Today, February 22, 2026, Leo Stan Ekeh, Chairman of Zinox Group, turns 70.
The boy from Ubomiri, Owerri zone, Imo State, has crested the divine age. A septuagenarian. A senior citizen. A statesman. An African savant.
Today, heaven acknowledges his ascension to the platinum plateau. A place where only sages dwell, a sacred club of the blessed and the wise. Angels surround him.
The hosts of heaven bear witness to this day. The day the boy whose life was almost cut short through a ghastly auto accident embraced the Biblical age of three scores and ten.
And what a moment in time for a boy whose mother foretold his life as a herald of abundance, impact and positive influence. And he became just that.
An emblem of hope for the hopeless. A solution-bearer for humanity and for nations. An exemplar for hard work, industry and integrity.
Ekeh is an unusual entrepreneur. A non-conformist to traditional management rules. A renaissance man famed for being a serial digital entrepreneur. For him and to him, everything is possible. No mountain is too high to climb. Courage is his currency. Integrity paves his path. Or how else do you describe a man who dropped out of his post-graduate programme in the United Kingdom, returned to Nigeria and used the school fees to establish a start-up and grow it into a conglomerate; an African unicorn.
Let’s get it clear. While his mates were processing papers to stay back in the United Kingdom; some in Nigeria making dawn sorties to embassies for visa interviews to travel to and live in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the advanced West, young Ekeh packed his bag and returned to Nigeria. This is not just patriotism. It’s belief in one’s country, in the Nigerian Dream.
That start-up was a computer typing pool. Ekeh is a damn good disrupter. He disrupted the old analogue order by using desktop computers to do what the archaic Compugraphic machines were doing in Nigeria media houses. He has since scaled up that venture into a multinational with structured footprints in Asia, Europe, Africa and the UAE. And he never looked back. Listless and endowed with the gift of clairvoyance, he’s an entrepreneur of many ‘Firsts’.
He gave Nigeria the gift of the first internationally certified indigenous computer brand in West Africa and the first computer brand in the world to incorporate the Naira sign (N) on its keyboard. First Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) in sub-Saharan Africa to receive Microsoft Windows Hardware Quality Lab Certification (WHQL); first Microsoft Prime Production Online Automation Partner in Sub-Saharan Africa with the OA Version 3.0; first Intel Premium Partner; first OEM in West Africa to attain the ISO 9001-2015 Certification; first to acquire the Google Mobile Application Distribution Agreement (MADA) in West Africa; first OEM in Nigeria to introduce renewable energy and lifestyle products and attaining the status of Intel Platinum Partner in sub-Saharan Africa.
His success has been phenomenal and he traces it to three factors. A template he recommends for African entrepreneurs. I shall explain this using the game of football, the most watched sport in the world. Football is played by 11 men (women) on each side. Modern football has evolved into a serious game of strategy. These days, football managers adopt strategies. Some favour the 3-4-3 diamond ring formation of three defenders, four midfielders and three attackers. Some choose 4-5-1 formation while yet some are at home with the 4-4-2 architecture. In reality, no formation is a fool-proof against defeat. Each manager only deploys what works for the team depending on the team’s style of play and strength of the opponent.
If Ekeh were to be a football coach, he would be a 4-4-2 specialist. Here is why. Speaking at the Africa Summit organized by Nottingham University, United Kingdom on June 15, 2018, Ekeh laid out a blueprint for potential entrepreneurs in Africa. He said African entrepreneurs must apply 40 percent common sense, 40 percent knowledge of the business and 20 percent spirituality to succeed on the continent. That’s a 4-4-2 leader.
As the next frontier and with an active youth population noted for their peculiar exuberant lifestyle mixed with a tincture of religious enthusiasm, Ekeh says investors in modern Africa would need to factor religion in addition to other fundamentals to their strategy tool kit.
“Success for an entrepreneur in Africa does not come cheap. This is because the continent is still struggling with a lot of infrastructural deficiencies, many of which technology will help resolve soon. To succeed in the business terrain in many African economies, an entrepreneur requires 40% common sense – especially since common sense is not by any chance common; 20% spirituality which is important in view of the highly religious nature of Africans and 40% knowledge of the particular business one is investing in.”
Ekeh is supremely book-wise and street-smart. He is also deeply spiritual; and he has applied this in his business life. “I pay tithe on all my companies. Nobody taught me this. I believe there is a God-factor in life and in business.”
At 70, Ekeh’s life has turned full cycle. The non-smoking teetotaller, the disrupter-in-chief, master strategist and futuristic 360-degree leader has proven there is a Nigerian Dream. The man who has the knack to create the market; who put Nigeria on the global ICT map with his Zinox range of products; the Microsoft Ambassador and Forbes Best of Africa Leading Tech Icon has entered the sanctum sanctorum of the sages.
Let’s toast to Leo Stan Ekeh, a man for whom acts of kindness is a culture. The recently announced N10 billion 1,000 scholarships for Nigerian computer science students in Nigerian universities is just one of his many strategic social services to humanity. Let’s toast to a highly detribalised Nigerian, an Igbo man who named his first son Farouk and gave out her first daughter in marriage to a Yoruba man. Let’s toast to humility, hard work and patriotism; to a man who understands the art of the deal (apologies to Donald J. Trump and Tony Schwartz). On this day, let’s rise and toast to a man whom God has showed His marvellous mercy in a strong city.
