Bayport co-founder Justin Chola was treated to a red carpet retirement after 17 years at the helm of the company he built from scratch into what is now a leading multinational. Mwenzi Mibenge Mulenga will take over the reins into a new era.
Born in the small mining town of Luanshya in a humble middle class setup, Justin Chola was the son of mine policeman and his mother was a cleaner at Roan antelope hospital. He credits his parents for instilling in him values of integrity, honesty, hard work, fairness and putting education at the centre of everything he did. According to him, these values set the stage for all that he was going to achieve. Justin Chola is also an ardent Christian and a devoted family man with four children.
Justin Chola was awarded a scholarship at the age of 17 to study engineering in the United Kingdom. He would return to the country 5 years later, at 23, to make a maiden debut in the corporate world. At that point, it was all too clear that there was nothing that was going to stop the young man from Luanshya. His eyes were flaming red hot with ambition like heated red metal from his hometown. It was game time. At 29, he would break into senior management and went on to have nothing short of an amazing career in five different countries across different continents. He also had an executive stint at ZANACO as director of IT.
In 2004, he would return home and together with partners; Stuart Stone and Martha Akapelwa among others set the foundation stone for Bayport. The journey to build Bayport has been gruelling, grinding and triumphant at last with the firm standing tall amongst its peers in the micro finance sector. There have been calls by financial insiders that Bayport is fully ready to compete in the big league by applying for a banking licence; that’s a story for another day.
He credits in no particular order, his family, partners, board of directors, regulators and employees for the stellar success story that Bayport has become. Despite his humility to deflect attention away from himself, you could tell that this is a man with the ‘Midas Touch’ just by the poster hanging in his office; it reads, “Failure is not an option”.
He admits to the bitter-sweet moment nature of his retirement though; that he will miss his Bayport family and the daily grind the business presented but at the same time, he is also looking forward to fishing and some ‘Twangale moments’ with his grandchild.
As he pulled out of the driveway in a Mercedes-Benz, the endearing names engraved on the firm’s headquarters building that came into view were epic almost legendary, they simply read, ‘Justin Chola House’. They say diamonds are forever, Justin Chola will live forever too!