Part 2. ‘If it doesn’t work, I’m going back home’

Rungano Innocent Nyaude built a career in the Gulf one reset at a time. Part Two of The Corridor’s profile traces the banker, the builder, and the scars in between.

The first week of July 2012, Rungano Nyaude boarded a flight from Doha to Dubai. He had been in Qatar for just over two years — long enough to know the corridors of the Standard Chartered office, long enough to have his permanent contract, long enough to have considered staying. He left anyway.

It was not a promotion. It was not a planned move. There were, as he puts it now with the careful restraint of someone who has had a decade to process it, “a couple of challenges happening within the office.” His career was not moving as he wanted. When the opportunity came to relocate to Dubai and cover part of the Qatar portfolio from the UAE, he weighed it simply: reset or go back.

“I might as well go to Dubai, see what it is like,” he says. “If it works, oh good. If it doesn’t work, then I’m going back home.”

It worked. It worked for almost thirteen years.

“The only day you’re allowed to rest is the day that you rest. If you rest and yet you’re still supposed to be moving, you’re going to be left behind.”

The story of how Nyaude arrived in the Gulf at all is, on its surface, a story of chance. In January 2010, just over a year into his career as a graduate trainee at Standard Chartered Zimbabwe, he was asked if he could go to Doha. Not permanently. Not even for long. Standard Chartered Qatar needed someone to fill a gap for two months while a permanent hire made the transition from another country.

He said yes.

The gap extended. Within the first two months, someone else on the Qatar team left. The temporary placement became three months. Then, within that three-month window, he was offered the role on a permanent basis. He went back to Zimbabwe briefly to process the paperwork, resigned from Standard Chartered Zimbabwe, and returned to Doha in June 2010 on a permanent contract.

He was 25.

It is worth understanding what Standard Chartered Zimbabwe he was leaving behind. He had joined in December 2008 — a moment when Zimbabwe’s economy was in open collapse. Hyperinflation had consumed the Zimbabwean dollar. Liquidity had evaporated. The bank’s clients were not managing growth; they were trying to survive.

“Bankers would actually hide their bank IDs as they left the bank,” he says, “so that people don’t see that you work in a bank.”

What that environment had given him, though, was a particular kind of discipline. You could not wait for the ideal moment. You executed now or your client lost. You stayed within the policy guidelines even when the environment made every guideline feel absurd. You thought about the client first, always. Speed and principle together. Not as a contradiction — as the only way to function.

That discipline travelled with him to Qatar. And Qatar, almost immediately, tested it at a different scale.

The first portfolio he handled in Doha involved contracting companies. The projects were not enormous. But within his first three months, he found himself sitting with a portfolio of four to five billion US dollars. He was looking at aircraft financing transactions. He had never encountered aircraft financing before.

The imposter syndrome was immediate. He remembers sitting in meetings with senior bankers and watching the conversation move above his head. He could not follow it. He posted on Facebook — a habit of the era, a moment of unusual public candour for someone who tends toward restraint — that he still had a lot to learn.

What held him, he says, was the realisation that the principles of the work did not change with the zeros. Whatever he had been applying in Harare on a half-million-dollar transaction, the same framework applied in Doha on a five-billion-dollar portfolio. The instrument was different. The rigour was the same.

“With time, when you get to continue doing this, you start realising that you actually belong,” he says. “You are not an imposter. You actually have something to offer.”

“When I left the first time, I was nowhere near thinking of leadership. I came back a leader.”

He spent almost thirteen years in the UAE. He will not reduce them to a resume. But when he describes what Dubai gave him that Qatar, at that particular moment in 2012, could not, the word he reaches for is platform. A platform to learn. A platform to grow. A platform, ultimately, to lead.

Coming back to Qatar in 2025 in his current role in corporate and investment banking, he marks the distance from the young man who first arrived in Doha by one measure above all others.

“When I first came into Doha in 2010 — young, still single, trying to figure out who I was as a person,” he says. “Life happened along the way. I grew as a leader. I came back a leader. I came back someone with a much clearer purpose in terms of what I wanted to achieve.”

He pauses. “I also came back a more seasoned banker and team player.”

Afrigate, the trade and advisory platform he co-founded, did not begin with a business plan. It began with a name, a domain, and a conversation between three Zimbabwean professionals in Dubai around 2018 or 2019: Nyaude, Simba Magumise, and Sipho Ngwenya. They were thinking about Zimbabwe’s participation in Expo 2020. About what it would mean to create a vehicle that could bridge Zimbabwe and the Middle East.

The idea did not immediately take shape. Things started, then slowed. Then a regulatory requirement changed the calculus: as chairman of the Zimbabwean Business Council in the UAE, Nyaude was required to represent a company. He went back to Magumise and Ngwenya, asked for their permission to continue using the Afrigate name, and rebuilt the platform from the gap he was seeing every day in his Business Council work.

The gap was specific. Zimbabweans were arriving in the UAE with products to sell, companies to pitch, capital to seek. They were not ready for the conversation they were trying to have. They did not understand the nuances of how the Gulf did business. And on the other side, the Gulf did not understand Zimbabwe.

“Afrigate came in to say, let’s help broker some of these conversations,” he says.

The reality check function became one of Afrigate’s most important services. He gives an example: a farmer who arrives with five thousand goats, ready to export. Afrigate’s first job is to tell him clearly that the numbers do not work. That the Gulf market operates at volumes his operation could not service. That, before any conversation about buyers or payment terms, the structure of what he is offering needs to change.

“Afrigate becomes the first reality check,” he says, “to say — you do not have the numbers. This actually doesn’t work.”

This is not a service that earns gratitude in the moment. But Nyaude’s understanding of what Afrigate is for extends beyond brokerage. It is, in his description, a walk — from the point where someone is wondering whether a market is possible, to the point where they are inside it and transacting. Sometimes that walk is long. Sometimes it begins with being told to go home and rebuild.

“There is no other place in the world where you can go with your capital and get 20% returns per annum. You go to Africa; you can easily get 20%. But capital is still shy of Africa because of the narrative.”

In February 2025, Nyaude spoke at the inaugural Family Business Summit in Zimbabwe, organized by Red Couch Advisory. He had met the summit’s founder, Sharon Bwanya, by chance at a table in Dubai. They had a conversation. She reached out afterwards. He told her he would do her one better than a list of pointers and come in person.

Rungano Nyaude at the Red Couch Advisory Summit, Zimbabwe - 2026

What he found at that first summit was a hunger he had not fully anticipated. Zimbabwean family businesses wanted to formalise. They wanted to understand how the Gulf managed generational transition, how economies built on family businesses had institutionalised that structure. They wanted, in the language of the summit, to protect what they had built.

In the Gulf, 80 to 90 per cent of businesses are family businesses. There are government departments dedicated to them. Government charters built around them. Zimbabwe, at that point, had none of that infrastructure.

By the time the second summit came around, something had shifted. Four or five Zimbabwean family businesses had set up UAE structures. A UAE investment bank had come to Zimbabwe to look at what was there. The connectivity was no longer theoretical.

“The growth in terms of connectivity between Zimbabwe and the UAE emanating from that family business summit has actually also been quite big,” he says. He says it without self-congratulation. It is an observation, not a boast.

Ask Nyaude what the institutions are getting wrong about the Africa-GCC corridor and he answers in layers, each one specific, each one earned.

The first is perception. The risk premium assigned to Africa is structurally too high. The cost of borrowing, the cost of capital, the cost of doing business — all inflated by a narrative that does not match the reality on the ground. He has seen it from both sides of the trade: the Zimbabwean who cannot access affordable finance because the market has already decided what their country is worth, and the Gulf investor who arrives expecting disorder and finds order.

The second is capitalisation on the shift that is already happening. The GCC has been investing in Africa because it understands where global trade is moving. Africa, in his view, has been slow to understand the same shift and slower still to build the relationships that make that investment productive. He points to Zimbabwe’s specific agricultural window — the months when Zimbabwe is harvesting blueberries, citrus, avocados and no one else in the world is — as an unrealised asset. He points to the rail connection from Harare to the DP World-operated container terminal at the Port of Maputo as infrastructure that exists and is underused.

The third is talent. Africa has the youngest population in the world. The GCC needs workers, professionals, and skilled people. The continent is not yet sending them strategically.

Then he adds something that was not in the question. He adds it unprompted, with a particular intensity that suggests it is, for him, the thing that sits beneath all the others.

“As Africans, we need to tell our story,” he says. “The narrative that is out there and the realities that we have on the ground are different. We see it every time someone travels to Zimbabwe, someone travels to any part of Africa — they come back and they will tell you what I saw and what I have read are two totally different things.”

He is, by this point, building something that is in part a storytelling operation. Afrigate. The Business Council. The summits. His own presence in the corridor as a named, visible professional. All of it serves the narrative. All of it is, in some sense, the work he describes.

"The cost of silence is higher than the cost of being known."

There is a certificate Nyaude holds that most people in his profession do not. He is a certified Mental Health First Aider. In the world of senior banking in the Gulf, it is an unusual credential. The story of how he got it is not the story he expected to tell.

His son Mako showed signs of exceptional ability early. He could work with even numbers before he could say his own name. But the nursery brought difficulties. Misunderstandings. Conflicts that escalated. Schools were changed abruptly. For a period, the phone calls from school became a frequency that shaped his days.

His wife’s work setup did not allow her to leave at short notice. His did. The logistics fell to Nyaude — his work allowed the flexibility that hers did not. He answered calls, dropped everything, showed up. He kept going. He kept functioning.

And then they took Mako to a specialist, and the picture clarified: he was on the spectrum. ADHD. A child who needed something the schools around him did not yet know how to give him.

Nyaude does not use the word ‘crisis’ for what followed, but the shape of what he describes is unmistakable. He was operating on adrenaline. He did not know who to talk to. He did not know how to ask for help. He travelled to Zimbabwe and spent hours locked in the Airbnb he had booked, seated on his own, trying to breathe. He came back. He still did not seek help. He carries this without accusation, but with the kind of clarity that comes from having understood it later.

“It’s one of the challenges that we as men have,” he says. “We don’t really seek help.”

When a programme within the bank advertised for volunteers to train as Mental Health First Aiders, he signed up. He did not sign up to help anyone else. He signed up, as he puts it, “as a disguise.”

“As I was going through it, I was also doing that therapy on myself,” he says. “In the end I became certified.”

He uses the certification in the bank now to point colleagues toward help. Not to provide it himself — he is clear about that boundary — but to open the door. To be the person who says: there is a direction. Here it is.

He says none of this with the ease of a man who has made peace with difficulty. He says it with the measured candour of someone who has decided that the cost of silence is higher than the cost of being known.

“Nobody else in my circle knew that I needed help.”

The graduate trainee who began her attachment in Dubai looking at international trade came through the Zimbabwean Business Council’s volunteer programme. Nyaude mentored her. He helped her think through her career. He helped her frame her dissertation. He pointed. She went.

Recently, just before he flew to Zimbabwe for the second Red Couch Advisory summit, an email arrived from one of Zimbabwe’s leading institutions focused on trade. They wanted a character reference. She had applied for their graduate programme.

She got in.

He tells this story not as a measure of his own success but as evidence that the thing he believes is true actually works: leadership, in his formulation, is measured by how many more leaders you create. The metric is not what you have built. It is who builds after you.

When Nyaude drives alone — a habit he has described, in conversations with this publication and elsewhere, as a form of moving meditation — he is processing. The inquiries that have come in. The opportunities to be sorted from the ones to be parked. The successes, which he says require their own kind of management: when pride comes in with the wins, the drives are how he brings himself back to the mission.

Ask him what the Rungano Nyaude of 2010 — young, newly arrived in Doha, still figuring out who he was as a person — would be most surprised by when he looks at the man who exists now, and he does not answer with a title or an achievement.

He says: The number of scars.

“It’s been a brutal journey,” he says. “We look at the good things, but it’s been a brutal journey.”

The MBA that arrived because Covid forced the question: if I go back to Zimbabwe today with only my undergraduate degree, I will be the most uneducated boss in the room. The anti-money laundering certification that came from a determination to speak the language of the room — to earn his place at the table not by rank alone, but by knowledge. 

He says the Rungano of 2010 would look at all of this and say: dude, what have you been doing?

And then, after a moment: that’s been a good journey.

“With its pitfalls,” he says. “With its flat tyres, with its burnouts and everything else. That’s been a good journey.”

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