Botswana property tycoon Gulaam Abdoola's Turnstar Holdings stake is worth $10.2 million

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Botswana property tycoon Gulaam Abdoola, who founded Turnstar Holdings Ltd. and ran it for 25 years, controls a stake in the Gaborone-listed property company worth P139.9 million ($10.2 million), more than a year after he handed over the managing director's job.

Abdoola holds the stake through G.H. Group (Proprietary) Ltd., his family's company. The company owns 67,928,703 Turnstar linked units, or 11.9% of the 572,153,603 units in issue. At Monday's closing price of P2.06 on the Botswana Stock Exchange, the holding is worth P139.93 million, or $10.21 million at an exchange rate of P13.70 to the dollar.

Turnstar closed 2025 at P2.05, when the same units were worth P139.25 million ($10.60 million at the year-end rate of P13.14). The price has barely moved since, and the dollar value has slipped because the pula has weakened. The units have traded between P2.05 and P2.26 over the past 12 months and are down almost 9% over that period. Turnstar's market value is about P1.18 billion ($86 million).

The holding used to be bigger. In 2024, when Turnstar announced a proposed property deal with G.H. Group, the family company owned 80,148,355 units, or 14% of Turnstar. It now holds 12.2 million fewer. Abdoola also held units in his own name and sold 272,278 of them on the market on May 23, 2025, at P2.26 each, for P615,348 ($44,900).

Each linked unit pairs an ordinary share with a debenture, so investors are paid partly in interest and partly in dividends. Turnstar has kept its payout at 20 thebe a unit a year, which comes to about P13.6 million ($992,000) a year on G.H. Group's current holding.

Building Turnstar

Turnstar was incorporated in Botswana on Nov. 7, 2000. Abdoola joined its board as managing director on Feb. 12, 2001, and the company listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange in 2002, the year its flagship mall, Game City, opened in the Kgale area of Gaborone. The mall now covers about 70,000 square meters under roof and holds around 140 shops.

The model Abdoola built relied on his own family company. G.H. Group took on the development of new projects and later sold the finished, rent-paying buildings to Turnstar. That is how the listed company came to own the Nzano Centre in Francistown, Botswana's second city, and Mlimani City in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's commercial capital.

Mlimani City, which opened in November 2006, was Tanzania's first indoor, air-conditioned mall. It sits on Sam Nujoma Road in the Ubungo area and includes an office park, a conference center and a residential estate. Turnstar agreed in 2011 to pay $77 million for the complex, which then had about 19,000 square meters of shop space, a fully let office park of about 11,300 square meters and 50 homes. In 2016 the company started work on a $45 million expansion to add nearly 16,000 square meters of shops, offices, conference space and parking.

Game City has been rebuilt and enlarged several times. At the groundbreaking of its fourth expansion in November 2014, which added 8,500 square meters, Abdoola said, "We want to take the mall to a level that in the next 10 years will still be relevant." In February that year he said, "Turnstar's objective is to build a quality portfolio of properties with strong contractual cash flows."

The company also sells buildings. In 2016 it sold Fairground Office Park in Gaborone to Botswana Life Insurance Ltd. for P129 million, above its valuation of P121.5 million.

Today Turnstar owns 12 properties with 150,497 square meters of lettable space. Seven are in Botswana: Game City, Nzano, Turnstar House in Gaborone, a small mall in Mogoditshane, a block of industrial units and two residential estates. Four are in Tanzania, at the Mlimani City complex. The 12th is Palazzo Venezia, an office block in Dubai's Majan district.

The family group and the Dubai review

G.H. Group is much broader than property. The family company has interests in retail, wholesale, restaurants, boutiques, tyres, spare parts, petrol stations and diamond supply. In 2006 it bought 19,000 square meters of land in Gaborone's new central business district, and the following year it began building a P100 million office and retail complex there, becoming the first private company to start building in the district. In 2024 Turnstar made a conditional offer of P123 million ($9 million) for a commercial letting business and two properties owned by G.H. Group, subject to the approval of independent shareholders and Botswana's competition regulator.

Abdoola has also chaired Stanbic Bank Botswana, McCarthy Retail Botswana and Prefsure Insurance. He is president of the Botswana Muslim Association, a trustee of the World Memon Organisation for its Africa chapter and a director of the Masiela Trust Fund.

His biggest setback came in Dubai. Turnstar bought Palazzo Venezia in 2017 for 28 million dirhams ($7.6 million), and in December 2019 its board approved a P10 million ($730,000) investment in four apartments at Okavango Place, a Dubai residential project, made through a company called Bucephalus Holding Ltd. Abdoola brought both deals to the board. When the Dubai investments went wrong, he started legal proceedings there, and in June 2021 Turnstar signed an agreement giving him the right to bring and enforce litigation over the investment on its behalf.

The board hired Desai Law Group, a Gaborone law firm, to investigate after the deals were questioned in December 2021. Its report, which the board adopted in April 2022, cleared Abdoola of theft and of seeking personal gain. It found that he had likely breached his duty of care and skill, that no proper due diligence had been done on the apartments and that Turnstar had no working investment committee. The report put the real value of Palazzo Venezia at about 10 million dirhams. Abdoola refunded the P10 million apartment investment.

The board decided in July 2022 not to discipline him. "We as the board have taken a decision not to institute any disciplinary action against our Executive," said Butler Phirie, who later became chairman. Phirie said the board believed Abdoola had been misled by associates in Dubai rather than setting out to harm the company. The office block is now fully let.

Results and the handover

Turnstar's rental revenue rose 3% to P354.4 million ($25.9 million) in the year ended Jan. 31, 2026. Operating profit was little changed at P184.4 million ($13.5 million), compared with P185.9 million a year earlier. Pretax profit fell to P64.4 million ($4.7 million) from P188.6 million, after P137.8 million ($10.1 million) of losses on property revaluations and currency translation, and net profit dropped to P50.7 million ($3.7 million).

The Botswana properties produced just over half of external revenue and were 97% occupied. Mlimani City, which earns rent linked to the U.S. dollar, contributed nearly 49%. The portfolio was valued at about P2.58 billion ($188 million), and gearing improved to 26% from 28%. Turnstar paid out about P114 million ($8.3 million) to investors for the year. Its net asset value is P3.51 a unit, well above the market price.

Abdoola announced in May 2025 that he would step down. "It is time for a change," he said. Comfort Rankgomo, the long-serving finance chief, became managing director on July 1, 2025, and Abdoola retired from the board on July 28, 2025. He was paid P4.96 million ($362,000) in his final full year as managing director.

"I will remain actively involved in a strategic capacity and remain a shareholder," Abdoola told investors in the company's 2025 annual report.

Before he left, he set out a plan to take Turnstar further into East Africa. In November 2024 the company said it would look at Rwanda and Uganda, invest more in Tanzania and consider listing its Tanzanian unit, Mlimani Holdings, on the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange. Abdoola said then that Turnstar wanted to "redefine property investment across the continent."