The Sunday Mail
Roger Boka
ANY tale of trailblazing local entrepreneurs can never be complete without the late business maverick Mr Roger Boka. It seems that the self-made tycoon — whose major turning point in life was when he decided to trade the mundane world of the teaching profession for the treacherous world of business — spent much of his life dodging the media.
Also, it seems the former Science teacher, just like local business magnate Mr Shingai Mutasa, was notoriously media shy.
A story is told how the late scribe Ray Choto tried, during his days with Horizon magazine, to get an interview with Mr Boka. He ended up speaking to “Mr Mabhunu”, who he suspected was Mr Boka himself.
He got more than he bargained for: In between heavy doses of threats, Choto was given an elaborate lecture on the meaning of black empowerment and the need to advance the interest of the black majority. That is all he managed to get.
Mr Boka’s endeavour to cross from the shallow waters of entrepreneurship to deeper waters of big-time business, however, naturally attracted white corporate sharks that were hell-bent on fiercely defending “their” territory.
Not only was he making waves on the local market, he was also attracting interest from as far afield as the United States of America.
Below we publish the edited version of an article written by Mr Robert Block, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, that was published on September 8, 1998.
It helps give a perspective of the iconic businessman.
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ROGER Boka often boasted that as the son of a poor black carpenter in white-ruled Rhodesia, he always won the best-math-student award at school. Later, the story continued, in black-ruled Zimbabwe, his math smarts helped him build a business empire encompassing interests in publishing, banking, mining and tobacco.
To doubters of his acumen, he displayed ingots of gold from his own mines and stacks of photos of himself in the company of other national luminaries — photos developed by one of his companies.
To himself and to many others, his rise to prominence embodied the rare realisation of the potential among Zimbabwe’s mostly poor black majority to break the white minority’s hold on the nation’s business and wealth.
Then, five months ago, his arithmetic failed him, and Zimbabwe is still reeling from the economic and political damage.
On April 29, Government regulators revoked the licence of United Merchant Bank of Zimbabwe Ltd, wholly owned and controlled by Mr Boka. The bank, officials said, was insolvent because of imprudent lending and debt-collection policies.
The failure threatened to trigger a national debt crisis as it emerged that the bank had bounced cheques totalling tens of millions of dollars and had improperly issued about US$52 million of Government-guaranteed promissory notes.
Mr Boka was declared the target of a Government fraud investigation, and his companies were put under Government supervision. Before the probe could make headway, Mr Boka left the country…
Roger Basil Nyikadzino Marume Boka was the third of nine children born to a family in a poor rural area of eastern Zimbabwe.
When he was young, according to an account of Mr Boka’s life published in his corporate group’s in-house magazine, his father worked at a general store.
When that burned down, the owners let workers pick over the remains, but by the time Mr Boka’s father arrived at the scene, all that was left was a chisel, a hammer and a wood plane.
From these humble beginnings grew a furniture business that enabled Mr Boka’s father to buy a Ford truck, which for blacks in Rhodesia was a considerable accomplishment.
His success attracted the ire of many whites, according to Mr Boka’s account, and on several occasions, his father was jailed at the whim of Rhodesian police.
Mr Boka’s childhood collisions with prejudice left a deep mark, says his 21-year-old daughter (1998) Rudo, who now runs the Boka tobacco business under Government supervision.
“The life my dad had in those days was one of apartheid and racism,” she said in an interview. “You could say that the ambition that Roger Boka developed was because of the lifestyle that he knew.’’
After graduating from a Government agricultural-training college, Mr Boka worked as a teacher in Highfield, the township in the capital, Harare (then known as Salisbury), where black nationalist politics were percolating around him in the early 1970s.
But the wages were terrible, and he stayed only two years before going into business for himself, selling household cleaning oils.
In 1980, black nationalist guerillas led by Mr Mugabe laid down their arms, beat their white-backed opponents at the polls, took power and renamed the country.
Using the contacts Mr Boka had made in Highfield, many of them now in positions of power, he won monopoly contracts to supply books and stationery to Government schools.
He later expanded into areas where blacks once never dared to tread, such as photo processing, cosmetics and gold mining. But it wasn’t until Mr Boka decided to break into tobacco – the last bastion of white dominance in Zimbabwe and the country’s main export earner, at US$600 million in 1997 — that he really began to make his mark.
In 1986, Mr Boka entered into a deal with a local trading company to export tobacco to East Germany.
It turned sour, his daughter says, when his white business partners tried to deprive him of his share of the profits. That experience, she says, convinced him that his ambitions in tobacco were being thwarted because he was black.
He began lobbying friends in Government, claiming that Zimbabwe’s most important export was held hostage by whites of questionable loyalty.
He started taking out full-page ads in the local Press, accusing Zimbabwe’s 70 000 whites of conspiring to keep its 11 million blacks poor, and threatening drastic measures if they didn’t loosen their grip on the economy.
The campaign propelled Mr Boka to national prominence.
The State-controlled media whipped up support for his endeavours.
