inBUSINESS Issue 12

Knight Ganje: The tycoon
who slept in a spaza shop
A conversation about a yellow Hummer led to a meeting with Jagdish
Shah, Botswana’s king of distribution and marketing. The rest is history
Over the last decade,
the African
Renaissance has been
a commanding topic
around the world.
Accordingly, the theme
of ‘Africa Rising’ has
made headlines in
global media as international investors
looked for a new economic frontier.
The continent that was routinely
brutalized by war, battered by poverty
and wearied by famine is undergoing
a revival, making it an attractive
investment destination. Coupled with
the rise in commodity prices over the
last 10 years, a growing middle-class
and visionary economic policies, Africa
has become the place to be.
No one knows this better than
Knight Ganje, a young Zimbabwe-born
businessman who came to Botswana
12 years ago with hardly two coins
to rub together but is now one of
African's most buoyant entrepreneurs
who bristles with confidence when he
says there is no better time than today
to be doing business in the Mother
Continent.
Ganje is the CEO of H&G Group, a
pan-African advertising agency that is
spreading its wings across the continent
from east to west, north to south. An
unassuming man with a functional,
yet cool sense of fashion, this is not
your average ‘ad man.’ Only a few items
betray the possibility that he may be
successful - his watch and the luxury
German SUV from which he alights to
meet for the interview.
His modest façade notwithstanding,
Ganje has been recognised by Forbes
Africa as one of the continent’s top 30
young entrepreneurs to look out for
in 2017. Afterall, it is the business of
the influential magazine to identify
exceptional enterprise from bud to
bloom. And so once he was on their
radar, the 29-year old soon made the
cut as one of the most brilliant business
minds on the African continent.
"It’s a great feeling to be recognised,"
he says of the rare accolade. “The truth
is that we have put in a lot of hard
work building this brand, which is an
authentic home-grown success without
the ‘primitive’ shade of the meaning of
‘home-grown.’ The recognition comes
at a time of growth for the advertising
agency."
But his journey has not been an
exponential trajectory. Far from it, after
fleeing dwindling personal prospects
and an ever-worsening economy
back home in Zimbabwe, for some
time Ganje lived in cramped quarters
inside a tuckshop at a relative’s home
in Gaborone. Compelled to become
something of a stoic, he accepted his
circumstances but decided to think
outside the box in which he literally
lived.
"I came to Botswana when I was 17
years old with a passion for media,”
Ganje explains. “It was after spending
some time here that I realised there
was an opportunity to build brands. I
was living with a relative, my sleeping
quarters a tuckshop in his yard. I
plotted my survival and eventual
success right there."
His first attempt to work in
advertising did not meet with much
success, but he persevered until he
approached retail giant Shoprite.
"They gave me an opportunity to do
some radio commercials for them,
www.inbusiness.co.bw | Issue 12 | 2017 13