Tanzanian billionaire Mohammed Dewji courts Botswana weeks after pledging $250 million to Mozambique

Mohammed Dewji, the Tanzanian billionaire who runs the country's largest privately owned conglomerate, spent this week in Gaborone meeting Botswana's president, its central bank governor and the leadership of its stock exchange, days after committing more than $250 million to Mozambique.

Dewji, known throughout East Africa as Mo, is president and chief executive of MeTL Group, short for Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited. Forbes valued him at $2.1 billion in 2026 and ranks him 14th among Africa's richest people. He is the only billionaire in East Africa on the list and, in his fifties, still the youngest on the continent.

His visit to Botswana, a landlocked southern African country of 2.7 million people whose economy has depended on diamonds for six decades, took in President Duma Boko, Vice President Ndaba Gaolathe, the governor of the Bank of Botswana and executives of the Botswana Stock Exchange. Neo Mooki, the exchange's chairman, arranged the meetings.

Boko's government is running a programme called the Botswana Economic Transformation Programme, which aims to reduce the country's reliance on diamond revenue, draw in outside investment and build industries beyond mining. Dewji said the discussions covered private sector participation and identified renewable energy and financial services as the sectors MeTL is weighing.

He described Botswana as having built a strong foundation and said what struck him was the emphasis the government places on attracting investment and creating conditions in which private companies can operate. He added that MeTL is looking for markets where it can commit capital and stay for the long term.

The company he leads is not a small trading house. MeTL was founded in Dar es Salaam in the 1970s by his father Gulamabbas Dewji as an importer of consumer goods. Mohammed Dewji joined the board in 1999, became chief financial officer, and expanded aggressively in the early 2000s by buying loss-making state companies cheaply during Tanzania's privatisation programme and returning them to profit. Revenue has gone from $30 million when he arrived to more than $3 billion.

MeTL now operates in 11 African countries, employs about 40,000 people and spans manufacturing, agriculture, trading, finance, mobile telephony, insurance, real estate, transport, logistics and food and beverages, selling under the Mo brand. Its sales are equivalent to roughly 3% of Tanzania's gross domestic product and more than twice what the country earned last year from tobacco, coffee, tea, cashews and cotton combined. Dewji has said he intends to build it into a $10 billion business by 2030, partly through graphite mining and luxury tourism.

Botswana is the latest stop in a run of expansion. Dewji left Mozambique days earlier having pledged 661.93 billion Tanzanian shillings, more than $250 million, and in May he announced a $50 million soft drinks plant in Kenya.

The push has political backing at home. President Samia Suluhu Hassan has urged Tanzanian businesspeople to pursue opportunities in neighbouring countries, a call she made to private sector figures as Tanzania began work on Vision 2050, a national plan targeting a $1 trillion economy.

Dewji served as a member of parliament for Singida Urban, his home constituency, from 2005 to 2015 before leaving politics for business. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2016, committing at least half his fortune to philanthropy and becoming the first Tanzanian to do so. He was abducted by gunmen outside a gym in Dar es Salaam in October 2018 and released unharmed after nine days.

Nothing has been signed in Botswana. What the trip produced was access to the president, the central bank and the exchange in a single week, which is the stage that precedes a commitment rather than the commitment itself.