Content area
Full Text
As a teenager I loved physics. I wanted to be Einstein and win the Nobel prize. But if you were born in Lebanon in 1971 like me and you lived through the civil war - having to leave for Syria when the fighting got too much - you focus on survival. That means a safe, good job. So I studied engineering in Beirut.
I got a job with MCI and got into telephony. I set up the first Lebanese news satellite in 1996 and taught myself coding. I was responsible for the first ever mobile GSM call in Lebanon. It was on one of those old, big Nokias.
I lefthome to set up mobile in places like Belarus, Chechnya, Grozny and Gabon. Then I decided to try Nigeria in the late 1990s....