Seated at his desk, hunched over the document, the man was counting the zeroes on it.

It was an instruction to the bank to transfer $850 million to a bank in Ethiopia.

“I have never signed an instruction to pay $850 million in my entire career,” Dilip Pal, the Chief Finance Officer at Safaricom, recalled.

He was counting all the zeroes so that he does not make a mistake, and making that deposit as the Safaricom-led consortium bid to be the second telecommunication provider in Ethiopia was a crucial moment.

That decision was among the things he has done at Safaricom that have made the decision by Safaricom to go into Ethiopia close to his heart.

Going into Ethiopia was one of the first projects he was drafted into after taking over as CFO at Safaricom in November 2020.

As the finance man, he had to get involved, poring over the numbers, scrutinising the business case, and answering the tough questions from the board.

He takes pride in the fact that with every base transmission station that goes up, Safaricom Ethiopia is building something for the future, something permanent that will serve many people for many years.

“We are not there yet. It’s going to take time. But we are very confident that we are going to achieve what we have set ourselves for,” he said.

From his experience making decisions at all the companies he has worked, Dilip has arrived at a philosophical approach to decision making: “Some investments don’t go well at all, but you learn from there. It’s not a mistake because all the decisions that you take at a certain point in time are the correct decisions you took. You take that decision with all the information available at that time.”

Watch the video to hear more and understand why Dilip says: “I have never made a bad decision.”

This story was first published on Safaricom Newsroom