Kama kuna mtu anao ule waraka ambao Zitto alimwanika huyu jamaa atuleteee lakini jamaa inaonekana anajua kucheza karata zake. Cha ajabu kwa nini zitto hakutokea wala hakujibu hizi tuhuma mpaka hukumu ikatolewa ya upande mmoja?
Source: The billionaire who
If you are a multinational company having trouble with governments in Africa over investment, you just phone one man called Moto Mabanga and task him to fix the problem.
In the blink of an eye, Mr Mabanga will have sorted out things for you, but for an astronomical fee, whose exact amount would depend on the nature and value of the business.
From presidents to prime ministers, millionaires to billionaires, Mr Mabanga has always fixed their problems and earned with a trust, power and millions of dollars.
He sorted out Ophir Energy in Tanzania about a decade ago when the gas exploration company from South Africa wanted the lucrative oil and gas concessions. When Vodacom was in trouble in the Democratic Republic of Congo few years ago, he took a private jet and flew to Kinshasa to fix the deal.
Fixing problems for multibillion-dollar companies and billionaires across Africa has been a veritable gold mine for Mr Mabanga in the past decade, making him one of the richest men in Southern Africa.
For years, Mr Mabanga has been known in many places across the continent, especially South Africa and the DRC, as a Congolese fixer with an affinity for fancy cars, private jets and lucrative business across the globe.
South Africa's Daily Maverick newspaper dubbed him "a fixer with firm African National Congress (ANC) connection".
Another South African premier newspaper, Mail& Guardian called him "a politically connected fixer".
Here in Tanzania, Kigoma North MP Zitto Zuberi Kabwe said he was a Congolese fixer who allegedly bribed some local officials to obtain gas exploration licences for Ophir Energy.
Inside and outside Africa, Mr Mabanga, a millionaire with an estimated fortune of roughly $400 million, is identified as a Congolese currently living in South Africa.
Courtesy of his dressing style, fancy living and heavily accented Swahili, one can easily be persuaded to believe that he is indeed a Congolese who went to post-apartheid South Africa to seek greener pastures.
For reasons he has never publicly disclosed, Mr Mabanga has always refused to have his entire face photographed.
Last week, the alleged fixer, who often avoids the media, emerged in Dar es Salaam and gave stunning revelations: He was born in Serengeti District and is, therefore, a Tanzanian.
"My actual name is Moto Matiku," he told the Tanzania Editors Forum at Serena Hotel.
He emerged after winning a civil case (No. 153 of 2013), which he filed at the Kisutu Resident's Magistrate Court, which ruled that the outspoken MP had defamed the "Congolese fixer".
Mr Mabanga sued Mr Kabwe after the latter posted on his blog that he was involved in bribery deals in the lucrative gas sector in Tanzania currently valued at $430 billion.
In Mr Mabanga's victory, which was achieved through ex-parte judgment, the court ordered Mr Zitto to pay Sh3 million as damages plus the legal cost of the suit.
Mr Mabanga had earlier asked for $5 million (Sh8 billion) in costs and damages he suffered following the online publication, but the court declined because the plaintiff failed to prove before the court how he suffered such a huge loss.
But who is Moto Matiku Mabanga?
When Vodacom's business partnership in the Congo fell apart at the seams, and the company's directors in the DRC were about to land in jail, the mobile giant's chairman phoned Mr Mabanga, who sorted out the problem alright, but he and Vodacom had a difference of opinion on a little matter of a multi-million dollar success fee. No problem for Mr Mabanga - he's managed to get a Kinshasa commercial court to make a $21 million award against Vodacom.
Daily Maverick described it this way, "Moto Mabanga is what you'd call a "fixer".
He made his name plus $21 million fortune last year following his successful fight with Vodacom in Congo.
"Vodacom, as anyone who follows the mobile industry knows, was having a problem in the DRC. Well, you may ask, when hasn't Vodacom been having a problem in the DRC?" wrote the Daily Maverick. This time, the problem, they'd been having it, and so it was that Mr Mabanga's phone started ringing in the middle of the night. The man who was calling him was Advocate Oyama Mabandla, Vodacom's chairman at the time.
"Mabandla approached me late in the night because Vodacom was having a huge conflict with their partner in the DRC Congo," says Mr Mabanga on the phone during his interview with the Daily Maverick. Vodacom's partner in the DRC was, and still is, Congolese Wireless Network (CWN).
"The chairman explained to me that Alan Knott-Craig (Vodacom's former CEO) had offered to buy their local partner, which is a 49 per cent shareholder of the business in the DRC. Vodacom has 51 per cent of the business. Both parties agreed to the sale of CWN's shares and Knott-Craig, in a letter from London, signalled that Vodacom would buy the shares for $500 a share," says Mr Mabanga.
The time came to pay and Mr Mabanga explains that "for reasons known only to them, Vodacom reneged on the deal. Congolese Wireless Networks approached the courts in the Congo and the courts gave an order to arrest the Vodacom directors and liquidate Vodacom's interest. The courts were in the process of forcing a liquidation of the company when I got the phone call."
Following his immediate success Mr Mabanga advises that he was summonsed to Vodacom's offices in Midrand where Vodacom's executives were waiting. "It was like a funeral. They were still worried that something was going to happen in the DRC, but by midday they were more comfortable and they gave me all their files… everything to do with the conflict in the Congo."
The fixer says Vodacom's private jet was put at his disposal and soon he was flying back and forth from the DRC, and later went to Paris. "At that point the two parties (Vodacom and CWN) were not talking to one another, they were not agreeing, fighting and would not even sit in one room together," says Mr Mabanga who adds that after lengthy negotiations he got the parties together in the offices of Rothschild's bank in Paris. When Mr Mabanga saved the day in Paris, Vodacom warmed to him and offered him more work, apparently going as far as enlisting him as a potential business partner in the Congo. In an earlier story, the Mail & Guardian says legal papers show Mr Mabanga consulted to Vodacom in the DRC under a company named Namemco Energy, registered in Cyprus, for 6 May 2007 and 31 July 2007. The second period was said to be between 12 September 2007 and 31 August 2008.
Everything was going well when Mr Mabanga was doing his thing in Africa and learned that Knott-Craig was due to resign. "My first agreement had three months on it, and the second agreement, they wanted to extend it because Vodacom wanted me to be their partner in the DRC. For the second agreement they gave me an extension and another $1.5-million," he says.
The fixer says he was pressed into a corner and with the statute of limitations running out he was forced to go to the Johannesburg high court to lodge a claim against Vodacom. "A year later I found out that Vodacom was trying to sell their company in the DRC, and this got me worried."
Mr Mabanga approached the courts in the DRC, which took his case. "I brought the case against Vodacom in the DRC and provisionally attached 5 per cent of Vodacom's 51 per cent shares in the DRC, which was meant to be valued at $40.8."
As January 2012 drew to a close, Kinshasa's criminal court ruled in Mr Mabanga's favour and awarded him $20 million with a further $1 million award for interest. The court also decided that Vodacom should pay Mr Mabanga's legal costs.
It is in Tanzania where Mr Kabwe claimed in Parliament last year that Mr Mabanga bribed some top Tanzanian politicians millions of dollars to secure the oil and gas concessions, the claims strongly refuted by the fixer.
In his private motion tabled in Parliament in November, last year, Mr Kabwe claimed some Tanzanians with offshore bank accounts made money from corruption deals and tax evasion.
Mr Kabwe further claimed some individuals made ill-gotten money through procurement of military hardware, as well as energy and mineral deals.
But Mr Mabanga wasn't amused when the MP specifically named Ophir Energy, an oil exploration firm, as one of the companies that dished out hefty bribes to government officials so that it could be awarded three oil and gas exploration blocks between 2004, 2006 and 2007 -- and that he (Mabanga) was the fixer who facilitated the award of licences for the oil explorations.
In his private motion, Mr Kabwe claimed that in 2004 and 2005 a prominent South African politician, Tokyo Sexwale, made a business trip to Tanzania bringing with him two friends before he set up a firm known as Ophir Energy Tanzania Limited – which now owns blocks 1, 3 and 4 off the Indian Ocean in the Southern parts of the country.
*Additional reporting by agencies
Source: The billionaire who