I started programming and developing software while I was still a very young boy,” he says. The incubator trained Mr Magila on how to monetize his passion, and while that was a good incentive, he had yet to fully understand the purpose of his drive for technological development.

“With all the existing solutions that were already there, it was extremely difficult for me to find success stories in our ecosystem unless you looked outside the country. It was both good and bad for me—two sides of a coin. It was good because I wanted to make something unique in our ecosystem, but it was bad because I had no reference points to look up to in case I failed or got stuck,” Mr Magila shares.

At this point, he had his hands in as many cookie jars as he could find and was developing all manner of software and programmes. 

“I would create banking software, voting software, or pretty much anything I imagined. All these I did, unfortunately, without much focus at first, but with the aid of the incubator, I eventually began to create focus, and I realised I could actually solve problems,” he narrates.

“I started to create a few products for institutions and started to secure platforms by showing them their security flaws. I also started to work with banks, payment aggregators, and other institutions like SMEs and government institutions. What he was doing at the time was getting into a system, finding security flaws, reporting them, and fixing them. While that may sound like the basis of a spy thriller movie, it is this ingenious niche that Magila managed to use to garner respect from his peers, mentees, and clients.

“Eventually, I thought to myself that this was a serious issue because I got money and serious clients out of it with certain requirements, and I decided that this is definitely what I wanted to do. I wanted to solve problems.”

That moment of realisation also marked the beginning of Magilatech. Today, the company is a solution innovator, having developed application software, banking software, and payments software, and it has a long list of satisfied clients both within and outside Tanzania’s borders. “In 2015, I had a major breakthrough when we signed the largest contract with Tigo Tanzania, and from there, we grew to doing products with other telcos, banks, and aggregators and not only showing them their weaknesses, financial damages, and securing their software but also building, so we got a lot of work in those areas,” Mr Magila shares.

Frankly, if you live in Tanzania, you are likely to have used some of their products, as they have created solutions for the likes of Tigo, TRA, TCRA, DSR, Tanesco, Airtel, Selcom, Azampay, NMB, and UTT AMIS. However, they have spread their wings to Dubai and the DRC, among others, but this did not come as an easy feat.

This required a lot of hard work to be put into building trust between himself and the clients, because what is a man if not his integrity? For a long time too, Mr Magila was a one-man show, which meant he did all the jobs himself. In the long run, this was a boon for his credibility, as he was able to allay his clients’ concerns and prove to them that he was more than capable of delivering beyond their expectations.

“In Congo, we have performed development for the entire core financial infrastructure, so whatever their government collects passes through our systems. Initially, the nature of our work was me running around with my computer and working with subcontractors. There’d be people who get the jobs and then give them to me, and as a result, one of the reasons one won’t really hear much about us is because we always work in the background.”

Behind Magila’s calm demeanour and hard-working persona lies an equally soft-spoken and resilient young man who has been able to turn the many lemons life has handed him into lemonade. Magila also values his silent profile, a very mystique-like quality that only introverts possess. However, a silent profile in his line of work also means complete discretion, a quality a lot of his clients are privy to in his service. “What should always speak for you is the quality of your work. This way, we garner respect and build better and lasting relationships,” he says.

Remove the element of luck from the ecosystem

The Tanzanian tech ecosystem is slowly gaining the support it needs, but not as fast as the technology itself. However, Godfrey attests: “We do have more players now, and capacity-wise, there isn’t much we can’t do. 

“Right now, you can easily find students, some of whom haven’t studied computer science at all, who can do wonders. This tells you that the players and stakeholders are in the industry, and it is no longer an issue of capacity but an issue of opportunities. What opportunities are they now exposed to?” he challenges. “In many cases observed, when a company is looking for a systems developer and they put out a tender, it is always the lowest bidder who is picked, but that is not how the tech space is geared,” Magila explains. “You are not looking for furniture, and so this needs redefining.”

Likewise, there are certain areas in the ecosystem where understanding is still not where it should be and the trust factor isn’t completely solid yet. Perception is also difficult in terms of how people view products and software from outside the country versus those developed locally, sometimes even before looking at what has been created.

“Using local solutions helps build reputation. We did not go to the DRC because we were the best in Africa. We went there because we already had a solid working product here in Tanzania, and so we had a reference that gave us enough credibility to export the product,” Mr Mangala shares.

“Our valuation system is still very low. You cannot value a tech company based on profit and loss. Consider Whatsapp: it was sold for $19 billion but never made even a million dollars in profit.”

Tech valuation is way above average because it is based on forecasts of customers and many other things, so people need to change how they view technology. Sometimes one has a proven product in an unproven market, and this throws off the valuation of the process. This then spills into the investment in technology, and these gaps can be covered if we also include learning in terms of entrepreneurship in technology from very early levels. This will go a long way in changing how it is perceived.

Another element that Magila attests to is luck. While it has served him well, it is sadly a hurdle that many are faced with. “The market itself is driven by luck. If you take me a mere seven years back, I would confidently tell you that there was no way I saw myself being where I am today,” he says.

Another big issue is the lack of support from our communities, the government, and even the technology space as a whole.

“This is a sector where you find yourself spending a lot of what you earn on research and development on the technology, simply to stay ahead of it, and instead of growing, you are held back because of red tape and bureaucracy.”

Mr Magila explains that IT is a lot more helpful to allow them space to grow and expand as a company, enough for them to be able to then contribute their share. 

“If we want to really scale up, we need to remove these elements of luck in the tech business and put in place paths that will enable individuals to grow and meet opportunities,” he emphasises.