Every August, somewhere in Kenya, the same joke goes round. A woman hands the television remote to a man, with all the ceremony of a head of state surrendering power, and the caption explains everything: the new football season has begun, and the telenovelas are officially on leave. Most people laugh and keep scrolling. Ronald Baraka Shelukindo stopped scrolling and wrote an opinion piece about it.

That small act is a decent summary of the man. Where others see a meme, he sees a viewing calendar, a household negotiation and a business case, all wrapped in a single image. It is the instinct of a marketer who understands that audiences announce their habits long before any research agency gets around to measuring them, and that the job is to be listening when they do.

This month, Evolve Africa names Shelukindo its Marketer of the Month for October 2026.

Experience

The long way round is often the right way in. MultiChoice Tanzania opened its doors in 1997, and when the company marked two decades in the country, the man fielding the press’s questions was its operations manager, Baraka Shelukindo, insisting that the arrival of new digital rivals after Tanzania’s 2015 analogue switch-off had not dented the business. Professional directories suggest he spent well over a decade on the operational side before crossing over to marketing, and that grounding is the quiet secret of his credibility. He knows what happens after the sale: the installation, the billing query, the screen that goes dark on the eve of a derby.

Today he is Head of Marketing and a name on the executive management page of MultiChoice Tanzania, working out of Dar es Salaam. The title is backed by an MBA in management and marketing from the International University London Centre.

His campaigns carry the operator’s eye for commercial detail. In early 2021 he fronted “Panda Tukupandishe”, an upgrade offer that ran from mid-January to the end of March and invited active and disconnected customers on the Bomba, Family and Compact packages to step up to richer programming. He framed it as value and access to great entertainment. The cleverer part was the guest list: lapsed subscribers sat in the same offer as loyal ones, win-back marketing dressed up as generosity. Another season brought “Zigo la Sikukuu”, the festive campaign unveiled in Dar es Salaam with the Temeke District Commissioner on stage, which wrapped special line-ups, a pop-up channel and the year’s big sporting events around one promise: watch it however suits you.

Career achievements and recognition

A marketing head in this business is judged partly on the commercial scoreboard and partly on reputation, and the reputational half is easier to show. In 2023, MultiChoice Tanzania collected five top awards for sustainable business practice, with wins for its Talent Factory training programme, its investment in local content and its partnerships, and an overall win in the partnership category. Those are company honours rather than personal ones, but they sit squarely inside the story Shelukindo’s department tells: that a pay-TV giant can be rooted in Tanzanian creativity rather than merely beamed over it.

The commercial record is told in distribution and content. In December 2024, MultiChoice Tanzania teamed up with Vodacom Tanzania to put Showmax, with its local productions, global hits and Premier League football, in front of Vodacom’s customers across multiple devices. And when the producer of the Showmax Tanzania Original Undugu Hatibu Madudu was hosted at the Dar es Salaam headquarters, Shelukindo was in the room alongside the head of the Swahili channels Maisha Magic Bongo and Poa, which is exactly where a marketing chief should be when a homegrown series is being built into a brand.

Contribution to the industry

Shelukindo’s most visible contribution is an argument. His opinion editorial on football and personalised content, carried on MultiChoice Kenya’s page, insists that viewers are being pulled back to their television sets by the pairing of live sport and content that feels chosen for them. It cut against a decade of obituaries for linear TV, and every August the memes keep proving him right.

The second contribution is talent. The MultiChoice Talent Factory, launched in May 2018 as part of the company’s shared-value programme, trains young filmmakers across the continent, and its East Africa Academy graduated nineteen of them from Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda in Nairobi on 16 April 2026, in its eighth year. A marketer who sells local stories has a direct interest in a pipeline of people able to tell them, and Shelukindo’s brand benefits when that pipeline is visible.

The third is timing. MultiChoice is in the middle of a major restructuring after Canal+ completed its takeover in 2025, with Showmax being wound down and its originals migrating to DStv Stream. Keeping a subscriber base confident through a change of owner and a change of platform is the kind of job that does not make headlines when it goes well. That is rather the point.

Beyond the boardroom

Most heads of marketing in broadcasting keep a low profile. Shelukindo does not. His Instagram following runs past 101,000, his LinkedIn past nine thousand, and his bio is refreshingly unpolished: marketing specialist, proud father, passionate traveller, football fanatic, music lover, proudly Tanzanian. There is strategy in that openness. People buy entertainment from people who seem to enjoy it, and a marketer comfortable being a person in public is a far more credible advocate than one hidden behind a logo.

The next time a football season opens and a remote control changes hands somewhere in East Africa, remember that someone was already planning for the moment.