MTN Ghana Boss is Africa's Telecom CEO of the Year

MTN Ghana CEO, Ebenezer Twum Asante has been named overall CEO of the Year in Africa's telecom industry at the recently held AfricaCom Awards.

AfricaCom is the continent’s most prominent annual industry awards for the telecommunications and information technology sector, and Ghana dominated this year's awards.

This top award to Eben Asante adds another feather to his cap, coming weeks after he was named CEO of the Year within the MTN Group.

When he won the MTN Group top award, the accolades recognized his competence and strong leadership qualities, emotional intelligence, focus on the bigger picture, providing vision and strategy, demonstrates problem solving capability and delivers value.

Asante was also lauded as person who drives culture and change, builds stakeholder relationships and achieves both financial and non-financial results.

“He is also an exceptional leader who understands self, is emotionally matured, shows humility and compassion, exemplifies ethics and integrity and communicates effectively," a statement from MTN said.

The AfricaCom award was in recognition of consistent growth of MTN Ghana under his visionary leadership.

Eben Asante is the first Ghanaian-born CEO of MTN Ghana, after serving two years as CEO for MTN Rwanda.

He has overseen the healthy performance of MTN Ghana, including growing market share consistently even in the face of a market largely described as saturated.

Recently, MTN Ghana subscriber base saw a 3 percent growth to over 18 million, shooting it total market share to almost 50 per cent, and mobile data market share to over 60 per cent.

Eben Asante led MTN Ghana to acquire 4G LTE spectrum late last year at a whopping US$67.5million and invested an additional US$18million for initial deployment within just six months, making it the first telco to start 4G LTE services in Ghana.

Under him, MTN is in the process of offloading shares to local investors to give Ghanaians a greater stake in a company that has enjoyed tremendous success in this country.

Eben Asante told Adom News he is humbled by the laurels and he gives all the credit to his strong leadership team & the gallant staff of MTN Ghana, who make a difference each day.

"I'm only there to serve, provide direction, vision and create great execution environment for the team to perform," he said.

He said the awards "tells about our vision and digital strategy to focus on customers, people in the organisation - it also shows innovation is on course."

The MTN Ghana Boss said he will continue to provide serviced-based leadership that should convince our customers the future can only be great.

His staff say they love him for his famous principle called "the stretch", where he insists that good is not enough because excellence is within human reach.

Meanwhile, Ghana's dominance at the AfricaCom awards was also marked by five other awards, including Tigo Ghana's two awards, notably the widely coveted Changing Lives Award for their Mobile Birth Registration project.

Other wieners were Huawei, which scooped the prize for Delivering Excellence in Customer Experience and Most Significant LTE Development, the latter alongside Namibia’s MTC.

Liquid Telecom picked Best Marketing Campaign for AfriCan and Mauritius Telecom had Best App for Africa with its Traffic Watch Mauritius.

The judges’ most notable entry came from BRCK with their Kio Kit – Digital Classroom in a Box which won Best Pan-African Initiative.

There were over 100 entries with 13 overall winners.

Adam Thompson from KNect365 TMT, the organisers, said this year’s awards saw an exceptional shortlist of entries.

The judging panel were thoroughly impressed with the quality of entries and the range of industry projects carried out.