It’s past noon on a blistering hot August afternoon in Dubai Silicon Oasis, but Yacoub Sidya is the picture of cool. Donning dark shades and casually dressed in a grey T-shirt, denim jeans and white sneakers, he is behind the wheel of his shiny, black Mercedes G-wagon, weaving in and out of the city’s grating traffic. To an onlooker from afar, he looks like the archetypal trust fund baby with his manly charm and boyish good looks. But Yacoub Sidya, one of Mauritania’s most successful businessmen, has never had anything handed to him on a platter.
“It’s funny because people generally look at me and see the business we’ve been able to build over the last 15 years, and everyone assumes I had a lot of help from some wealthy relative somewhere, but nothing could be farther from the truth,” Sidya says.
Yacoub Sidya, 40, is the founder of MSS Security, Mauritania’s largest security company. MSS Security, which he founded in 2003 at the age of 24, is now one of the largest employers of labour in Mauritania, a small West African country with a population of roughly 3.5 million.
The company employs more than 1,500 people in Mauritania alone, with another 2,000 spread across Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Congo DRC and Burkina Faso, while clients include the United Nations, central banks, and several of the world’s largest mining companies with operations in West Africa. Sidya also runs PPM Holding (Phoenix Precious Metals DMCC), a Dubai-based gold trading and mining company that owns 12 licenses in multiple African countries. He has personally invested $15 million in his flagship Mandiana gold mining project in Guinea which has been in full production since December 2018 and is currently producing circa 30kg per month.
Sidya was born in Mauritania in 1978 and was raised by a middle-class single mother in Nouakchott, the capital city. After he acquired his High School Diploma in the country, he proceeded to study Business Administration at the Northern Kentucky University on a soccer scholarship. After college, he worked for Town and Country Sports complex in Northern Kentucky where he did everything from coaching young kids to refereeing games and working the concession stands.
A few months after he started working for Town and Country, a Mauritanian friend of his in Washington DC called him and asked him if he was interested in a job in Telecoms – a field he knew little about. There was an American telecoms company looking to hire a French-speaking employee for a role in West Africa and his friend had recommended Sidya for the job.