Pindula:Weekly featured article/February 2015, Week 9

Roger Basil Nyikadzino Marume Boka was a controversial and successful Zimbabwean entrepreneur known mostly for establishing the Boka Tobacco Auction Floors tobacco auction company, which was at that time considered the largest in the world.

He had vast amounts of interests in mining, banking, cosmetics and even in books, but the businessman could be looked at as one of the pioneers of the indigenisation programme due to his outspokenness towards the status quo in the late 1980s and early- to mid-1990s. Boka went to the extent of taking out full page newspaper adverts in the local press, accusing Zimbabwe's 70,000 whites of conspiring to keep its 11 million blacks poor, and threatening drastic measures if they didn't loosen their grip on the economy when he faced resistance in entering the white-dominated industry of tobacco sales.

On 21 February 1999, Mr Roger Boka would pass away on a private plane on his way back from the USA where he went to seeking treatment. He died about 30 minutes before the plane landed at Harare International Airport. He was 54 at the time of his death. (Full article...)

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