GRANT Thornton’s joint corporate rescue practitioners have formally invited interested parties to bid for a stake in Telecel Zimbabwe, with a deadline of April 28, 2026.
The tender notice, signed by practitioners Kundai Tibugare and Bulisa Mbano, describes this as an opportunity to invest in a mobile network operator.
The more pressing question, the one any serious investor should be asking before signing a non-disclosure agreement and requesting access to the data room, is: what exactly is on offer?
Telecel Zimbabwe began operations in 1998 as a partnership between Telecel International, a subsidiary of Cairo-based Orascom Telecom, and the Empowerment Corporation, a consortium that included James Makamba through Kestrel Corporation, Jane Mutasa’s Selporn Investments, Philip Chiyangwa’s Affirmative Action Group, Leo Mugabe’s Integrated Engineering Group, and the War Veterans Association, among others.
The licence, originally granted in February 1997 under then Telecoms minister Joice Mujuru, gave the Empowerment Corporation a 40% stake against the foreign partner’s 60%. That founding structure, designed as a vehicle for economic empowerment, became the source of virtually every crisis that followed.
The licence was formally cancelled twice before the 2016 ownership transfer: first in 2007 over a shareholding dispute, and again in April 2015, when the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz) revoked it, citing both failure to pay the US$137,5 million licence fee and breach of Zimbabwe’s indigenisation and economic empowerment laws.
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In 2013, when the original licence expired and Potraz was slow in renewing it, Econet Wireless announced it had no legal obligation to interconnect with an unlicensed operator and briefly cut Telecel off. Potraz eventually renewed the licence for a 20-year term at US$137,5 million, a figure the company would never fully pay.
The 2015 cancellation was overturned by the High Court the following month, but the reprieve came only because VimpelCom’s exit negotiations were already underway.
Inside the Empowerment Corporation, the ownership confusion was extraordinary.
Makamba, who initially held approximately 15% through Kestrel Corporation, subsequently bought out other empowerment groups and converted unallocated shares into his own name, allegedly without full approval from the other members.
The Indigenous Business Women’s Organisation claimed its 9% stake had never been sold.
A Harare-based housing trust, Magamba Echimurenga Housing Trust, went to court claiming 24% of Empowerment Corporation. These competing claims made clean due diligence nearly impossible and, critically, prevented the injection of capital the network needed to compete.
Holding SAE held an indirect 60% stake in Telecel Zimbabwe through Telecel International, eventually decided to exit Zimbabwe entirely.
The government, having raised US$40 million from the National Social Security Authority, completed the purchase through the Zimbabwe Academic and Research Network (ZARNet) in November 2016.
Replacing a major global telecoms operator with a domestic state entity that had no experience running a mobile network had a predictable outcome. Investment stopped.
The scale of Telecel’s decline is documented quarter by quarter in Potraz’s sector performance reports. In 2015, as the VimpelCom exit was being negotiated, the company held a 15,1% share of active mobile subscriptions, with approximately 1,92 million customers.
By the third quarter of 2023, subscriber numbers had fallen to 303 364 and Telecel was the only mobile network operator to register negative subscriber growth for the period. Voice traffic market share stood at 0,2%. Data market share was functionally negligible.
By the time the board resolved to place the company under voluntary corporate rescue on October 22, 2025, filing with the Master of the High Court under Section 122 of the Insolvency Act, the operational picture was stark.
Active subscribers had fallen to 319 548, representing less than 2% of the mobile market. The company was handling 0,02% of all voice calls against Econet’s 87,61% and NetOne’s 12,3%, and carrying just 0,16% of internet traffic. Since 2015, the workforce had dropped from roughly 700 to around 300, with US dollar salary components going unpaid since January 2022.
The infrastructure position is the most telling indicator of sustained underinvestment. By end-2025, Telecel operated 671 2G towers, 435 3G towers, and just 17 LTE base stations. Econet had 1 700 4G tower.
There is no 5G footprint. This is not a network that lost a competitive race. It is a network that stopped being built the moment the operator with the capital and technical capacity walked away.
Before any investor proceeds, Grant Thornton’s data room must provide a clear answer to one question: what is owed to Potraz, and who carries that liability once a transaction closes?
When Potraz renewed the licence in August 2013, the US$137,5 million fee was to be paid in instalments, with an initial payment due before the end of 2013 and subsequent instalments through to approximately 2020.
By July 2018, government correspondence obtained by Business Times Zimbabwe showed the Accountant-General writing directly to Telecel’s CEO, noting that the company had not made licence payments for 2017 or 2018 as per the agreed schedule, and demanding US$25 million in outstanding arrears.
The Communication and Allied Service Workers Union of Zimbabwe, in its 2022 High Court application, stated that the company was chronically in arrears on its Potraz obligations.
There is no public record that the full licence fee was ever settled.
Beyond the licence fee itself, mobile operators in Zimbabwe pay an annual fee of 2% of audited gross turnover to Potraz, plus 0,5% towards the Universal Service Fund, plus separate spectrum fees.
For a company that carried just 0,16% of sector internet traffic in 2025, even formula-based obligations are difficult to service. Any investor must establish whether these accumulated liabilities sit with the company and whether Potraz will require full settlement before a new controlling shareholder can operate the network without regulatory risk.
The infrastructure is degraded. The subscriber base has collapsed. Telecash, the mobile money platform, never achieved scale and has contracted alongside the core network.
What Telecel Zimbabwe retains, and the reason this process is worth watching at all, is one of only three Public Cellular Telecommunications Network Licences in Zimbabwe.
A new licence costs US$137,5 million for a 20-year term. There are no others available. For any entity that wants to operate a mobile network in Zimbabwe without paying the full regulatory price from scratch, acquiring Telecel is the only route in.
The 671 2G towers and 435 3G towers, concentrated in urban centres, give an incoming operator a geographic foundation rather than a blank site. The spectrum allocation across 2G, 3G, and limited 4G bands is transferable through Potraz’s change of control process. Potraz’s 2024 annual report recorded total sector revenue reaching US$1 billion, with mobile internet and data traffic growing 75% in the year. A properly capitalised third operator, competing in a market that expanded substantially while Telecel retreated, has a realistic path to recovering meaningful share.
The Zimbabwe Independent reported in 2024 that Telecel required approximately US$50 million to reboot operations and carry out the network modernisation needed to compete. That is the realistic minimum entry cost, on top of whatever acquisition price Grant Thornton and the rescue practitioners accept, a figure they have not disclosed. Given that the government acquired the 60% stake for US$40 million in 2016 and the company has deteriorated materially since, the equity is worth considerably less than that today. The value in this transaction is not what the company is worth now. It is what the licence is worth as the foundation for something rebuilt.
The most strategically logical buyer is MTN Group. MTN is the largest mobile operator in Africa, operating across 19 markets, but it has no presence in Zimbabwe, nor in neighbouring Mozambique or Namibia, making the country a clear gap in its southern African footprint alongside those markets. Its operations in eSwatini and Botswana are joint ventures rather than wholly-owned subsidiaries. Acquiring Telecel’s licence would deliver instant market entry in Zimbabwe at a fraction of the cost of bidding for a new licence, with MTN’s balance sheet and technical capacity more than sufficient to rebuild the network from its current degraded state. The government’s track record of blocking foreign telecoms acquisitions is the primary obstacle. ZARNet retains 60% through the Mutapa Investment Fund, and the government has consistently signalled it wants capital partners, not a transfer of control.
China is a credible and arguably more politically comfortable candidate than any Western or pan-African operator. The relationship between Beijing and Harare is deep and well-documented. China’s Exim Bank extended a US$98 million concessionary loan to TelOne for infrastructure expansion, and approved a further US$218 million facility to NetOne for base station rollout, both delivered through Huawei Technologies. ZTE, meanwhile, arranged a US$500 million financing package with China Development Bank for Econet in 2015. These are not vendor relationships. They are state-to-state financing arrangements routed through Chinese telecommunications companies. Beyond the sector itself, Zimbabwe has allowed Chinese firms to acquire its most strategically significant assets: Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt paid US$422 million for the Arcadia lithium mine in 2021, Sinomine Resource Group acquired Bikita Minerals for approximately US$180 million in 2022, and CloudWalk Technology signed a national facial recognition agreement in 2018, handing a Chinese AI company access to biometric data on millions of Zimbabweans. If Zimbabwe was prepared to offer Chinese entities its lithium reserves and its citizens’ faces, a distressed mobile network licence held in a state vehicle is a considerably smaller ask. A Chinese state-linked operator or a Huawei-backed consortium acquiring Telecel would fit squarely within the established pattern of Sino-Zimbabwean economic cooperation, and would face far less political resistance in Harare than any bid from London, Johannesburg or Lagos.
A structure more likely to clear regulatory approval from a non-Chinese bidder would pair a domestic institutional consortium, Zimbabwean pension funds and insurance companies providing the equity, with an experienced regional operator holding a minority technical partnership stake. This mirrors the framework the Mutapa Investment Fund was designed to attract: structured private capital without majority ownership changing hands. A deal of this kind, backed by a credible turnaround plan and a firm commitment to settle the Potraz arrears, has a realistic chance of moving through government approval.
A third scenario is a data-infrastructure play by a regional operator less interested in voice market share than in the licensed spectrum itself. Safaricom’s expansion into Ethiopia, launched commercially in October 2022, is the closest recent precedent: a licensed entry into a market previously closed to private operators. The Ethiopia venture has been costly, reporting a loss of US$325 million against revenue of just US$53,6 million in its 2024 financial year, and should not be mistaken for an already-successful template. But the Ethiopia model does demonstrate that a well-capitalised operator is willing to absorb years of losses for the right licensed position in an underserved market. With mobile internet traffic in Zimbabwe growing at 75% annually, a patient operator prepared to treat the Telecel footprint as a data network in need of reconstruction could be looking at a similar long-term thesis.
The tender closes on April 28. The rescue practitioners have been explicit that this notice is not a prospectus and carries no obligation on the state to accept any offer. What it is, stripped of its legal language, is a structured last attempt to find a buyer willing to pay for a seat at a table from which Telecel has been effectively absent for a decade.
The right investor needs capital above US$50 million, tolerance for Zimbabwe’s regulatory and currency environment, the willingness to settle an unquantified Potraz liability on entry, and the discipline to invest in infrastructure before chasing subscribers. That is a narrow profile. But the licence itself, one of only three in a market of 15 million people where sector revenue just crossed US$1 billion, is a scarce and legally transferable asset. What Telecel Zimbabwe has always had, through every dispute and every failed payment, is that licence. Whether anyone in Harare recognises it as the only thing worth buying is the question this process will answer.
Muhamba is a business analyst, market researcher and the AMH Group chair’s executive assistant. — valentinem@alphamedia.co.zw