Farm boy to self-made millionaire

Dumisani Ncube now imparts practical entrepreneurship skills

Dumisani Ncube

By VICTOR KALALANDA, Reprinted from the Zambia Daily Mail, July 6, 2019

What's now a success story would have been terminated nine years ago when thugs, bloodthirstily brandishing fists and knives, had him beaten and robbed and left him half-dead in the lonely night of a foreign country.

The enterprising Dumisani Lingamangali Ncube, only 17 years old then, suffered the tragedy while on a business trip in Johannesburg, South Africa. That fateful day, March 12, 2010, seems indelibly engraved in his mind, as he still speaks of it like it happened yesterday.

“They wanted to kill me . . . luckily, I survived and I used the little money I had left on me in an ‘inner’ pocket to get back home,” he narrates, though that inner pocket may sound like the most awkward of places—his pants.

And as he left a university seminar hall where he had been speaking about entrepreneurship in June this year, swarms of students vied to obtain contacts from this young Zambian millionaire, a riveting business executive who demonstrates that any youth can strike the aquifer of wealth and make money gush out.

Small in stature and maintaining a sometimes severe aspect, Ncube now spends time attending to countless clients in his majestic office at the DLN Entrepreneurship Institute— the first of its kind in Africa—where an entrepreneurship revolution that is poised to cause national impact proceeds from.

With the establishment of this Institute at age 30, Ncube no longer works in the usual sense of the word: after serving for over four years, he has completely stepped down as CEO of his company, DLN Technologies, now assuming the distant role of chairman as he makes the empowerment of other Zambian entrepreneurs his lifework.

Reverently addressed as the Radical Entrepreneur in businesses seminars around the world, the book enthusiast was born in Lusaka West to Burton and Matildah Ncube, a poor couple that could only afford a thatched house for its family on a farmland.

“I was born in a village set-up on the outskirts of Lusaka. My parents were subsistence farmers, growing maize, tomatoes and vegetables,” says the seasoned preacher.

His love for reading paid off at Chikwama Primary School, where school authorities observed that as a pupil who “would literally hammer everything,” Ncube should skip his sixth grade and instead sit for the grade seven examinations.

The recommendation by the school got approved and the small farmer’s child emerged the best student in the examinations, whereupon he joined Matero Boys Secondary School for both his junior and senior secondary school.

It was at Matero that he heeded the promptings of his then latent entrepreneurship genius: “I started selling pamphlets [and] since I was faring reasonably well [academically], I would give a geography pamphlet to my friends and convince them to buy,” he states.

The pamphlet had long been purchased for him by his father; since he had no financial capital, he would persuade his peers to first pay for half the price of the booklet, which money he would ingeniously spend on photocopies in Lusaka’s City Market, and then pay the remainder when collecting the copy.

As such, just from nothing he created savings, and he says, “I never invested any financial capital. What is important to note from here is that it is not always that you need money to start a business. So, your greatest capital is your brain.”

For easier travel during his Matero days, Ncube had left his parents’ home and was now staying with relatives and family friends in Marapodi and Chazanga townships.

Whenever on holiday, he would go back to the farm, and, upon noticing that “the people had problems accessing oil, salt, sugar and other home necessities,” he used the money made through the selling of pamphlets to open a kiosk and sell the commodities.

It was about K200 worth of investment, and he says: “People should start identifying challenges in their communities. My message is that anything they have complained about is a possible business opportunity.”

Meeting the needs largely of farm workers, the kiosk grew, making Ncube admired and also ridiculed, in this instance by friends who found it embarrassing that he was trading in merchandise like the slightly bitter kasempa. Whatever the reception, however, his grit to succeed got bolstered day by day.

In 2004, upon noticing that his business was making losses whenever he had gone back to school, he started dealing in goats: “I’d sell to those people in Chibolya for meat,” he says, adding, “to lure the farmers, I would engage in barter system: I would buy a bike and then exchange four to five goats with the farmers.”

With the goats tied one to the other, he would emerge from the farms and trudge back home from 10 am to 01 am.

Upon completing high school in 2006, he started buying clothes and duvets from Botswana and later in South Africa, where robbers attacked him.

When grade twelve results were published in 2007, he scored 13 points but failed to enter the University of Zambia (UNZA) as studying his dream programme, civil engineering, entailed self-sponsorship, which he couldn’t afford.

He thus settled for an accountancy programme, ZICA, which he would pursue to the last level with ZICAS in Lusaka in 2013.

Moreover, in 2010, Ncube met Mukelebai Mukelebai, a fourth year computer science student at UNZA, whose final year saw him working on a software package that would allow Zambian students and their families check results from the comfort of their homes.

“I found Mukelebai and another teacher, Eston Habanyati, who was doing his degree discussing the project [and] I thought we could make money with the idea. That’s how we formed Glad Tidings Software Limited with Mukelebai and Eston,” he explains.

In 2011, they commenced marketing of the product, though in 2012, having graduated with a distinction, Mukelebai was recalled for a Staff Development Fellowship (SDF) at UNZA, a situation which left Ncube in a crisis as he lacked the software knowledge to run the company.

“From the money we made I went back to the farm to invest in tomato farming. I would bring 1000 crates into Soweto every two weeks. I was making K150,000 every two weeks that time,” he discloses.

However, the swelling costs of the business proved it was unprofitable, a fact which became more devastating when Ncube’s only girlfriend left him.

In April 2013, fortunately, Mukelebai returned to the business and the duo regrouped to become more aggressive, whereupon most of the provinces in the country adopted their software products.

“Life changed and I bought my first car. Three months later I remembered my childhood dream to own trucks. I was 23 and I bought my first truck and another 30 tonnes trucker and trailer,” states Ncube, who hopes to marry soon.

Sadly, on August 24, 2019, his trucker got involved in a road accident while transporting 600 bags of maize for the FRA. The disaster plunged him in a loss as unscrupulous people stormed the scene of the accident for a looting spree.

In 2014, the one-time stammerer ultimately launched DLN Technologies—a company named after him—which was declared the largest supplier of PVC cards, and is also a leading provider of printers, access control and time attendance.

Before long, he started a construction company which deals in building and civil works around Zambia.

All these are major accomplishments that have established Ncube as a business magnate and investor, who in 2016 became the first Zambian CEO and youngest African CEO to receive the Evolis Performance Award.

Under his high-minded leadership, DLN Technologies has received such awards as the Customer Commitment Award (SME) and the Most Customer Focused Organisation in ICT services courtesy of the Zambian Chartered Institute of Customer Management. He is also a recipient of the Customer Service Business Leadership Individual Award from the same institution.  

Having been recognised as the 2018 Entrepreneur of the Year, the Adventist has already tasted millionaire status, and he is now managing his Entrepreneurship Institute in Lusaka after resigning as CEO of DLN Technologies, both of which are part of the group of companies he owns.

The Institute is born out of the harassment he suffered in 2015 at the hands of immigration officers in France who thought he was joking when he told them he was a Zambian CEO visiting that country for business purposes. They deemed him an impostor and threatened him with deportation amid unjustified scrutiny.

“I was treated like that because I am black and coming from a poor country. I realised we need to raise our standards and, from this, I decided to offer guidance to young entrepreneurs,” he says, adding that “when I am gone, I want to be remembered as one who fought for economic liberation in my country and indeed my continent through entrepreneurship.”

Ncube now boasts of more than 120,000 social media followers and annually speaks to more than 60,000 people on entrepreneurship around the world.

Most recently, he toured the country for the Africa Must Think Conference, by which he inspired hope in the hearts of nascent entrepreneurs like Emmanuel Simfukwe, who says “it was at that conference where I met people that influenced me to actualise my untapped potential,” with another attendee, Stephen Kanange Jr., adding that “you couldn’t go in and come out the same person.”

Through the Institute, the MBA student hopes to train generations of Zambians in entrepreneurship and public speaking using practical modules he has helped develop, and he is looking to injecting money up to the tune of K27 million into start-ups in the country.

Whatever Ncube has done so far, there is no doubt that he is walking the talk when he says “the future of this country is in our hands as youths. We need to build entrepreneurs.”