Tanzanian billionaire Mohammed Dewji |
By Our Reporter, Dar es Salaam TANZANIA
Tanzanian billionaire Mohammed Dewji, who was kidnapped and held for 10 days
in October last year, says he was ready to die, having been disoriented by his
captivity.
43-year-old Dewji, who is widely
considered to be Africa’s youngest billionaire, told the BBC he asked
his kidnappers to shoot him. He was speaking to mainstream media for the first
time since he was abducted outside a hotel gym in the country’s main city, Dar
es Salaam.
Dewji said he was disoriented and
blindfolded at the time he asked the kidnappers to end his life.
“I was blindfolded and there were
times they kept on threatening me with guns to my head and five days, six days
into it I was thinking I was losing my eye sight,” Dewji narrated.
“[The kidnapper] was like ‘I’m going
to shoot you’ and I was like ‘you can shoot me and kill me’, because I was
losing it. You get disoriented, you’re tired, because it’s a form of torture.”
Ten days after his abduction, Dewji
was released, and he says no ransom was paid.
Neither the authorities in Tanzania
nor Dewji have established a clear motive for his abduction. The billionaire
says he was abandoned in a field near the same hostel where he had been
kidnapped.
“I still don’t know why it happened,”
he said. “Obviously the intention looked like it was money that they wanted. In
the end they left me without the money.”
A Tanzanian taxi driver, Mousa Twaleb
is the only suspect who is being held in connection with the case.
There was a huge investigation after Mohammed Dewji was kidnapped in October 2018 |
Dewji says he has made a few
lifestyle changes following this traumatic experience, including replacing the
lights in his house with brighter bulbs and abandoning his habit of jogging
alone on the beach.
With wealth estimated at $1.5bn
(£980m), Dewji says the experience has also intensified his appetite to ‘give
back’.
He says he will invest up to $400m in
agriculture in Tanzania over the next two years, ‘not for profit but to make an
impact’.
His company, MeTL has interests in
textile manufacturing, flour milling, beverages and edible oils in at least six
African countries, and Dewji is credited with turning the company from a
wholesale and retail enterprise into a multi-billion dollar pan-African conglomerate.
-
BBC
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