MultiChoice has announced that Nolo Letele the man who built DStv into a juggernaut will retire as a non-executive director of the board of directors and the social and ethics committee with effect from 1 December 2021. The company said in a statement on JSE SENS: “The Board expresses its deepest gratitude to Nolo for his significant and invaluable contributions to the Group over many years and wishes him well in his retirement.”
Nolo Letete is a Chartered Engineer from the University of Southampton and received several awards during his tenure as MultiChoice South Africa group chief executive, and subsequently as executive chair for MultiChoice South Africa. These included the Lifetime Africa Achievement Prize for Media Development in Africa, the Naspers Phil Weber Award, and the Black Business Executive Circle Chairman’s Award.
Letele began his MultiChoice career at a small radio station in Lesotho that broadcast in collaboration with M-Net. Together they started the first TV station in Lesotho, Letele said in a 2012 interview with Moneyweb. From there, he was “thrown in the deep end”, worked under pay-TV giant and former Naspers CEO Koos Bekker, and helped build DStv into the juggernaut it is today.
Letele has also seen his fair share of controversy. These included South Africa’s digital TV battle, where MultiChoice was accused of paying the SABC kickbacks to support its position of blocking the encryption of South Africa’s digital TV signal.
MultiChoice denied ever paying kickbacks, and Letele said that a 2013 meeting between MultiChoice and the SABC that included a conversation about encryption standards was a normal commercial negotiation, and that there was nothing untoward about it.
Nolo Letele joined M-Net in 1990 and spearheaded MultiChoice’s expansion outside South Africa. In 1995 he moved to Ghana, where he served as West African regional general manager. In 1999 he was appointed chief executive of MultiChoice South Africa. Later, he served as MultiChoice group chief executive until 2010, when he was appointed executive chair of the MultiChoice South Africa Holdings board.
He was a non-executive director of MultiChoice Group Limited after the company was spun out of Naspers and listed separately on the JSE.
