Mteto Nyati, the newly-appointed (October 2023) Board Chairman at ESKON, is a turnaround expert who puts people and customers at the centre of the business strategy. He invests in unlisted medium-sized companies that operate in high growth segments of the market.

He is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Wazo Investments. Through Wazo Investments, he holds a 40% shareholding in BSG, a homegrown business and technology consulting company that focuses on strategy execution.

Mteto sits on the Eskom, Telkom and Nedbank boards as a non-executive director. Previously he was the Group Chief Executive of Altron and Chief Executive Office of MTN South Africa.

He led Microsoft South Africa as Managing Director for 6 years.

Over a period of 12 years, he held various leadership positions at IBM in South Africa and Europe.

In 2021, Mteto won the EY World Entrepreneur Award, Southern Africa, in recognition of his turnaround of Altron. In 2019, he received the ‘Business Leader of the Year’ award at the All Africa Business Leaders Awards. In the same year, the University of Johannesburg’s College of Business and Economics awarded Mteto an honorary doctorate in IT Management.

In 2004, he was named one of ‘Yale University’s World Fellows’..

Mteto mentors and coaches senior executives – including CEOs – as well as up and coming business professionals, but he is also a bestselling author. He says he wrote the number one bestseller, ‘Betting on a Darkie’, to impact primarily those individuals he could not mentor directly. It is a book about his life as a shopkeeper’s son, family man and business leader at local and multinational corporates. ‘Betting on a Darkie’ is in its 7th reprint and is available as an audiobook via Audible. Recently News24 chose it as their “book of the month” offering its audio version to their entire subscriber base for free.

He holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of KwaZulu Natal.

He names two of his prime passions as people and technology.