In nine years Oscar Manduku-Habeenzu turned a single analysis platform into twelve magazine editions reaching business owners across twenty-four African countries. The method has not changed since the first article.

One website and an argument

Oscar Manduku-Habeenzu began with one website and an argument.

The argument was that African business was being reported but not read. Coverage described what companies and institutions had done; very little explained what they were likely to do next. The continent had news. What it did not have, in his view, was analysis a business owner could act on before an event rather than after it.

The website was BehaviourReport.com, and the discipline behind it was behavioural: institutions and the people who run them repeat patterns, and those patterns can be read by anyone willing to do the work. Manduku-Habeenzu, who holds an MBA from the University of Cumbria and had spent years building digital infrastructure for banks and microfinance operations across four markets, was not a reporter. He was an analyst who published.

“The wind was speaking and I heard the wind,” he says of that period. “The data was speaking and I heard the data. The behaviour was speaking, and I heard it.”

The method, tested in public

An analytical method is worth what it can anticipate. His was tested early, and in the open.

Working from Machiavelli’s The Prince – and its argument that a ruler’s stature is built by the rivals who rise against him – and from Fabius Maximus, the Roman general remembered as Cunctator for a doctrine of patience and attrition against an opponent committed to brinkmanship, Manduku-Habeenzu published an analysis of Zimbabwe’s leadership landscape framed as a contest between the cunctator and the brinkman. Written months in advance, it set out that the country’s executive leadership would change, and who would take it. In November 2017 events followed the sequence he had described.

The publication drew the attention of the state, and for a period he was watched. He did not retract the analysis, soften it, or attach a political position to it. He had no political position to attach. He published the same facts he had been publishing and let them stand.

What mattered afterwards was not the forecast itself. It was that a method had been demonstrated to work in public, under conditions where being wrong and being partisan would each have been expensive.

The evaluation

The following year, Dow Jones shortlisted him for a Wall Street Journal magazine franchise. The evaluation ran close to two years. He was, at that point, an independent publisher in a small market with no international profile and no institutional backing.

“If global media can pick me up with just this little that I’m saying,” he recalls thinking, “what happens if I do that in every single country in Africa?”

Building it twelve times

The answer was Kufunga – the first title designed from the outset to be rebuilt country by country rather than exported from a head office. He started with the markets nearest to him and worked outward.

He did not do it alone and does not claim to. He led teams that built it first in Zimbabwe and then across borders, and the model was designed from the beginning to be run by people other than him. A system that only works while its founder is in the room does not replicate, and replication was the entire objective.

Nine years later the single site that was BehaviourReport.com has become Cabanga Africa Group: twelve regional magazine editions – cabanga is Nguni for to think – circulating across twenty-four countries, with contributors and editorial leadership drawn from twenty-eight.

What the replication does

A handful of articles from one platform in one country changed the terms of a national conversation. Cabanga Africa Group has now published more than seven thousand business articles across twelve editions, circulating into twenty-four countries and downloaded 1.8 million times.

Its readers are business owners. They read commercial analysis and act on it inside their own companies, which is the plainest form influence takes: a decision made differently because of something read. Whatever the first platform did to one national conversation, twelve editions now do continuously, in twenty-four markets, for people whose livelihoods turn on the quality of what they are reading.

The second effect is on the people who write it. More than a hundred contributors carry bylines across the network, and editorial leadership is sourced from twenty-eight countries rather than appointed centrally. Each edition takes local practitioners and makes them published authorities in their own markets – people who were not that before the edition existed. The replication of the model and the making of those authorities are not two separate achievements. They are the same act, performed twelve times.

Where that influence lands on a single business, the record is traceable. Evertol Associates came to him holding a client portfolio worth ten thousand rands; by 2026 it was an advisory business with a portfolio of R500m spanning digital banking, financial services, manufacturing, agriculture and commodity broking, placing capital from the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia and China into African markets. Across the group, 127 projects have been delivered.

Alongside the publishing, Manduku-Habeenzu has mentored students for roughly ten years – in a typical year, students drawn from around ten different universities across the twenty-eight countries the network reaches. That work is now formalised as the Digital Navigator Academy, built on a deliberately unfashionable premise: teach the trade, not the tool, so that what a graduate learns survives the next platform.

Chisipiti

“We will tell you things that are going to come. And you will ignore us. But when they come, those that have listened to us will enjoy them.”

He describes the group with a Shona word – chisipiti, a spring that does not stop giving water. It is the closest thing he has to a mission statement, and the promise attached to it has not changed since the first article on the first website: