Safaricom has appointed Michael Joseph (the telco’s former CEO) as new board chairman, he succeeds Nicholas Ng’ang’a who has retired. Joseph will take up this position effective 1 August 2020.
“Mr Ng’ang’a took up the leadership reins at a time when the government was starting the process of offering 25 per cent of its shares to the public through the Nairobi Securities Exchange in 2008. He has managed to grow shareholder value by 607 per cent since listing,” says Safaricom CEO, Peter Ndegwa.
“At the time of his appointment as chairman, Safaricom had slightly over six million customers, 1,000 employees and only eight Safaricom shops across the country. Mr Ng’ang’a retires from the telco that now serves over 35.6 million customers, across 50 shops and hundreds of service desks across the country, with a staff force of over 6,500 employees.”
Ndegwa continues, “[Joseph] is not a stranger to the Safaricom family… and joins with a mandate to improve customer sentiment, greater brand consideration and to bolster our digital transformation agenda. I look forward to working with [him] in his new role.”
Last year, Joseph was appointed as interim CEO after the passing of predecessor, Bob Collymore.
Joseph was first involved with Safaricom when he, for over a decade, acted as founding CEO — Collymore took over this position in 2010. Since then, Joseph has been an active and critical member of the Safaricom board, as well as chairman of Kenya Airways.
The newly appointed chair studied at the University of Cape Town, where he completed a degree in electrical engineering. He then went on to fine-tune his skill for constructing and scaling new networks. Most notably, Joseph initiated Kenya’s most prominent mobile-money platform in 2007.
