Growing up in the dusty market town of Dilla in Ethiopia, Tariku Bogale’s world should have been small.
During his pre-school years, the North East African country was caught in a famine so great thousands of people died and the scars left by a devastating civil war had yet to heal. His childhood was tough, but so was the young Bogale. And thanks to a love of books and the company of young Peace Corp volunteers from abroad, he saw far more when he looked around than fruit stalls, coffee plantations and limited opportunities. Instead, he saw a world that was his to explore.
My childhood was tough. From age of eight I had to look after myself, following my parents divorce, my days were lonely and was left to be responsible for my own upbringing.
Bogale found friendship on the streets of Dilla. Because he had a room provided for by his dad, he drew the attention of older children who needed a place to hang out. Their influences were not always good and at a young age Bogale was exposed to alcohol and drugs. Given that he was small and therefore less likely to raise alarm bells, he was used by the older children in some of their more unsavory dealings. I tested a lot of things, says Bogale.
But a desire to get ahead stopped him from straying too far off the beaten track and by the time he was a teenager himself, it was education that drove him. Ethiopia was one of the first countries to invite the Peace Corps to establish its program there in 1962, just one year after the Peace Corps was founded.These young volunteers had a huge impact on Bogales life.
The primary founding focus of the Peace Corps was to promote world peace and friendship and the volunteers in Ethiopia found Bogale friendly and useful, given his good command of English. He proved helpful in providing advice to these youngsters so far from home, while they in turn opened his eyes to a much bigger world. Through their stories of home and the books, newspapers and magazines they gave him, he suddenly knew that exciting opportunities awaited beyond Dilla, and even beyond Ethiopias capital Addis Ababa.
Years later when I arrived in Johannesburg, and later still in New York and other Western countries, I did not feel overwhelmed. It was thanks to them that I almost felt I had been there before. With his head filled with big dreams, Bogale decided to apply to universities abroad, despite the fact that he had not yet graduated high school. In those days, Dilla had no internet and so influenced by his girlfriend, a 20-something British woman visiting Ethiopia, Bogale headed for the capital city around 370km away to email off what would prove to be fruitless letters of appeal.
This offered him his first enticing taste of IT and with a few clicks, his world was opened up even further. Back home, he was befriended by the dean of a local school who often invited Bogale home in the hope that his ambition would inspire his own children. Bogales interactions with the Peace Corp volunteers perhaps also sparked his philanthropic spirit and he began volunteering at hospitals and doing environmental community service. I was thinking beyond where I was, he says.
Meanwhile, I managed to convince my father to pay for me to enroll in an Addis Ababa computer school. Life was not easy and after a while my dad stopped paying my tuition. I had luckily found a mentor in the owner of the computer school who allowed me to work there after hours and assisted me where he could. The need to fund his living expenses unleashed the entrepreneur in him and Bogale soon opened a market stall from where he assisted people with their computer problems.
And so at the age of 17, Tariku Computer Systems became Bogales first of many businesses. Life was hard in Ethiopia, however, and I seized the chance to take up a position teaching IT skills in Kenya. After four months, I headed for the bright lights of Johannesburg. I knew little about the country or the city; London had always been my dream but I knew I had to make things happen for myself, and South Africa was more attainable.
Propelled by sheer confidence and youthful gusto, he first survived in the City of Gold through leasing and subleasing inauspicious properties, and soon built up a small nest egg. He saw the opportunities presented by the inner city, which had all but been abandoned when business moved to the suburbs and retail parks following the demise of apartheid.
Today, still a young lion at 36, he has travelled to many of the places that he ‘visited’ as a child through the words and pictures in books and newspapers. He has done business in a number of diverse fields, grown his fortune and along the way, nominated for African Pioneer, Black Business Award, and earned the reputation of ‘serial entrepreneur’,
A glance at his CV might make one think of a child with an attention deficit disorder, so varied is the range of business ventures he has explored, from travel agencies to banking, real estate development, information technology including mobile marketing, oil and energy, diplomat, philanthropist and even now has become actor-writer-producer.
But the fact of the matter is that Bogale’s energy and passion are insatiable and his actions are driven by a philosophy that demands the ability to transform and remain viable – ‘adapt or die’.
Eminent economist Joseph Stumper (1883-1950) coined the phrase ‘creative destruction’ which relates to his belief that long-term economic growth is sustained by radical innovators who force established business to adapt or die. As an entrepreneur, Bogale is adept at spotting opportunities in existing markets and exploiting them. He is equally able to recognize when the time has come to move on, however.