The final part of my three-part conversation with Tito Alai begins with a question that challenges one of the most familiar narratives in African technology.

What came before M-Pesa?

For many people in Kenya and beyond, the history of African mobile money begins in 2007 with Safaricom’s launch of M-Pesa.

M-Pesa unquestionably transformed financial services, everyday commerce and the global perception of what mobile technology could achieve in emerging markets.

But Tito’s first-hand account of Celpay reveals an earlier and less widely understood chapter.

According to Tito, Celtel was already operating a mobile-value-transfer platform in Zambia in the early 2000s, several years before M-Pesa’s commercial launch.

The most important part of the story is not the contest over who was first.

It is how the innovation emerged.

Consumers Were Already Solving the Problem

At the time, telecommunications “products” were often little more than new tariff plans or bundles.

Tito came from consumer goods, where product development involved a much broader understanding of needs, behaviours, usage occasions and value.

He was also deeply interested in market research.

In Zambia, the team noticed something unusual. Airtime purchased in Lusaka might be activated almost immediately in another city.

The buyer could not have physically travelled that distance in the available time.

The implication was clear: people were buying airtime on behalf of others and communicating the top-up details remotely.

That behaviour inspired Me2U, which allowed one person to transfer airtime directly to another.

But the market did not stop there.

Some recipients were dividing the airtime and sending portions to other people. Others did not need all the airtime they received, so they exchanged part of it with traders for cash or goods.

Airtime had become a proxy for money.

In a hyperinflationary economy with limited card penetration, few ATMs and significant friction in moving physical cash, consumers had created their own mechanism for transferring value.

Tito’s description of the innovator’s role is instructive: the consumer has already built the hack. The company’s job is to observe it, remove the friction and make it legitimate and reliable.

That is how he explains the progression from remote top-up to Me2U and then to the cash-in and cash-out logic that underpinned Celpay.

The First-Mover Burden

Being early is often romanticized.

In practice, the first mover carries costs that later entrants do not.

A completely new category must be explained before it can be sold. The company is not only marketing its own product; it is educating the market about the concept itself.

The second or third entrant benefits from that work.

Tito describes Celpay as an innovation that needed more time, capital and market education. At the same time, Celtel was pursuing an ambitious Pan-African telecommunications strategy and needed resources to enter larger markets such as Nigeria and Kenya.

The company therefore made a strategic decision to sell Celpay to a banking group and focus on its core network expansion.

It is easy to look back and ask what might have happened had Celtel kept the platform.

But strategy is always about choices under constraint. A company cannot fund every promising opportunity indefinitely. Celtel had to decide which story it wanted investors, employees and markets to understand.

It chose telecommunications scale.

Kenya, Nigeria and the Complexity of Acquisition

Celtel’s earlier growth had largely come through greenfield operations. The company could build the network, culture and commercial model from the ground up.

Nigeria and Kenya were different.

Entry required acquisition.

That meant inheriting existing brands, systems, people, partners and market perceptions. Integration is rarely as simple as changing a logo and issuing a new strategy document.

Tito discusses the acquisition of V Mobile in Nigeria and Kencell in Kenya, including the personalities and negotiations surrounding the Kenyan transaction.

The larger lesson is that scale through acquisition creates a different leadership challenge from scale through organic growth.

A greenfield operation allows a company to establish its DNA. An acquisition requires the company to reconcile its DNA with an organization that already has one.

When Celtel Met the Middle East

The next major transformation came when Celtel was acquired by MTC of Kuwait.

MTC had a bold ambition to become a leading Pan-Middle Eastern and eventually global telecommunications group. It had acquired operations across several countries, but those businesses still carried different names, identities and ways of going to market.

Celtel, by contrast, had already created a coherent Pan-African brand and operating model across highly diverse markets.

Tito was asked to take on integrated commercial responsibility across the group.

That was a significant endorsement of what the Celtel team had built in Africa.

The challenge was now much bigger: how do you create one commercial and brand system across the Middle East and Africa without flattening the distinct histories, cultures and equities of the businesses involved?

Why Celtel Could Not Simply Become the Global Brand

One option was to extend the Celtel name across the entire group.

Tito believed that would be a mistake.

Celtel’s strength came partly from its African identity. It had been built around African markets, aspirations and cultural meaning.

Stretching it across the Middle East would have required diluting precisely the qualities that made it powerful.

The alternative was to create something new.

The process began with hundreds of potential names contributed from across the organization. Those options were narrowed through structured evaluation and market research until the final choice became an executive decision.

Zain emerged.

The name, identity and visual system were then developed and rolled out across markets.

The success of Zain demonstrates something that is often misunderstood about branding.

A brand is not merely a logo or advertising campaign. It can solve a strategic business problem.

A unified identity allowed the group to present itself as a regional and global operator rather than an assortment of national telecommunications assets.

It changed how regulators, partners, employees, investors and customers understood the organization.

In markets where a national identity could create political or commercial limitations, a neutral global brand created new room to operate.

Moving Brand Equity Without Losing It

Tito’s final major assignment at Zain involved moving Celtel’s brand equity into the new brand with as little disruption as possible.

This was not a superficial rebranding exercise.

Celtel had substantial trust, recognition and emotional meaning across African markets. Replacing the name too abruptly risked destroying value that had taken years to build.

The job was therefore to transfer familiarity, confidence and commercial momentum from one identity into another.

The Zain story is a useful reminder that rebranding should never begin with design.

It should begin with strategy:

• What business problem must the new identity solve?

• What existing equity must be retained?

• What meanings must change?

• Which audiences need reassurance?

• What must employees understand before customers do?

• How will success be measured beyond awareness?

After Zain: Curiosity Continues

Tito left Zain in 2010 and created Mimi Africa as a platform for ventures that interested him across technology, media, telecommunications, financial services and consumer goods.

His work included digital distribution tools, mobile content investments, diaspora-focused telecommunications concepts and attempts to acquire and rebuild technology assets.

Not every project succeeded.

That is another reason the conversation feels credible. Tito does not present a career in which every idea became a triumph. Some ventures encountered capital constraints, infrastructure demands or market realities that made them unsustainable.

Curiosity creates opportunity, but it also creates experiments — and experiments do not always work.

Afreximbank and the Importance of Institutional Storytelling

Tito later joined Afreximbank as Director and Global Head of Communications and Events.

The role returned to a theme that appears throughout the series: African institutions often do important work but fail to explain it compellingly.

During the COVID-19 period, African institutions collaborated around vaccine acquisition and financing at a time when the continent could not rely on the generosity or priorities of the rest of the world.

Tito’s concern was that these stories of African agency were not receiving sufficient attention.

When institutions do not tell their own stories, others fill the gap — and they often do so using approaches that diminish African competence and leadership.

Digital Identity and Africa’s Next Inflection Point

The final part of our conversation turns towards Tito’s present focus: digital identities, certification, signatures and the infrastructure required for trusted transactions across Africa.

His argument is that African identities and attention have immense economic value, yet Africans often give away that value without fully recognizing it.

Secure digital identity is not only a privacy or compliance issue. It is economic infrastructure.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AFCTA) can remove formal trade barriers, but the movement of goods, services and people still depends on trusted credentials, interoperable systems and reliable verification.

A truck moving from Mombasa to Kisangani should not be stopped repeatedly because institutions cannot validate documents, identities or authority across borders.

Technology can help turn the political ambition of integration into everyday commercial reality.

My Biggest Takeaway

Part 3 brings together the entire Tito Alai story.

The Celpay chapter demonstrates the power of observing consumer behaviour.

The Zain chapter demonstrates the strategic importance of identity.

The Afreximbank and digital-certification chapters demonstrate the importance of African agency.

Across all of them, the underlying question is the same:

Do we understand the value we are creating — and are we building the systems and narratives required to retain that value?

Tito’s career has crossed Kenya, the wider African continent, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia. It has moved through consumer goods, internet services, imaging, telecommunications, mobile payments, venture building, banking and digital identity.

But the core discipline has remained consistent.

Watch people carefully. Understand the real problem. Build around the context. Create meaning at scale. Tell the story before somebody else tells it for you.

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