It is a chilly Friday morning in New York and I am sitting in the back of a black SUV on its way to pick up supermodel Alek Wek from her brownstone Brooklyn home. It was meant to be a glamor photo shoot in the wide open spaces of upstate New York with the supermodel-turned-businesswoman-turned-activist. The temperamental weather in New York had other ideas and simply would not let us be great outdoor Africans. A weather advisory warning of a snow blizzard had been issued. New Yorkers are overly sensitive about the weather for good reason; Hurricane Sandy had torn at the city earlier in the year. I took the cue from my New York crew and booked a studio close-to-home in Brooklyn to minimize travel and exposure to inclement weather.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-31063 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A9124-232x300.jpeg" alt="" width="232" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A9124-232x300.jpeg 232w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A9124-300x388.jpeg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A9124-600x776.jpeg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A9124.jpeg 612w" sizes="(max-width: 232px) 100vw, 232px" />
Wek is as much a supermodel as she is the girl-next-door. She commands the runways in the name of fashion designers such as: Chanel, Hermes, Donna Karan, Christian Lacroix and Zac Posen. Her career has thrived in Paris, New York, Milan and London and she has also appeared on the covers of high-end fashion magazines such as Elle, Glamor, Cosmopolitan and Essence. She has also been the face of campaigns for Benetton, Kenzo and Saks Fifth Avenue.
No small feat for an African girl born in Wau, Sudan, now South Sudan, in 1977 to a family of nine. Speaking softly in her British accent, Wek talks of her life, between sips from the coffee cup clasped between her hands.
“Our careers define us to an extent, but then there’s you as a person. You are not born with that career even though you have it already in you. For most of us, and especially us African women, we have to overcome a lot of obstacles to get there. And even when you get there, however you define there for yourself, there is still more to accomplish.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-31065 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A7868-300x225.jpeg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A7868-300x225.jpeg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A7868-600x450.jpeg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A7868-768x576.jpeg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A7868.jpeg 864w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Despite the fact that she is one of Africa’s global icons, she has a pleasant disposition and we chat like old friends as the driver deftly drives us through the snowy roads to the studio.
That Wek has defied all beauty standards is obvious. Dressed in skinny jeans, layered tops, winter jacket and her trademark head scarf, she stands at 180cm tall, with short hair. Wek is from the Dinka tribe of South Sudan, with piercing, oval-shaped brown eyes, high cheek bones and teeth whiter than white. It is an understatement to say Wek’s features are striking: very model material in a nouveau kind of way.
“I came into the industry at a time when some people would say: ‘she’s odd, she’s weird, she’s bizarre.’ But I never saw myself that way and the true people, the legends, the talented, saw me.”
As Wek slips into a gown made by fellow African David Tlale, of Johannesburg, she also assumes her professional power. In front of the camera, she epitomizes the confidence of the new generation of African leaders.
Her head wrap is more than a fashion statement. It is a reminder of the place she came from, where her fragile frame survived only through incredible strength and resilience.
“I have gone through the civil war where we were barricaded in our house for three days because of the shootings and bombings. The scariest thing for me was feeling like there is nobody to protect you and nobody’s life is accounted for. I used to have nightmares when we fled to England. It took me some years to get over that.”
Wek has never forgotten these desperate days. As her fame rose, she found her voice to speak for the millions of huddled and vulnerable refugees around the world.
“I know firsthand what it feels like to walk for weeks and weeks. I know what it feels like to eat whatever you can find in the bush. I know what it is like to be voiceless,” she declares as she describes the journey she undertook as her family fled from rebel and government forces, when civil war raged in her hometown in 1985.
Wek arrived in London, aged 14, and was discovered soon after by a Models 1 scout in a South London market and has been a model ever since.
“I model in moderation now. It is not the quantity, but the quality of my work. I also want to make time and space for the next phase of my life. I would love to settle down, get married and have children.”
So much so, that Wek has scaled back her work so she can live a more grounded life. This year, she ended a five-year relationship.
“For him, it was more like a three-year relationship since I traveled a lot. I then realized that I have to live in the same country as the man in order for this marriage thing to happen!” Not one to pine for long, she is back in the dating scene and also dotes on a fox terrier by the name of Lil Bit.
Wek says her mother is a true African mother.
“Whenever I visit mom in England, and we sit down to have supper, the first question is always: ‘The babies?’ So, I get to practice with my Lil Bit,” laughs Wek.
At 36, she is a grown woman—an African woman with a strong sense of self and purpose in life.
“If anything, fashion and modeling has not only given me trips to the most exotic locations around the world, fantastic perks, stays in five-star hotels and expensive gifts. Most importantly, it has given me a platform with which to make a difference on important issues that matter to me.”
This stance earned Wek a position as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in which she travels to war-torn nations.
In 2011, South Sudan split from the Sudan, as part of a 2005 peace agreement that ended decades of protracted war in the continent’s largest country.
“Freedom is so special and so precious,” she speaks cautiously, as if she were reliving her traumatic childhood.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-31066 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A8551-300x212.jpeg" alt="" width="300" height="212" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A8551-300x212.jpeg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A8551-600x424.jpeg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A8551-768x542.jpeg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DONE_3T4A8551.jpeg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
For the first time, since she fled from the region with her family, the Sudanese refugee-turned-supermodel went back to South Sudan.
“Going back after South Sudan became independent was very emotional for me. I never really thought that we would attain independence. It was a very surreal moment for me,” she says fighting back tears.
She is guarded when I ask her to rate the new president of South Sudan, Salva Kii.
“It would be unfair to try to rate him so soon and I will tell you why. When someone has been in the bush for decades fighting a war and now has to make a considerable switch to lead the country, you have to cut him or her some slack.”
Wek is mindful that South Sudan is a collective effort—a collaboration among stakeholders including the government and citizens.
“I truly believe that it is our generation. Us. You and I and the rest of the continent and diaspora. We are the ones we have been waiting for.”   FL

DONE_3T4A7835

The beauty that tumbled from war

Widely regarded as one of the best business leaders to have emerged from Africa over the past 20 years, there is not the slightest embarrassment on the face of this self-taught entrepreneur as he admits to having no investments—none whatsoever—other than the shares he has in Discovery Holdings, the company he formed over 21 years ago and built into a global diversified financial services group with an annual income of more than $4 billion (R40 billion).
With glee, he says he doesn’t subscribe to the conventional investment caveat of not putting your eggs in one basket. So, he is invested to the hilt in Discovery, now the largest health insurer in South Africa, of which he owns about 9%, part of a personal fortune of close to $300 million (R3 billion).
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2177" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CTP9533-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
Welcome to the world of, the sometimes maverick, Adrian Gore.
It is a day after Gore released more than respectable annual results for the year that ended on June 30. The results showed that the group had achieved a 20% increase in normalized headline earnings, to almost $281 million (R2,8 billion), while cash generated from operations was up by 45% to over $201 million (R2 billion). All this with a 15% rise in new business to $1 billion (R10 billion), mainly in Britain, China and the United States.
An ebullient Gore intimates that taking on the rest of the African continent could be in the offing in another three to five years.
“You don’t have to be first. I see a massive opportunity. Health insurance requires private health systems not yet present in Africa.”
Not that he hadn’t tried before; the company had to reassess its strategy following a couple of dud acquisitions.
“Ours is about building a product—not buy a business and bring costs down to make a profit. We create value for customers,” he says.
Gore’s contemporary, Barry Swartzberg, with whom he left Liberty to start Discovery and remains an executive director, was asked recently how the two complemented one another.
“He’s more thoughtful, works on aspects, takes a long time to mull over ideas.”
An actuary by training, Gore has spent the past 21 years changing the world of medical insurance in South Africa. Today, the company is a fully-fledged financial services entity after adding insurance and life asset management to its portfolio.
Gore now wants to change the world, and looks like he’s very much on the way—one country at a time.
In China, Discovery has a 25% stake in Ping An Health Insurance, the country’s largest private health insurer. It does business with companies like Volvo, Unilever and Goldman Sachs. In Britain, the company has created the fourth largest insurer in an alliance with old stager Prudential. It also has ties to Humana Inc in the United States, and the AIA Group in Singapore.
“China remains a huge growth market, with the estimated total healthcare spend expected to rise by over 90% by 2020. Private healthcare spend is expected to grow even stronger over this period. Ping An has established itself as the leader in Critical Illness Insurance and related spend, a strong position to be in given that approximately 65% of deaths are classified as non-communicable diseases. By increasing their stake, Discovery has identified this opportunity,” says Nick Crail, a portfolio manager at RMB Private Bank.
“Getting into these markets is brutal,” Gore says.
“There’s no easy way or short cut. Each market takes time.”
The market appears to approve of the AIA deal in Singapore. On the day it was signed, Discovery shares shot up 6.6%.
“The AIA deal entrenches Discovery’s footprint across the growth markets of Asia, excluding Japan, giving them access to 17 markets in the region with total assets of approximately $147 billion. Discovery has entered this market through their offering in Vitality. This will therefore be a cost exercise for them for the first few years, but should realise profits into the future,” says Crail.
“I think, judging by the rally in the share price, that the market has already priced in much of these ‘blue-sky’ ventures. Their recent trading update unsettled markets somewhat and we would expect investors to be more cautious in driving up the share price too strongly. Therefore we wouldn’t expect much more in the share price to year-end. Having said that, we like Discovery and believe in their long-term outlook.”
In Britain and the United States, Discovery entered markets that were already established, with a great deal of certainty, facing a myriad of competitors and very tight regulations. It made it difficult for Discovery to innovate as much, or as well, as it would have wanted. A developing market like China, on the other hand, while posing lots of possibilities, is a frontier that still calls for a fair amount of learning and cautious optimism.
Tenacity from the pioneering years of their South African operations has made Discovery able to withstand pressure and adapt.
“South Africa is a small but more sophisticated market than we are getting credit for,” says Gore.
Paul Theron, CEO of asset managers Vestact, says Gore’s character has been one of the key factors behind Discovery’s success.
“His growth has been amazing. It wasn’t a completely unique product that he was selling, coming out of Investec to start Discovery. But to go from that tiny firm to span into a global expansion has been brilliant.”
“They had some problems in the US. But in the UK they have been able to offer a good product around Vitality. The intellectual property is certainly something that will do well there. Incentivizing people with a healthy lifestyle will certainly take off. Along with the operational expertize having been around for a good number of years. Many people can come up with a good idea, but to actually make it work and have it run successfully over a number of years is an entirely different matter,” he says.
Discovery’s latest foray is into Singapore. It was announced in July, but Gore has little to say months later.
“We haven’t divulged the details of the transaction,” he says.
It is a trait of Gore that he has little to say about his missions until they are accomplished. This has been since the day he left Liberty Life, after developing the itch to start a small medical insurance unit within financial services group FirstRand, through the listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange to unbundling from the parent company. It led to Discovery claiming more than half of the South African health insurance market. A story of more bite, less bark from the man who keeps to himself.
Laurie Dippenaar, who is 23rd on the FORBES list of the 40 Richest Africans and the father of FirstRand, was the man who gave Gore his shot. He has a clear memory of their first meeting.
“You could immediately see this guy was different. He was not the typical chartered accountant nerdy smart. You could see he had intelligence but he also had business sense, all the qualities that make you a success. I think he is actually one of the smartest business people I have ever met.”
According to Dippenaar, Gore’s first pitch didn’t go as well as he planned. The life insurance scheme was too much like others.
“To this day he says I got it wrong. A year later he comes up and says he’s got something completely different. From life insurance he had gone to a health insurance. He started to describe what he had in mind and I could immediately see he was onto something.”
This something was Discovery.
“When he described that medical savings account, it was a pioneer move in South Africa. I remembered when I was a bachelor and paying all these premiums for health insurance. You are young and healthy you don’t need to claim. All you do is pay premiums. Here was a product where you could carry forward some of the premiums if you were not claiming. In theory you could get into a situation where you didn’t have any premiums to pay,” says Dippenaar.
Gore left his job and Dippenaar gave him three months to draw up a business plan, in Dippenaar’s own offices.
“He never had any hesitation. He came up with the numbers. We liked it. So we backed him,” he says.
Gore is undoubtedly a darling of his shareholders, as well as share speculators, but that’s not to say he is liked by all. He has made enemies and detractors. He stands accused, for example, of squeezing competitors out at every opportunity, a charge Gore denies vehemently.
“I don’t think that is fair. We are strong competitors and more competition is good for society. We do nothing unfairly.”
It’s not only competitors who are unhappy. Doctors have taken issue with Discovery’s payment rates, where practitioners are forced to cap their rates and accept smaller fees. Gore’s defence? Nothing wrong with the practice.
“After all, we are the paymaster.”
What about the hundreds of thousands of people covered by Discovery Health? Some of them think Discovery is making huge profits on the back of above-inflation medical rate increases, while bombarding them with peripheral benefits like gym contracts.
Furious customers, writing on a business news website on the day of Gore’s announcement of financial results, complained bitterly about forever shrinking benefits, while others used words like “robbery”, “rip off” and “gimmicks” to describe Vitality, Discovery’s rewards-for-healthy-living scheme.
“These are natural issues,” Gore says, “they see the money we make.”
It doesn’t bother him much, though, as experience shows that customers stick with Discovery.
“The customer satisfaction rate is very high,” he says proudly.
Honesty and optimism have been driving forces at Discovery from the day it was established, says the man who prides himself for being, in his own words: innovative and prudent.
“Building insurance around making people healthy may be quite soppy”, he says, but it has been the key to success in international markets.
“We know where to be bold, and when to be reticent. We are pushing hard on the ground, taking no prisoners. We are ruthless.”
Gore’s steely, and ruthless, determination is often likened to that of Steve Jobs, the late genius who founded Apple and who was liked and hated in equal measure; depending, of course, who was telling the story.
There are two framed pictures of Steve Jobs in Gore’s office. One is from a business leadership article and the other is from a cover of the Economist magazine.
Gore is at pains to explain that Jobs graced the cover in the same edition that carried a story about Discovery. In the piece, the Economist hails the innovation of Discovery’s Vitality program as an example of how quickly new ideas are starting to flow out of emerging markets to challenge the world.
As for Jobs, Gore finds him very inspiring—especially for his obsession with one product.
“The obsession with a solution for society,” says Gore, who says he uses this belief at Discovery.
“Every organization must be started by someone,” Gore says, “owner-manager culture has a certain drive to it, a certain authenticity.”
Discovery’s success owes much to its founding team, most of whom are still with the company.
“But what’s most exciting about Discovery is that the future is ahead of us,” Gore says.
That future, though, may be under threat. At least, according to analysts.
The private health care industry is nervous about the announcement by the South African government—the continent’s biggest economy and a huge contributor to Discovery’s profits—that it is planning to introduce National Health Insurance (NHI). It will be funded through taxes and administered by the state; the NHI will strive to give health care to all.
Some analysts believe it will make a huge dent in medical insurance industry profits, big enough to send a few of them under. They single out Discovery as one company on the risk list because of high administration and managed care charges.
“We will have to adapt in some way, but I don’t think it’s threatening at all,” says Gore.
Gore says while NHI was excellent and rational and could strengthen the public system dramatically, it won’t supplant the country’s private health system and will take much longer to introduce than the 12-13 years the government has given itself.
If history is anything to go by, there can be no doubt Gore and his team—called the best brains in the industry—are busy preparing, which probably explains Discovery’s involvement in at least one NHI pilot project.
“Status quo is undesirable. You can’t have huge portions of the population with no access to proper health care. It’s not good for the country. I don’t think a great business exists on the back of dysfunctionality. You can’t exist at the expense of society. You’ve got to be part of society,” says Gore.
But what is he doing for that society? That is, when not ensuring that everyone is covered, or spending time with his wife, his two university student daughters, and the son he takes to school every day.
Driven by a philosophy that only entrepreneurs create jobs, Gore chairs Endeavor South Africa, the local chapter of a global non-profit organization that seeks to identify and nurture young entrepreneurial talent. It’s where he hopes to find, mentor and offer a break to future Gores – perhaps in pretty much the same way Dippenaar did for him 21 years ago. First lesson, don’t take prisoners.

A Maverick  In Rude Health

Even when he was a 12-year-old sitting in a church pew, Laurie Dippenaar was thinking about numbers. The sermon bored him so he would guess how much each person would put in the collection plate; then he would work out the total. This was how deeply the roots of people and money run in his life.
Fifty three years on from the church pew, Dippenaar sits in a more comfortable chair, in a well upholstered boardroom in Sandton, the business district of Johannesburg. These days, his collection plate is worth $625 million; a fortune he has built carefully over the last 30 years. He is the father of FirstRand, a financial investment company, and the grandfather of First National Bank (FNB), Rand Merchant Bank Holdings (RMBH), OUTsurance, and Discovery Health; all of which are pillars of South African business. Dippenaar has built an empire on old business, but is more interested in the new. It has been some ride.
They say when Dippenaar is involved in a deal, it’s always a big deal. It’s one reason why he’s listed at number 23 on the FORBES ‘Africa’s 40 Richest list’. Try telling him that.
“To me it’s senseless. Success is not money; there are thousands of things that people are very successful at that don’t involve money. In business it’s one of the measurements, but it’s not the only measurement of success. People can say how they built a business, but it’s irrelevant what the founder’s net worth is,” says Dippenaar.
From a humble middle-class home to Menlo Park High School in Pretoria, South Africa, to riches. It was a journey that was helped by being at the right place at the right time. In his case, that meant working with GT Ferreira and Paul Harris, the men with whom he would build the FirstRand Empire, the second largest financial services company in South Africa.
Dippenaar grew up talking about kidneys and livers around the dinner table. Of his family of six, four are doctors. But he says the calling to save lives was not his. He knew he was different. He recalls reading the Financial Times from an early age, something he does to this day. Dippenaar always likes contextualizing numbers.
“Any person who has a business, I am intrigued at how it works, what its key things are. Some guys might like cars, I like business. Any business,” he says.
Success did not come overnight. It took 30 years of hard work—waking up at 4AM and leaving at 8PM—with a lot of tough decisions over hard business facts.
It was a difficult choice for young Dippenaar when he went to university. He wanted to be a lawyer, but ended up a chartered accountant.
Dippenaar saw his chance during his only three years of working for someone else. He worked as an investigating accountant at the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), a South African government institution that bankrolls companies.
“That’s where the big idea came. They had a structure called leverage leasing and I used to work with it a lot. I thought this has got huge applications in financial services,” says Dippenaar.
In a leveraged lease, the lending company, in this case IDC, holds the title to the leased asset, while the lessor creates the agreement with the lessee and collects the payment. The payments are then passed on to the lender.
In 1977, Dippenaar left. With leverage leasing in mind, he teamed up with Ferreira and Pat Goss, with whom he worked at the IDC, and created Rand Consolidated Investments (RCI). All they had was a secretary and R10,000. At the time, the rand was worth a dollar, says Dippenaar, even so, in today’s context, the seed capital would be worth around $9,000. It meant that they did not draw a salary for nine months.
Goss left the company after three months when his father died. Dippenaar and Ferreira bought him out, in a trade-off for shares in the Goss family business and a racehorse called Scoop. Goss left with a R500 ($50) stake in RCI. Today, Goss’s current shareholding with the company is worth R740 million ($74 million). The racehorse did not do as well.
Harris, another university friend was called to fill the gap. The company grew from R10,000 to profit after tax of R657,000 in four years.
It meant RCI borrowed money on long-term capital markets off the balance sheet of its clients. In effect, they were able to become their own bank.
In 1983, six years into the business, RCI was approached by Johann Rupert, the second richest man in Africa worth $5.3 billion, who wanted to sell his bank, Rand Merchant Bank (RMB). Rupert was going back to the family business, Rembrandt Group, and needed to offload.
The opportunity was too good to pass up, says Dippenaar. RCI sold into RMB and got a controlling stake of the company, which they named Rand Merchant Bank Holdings Group (RMBH); while RMB remained a subsidiary. The deal gave Dippenaar and his crew a banking license and a chance to diversify. By 1988, RMBH was making profits of R13 million ($1.3 million) a year.
“We decided you have to operate under some sort of regulatory regime, you can’t just be out there if you are financial services. So, we explored different regulatory regimes and we decided on banking,” says Dippenaar. This was the first of three massive company takeovers.
In 1992, the company decided it needed an entity that could yield a steadier flow of income. The answer was Momentum Life, a life insurance company. Dippenaar carried a reverse takeover and sold RMBH to Momentum Life for a majority share and formed Discovery Health, now the largest private healthcare company in South Africa.
By the time democracy came in 1994, Dippenaar was just getting into his stride. He could see that a number of big international investment banks would be looking to the country. The company needed a retail bank strategy.
“Our next move as a sort of defense mechanism, we bought 20% of the old Natal Building Society (NBS) bank. We wanted a controlling stake but they decided against it. We sold the shares.”
“In 1998, we identified Southern Life. It was ailing at the time, so we decided it was a target we could take over and fix. We approached Anglo-American and they said if you want Southern Life, you have to take FNB [First National Bank] as well. It fitted into our strategy, it was a retail bank, but it was a massive deal. It was beyond our size. But we took it as a massive opportunity, the next very large deal,” he says.
RMBH needed to raise R5 billion ($500 million) in new capital, in a day or two, in order to seal the deal, according to Dippenaar.
“It would have ranked, at the time, as one of the bigger merger deals in the world,” he says.
Out of this, FirstRand was born. It was to become the second largest financial services company in South Africa, with normalized earnings of R12.7 billion ($1.27 billion) in 2012.
It’s all about being rational. The golden thread that binds FirstRand together is a 30-year-old pay-off line.
“I know what made us successful. You can almost capture it in four words: ‘Traditional values, innovative ideas’. Our companies have very strong value systems.”
Dippenaar says this makes for a culture of entrepreneurs.
“FNB, under Michael Jordaan—who was steeped in this culture—has made the bank one of the most innovative in South Africa. We spawned Discovery which has reshaped the whole of the medical insurance industry. We spawned OUTsurance, which has rewritten short-term insurance. We like to think we are no holy cow. There is no space where a junior cannot challenge his boss, in fact we encourage it. As long as you are polite about it,” he adds.
It was Dippenaar who gave Adrian Gore, today the guiding spirit of Discovery, his shot.
Gore remembers their first meeting. As a young actuary in 1991, he says he was taken aback by Dippenaar’s intelligence and strong thoughts of what he needed to grow his idea. When Gore and Dippenaar meet, it’s business over the breakfast table.
“It’s a good time in the day to have an intense discussion. There is always some deep issue he wants to talk about and it’s always a treat. Even when he has breakfast he’s thinking. Dippenaar has the ability to build businesses that are based on real social values and real nation building&#8230; it’s not fair to call him a businessman; he’s much more than that,” says Gore.
It’s a partnership that has lasted 20 years and is responsible for the health of 2.5 million people. Gore is planning to expand into Asia, and Dippenaar is likely to be along for the ride.
So what did Dippenaar do when the recession hit like a flash flood in a desert?
The global financial crisis hit FirstRand hard. Dippenaar and the crew lost R1.4 billion ($140 million) in overseas earnings. It was the biggest loss since the company began.
“It was an Armageddon of unbelievable proportions in financial services… there may be a few who hedged a bet, they might have foreseen something, but not what finally happened,” he says.
The United States had a housing bubble, built on subprime mortgage-backed securities against property price estimates. It popped. Dippenaar had planned for everything, but he never thought the bubble would deliver such a blow.
“No one had any idea of the knock-on effect of the popping of that housing bubble. When the property prices started collapsing, that’s when people started discovering the banks had extended credit in the most irresponsible manner and no one had any inkling of the effect on massive banks.”
The company weathered the storm, thanks to a strong balance sheet and copious reserves. It was a storm that forced banks around the world to tighten their belts with stricter regulation.
“The thing that has hurt them [the public] and angered them is that the tax payer, in many countries, has had to bear the brunt of failed banks. So, poor decision-making in banks, which were too big to fail, had to have the state inject capital at the tax payers’ expense. It’s a very legitimate gripe,” he says.
In business, says Dippenaar, risks change all the time and the key is to stay confident.
“If you had an ounce of doubt that we would not be able to pay you back, you would be gone. It’s that confidence; it’s the customer’s confidence in your product,” he says.
One risk of the day in South Africa is unsecured lending. The South African National Credit Regulator shows that this risky lending has grown from $711 million to $2.9 billion in five years.
Unsecured lending has opened the way for banks to boost their interest margins as home loans, one of the mainstays of banking, have tightened following the global financial crisis.
It means that more banks are offering loans without collateral. In return, the borrower must pay more interest. The risk is that if the borrower runs into trouble, banks must go through a costly process to claw back the loan, without any assets to help them.
The growth in unsecured lending has spooked international credit rating agencies such as Moody’s Investors Service, which threatens further rating reductions. This could lead to higher interest rates for borrowers.
“We reflect the increased risk of such shocks occurring in our negative outlook on the South African sovereign [rating]. This outlook also reflects the country’s extreme socio-economic challenges, which, in turn, threaten its longer-term economic and political stability,” according to investors from Moody’s.
Even giants such as FirstRand are trying to surf the unsecured lending wave. Last year, FirstRand increased unsecured lending by 27% to $467 million, while home loans grew a mere 2%. In May, African Bank Investments wrote off $45.2 million of bad loans and registered a 26% drop in first-half profit this year.
“It’s a problematic area. And there is going to be a lot of pain,” says Dippenaar.
Through the pain, is a legacy of FirstRand entrepreneurs. Dippenaar says they sold $40 million of their shares to entrepreneurs whom they believe will be the next generation of FirstRand top dogs; this will give the entrepreneurs some skin in the game.

A MAN FOR ALL NUMBERS,  WHO TURNED $50 INTO $74 MILLION

It’s 10AM on a Thursday on Victoria Island, Lagos; the pulse of the Nigerian financial world is racing. Blue-chip boardrooms buzz; so does the traffic. I’ve eased my way to the serene offices of a man who surveys it all from the 12th floor.
The view is framed by the Atlantic Ocean to the south and some of Nigeria’s richest buildings to the north. From his vantage point, Jim Ovia can pick out the twin pillars of his success. Across the city is the unmistakable red of Zenith Bank, where he made most of his $825-million fortune. Company insiders say that his wealth is nearer $1 billion after a string of lucrative deals this year. Also on the Lagos horizon are Visafone billboards, his telecommunications business and moneymaker, with a current subscriber base of  around 2.3 million.
Inside the huge office are shelves of plaques, awards and photographs of Ovia with Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Goodluck Jonathan, alongside pieces of literature and art.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1814" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/BW0A9875-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
Dressed in a well-cut suit, he greets me like an old friend. They call him ‘the godfather of Nigerian banking’ and in many ways, he is. Banking is where he began life as a clerk; it was also the vehicle that carried him to his fortune. He created West Africa’s largest financial services provider, according to market capitalization and assets.
Ovia transformed Zenith from a small commercial bank into a financial services conglomerate, with operations in private and retail banking and investments around the world. After nearly two decades at the helm he stepped down, but he remains its largest individual shareholder with a 15% stake in the company.
“When we started Zenith in 1990, it was extremely difficult as the necessary resources and infrastructure to do business, particularly banking, were not in place. There were no ATMs, no mobile phones and ICT was a rarely known concept in the business space,” he says.
“When, in 1990, banking licenses were being issued, indigenous private individuals were being offered the opportunity to set up financial institutions. Prior to that, you either needed to be a foreign global financial institution, or a federal or state government institution, to own or set up a bank in Nigeria. Businesses and entrepreneurs could not possibly get these licenses because of the prerequisites attached. It was perceived then, that Nigeria did not have the technical expertise to run or manage banks.”
A surge of liberalization soon changed this. On May 30, 1990, doors were opened for Ovia and 119 other hopefuls, who received their bank licenses. It was a long-awaited breakthrough. Ovia and his team got down to work quickly. They commenced operations on July 16 for what proved to be a rocky beginning, with technology very thin on the ground.
Improvisation was the way forward. Ovia had to be creative with the sparse telecommunications and financial services on offer. In time, with the help of improved infrastructure, the bank found its feet.
Ovia saw a silver lining, then noticed the cloud. The introduction of ATMs to Nigeria was not an easy one. It proved difficult to win over people who had grown up with counters and rubber stamps. People worried about fraud and it also took time and feasibility studies to decide where to place the ATMs. Ovia and his team persevered and Zenith blossomed.
Banking isn’t Ovia’s only game. He also owns an expansive real estate portfolio with landmark commercial and residential properties. These include the Civic Centre  and an exclusive boat club, Aquamarine in Lagos, where Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, is a member. Ovia is known to have a weakness for expensive boats.
It is his infectious entrepreneurial passion that paid for this lifestyle.
“Your passions are always in sync with opportunities. You’re naturally able to identify them and respond to them as they materialize because of the passion you have for them,” he says.
It is an intuition that has driven Ovia through life as an entrepreneur. Choices came early for the young Ovia, who grew up one of many children in a large family in Akbor in Nigeria’s Delta State. As a young man, Ovia pondered what to study. He was encouraged by his uncles, who had run successful businesses, to pursue a qualification in business administration. To this day, for most Nigerian families, business administration, alongside medicine, law, accounting and engineering are the keys to success. Ovia went for it and enrolled for a degree in business administration at Southern University, Louisiana, in the States.
“It so happened that halfway through my studies, my keen interest in computer science and information technology was heightened… I couldn’t help it and decided to incorporate computer science into my program. One of my uncles advised me against this, as he reckoned that it was an immature industry at that point. Business administration was the way forward,” he says.
Ovia carried on regardless of avuncular warnings.
“Like any young man, I was full of hopes… [there were] tremendous opportunities in the future. It wasn’t so much what you studied but what you did with the knowledge that mattered.”
Ovia earned an MBA from the University of Louisiana, after which he returned to Nigeria to do his National Youth Service Corps, where he worked with one of the government-owned banks. He secured a job with First National Bank of Chicago—then International Merchant Bank—in Lagos, where he was trained as a financial analyst. This was just one of many strings to Ovia’s bow.
“I’ve worked as everything, from a junior clerical officer in a bank to a middle management trainee. I really did work my way up the ladder. I had enjoyed banking as a profession right from the onset and because of the passion I had for it, it became a place that I went to be happy. I worked 16 hours a day and I enjoyed every minute of it,” he says.
Many years later, Ovia knew the business inside-out and nurtured his brainchild, Zenith Bank, to rude health. ICT was the next fertile field.
“The way I see it, all are seamlessly interwoven. You can’t do telecommunications without combining information and vice versa. As part of my interwoven passions, it became my immediate desire, and the next level of evolution for me was the establishment of a mobile phone company,” he says.
Ovia was one of the early players in the internet space and established a company called Cyberspace in 1995, when the internet was almost unheard of in Nigeria.
“We were the pioneering set of internet service providers in the country and it was very challenging back then because there were no submarine fiber optic cables to give us the bandwidth and speed we needed to download data. We then had to rely on satellite dishes that would provide this speed to log into any portal out of the country,” he says.
As the private sector fought steadily for its place, the government kept a firm grasp on major sectors, especially telecommunications. Nigerian Telecommunications (NITEL) enjoyed a monopoly.
“It had the density of only about 0.04 percent, which equated to about 250 entities and homes sharing a telephone line. There were hardly 450,000 existing lines for an entire population of about 120 million Nigerians then. Today, we have about three other submarine cables that enable high-speed broadband technology internet services in the country.”
Ovia’s telecommunications company, Visafone, was another testament to his faith in timing and instinct. The Nigerian government, after an apparent communications epiphany, decided to license the Global System for Communications (GSM) services to a few bidders. Ovia didn’t participate in this auction—an opportunity every bidder couldn’t afford to miss back then.
“All my attention was focused on building a strong financial institution at that point, I couldn’t afford to be distracted and the timing was unfortunately not good for me. Failure is an opportunity to learn&#8230; You can only succeed when you fail, get up and then run again. I was determined to keep running.”
Ovia’s philosophy on setbacks was useful when a new directive from the Central Bank of Nigeria, on the tenure of bank CEOs, forced him to step down from an organization he had built from scratch.
“I immediately took it in my stride and couldn’t find any reason for resistance… I’m in fact glad that decision was made, because it also opened up tremendous opportunities for me and this allowed me to move on to accomplish new things I wouldn’t have had the time for.”
With this philosophy in mind, Ovia started anew. Along one of the major roads in Victoria Island, Ozumba Mbadiwe, is the waterfront, which used to be refuse dump. A drive along this road saw the genesis of Ovia’s real estate empire.
“I saw an opportunity on this refuse dump and decided to transform it into something else. The result of this foresight is the famous Lagos Civic Centre—a masterpiece event venue on the waterfront. This development immediately opened up other opportunities,” says Ovia.
Lagos, a metropolitan mega-city with a population of around 21 million, scores poorly when it comes to hotel rooms per head. Ovia saw the gap. As the result of a multi million dollar deal, the Lagos Marriott Hotel is set to open in December next year.
“This is one of the ways to create an enabling environment for the future of tourism in Nigeria,” says Ovia.
Philanthropy is equally important to him. He has embarked on the establishment of a free, co-educational high school, James Hope College, in Delta State, the place where he pondered his future as a young man. The school, an 18-month project, launches in September with an initial capacity for 420 students. He is also the founder of Mankind United To Support Total Education (MUSTE), an organization providing scholarships for the underprivileged.
“This will provide an opportunity for our future leaders. It is a mission I’m thrilled to drive, as it is a great investment in the future of my country. The first thing you learn in business is to make profit. However, how you choose to spend the profits is just as important. Philanthropy is important to me as I derive more joy from spending mine this way. You need to give back, reach out to the larger society and less privileged,” he says.
In the past year, Ovia gave $6.3 million to help the rehabilitation of flood victims across Nigeria. He also runs a non-governmental organization for young Nigerians that drives social change through information and communications technologies. Ovia is a father of five and a family man.
“Family is very important and I derive tremendous joy from being with [them]. I’ve always been family-focused. My father had three wives and I have almost a dozen siblings but we’ve always been very close-knit,” he says.
While he is revered by many, Ovia has also been influenced by a few. One of his inspirations is Akintola Williams, the first African to qualify as a chartered accountant, whose firm, Akintola Williams &amp; Co., was founded in 1952. The company merged with two other accounting firms to create Akintola Williams Deloitte, the largest professional services firm in Nigeria today—a position it has held since 2004.
“This 94-year-old man is someone that I have so much respect and gratitude for. He inspired me very greatly, because he’s a man of honor, integrity and an unbelievable level of discipline,” says Ovia.
Ovia learned from many to become the fourth richest man in Nigeria and the 19th richest in Africa. I ask him about his fortune but he becomes reticent.
“Wealth means nothing to me—it’s what you do with it that is truly important. Yes, I am blessed but there is really nothing special about me. I’m just a regular guy who has a hunch for identifying opportunities and taking advantage of them.”
He says that he achieved his success by remaining truthful to every partner and stakeholder.
“Honesty and integrity are key. Always honor contracts. That speaks volumes. It’s very important to be of tremendous integrity. There are really no shortcuts. Those who try to take shortcuts will always fail,” he says.
When it comes to Nigeria and its entrepreneurs, Ovia is fulsome, believing that with improving infrastructure and the privatization of the power sector, the country is a breeding ground for entrepreneurial spirit.
“Nigeria will be a gold mine in the next few years… Every day, international airlines are fully-booked to come to Nigeria and the only reason they do this is because the return on investment here is one of the highest in the world. I’m very proud to be a Nigerian because this country gives… tremendous opportunity to blossom,” he says.
Nigeria is a country that rewards hard work and Ovia says that some foreign investors misunderstand the terrain. The solution, he says, is understanding that while the work is tough, it is very rewarding.
Zenith has seen the fruits of this kind of hard work. This was reflected in the 2012 financial year, as it achieved $634 million profit after tax, according to reports released by the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) a grand feat that not only saw it become the first bank to cross the 100 billion naira mark within a financial year, but also reflected an impressive 106.7% growth on the $303.2 million profit after tax recorded for the 2011 financial year.
Zenith is now Nigeria’s largest bank. It recently listed $850-million worth of shares on the London Stock Exchange at $6.80 a share, to improve its liquidity through Global Depository Receipts (GDR). It has a current market capitalization of around $4 billion, according to the NSE.
In recognition of his accomplishments in the banking sector, Ovia was conferred with the national award of the Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON) in November 2011.
From these achievements, it may seem to many that Ovia has reached his zenith with a sharp mind that once saw value in a refuse dump.

The Godfather of Nigerian Banking

Naushad Merali has spent a lifetime making deals at the speed of light; deals that turned him into one of the richest men in East Africa. How did he do it?
The tea and telecom tycoon was a new entry, at number 39, on the 2012 FORBES AFRICA ‘Africa’s 40 Richest People’ list, with a personal fortune of $410 million.
Not bad for a man who started life as a humble finance clerk in a Nairobi garage. Merali was a young man when he joined the finance department of Ryce Motors—a company he would one day own. All he had on his mind, in those days, was making ends meet for his family. Fate lent a hand one day, when Merali was 24 and his boss took him to one side.
“The owner, Frank Ryce was getting old and wanted to go back to Germany. So I thought to myself, ‘Why should I let this company go after working here for so long?’ I went for it,” says Merali.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1721" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Merali-3864-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
He took a loan of Ksh200,000 (around $2,350 at the current exchange rate) from Bank of America, now known as Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA), in 1975 to buy Ryce Motors. The amount from the bank was a third of what he needed, but Ryce agreed to take the money as a down payment.
Merali’s life transformed overnight as he became managing director. He was no longer worrying about putting food on the table; he was now worrying about: running a company; paying employees on time; repaying his first loan and honoring his commitment to Ryce.
“The company had a lot of potential and never once did I doubt the decision I had made,” he says.
Ryce Motors was housed in a warehouse that doubled as a showroom, with a petrol station next door. Merali wasted no time; he found a bigger warehouse in which the business could expand.
As money came in, so did investment opportunities. Six years into managing Ryce Motors, an opportunity came to invest into construction company H. Young &amp; Co. and this became Merali’s first buyout. His revenue was growing, so was his confidence and soon he found himself rubbing shoulders with the Kenyan elite.
Merali remembers the day, in 1985, when he walked into CBA and walked out its proud owner.
“You see, I signed a deal of $600,000 but believe me, I only had $6 in my pocket and had 90 days to complete it,” he says with a smile.
His family and friends thought he was mad.
“A family friend even asked my wife to have my mental status checked,” he says.
“When I came back and bought the bank, suddenly people were interested to participate and so I formed a consortium,” he adds.
It was a turning point: the consortium included the family of the first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta. The CBA acquisition was, at that time, one of Kenya’s biggest buyouts by a Kenyan. This was the first acquisition in his buying spree that included: First National Bank of Chicago; Firestone East Africa; Eveready East Africa and Sasini.
“Our specialty is buyouts. The company has grown from zero to the current state, where we employ over 24,000 people in Kenya alone. Turnover for the group is over a billion dollars,” says the 61-year-old.
To order these acquisitions, Merali formed a holding company for his business empire and named it after his son, Sameer. Today, the Sameer Group runs five agriculture companies, including Sasini; Savanna Coffee Lounge; Sameer Industrial Park; a corporate showroom along Mombasa Road; Eveready Head Office and Ryce Engineering.
In the finance sector, Sameer Group owns shares in Equatorial Commercial Bank, alongside Kenya Data Networks in the information technology sector. Sameer Industrial Park is a premier export processing zone, which was established in 1991. Sameer has ownership in Kenya’s second largest mobile phone service provider, Airtel, and owns tire maker Yana Tyres and Yansam East Africa Motors. Merali also has properties in London, Dubai and across Africa.
The company has spread beyond Kenya. It owns 33% of Farmsecure, a South African agricultural company, and has dairy operations in Uganda. The latter came about when Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, approached Merali for a solution to the struggling dairy industry in his country. Merali, together with the RJ Corporation of India, revived the industry from a daily production of 25,000 liters to 450,000, through 39 processing plants. The Dairy Corporation also ventured into the production of powdered milk, resulting in Uganda becoming a milk exporter, rather than importer.
Today, Sameer Agriculture and Livestock in Uganda exports to Yemen, Egypt, South Sudan, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and parts of Rwanda. The Ugandan operation inspired Merali to launch a milk processing company in Kenya called Daima.
Merali’s company owns majority shares in Sasini, one of the biggest tea and coffee producing and processing companies in Kenya, which has 12,000 acres of tea and coffee plantations. At the plantations, in Kiambu, 12km outside of Nairobi, one acre of land is valued at an average of Ksh30 million ($351,981), which makes the land worth Ksh260 billion or close to $4.3 billion. That is just a fraction of his assets, which include stocks and properties in prime locations across Nairobi.
“It’s always difficult to put a figure to it and this is not all investment. We borrow money. That is why I wonder how to put a value to my worth,” he says.
Merali attributes a huge part of his success to instinct. He bought Sasini from a complete stranger on a plane headed to London.
“There was this fellow next to me and we started talking about what he was doing in Kenya. He said that he had come from a board meeting for Sasini, but I did not know what Sasini was,” says Merali.
It turned out the man on the plane was the chairman of Mercanta, a company listed in the United Kingdom (UK).
At the end of the conversation, Merali was not only taken by the idea of a tea and coffee plantation, but wanted to put his money into it too.
“Do you want to sell?” Merali asked him.
When he was questioned about whether he had a background in tea and coffee, he responded to the challenge by bragging that he knew Africa and asked for a price.
“He said GBP 10 million and we shook hands. That was on May 1, 1989 and on June 1, he had his check and I had his company!” Merali says with pride.
In the end, Merali bought 43% of the company and, 24 years later, is very happy with that decision as the company has grown tremendously.
This is one of Africa’s great migrant entrepreneur stories. Merali’s great-grandfather came from India and settled in Lamu, along Kenya’s coast, in 1883. The family lived there until Merali’s father moved to Mombasa, where Merali was born in February 1951. In those days, it was easy to move around East Africa. The family moved from Kenya to Moshi, Tanzania, where Merali attended primary school with his three brothers and three sisters.
In 1967, when the then Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, announced the Arusha Declaration—laying down socialist principles for his country—Merali was one of the thousands who joined the 400-mile walk from Moshi to Dar es Salaam to mark the occasion. It took 11 days.
“The reason I did it was not because I believed in Nyerere’s policy but because there was no other Asian doing it,” he says.
Shortly after the walk, he moved to Nairobi, where he completed high school in 1969. He then jetted off to Britain a year later, where he studied accounts and finance at a college on Oxford Street in London. In 1973, he came home to marry Zarina, a girl chosen by his mother.
Merali’s journey came with its fair share of tough lessons.
In 1999, investors from French company Vivendi were looking for a Kenyan partner to invest in what would be Kenya’s second mobile phone service provider. Forty percent was up for grabs. Though Merali had not dealt with GSM and mobile phone technology, he took the opportunity to invest money in a company called Kencell.
It took a turn for the worse due to internal problems at Vivendi and the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York, which, forced the company to reconsider its strategy in Africa. Simply put, they wanted out.
“Every time an issue came up, either in New York or anywhere else, they would turn the heat on their African operations and I could see that they were doing their best to get rid of their African interests,” says Merali.
Vivendi was obligated to make Merali an offer first, owing to his pre-emptive rights as owner of the remaining 40% in the cellular service provider, Kencell. They gave him 15 days to raise $250 million to exercise his right. Almost certain that Merali would not pull it off, Vivendi went ahead with negotiations with South Africa’s MTN.
With the end of the 15 days nigh, Merali contacted an old friend Mohammed Ibrahim—founder of cellular services provider Celtel—about the 60% stake offer in Kencell. Celtel had tried, unsuccessfully, to enter the Kenyan market for four years and agreed to take up the 60% majority stake in Kencell at $250 million. In the meantime, Vivendi agreed to sell their stake at $230 million. The upshot was that Merali made $20 million profit in 24 hours.
“Always remember that the best time to buy is when foreign companies want to go, and the best time to sell is when they want to come. I celebrated later that evening because it was a great thing,” he says.
He later offloaded his stake in the cellular company, noting that he would not have made as much money had he waited longer.
“When I sold my 15 percent, I managed to create good wealth. In business, timing is key.”
When Merali sold 15%— worth an estimated Ksh6 billion—of his 20% stake to Kuwait-based Zain Group. He made more than $130 million on the sale, which he says never would have happened had he held on to the stake longer. Merali retained 5% ownership in Kenya’s second largest cellular service provider, after selling most of his stake to India’s Bharti, which took over from Zain Group. The company has changed hands four times, since it was established in Kenya, creating speculation about its profitability, but Merali maintains that he has never lost a cent through the company.
Immediately after the Kencell deal, Merali brought fiber optics into the country, through Kenya Data Networks (KDN). The company offers data services to corporates, internet service providers and telecommunication companies.
“Once I saw the use of information technology in Europe, I knew that it had to catch up in Africa, and data today is growing very fast. That’s how we have been shifting our investments,” he says.
Merali’s interest in information and communications technology includes a share in Altech Swift Global that offers retail services such as voice over internet protocol (VoIP). He sold his majority stakes in both KDN and Altech to Liquid Telecom, from the UK. From his telecommunication deals alone, Merali has made more than $500 million.
One might wonder if Merali has ever got his fingers burnt. He has and green fingers at that. Once, he invested in a flower farm, but lost more than Ksh50 million ($586,635) when he sold. The farm had started performing badly and Merali says that he would have lost much more had he chosen to hold on. He also partnered with a German investor to open a hotel, but when the German partner died, things went downhill and he had to abandon the business.
“The important thing is that you learn from it, it’s always a learning process,” says Merali.
In his dealings, the stability of a company’s management contributes hugely to his decision to take it up or not. He does not buy companies to run them, but to make money. And when it’s time to sell, he sells.
“Keep emotions out of business, save that only for your wife!’’ says Merali.
He adds that business partnership must be based on mutual interests.
“It’s not like in a marriage where you can part ways and give 50 percent and say ‘go’.”
Merali is not only a profit taker; he joins the likes of Manu Chandaria in philanthropic activities around the country. The Zarina and Naushad Merali Foundation gives between Ksh150 million ($1.75 million) to Ksh250 million ($2.92 million) every year to communities. One of the biggest donations made by the foundation, included Ksh100 million ($1.17 million) to the Kenyatta National Hospital to build a day care center.
Merali donated 30 acres of prime beach property, in the affluent coastal town of Malindi, to the Kenyan government to be used as a public beach. He reserved a piece of land in Nairobi to establish a sports club called Jaffery’s.
Merali plans to invest in Africa’s energy infrastructure. He has put Sameer at the helm of the company, saying that his son has a name to protect, which will ensure that he stays focused.
“The company has grown on reputation. Your word is your bond, it’s not even the agreements,” he says to his son, who comes in for an introduction.
Thirty-seven-year-old Sameer has a Master’s Degree in banking and finance, but little can prepare him for his father’s big shoes. He is already running some of the companies both as an executive and non-executive director.
“As you know right now, Africa and more so in East Africa is where all the opportunity is. In the last 10 years, we knew it and now everybody knows it. There is a lot of activity, just looking at how the country has changed in the last 10 years and what is there for the future. It’s exciting,” he says.
Merali is one of the millionaires to watch in 2013. His ability to buy and sell at the speed of light has earned him millions of dollars. You can be sure, in the time it has taken to read this article, the old fox has struck another deal.

He Risked Millions On A Handshake With A Stranger On A Plane

Sam Jonah has broken rocks miles underground and brokered deals over the boardroom table. He’s advised world leaders and discovered a passion for parrots. He is probably one of the few men in the world to be knighted in London nearly 30 years after sweating as a miner in the searing heat, miles beneath the country of his birth.
It all began in 1949, Jonah was born in a military camp in Kibi, Ghana; his father—a sergeant major and World War II veteran, served in the Royal West African Frontier Force. Soon after, Jonah Senior left the army and set up a construction company. The family moved to Obuasi where Jonah went to school. It was after high school that Jonah made the surprising decision to work underground at Ashanti Goldfields Corporation’s (Ashanti) Obuasi mine, the only mine in Ghana. Jonah’s classmates were going into law and medicine, while he was going to work shoulder-to-shoulder with men who had barely gone to school.
“My business was breaking rock,” he says.
Jonah saw that mining was run by whites and wanted to change it. There were tough days underground. Jonah calls it his most humbling experience and with merely a high school certificate and no experience, he had to sink to the bottom of the barrel to learn to survive.
“You learn quickly how to get what you want from people who are better equipped, who are better skilled, who are better experienced, who are much older than you are,” he says.
In his quest for more, Jonah won a scholarship to study mining engineering at the Cambridge School of Mines, in England, which later awarded him an honorary doctorate. He returned to Ashanti and moved up the ranks. Then he returned briefly to London to study business at Imperial College, now the University of London.
It was during these exciting days at Ashanti that tragedy struck. One day, Jonah was underground when the chamber’s ceiling fell in, trapping and killing miners. It was time for quick thinking. Jonah saw a man trapped under rubble who showed signs of life by muttering softly. Under Jonah’s guidance, a team worked to pull the man free and carry him to the lift. The miner, whose legs were crushed, drew Jonah close and thanked him. Four hours later the miner was dead. This was the life Jonah chose as a young man; a life he likens to that of a soldier.
Jonah’s life was moving apace. In 1979, air force officer Jerry Rawlings, then 32, led a coup in Ghana and nominated Jonah, who was the same age, to be Ashanti’s vice president. In 1986, the late Tiny Rowland, the founder of Lonrho, which owned Ashanti, appointed Jonah as managing director. This was at a time when production at the company’s single mine had deteriorated and the industry had yet to see a black man at the helm.
Jonah’s father had once said that the day Ashanti was run by a black man, would be the day he left town. Jonah had the pleasure of telling his father that the day for him to pack his bags had come.
In his new position, Jonah introduced his ‘Africanization Policy’. He wanted to change an industry that was run by whites. He wanted to attract his countrymen to the industry to prosper like he had, by forcing expatriates to fulfill their contractual obligations to impart skills. Moreover, Jonah wanted to cut the expense of expatriates. Why pay a foreigner four times what you would pay a Ghanaian to do the same job?
This policy was unpopular among expatriates but it was all about the big picture in a growing company.
“Glass ceilings were punched through,” says Jonah.
Jonah considers business to be all about people. He feels that it is a leader’s responsibility to identify talent and harness it, to set aside one’s ego and surround oneself with the very best, to make one look good.
“Wisdom does not reside in the head of only one person,” warns Jonah.
Jonah says his parents taught him all he knows about leadership. They encouraged humility, told him that good days are not forever and that he should never give up.
In 1999, Jonah needed all these skills when Ashanti faced a liquidity squeeze. It came at a bad time for the company as it was trying to raise $125 million to build a mine in Tanzania.
The root of the problem was hedging done by the company when the gold price was low. This was viewed as a risk management tool and a price protection mechanism. Unfortunately for Ashanti, a decision taken by global central banks saw a sharp increase in the gold price. The market price was greater than the hedged price and the company did not have enough cash for margin calls because it had pumped a lot of money into new mines. Jonah says this was a bruising time for the company and the most difficult of his career. The company’s share price fell to the point that the New York Stock Exchange was considering delisting it. It took eight months to recover and years to prosper.
Jonah, the driving force behind Ashanti’s growth, sees opportunities where others don’t. In his time, Ashanti grew from a single mine in Ghana to the second largest gold producer in the world.
The company was public until the Ghanaian military government under General Acheampong, took 55% share in 1972—making it a partnership between the government and Lonrho. In the quest for growth, Jonah and his team convinced the partners that better days were ahead if the company went public again. Once Ashanti listed in both Ghana and London, the government held 17% of the company and Lonrho 27%. Between 1994 and 2004, Ashanti went on the acquisition hunt in an attempt to be both an entrepreneurial as well as a conservative company. It extended its operations in Ghana, Australia, Zimbabwe, Guinea and Tanzania. In 1996, Ashanti became the first African-based company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
There is a saying that goes: “No good deed goes unpunished.” As Ashanti grew, the hunter became the hunted. Success attracted the interest of numerous companies.
Jonah felt the choice was to grow from within, or agree to be part of a bigger outfit. It proved difficult trying to convince partners that issuing shares, thus diluting power, was best. The government was faced with a competitive demand for its money, while Lonrho wanted to focus more on platinum. With no other defense, a merger was the only option.
The $1.48 billion merger between Ashanti and AngloGold, then the seventh and second largest gold producers respectively, was far from a merger of equals.
“We were punching beyond our weight,” says Jonah.
Despite this, Ashanti’s management secured key positions within AngloGold Ashanti, with Jonah becoming the executive president of the merged entity.
After his time at AngloGold Ashanti, Jonah became a serial director. Some junior mining companies approached him to guide them to success, as he had done for Ashanti. Equinox Minerals, a mining exploration company based in Zambia, was at the feasibility stage when it approached Jonah. Years later, in 2011, the company that had a market capitalization of $63.1 million in 2006, was sold to the Barrick Gold Corporation for $7.4 billion. Moto Goldmines, in Ghana, grew from a $50 million market capitalization company and was sold to Randgold Resources and AngloGold Ashanti in October 2009.
Since AngloGold Ashanti, Jonah has sat on at least 18 boards of companies.
Jonah currently sits on the boards of a few companies, including Vodafone Plc. He is also the founder and chairman of Jonah Capital, a private investment holding company, based in South Africa, with interests in mineral resources, real estate, agriculture, construction materials, financial services and oil and gas services.
His counsel has extended beyond the business world. When former South African President Thabo Mbeki set up the International Investment Advisory Council in 2000, Jonah was the first and only African to sit on it. He has also been an advisor to Nigerian Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, his successor Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan. He was a founding member of Ghanaian President John Kufuor’s investment advisory council and advised the late president of Zambia, Levy Mwanawasa, on investment promotion. Jonah was also on Kofi Annan’s UN Global Compact Advisory Council. Three years ago he helped the president of Togo put together a team that would formulate strategy for the country.
According to his biography, Sam Jonah and the Remaking of Ashanti by Ayowa A. Taylor, Jonah turned down the position of Ghanaian vice president twice.
On June 25, 2003, Jonah received an Honorary Knighthood in recognition of his achievement as an African businessman at St. James’ Palace, in London. Knighthoods conferred to foreign citizens are done so on the advice of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. They are bestowed on those who have made an important contribution to relations between their country and Britain.
It came from the blue. Jonah took a call from the British high commissioner in Ghana who, after making sure that he had sat down, told him that he had received a call from the British prime minister’s office informing him that Jonah’s name had been put forward for a knighthood. The high commissioner asked Jonah if he would accept the honor, should the Queen approve. The final word came two weeks later, while Jonah was in Guinea. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin was on a state visit on the day of the ceremony, the knighthood was conferred by Prince Charles.
In 2006, Jonah received the Order of the Star of Ghana, the nation’s highest award, and the Commonwealth Business Council Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
More recently, Jonah has been appointed—along with 12 other internationally recognized business, academic and public policy leaders—to sit on the newly formed Bank of America Global Advisory Council.
A lifetime away from his days of breaking rock underground, Jonah says: “I saw no barriers. I was determined to get to the highest [level] in anything that I did.”
This sentiment is echoed in his biography where Taylor writes: “Jonah was determined to build a ‘First’ World company, to dispel the unspoken belief that coming from the ‘Third’ World implied that he would be a third-rate businessman.”
Jonah acknowledges the big part that mentorship played in his success and feels that it is important that those that have found success pass down their knowledge and not have the arrogance to think that they did it all on their own. Jonah has, through the years, been approached by those seeking guidance and says that there is nothing more fulfilling.
“You must be humble enough to know what you know and to appreciate what skills you don’t have, and to have a plan.”
Jonah says it’s sad that young people are no longer as keen to serve apprenticeships.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for Jonah. In 2008, a conflict of interest arose when Jonah became a non-executive director at Metropolitan Holdings Ltd while on the board of the Standard Bank Group’s Liberty Life. He stepped down after holding the position for a month. Jonah refers to this as the shortest directorship in South Africa and says he failed to see the conflict from the onset as Liberty Life had a separate board to Standard Bank.
Also making it into the news that year were claims of insider trading and the resignation of senior staff in a company chaired by Jonah. Sentula Mining was accused of misdeeds worth R242 million ($29.7 million).
Jonah says he was approached by the family with the controlling interest in a company called Scharrighuisen to become the chairman and shareholder, buying in on concessionary terms, at around R2 ($0.25) a share. Jonah went to distressed shareholders, and some potential ones, and sold them his vision to rebrand Scharrighuisen as a new mining services company to be called Sentula Mining. Jonah Capital and Coronation Capital were the two largest shareholders when they sold some of their shares, at around R21 ($2.60). The combined sales were reported to amount to R680 million ($85.4 million). The share price subsequently fell to around R1 ($0.12) before recovering slightly.
The parties were thought to have had knowledge that the market did not. The Financial Services Board opened up an investigation into the possible insider trading and trading was suspended for a few months. During this time Jonah resigned as chairman of the company but maintains that there was no wrong doing and that they were cleared.
With his focus on the many possibilities the future holds Jonah’s Iron Mineral Beneficiation Services (IMBS) is using industry changing technology for processing super scrap, metallic iron, from the waste dump at Phalaborwa Mining Company, in South Africa’s Limpopo Province. The super scrap replaces traditional scrap in steel making.
Jonah says that when he told Lakshmi Mittal, of ArcelorMittal—the world’s largest steel making company—the chairman and CEO asked: “Sam, what do you mean? I have 77 PhDs in Chicago and New York looking for this technology, and you’re telling me that two South Africans have found the technology?”
Jonah is proud of the fact that while big companies around the world were writing off lots of money in search of this technology, two South Africans beat them to it. Jonah Capital has the largest stake in the company, with South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and Russian company, OAO Severstal, as partners. The R120 million ($15 million) pilot plant will be up and running by May.
Despite all this success Jonah maintains that he is not a wealthy man and that he is merely comfortable. He has been reported, by African journalists and bloggers, as having a net worth of between $500 and $600 million and has been celebrated as the richest man in Ghana. His worth remains a mystery but Jonah says that he is appalled by the speculation, adding that his father would be upset by people saying such things about him.
“We were not brought up that way,” says Jonah.
Evidence of this is the inscription by Jonah’s father placed on the house he built for his family in 1950. It read: Wobisa wo din enye wo sika, which translates to: They ask about your name, not your money.
“I’d like to be defined more by what I have done, than what I have…” he says.
Jonah says that having earned a monthly salary from the age of 19 until his retirement from AngloGold Ashanti, at 58, and sitting on boards and owning shares, means that he has done well for himself but he denies being the richest man in Ghana.
Jonah may not be pleased by some of the reporting about him, but what pleases him is the way business is going on the continent.
“Africa is all about entrepreneurship,” he says.
Jonah feels that people are now being given the space to grow, that businessmen like Aliko Dangote, Mike Adenuga and Patrice Motsepe, are world-class.
Jonah is also adamant that the world’s attitude towards Africa has changed. He feels that Africa’s potential is now being appreciated and harnessed, which, he says, is coming on the back of political and social change.
The world’s eyes and markets were on South Africa when the Lonmin mine workers’ strike in Marikana turned violent. As the longest serving director of Lonrho, Jonah doesn’t want to weigh in too heavily on the matter but points out that there are philosophical differences in the style of management and his own, influenced by his time underground.
“I came to appreciate the roles of these people [miners], how backbreaking the job was, how hardworking they were, how committed they were,” says Jonah.
He believes there will always be a future in mining as long as there’s a demand but that miners’ living conditions are shocking and that South Africa needs to focus more on the social aspect of the business.
Jonah has enough thoughts to fill a book but jokes about not being literate enough to write it.
Jonah does, however, have a more relaxed side. The jet-setting entrepreneur enjoys fishing. His eyes light up as he talks about it. He took up golf once again, four years ago. It brought back memories of a battle around the golf course nearly 40 years earlier. Jonah challenged the exclusively white Obuasi Golf Club, where he was not welcome. He was determined to learn the game and when none of the other members would teach him he went to the caddies. After 10 lessons, no-one wanted to play with him. Jonah used to go early to the golf course and play slowly, deliberately, to irk the white golfers backed up behind him. It worked and eventually the invitations to play grudgingly arrived. On the other side of the coin, some of his fellow Ghanaians couldn’t see the victory and sneered that Jonah now thought he was white.
It is no surprise that decades later his children tease him about becoming obsessive about his hobbies. When Jonah discovered squash, playing twice a day was not enough so he built a court at his home. When he took to the gym, he was there every morning at 5AM and then built himself one.
You could have guessed that buying a parrot in Guinea would lead to an aviary being built back home. It is now filled with a collection of parrots from South Africa, Ghana and Brazil.
An avid reader and big fan of Rudyard Kipling, Jonah recommends the poem If.
In a speech to inspire leadership Jonah closed with an extract from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life: “Lives of great men remind us that we can make our own lives sublime and departing we can leave our footprints in the sands of time.”
At the very least, Jonah proves that if you can keep your head while others are losing theirs and blaming it on you… you can be a man, my son.

THE MAN  WITH THE  GOLDEN TOUCH

Tales of entrepreneurial success are usually based on events or circumstances that define and distinguish each story. At times, these relate to the individual’s planned or fortuitous foray into a business venture; the painstaking process of building same, a bruising setback or a stroke of fate that leads to the game-changing break. The interplay of these elements is what makes each entrepreneur’s story unique, and in the case of Hakeem Belo-Osagie, the Nigerian entrepreneur and chairman of the mobile telecommunications company Etisalat, the chemistry between these elements is as vivacious as ever.
After more than a decade of running UBA and overseeing a transformation of its fortunes, Hakeem, or Keem as he is widely referred to, shifted his focus to the telecoms industry. Two prior unsuccessful attempts to obtain a license were followed by a successful third bid with the Mubadala Company of Abu Dhabi. The new player, Etisalat Nigeria, rolled out its services six years after the first mobile operator had launched in the Nigerian market. Etisalat became the fourth operator alongside MTN, Glo and Airtel.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1508" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/MG_3120-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
“I had made two attempts to get into the telecoms industry before. The first time was when we had the first bid for GSM and there I was a partner to Orascom. Four licenses were given and we were fifth, so we just missed it. With the second attempt, this time working with Orascom again to buy NITEL, we won, but we were told that our price was too low. I thank God that we were rejected because I think that it would have been very difficult managing NITEL. And then the third time, this time I was not working with Orascom, I was working with a company called Mubadala, which is one of the sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi, and this time we were successful in getting a license and that is the foundation of the company called Etisalat.”
Experts and skeptics predicted a rough ride for the company due to its late entrance into the industry. But since its commencement of commercial operations in October 2008, Etisalat has surprised with its solid growth and achievements. The newcomer had two million subscribers in its first year and gained the reputation of being the most innovative telecoms company in Nigeria. By 2011, it had 12 million subscribers, despite the intense competition in Nigeria’s telecoms sector.
As mobile penetration continues to increase in Africa’s largest telecoms market—with recent figures showing that the aggregate mobile subscriber base has surpassed 100 million—telecom infrastructure continues to mushroom across the country. Etisalat has invested more than $2 billion in building and expanding its network. Of the estimated 20,000 cell sites scattered across the country, Etisalat’s infrastructure accounted for around 15% in 2011. Belo-Osagie points out that the expansion of the company’s network will continue.
“We had some gaps in our network in the South-South and South Eastern part of Nigeria and we are now in the process of filling those gaps, right now we have something in the range of just over 4,000 base stations. We are very happy with our rollout because we think with this number of base stations we can cover the whole country. However, our objective over the next few years is to double that number and get to the range of about 8,000 base stations.”
By October, Etisalat had surpassed its target for the year of 14 million subscribers.
“What we are particularly happy about is our 3G data offering, which we think is universally accepted as the best and the fastest in the market. As a company, we are going to continue to pioneer innovative solutions as we seek to distinguish ourselves from our competitors.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1509" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_4682-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
True to his words, Etisalat is stealing a march on its competitors in the mobile banking race with its recent introduction of an innovative SIM application called ‘Easy Wallet’. The application, which comes pre-loaded on every Etisalat SIM card, encourages the adoption of mobile phone as the preferred means of conducting basic financial transactions. Belo-Osagie promises that the coming months will see more such mobile money products.
“Well, I think we are very proud of the fact that our partner Etisalat indeed won a prize for having one of the best mobile applications in the world&#8230; at the recent telecommunications conference. In addition to that, we’ve built on the strengths of Mubadala, which is a sovereign wealth fund very much in the area of finance. You will notice that many of the Nigerian directors have, at one time or another, been involved in banking. We felt that it should only be natural that we be a leader in the area in which telecoms and banking cross each other.”
Being the resolute operator that he is, Belo-Osagie wants Etisalat to rise to the second position in the industry.
“I do think though that with the correct strategy we can become the number two [telecom] company in Nigeria. We focus very much on the youth market. We focus very much on the data market and we focus very much on the quality of services. I think we are also helped by the fact that we have two very financially strong shareholders, Mubadala and Etisalat, and we have funded our rollout, so the amount of debt that we have on our books is relatively small. I believe that with the strategy that we have, especially one that has avoided a lot of changes of management which Airtel has gone through, and the depth of management we have in comparison with Glo, I think that we will eventually get to the second position in the market place.”
He describes the challenge of catching up with the market leaders as “a management and intellectual challenge,” which he enjoys. With an air of confidence that is almost palpable, he offers a concise analysis of the industry.
“Realistically, I don’t think that any company can beat MTN in Nigeria because the gap is very large between MTN and everybody else. And while I think that MTN can improve its quality of service, I think that it has a strong management; there is a real commitment to Nigeria from MTN, and they’ve also done a lot in terms of the development of local staff.”
Belo-Osagie’s childhood fantasies had nothing to do with running businesses. His early ambition was to become a mathematician. Later, while studying at a sixth form college in Wales, he developed an interest in public service and went on to study politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. He obtained a law degree at Cambridge University before undertaking the Harvard MBA program. While at Oxford, he obtained work experience as an intern at the OPEC headquarters in Vienna.
His graduation from business school would coincide with the enactment of a policy by the Nigerian government that permitted federal ministers and the president’s advisers to employ aides. Through much more than a stroke of luck, Belo-Osagie was appointed as an aide to the president’s adviser on petroleum. He would go on to hold the position for six years, despite a coup d’état that led to the arrest and incarceration of his initial boss. Following another coup, which occurred when he was getting married, he made the decision to abandon the precarious public sector to pursue opportunities in the private sector.
He set up a consulting firm which advised international companies that sought to play in Nigeria’s oil industry. The venture was a resounding success and after a few years and millions of dollars in the bank, his entrepreneurial instinct sparked the hunger for another venture. This led him to cast his attention to the financial sector and, as fate would have it, the Nigerian government decided to privatize banks established by the British, which were still under government control.
Sensing the opportunity, Belo-Osagie cashed in and acquired UBA in a landmark transaction. The consequent modernization of the bank, which he spearheaded, led the bank to remarkable achievements. The UBA acquisition would become the transaction that cemented his reputation as an astute and dogged entrepreneur.
Before the triumph with UBA, Belo-Osagie tasted his share of failure. He set up a financial services company called KMC in the early 1980s.
“We did very badly, but that failure was very useful to me because it taught me a lot about what not to do. One of the things that I believe is that setbacks are a very vital part of life because setbacks strengthen you. You learn lessons from them; you learn to be tough; you learn to be bold. Therefore learning the lessons from the failure of KMC, I, with a group of others, set up First Securities Discount House, which was a great success.”
Despite his media shyness, Belo-Osagie is well-known in business circles locally and internationally. Indeed, he maintains a good friendship with Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and energy analyst under whom he authored a special paper on the state of international oil markets, while at Harvard Business School. His calm and unassuming demeanour belies a strong intellect and an uncanny ability to spot lucrative opportunities. This is best reflected by his status as one of Africa’s wealthiest men with an estimated fortune of $400 million, which saw him at number 40 of the ‘Africa’s 40 Richest’ list in December.
When asked about recent calls urging telecoms companies to list on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, he pauses to gather his thoughts, before explaining meticulously and systematically the role that the telecoms industry will have to play in fulfilling Nigeria’s aspirations.
“One way or another, all of us telecoms are going to have to accept that we are living in a certain country, that the country has certain communal, social and national interests and we are going to have to adjust to those interests. I don’t think that the interest of the company and the interest of Nigeria necessarily have to conflict. But I think that there has got to be flexibility on both sides. And I don’t think that the telecoms companies will be successful if they have an attitude that is inflexible. So for me, sooner or later the Nigerian companies will have to list, and I honestly don’t have a problem with that at all.”
Government and telecoms companies should be discussing how the listing process should unfold, with the question being on the various policy options for listing, according to Belo-Osagie.
“Should all the companies be listed? Should it only be companies that have been in existence for a certain number of years, or companies that have reached a certain level of profitability?” he asks rhetorically.
He feels that it will be counter-productive, were government to compel the operators to list. He advises that consultation rather than fiat, should be adopted by government, so that the healthy atmosphere, which he believes the Nigerian government, and to an extent, a lot of African governments have done good to create, is sustained.
As the conversation switches to the subject of the future of Nigeria and Africa, Belo-Osagie points out that he is cautiously optimistic about Africa’s future. He believes that a lot of the growth in Nigeria and Africa stems from the dismantling of many of the barriers imposed by the over extensive state investment and participation in the economy, in African countries. In his opinion, reforms, especially those in the Nigeria, need to be stimulated. He observes further that governments have an important policy role that needs to be refined.
“No matter how effective a private sector is, it cannot generate electricity outside a set of policy measures that determine how everything works together.”
Belo-Osagie believes that a crucial factor to the performance of African economies in the next few years is the extent to which the African public sector is reinvigorated across the continent. He notes that, Africa’s success hinges on the paradox that sees governments relinquishing control in terms of administering the economy, while developing and exercising its capacity to articulate and implement policies. He expresses his concerns that the pace of the policy strengthening across Africa is not taking place fast enough. Comparing developments in Africa with Asia, he says: “Whether it is Japan, Singapore or South Korea, you will see the hand of the government that is pushing, that is encouraging, that is putting together the infrastructure, that is ensuring that a competitive system is established, you will see them in all of those areas. You will see them ensuring that things like airports, immigration, state security, all have the tools to do well in their area. The success of each of those areas is as important to the running of an economy, as is simply giving licenses to private companies”.
Outside his business ventures, the entrepreneur is a generous philanthropist. As one who had the privilege to attend prestigious universities, he is very active in supporting education. He is one of the largest donors to the African Leadership Academy, an advanced level college in South Africa, to which he has given more than $1 million. He announces with pride that the school has named part of the library after him and his wife for their contributions. Keem is also in his third term as president of the King’s College Old Boys Association, the college where he attended secondary school in Lagos in the 1960s. He also sponsors an annual scholarship, The Hakeem Belo-Osagie Scholarship, at Oxford University.
An ardent lover of jazz music and fan of Manchester United, Belo-Osagie takes a broad yet simplistic view of success.
“There is a quotation, which was adapted from something that John F. Kennedy said, defining happiness, which I think is a definition of success as well. He said it’s ‘The full use of ones talents, along lines of excellence, in the life affording one opportunity, and in the direction towards service’. I think that one thing that makes you happy or successful is to know that you are operating at the peak of your abilities. The abilities can be in the carpenter who takes great pride in his craftsmanship, making the great table. It can be the great singer, the great mathematician. ‘In a life affording you opportunity’, by that I mean that to be successful there must be the opportunities for you to exploit, and that part of the kind of society we must create is a society in which more and more people have the opportunities to develop those talents. And in the African societies that we have today, we are not doing enough of that. And then we say, ‘In the direction towards service’, which simply says that the ends, the objectives cannot be solely focused on me, me, me. So I like that definition of success or happiness because it says a lot which I think is important.”
For a person who has traveled the world and been actively involved in business for more than three decades, he clearly knows a thing or two about what success means.

Africa’s Unassuming Giant

“It has been decided that you have to resign with immediate effect.”
Those words stunned Jannie Mouton. They were uttered by the senior partner of the broking firm Senekal, Mouton and Kitshoff (SMK), of which he was the founder. He was dismissed by the very firm he had started in 1982, which bore his name.
The next day, at a special meeting of the board of directors, he had to submit his official resignation. There was no farewell party, just an abrupt note of dismissal by the new chief, Louis Geldenhuys.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1334" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Shot-01-CF208186-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" />
“Right, you may go.”
Suddenly, he was unemployed, dejected, lacked confidence and was floundering in emotional turbulence. Mouton was dazed, confused… and angry. As he said in his autobiography, “Resentment was winning the first round”. Some predicted he would opt for a civil lawsuit, for unfair dismissal but a friend, Donald Masson, talked him out of it.
“It was wise counsel. A negative person has never established or started anything positive,” says Mouton.
Fifteen years after that fateful day, in August 1995, Mouton co-authored a book, And then they fired me. The book was not an attempt at retribution by a defeated and embittered businessman, whose evening star had fallen, it was a glorious celebration by a business tycoon who had been dubbed ‘The Boere Buffett’ by Moneyweb, a South African investment news website.
In the 15 years since he was fired, Mouton built one of Africa’s most successful and formidable business empires.
Today, PSG Group, of which Mouton is non-executive chairman, has interests in several companies with an overall market capitalization of around R75 billion ($8.6 billion).
The term “Boere Buffett” is a massive compliment, says Mouton.
“He is one of the two or three wealthiest men in the world and when he passes away, he will leave his entire will to charity, a gesture that underlines what a special individual he is,” he says of Buffett.
Buffett, is the primary shareholder, chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway and is consistently ranked by FORBES as among the top three richest people in the world.
“Every investor with a long timeframe wants to call himself the Warren Buffett of someplace. Of course, many of Buffett’s well-documented principles have universal application, so it’s understandable [that he is referred to as the ‘Warren Buffett of Africa’] but [it is] still silly. Jannie Mouton is the Jannie Mouton of Africa. That should be enough,” says Paul Theron, a financial analyst.
The PSG Group—over which Mouton has presided for 14 of the past 16 years—showed a total return on equity of a healthy 57%. While he is still non-executive chairman, his son, Piet, succeeded him in July 2010 as executive chairman
The PSG Group outperformed Shoprite, Remgro, Rand Aksepbank, Bidvest, Imperial and even Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which managed 23% in 40 years.
So, how did Mouton complete the transformation from disgraced and deposed founder of SMK to Boere Buffett? First, came a SWOT analysis of his strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats. His friends and his wife reminded him of his obstinacy and temper, weaknesses he had to tackle head-on.
Mouton came up with his greatest threat.
“At the age of 50, I was not ready for retirement yet… I had to persuade myself that I was doing something useful, that I was devising plans and ferretting out opportunities. I knew I had to fight against the threat of stagnation.”
Mouton read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, the manuscript that changed his life and inspired him to start the PSG Group. Buffett proved to be a literary companion with his memoirs in The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.
“To me, strategic planning is the alpha and the omega,” Mouton says.
“In the book The Art of War the principles of the Oriental military strategist Sun Tzu are outlined. Strategy is the great world of the organization. According to the book, strategic thinking determines the survival or extinction in situations of life or death.”
His plan of action to direct his dreams were to be in control of a listed company; to focus on the financial services sector; to procure capital for a strong capital base and to think more and do less.
Before the PSG Group was formed, he gained control of the embattled PAG Group.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done a better deal than PAG, the small listed financial services company, the predecessor of the PSG Group, that fell into my lap like a dream,” he says.
“If its R7 million ($804,200) did not become R107 million ($12.2 million), a foundation for this powerful company would never have existed.”
In February 1996, Mouton, Johan van der Westhuizen, Ian Müller and Jaap du Toit started PSG. Du Toit derived the name Professional Securities Group (PSG) from the PAG name.
“We started small and slowly achieved success. Success gives one self-confidence and that’s quite contagious in the market,” he says.
Good timing contributed to PSG’s next round of success. In 1997/98, they sold all of PSG’s business to Servgro, a listed cash shell, for R863 million ($99 million). They were paid with R327 million ($37.5 million) in cash and with an issue of 200.7 million Servgro shares, which gave PSG a stake of 61.9% in Servgro. It remains one of the best deals they have done, says Mouton.
Simultaneously, they issued ten million shares at R9 ($1.03) per share to Siphumele Investments for an 11.5% stake in PSG.
“The timing of both deals was incredible and increased PSG’s net asset value per share from 147 cents in 1997 to 617 cents in 1998. Over the same period our market capitalization increased from R249 million ($28.6 million) to R1.172 billion ($134.6 million),” says Mouton.
Mouton, since listing PSG, has set up significant deals that have secured vast wealth for shareholders.
Leon de Wit, former executive chairman of Channel, described Mouton as, “Inherently a trader, a shrewd one at that, as he hardly ever does a bad deal”.
“Jannie is also known to have good ‘exit discipline’—knowing when to get out of an asset, or to turn down an investment opportunity,” says Theron.
Another success story has been inspired: agribusiness investment company Zeder, which many insiders expected to fade into oblivion. Zeder’s investment philosophy is unlocking value from companies with shares that trade at a sizeable discount to
intrinsic value.
Zeder, as Finweek suggested, initially offered its own scrip as settlement, with the tagline, “If we make money, you make money” to counter any notions of opportunism.
Capitec Bank is another story in a long line of PSG’s successes. The PSG Specialized Lending was established in 1998/1999 as a precursor to Capitec. Capitec Bank obtained a banking license in 2001/2002.
Gerrit Thomas (GT) Ferreira—chairman of RMB Holdings Limited, which is in competition with Capitec—lived on the same floor of the Simonsberg hostel, as Mouton, at Stellenbosch University in the Eastern Cape Province. Now they share offices in the same building.
“Jannie refers to me and us [at Rand Merchant Bank] as ‘friends and family’ of PSG.… I own quite a few shares in PSG which I have had for a long time because I have backed Mr. Mouton from the beginning,” says Ferreira.
Mouton’s opening up of banking to the poor, through Capitec, has won him many friends. The idea came through another book. He read the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus’s Banking to the Poor as well as a report by Huysamer Stals on microloans to the poor. Mouton says their arguments convinced him that the poverty in South Africa could only be relieved by making capital available to people without collateral.
Capitec, with its micro-financing soul, was honored 10 years later as one of 27 outstanding brand names of tomorrow, in 50 countries, by 3,000 analysts of the Swiss-based financial services group Credit Suisse.
Mouton’s ability as a strategic thinker is almost legendary. When some companies, with white-controlled board rooms, fulminated against the future of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), he and the PSG Group sought new opportunities and investment through their partnership with Thembeka.
“Thembeka is a Black Economic Empowerment group that is an unqualified success. We, the PSG Group, have a 49 percent share in Thembeka and the black business people have a 51 percent share,” he says.
Mouton has been an outspoken, vocal advocate for the principles of BEE.
“Through BEE you help to level the playing field in South Africa instead of being politically incorrect due to sheer obstinacy.”
Mouton prides himself in the success of Thembeka and in his role of seeking BEE partners.
He is also very passionate about Curro, an affordable, bilingual private school group, and PSG’s role in it.
In 2009, the PSG Group acquired a 50% stake in Curro Holdings by means of a R50 million ($5.7 million) injection.
It was decided in 2010 that PSG, through its subsidiary Paladin Capital, would acquire a further stake of 26%.
“In 2011, I had 5,500 children in 12 schools. The current objective is 40 schools with 50,000 SA learners by 2020,” he writes in his book.
In his investment philosophy, Buffett understood that there is a difference between the value of a share and its price.
“Prices might fluctuate and if you trade during a bad time on the stock exchange, prices would be low and it won’t reflect the true value of an item,” says Mouton.
Understanding the culture of a stock market is important. If everyone is optimistic and even people, who don’t work with the stock exchange every day start chatting about it, it is time to sell. And if nobody is interested in the stock exchange any more, it’s time to buy.
“The classic ‘big’ win for him was many years ago when he saw a thinly traded ‘A’ class of shares in media giant Naspers…he bought that class of stock cheaply and sold it back to Naspers for a fortune,” says Anthony Clark an analyst at Vunani Securities.
Buffett’s famous quote is, “We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy, and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”
Mouton warns that one should understand a company in which one invests.
“If you cannot tell someone else what the company is doing, don’t invest there. I’ve never made money from mining shares, especially gold, because I don’t understand it,” he says.
How do small businessmen take their empires to the next level?
“One must always think and dream. I have read somewhere about a great entrepreneur who said he worked by day in my company and dreamt at night about my company.”
His wife and trusted companion, Deidré, gave him a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The Story of Success. He reckons that if anyone dedicated 10,000 hours to something, they are bound to make a success of it.
Mouton also recalled a dinner hosted by William H. Gates, father of the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, for some hand-picked business people. Gates senior asked those present to write down a single word that they deemed of the utmost importance in the business world.
Coincidentally, two of the guests chose the same word. The guests were Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. And the word was ‘Focus’.
Asked by FORBES AFRICA, if South Africa and the rest of Africa need more people like Buffett, Mouton says, “For sure. Too many people are only interested in doing smart transactions, or in being part of the tender process. They don’t add value.”
“Capitec Bank creates jobs, they have 6,000 people working for them. You want to have Buffetts, or Whitey Bassons who employ hundreds of thousands of people, who create jobs.”
South Africa, says Mouton, is pre-eminently a country that presents its people with golden opportunities. PSG was born in the new dispensation after 1994.
“In an ancient culture like Europe, everything has already been done. There is no opportunity to start a Capitec in Europe. It has been done and dusted. But in South Africa with its [millions] of ‘unbanked’ people, a Capitec is possible.”
“For people who always complain about everything purportedly being so bad, I want to ask, ‘Why they don’t pack up their things and emigrate?’ The joy is in seeing opportunities, rather than troubling yourself about t
he problems.”
“We have political stability, the economy didn’t go to ruin during the recession and the doors to international trade have never been more wide open. We even have membership of BRICS now,” he says.
Africa as an investment destination is definitely improving. Growth in Africa will be faster than the rest of the world in 2012, but then the growth comes from an extremely low base.
“Africa has enormous growth and investment opportunities in terms of agriculture.
“We have made investments in Zambian agriculture. It’s unbelievable how much better the agricultural conditions there are, compared to South Africa. There is a bigger downpour because it is closer to the equator. It is also hotter, and you can do double cropping. In South Africa you can sow wheat and utilize that for six months, but you leave the ground barren and unutilized for the next six months.
“But in Zambia you can sow wheat for six months, and then use the same ground for soya for the next six months, so you double your income per hectare through double cropping. The World Bank encourages investments to Africa, and food producers are protected by them being allowed an insurance policy in case their assets are confiscated by a ruthless government,” says Mouton.
There are an increasing number of investors from Europe and the rest of the world investing in Africa in agriculture and other sectors.
“There are still some problems with things like transport, crime and a less ordered banking system. But there are improvements in the African climate for global investments. For us, it is easier to invest in Southern African neighboring states like Botswana and Zambia, as it is easier to manage it closer to home.”
Mouton doesn’t subscribe to the work ethic of a business executive that works 12 hours per day. It’s what he does when he is in the office that is important.
Somebody told him the other day that he had 240 emails waiting for him when he came back to the office.
“My question is, ‘What about delegating? You must trust subordinates. Employ competent people and trust them implicitly,” he says.
“I do believe that a company should have a dream of where it is heading, a desire directing one and which one can implement in practice. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Some men see things as they are and ask why? Others dream things that never were, and ask why not?’”
Mouton encourages his colleagues at the PSG Group to think and find solutions. He adds that positive people can start new businesses. Pessimists cannot create something out of nothing.
“If you say something can’t work, you have to come up with a better alternative or shut up. I don’t take ‘No’ for an answer anymore,” says Mouton.
Recently, the National Planning Commission announced its vision for 2030, which, amongst others, envisioned that South Africa should create 11 million additional job opportunities during the next 18 years, and reduce joblessness to a mere 6%.
“Entrepreneurs who take the risk of starting businesses and developing them, create value, job opportunities and eventually wealth. Get rid of the red tape and administrative burden in order to make life easier for these entrepreneurs.”
Probed about what South Africans can do to realize that dream, Mouton said, “Entrepreneurs like Capitec create 200 new jobs every month.”
Mouton said if the state doesn’t encourage entrepreneurship, South Africa is in trouble. The state on its own can never create jobs, because its only source of revenue is tax-paying workers and businesses. Without its tax base, it cannot even borrow money.
“Therefore their tax payers are the asset it should best take care of. In South Africa, we are in the position already where 14.3 million people received some form of grant in 2010, while only five million people pay taxes,” said Mouton.
A society is most in need of successful companies doing business within the bounds of proper corporate governance and performing well.
“Let’s take PSG as an example and assume there are 40 companies over whom we exert an influence. These companies have 38,000 employers. They pay tax on their salaries and they pay VAT on what they buy. The PSG Group and all the companies in which it has a material interest, pay R2.5 billion ($287.6 million) in taxes annually—an amount with which one can build 83,000 basic houses.
“If six people live in a house, 500,000 can find shelter in this way,” writes Mouton in his book.
“Before the state can collect and distribute taxes, there should be opportunities. Rules, laws and regulation that interfere with the distribution of wealth, discourage the creation of wealth.
“As the South African economist Mike Schüssler pointed out in South Africa’s Sake 24, there are only 301,000 individuals who pay a salary to more than four people. These people should be treasured,” he says.
“The current labor laws interfere with the market mechanisms. With the insistence on minimum wages, half of the country will remain unemployed,” says Mouton.
He added that the annual competitiveness report by the World Economic Forum showed that South Africa had fallen back to 54th.
“Our labor is not internationally competitive any longer. I have heard it is cheaper to manufacture furniture in Germany than in South Africa. The costs are higher over there, but the productivity is also so much higher. It is shocking,” he says.
“How could we ever compete with a country like China if we keep on striking for higher wages without better productivity?” he asks.
How, indeed.

Outbuffetting Buffett

It proved a hellish journey to see Pascal Dozie at his Lagos office on a Tuesday afternoon. The nightmare ride across the city, through dense traffic, bumped along to the parp of angry horns and the lurch of battered vehicles. Everyone seemed to veer towards each other in the fight for inches. It is hot and everyone is bothered.
To make matters worse, the pink-shirted traffic police stepped in to slow the lumbering vehicles even more by pulling over cars—including ours—with what looks like trumped-up charges. At one point, the traffic cop and our driver are hurling rapid fire insults at each other inches from my nose. Bizarrely, the traffic cop—who was far from pretty in pink—kept walking away, as if the fight was over, before turning on his heel to launch another finger-jabbing tirade. I felt like a monk in Gomorrah.
“They just want money,” our driver scowled as we drove off.
Then we arrived at the gate of Dozie’s business to find the rain had left a puddle wide enough to breed fish in. The wet welcome ended a torrid hour on the road with a metaphor of which writers dream. The failings of Nigeria, that Dozie wants to put right, lead right up to his door.
“Lagos is the only place in the world where you can utilize all the faculties God gave to man,” chuckles Dozie as we stand in his plush, air-conditioned office.
This is the office from which Dozie commands his investment and finance empire, which has made him one of the richest men in Nigeria. He is a gentleman, in the literal sense of the world, who loves Mozart and Bach, a man who is close to his roots and his family of five sons and 10 grandchildren.
“We didn’t see my father that often when we were growing up but when he came home to see us it was really quality time. We would sit outside for hours while he told us stories and sang us the songs of his ancestors,” says Uzoma Dozie, one of his sons, with a smile.
The polished office contrasts starkly with the dog-eat-dog poverty and chaos a stone’s throw away in the streets of Lagos. After half a century of business, as his own boss, Dozie could be forgiven for shutting out the problems of Nigeria behind his tall gates and high walls—but he says he can’t. He believes crumbling infrastructure and corruption are Nigeria’s heaviest shackles and hopes entrepreneurs will help shrug them off.
“Many people see Nigeria as an entrepreneur’s gold mine—the opportunities abound. Every single disadvantage you see—the traffic and the infrastructure—is an opportunity, but you can only change once the government goes hands-off,” he says.
I counter this with the words I heard Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni utter a few years back, in Kigali, that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to keep government out of business. Of course, Dozie disagrees.
“In Nigeria, we have been moving towards this for a long time. If the government had not been hands-off they would not have a number of major cellphone companies in the country. Some of them got their operating licences on the same day. This hands-off approach has helped us leapfrog communications technology,” says Dozie.
“We won’t get anywhere until we, in Nigeria, can say anything can be done in 24 hours.”
The other big concern for Dozie is corruption. The multi-millionaire says he has been campaigning against it since the dark days of military dictatorship under Sani Abacha.
“This is the only country in the world where people ask what business are you in and you say politics.”
“The clock is ticking, as massive strikes in January showed Nigerians,” says Dozie.
“Nigerians are waking up and the civil society in the country is coming alive. Nigeria is a country that is skewed towards the youth.
The Blackberry generation is using their Twitter and Facebook and you should see the things they are writing. In January, this country was besieged by angry youth when the government removed the fuel subsidy. Nobody could go to work. It is no longer business as usual and things are changing. Look at the number of probes into corruption, before it would have been covered up, but now it is no longer easy to cover corruption.”
Outspoken and salty, Dozie has reaped a fortune through his work and wits on a long and difficult journey from Owerri in Imo State. This is where he was born, the son of a country court interpreter, on April 9, 1939.
“We did not have many modern facilities, but we had the village set up. If you were hungry someone would feed you. If your neighbor caught you doing something wrong they would punish you. When your parents found out they would talk to the neighbor to make sure they had given you a proper spanking. Modernity has changed all of this.”
Along with a generation of idealistic Africans, from newly independent nations, Dozie headed for Europe to drink from the fountain of knowledge.
Dozie went to the London School of Economics where he rubbed shoulders with Mick Jagger, the louche singer who was soon to drop out of college to form the Rolling Stones. Legend has it that Jagger stood up during an economics lecture and shouted: “Eureka!” before walking out to a life of rock and roll.
In reality, it was less dramatic. Jagger studied Economics, British Government, Economic History and Political History, earning mediocre grades. He hedged his bets, by studying in the library, before leaving in 1963 when the Rolling Stones cut their first record.
“We thought he was different. We were very conservative and he had long hair. Me, as an African, coming from Nigeria, I couldn’t believe he was leaving what he was doing to go off and play music, it was against the grain to me,” says Dozie.
Dozie wasn’t the only one to wonder.
“My father was furious with me,” Jagger told a journalist decades later.
“But I really didn’t like being at college. It wasn’t like it was Oxford and it had been the most wonderful time of my life. It was really a dull, boring course I was stuck on.”
Unlike Jagger, Dozie earned his degree in economics and followed it up with a Masters in administration from City University in London in 1963. He went to work in London and consulted in Croydon where he worked at the National Economic Development Office.
Dozie wanted to go home, but his people, including his two brothers in the army, were fighting the Biafran War against Nigerian forces in the cause of secession for the Igbo people. It was a bloody war waged between 1967 and 1970 that cost 30,000 Igbo lives and those of an estimated one million civilians.
“It was a very traumatic period for us. Bombs were going off everywhere and you didn’t know what was the truth. People were being shunted from one place to another and at times I didn’t even know where my own mother was,” he says.
It meant Dozie had to take a job in Uganda until the war was over. When peace came, he moved home in September 1971, at the request of his mother, who was by then in poor health.
In Lagos, Dozie set up his own consultancy, the African Development Consulting Group. He never worked for anyone else again. In the early years, he was fortunate enough to gather consultancies for the big guns like Nestlé and Pfizer. In his spare time, he wrote about economics for the respected publication Business International.
In the 1980s, the road to real riches opened up thanks to a simple idea. Dozie had noticed traders from the remote villages in the east of the country, where he grew up, faced the problem of carrying huge bundles of cash when they trekked to Lagos on business.
“Sometimes they would be waylaid by rogues on the road,” he says.
Dozie pioneered electronic transfers in Nigeria so traders could transfer their cash to Lagos instead of having to carry it. It saw the creation of Diamond Bank, which opened its doors in 1991.
“The first customer was my wife,” laughs Dozie.
The bank started from a third floor office in Victoria Island with 20 people and $5 million.
“The assumption was we were going to come by money easily—it wasn’t easy.”
The problem was most companies, at that time, would not deal with a bank less than three years old. So the small staff at Diamond Bank went out to persuade everyone, from traders to car dealers, to part with their money to generate cash through deposits.
“In my view he is brilliant, driven and a great manager of talent—qualities which helped him in establishing Diamond Bank, especially through the 5 year period, from 1985 to 1990, when nothing was happening, and the early years from 1990 when he says they had it really tough,” says Akintola Akinbamidele of Renaissance Capital in Lagos.
The bank blossomed into a $240 million concern, but this was merely one step on a difficult path. In 2005, disaster struck when a new law that said all banks had to hold a minimum of 25 billion naira ($158.3 million) in share capital. Diamond Bank had a mere 6.4 billion naira ($ 40.5 million) in share capital—so it had to list to raise more, which led to a severe dilution of the family stake.
In the years leading up to this, Dozie had been busy with a deal that was to make his name and a large chunk of his fortune.
A South African cellphone company, MTN, approached Dozie with the idea of setting up a cellphone network in the vast Nigerian market. The South Africans wanted to pump millions into a 60% stake in MTN Nigeria, with Nigerians owning 40%. Dozie set off with high hopes to London and the United States to raise capital among the big money men and Nigerian expatriates. When he got there, it was as if he was trying to sell sand in the desert. Many people saw the struggles of the government telecoms company, NITEL, with its wobbly and sparse landlines. Investors said that if the state couldn’t set up a cellphone network in Nigeria, no one could.
“It was very disappointing. You have a good project and you are turned down. You start to question yourself and start to question your head,” he says.
Dozie could raise merely enough for a 20% stake in the new company. Through debt funding, MTN poured in millions to make up the difference. It was a huge risk, at the time, but MTN prospered and the rest is history. To this day, Dozie is chairman of a solid MTN Nigeria.
“Most of the people I asked to invest now regret not investing—I even regret it myself. They would have enjoyed returns of 20 times their money.”
More than a decade on, Dozie sits atop a family-owned investment company, Kunoch, worth $50 million, which pours money into everything from power generation to gas processing, oil exploration, real estate and banking. One of its investments is in a pilot project that could revolutionize the way power is provided in Nigeria—a country that needs electricity like a thirsty man needs water. The country’s economic progress is slowed by the fact that it produces a few thousand MW for tens of millions of Nigerians—around a tenth of what South Africa produces for a third of Nigeria’s population. Not for nothing do Nigerians call the state power company, PHCN, Please Hold Candles Near.
Dozie is investing in a pioneering independent power project, the Aba Power Project, in the south east of the country near Port Harcourt and not too far from the border with Cameroon. It will generate a minimum of 188 MW, from gas turbines, with plans to expand. In a region which has 20% of the power it needs, it will be like manna from heaven. The company running the project was founded by the former Nigerian minister of power, Bart Nnaji, who resigned in August over a conflict of interest. He was meant to sell his six power generating companies and 11 distribution companies.
It is part of the infrastructure that Dozie believes could be the salvation of his country. Travelers to Nigeria will be cheered to hear that this grand old man of Nigerian business has the crumbling Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos on his agenda.
“It erodes the image of the country. When you come through our airport you say, ‘Is this the Nigeria I have flown to see?’” he says.
Dozie reckons the government will concession the airport to private business in a bid to spruce it up. Others, close to the aviation industry in Lagos, believe the government will be loath to relinquish any control over the airport as it is the only one in the country that brings revenue into state coffers.
“I will give it a long shot… it will happen in the next five years,” says Dozie.
What about corruption? Even the pink-shirted traffic police on the way were a heavy hint that it permeates Nigerian life right down to the streets.
“It is very solvable. When we start seeing politics as a sacrifice, when it is a self-sacrificing exercise from those who want to serve… We need strong institutions with integrity and political parties with a well-known ideology.”
A stable political environment could clear the way for the virile entrepreneurs of Africa.
“I think they are counting on the political will of African leaders to smooth logistics, the factors of production and the movement of people. There are a lot of bottlenecks that need to be removed. People like Aliko Dangote have done us well and created a lot of employment. For me, what is lacking here is that we don’t have that critical mass in the genuine middle class, which is the bulwark of democracy. Once this happens we could start absorbing more young people into employment and our creative forces will be unleashed,” says Dozie.
“We all worry about food, shelter and health and until those things are made accessible to all people we will never change… Be patient don’t expect miracles to happen.”
In this yearning for a new Nigeria, Dozie draws on one of the entrepreneurs he admired, the late Steve Jobs.
“I loved his never quit spirit, he lost his position in the company, but did not despair,” he says.
A new Nigeria may have been a tall order, even for Steve Jobs. It is an ideal worth cherishing, but it does help if you believe in the sound of generators disappearing from Lagos forever, taking 15 minutes from the city to the airport, or fairies.

The Rolling Stone That’s Never At A Loss

At the end of April on a typically blustery Western Cape autumn day, a sleek private airplane glided into an airfield near the capital of South Africa’s fruit industry. Ceres doesn’t often play host to such finery and at the airfield’s perimeter fence, a huddle of children watched excitedly as the aircraft came to a halt and its door opened.
A small group of men emerged and the children seemed slightly disappointed.
They looked quite ordinary—and outwardly that was certainly the case—just a few friends on a weekend junket.
At their head was a man who shuns such attention; someone who has thrown off the shackles of a life in auditing; a man responsible for one-in-four of the private prescriptions being written at corner pharmacies and one-in-five in the public sector.
Stephen Saad is the chief executive and founder of a South African phenomenon—a pharmaceutical company that is the biggest in the southern hemisphere. It has found favor with American presidents. It has also defied the odds and based its manufacturing in a country dogged by the negative influence of a persistently strong currency; a lack of investment in infrastructure; poor skills and an attitude that has generally embraced these problems.
Saad is a multi-billionaire in rand terms and worth at least $650 million, according to Forbes, but his appearance in a private airplane, in a relatively remote rural region, is a world away from the allure and shimmer of wealth. He flew in for several hours of sweat and hard graft; a 240km cycle race to raise awareness of a condition that killed the 28-year-old son of his chairwoman and friend. The reason for the private jet? Saad assures us it is merely to save time so that he spends as little time away from what he calls his ‘big five’; his wife and four daughters.
I first met Saad in Monaco in 2004. Despite his modesty, I look back at that meeting and realize that he could easily have slotted into the glitz and glamor of the French Riviera. He was youthful in appearance and had a drive and ambition that laced every conversation.
We were at the World Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards. Saad represented South Africa having beaten off stiff opposition from stalwarts of the old guard of South African business. When the final votes were counted, an American pipped Saad at the post. The word on the night was that tactical voting had denied him the title that many believed was his.
Saad was visibly rattled. Being second in a global competition of such prestige would, for most entrepreneurs, be an accolade of which to be enormously proud.
Not he on that night.
Whether it was the nature of the defeat, with the whispers of voting to appease sponsors, or the disappointment of being second best that irked him, I’ve never quite worked out.
The disappointment in Monaco was merely one leg of a long journey. Saad graduated from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa as a chartered accountant in 1986. He joined Coopers and Lybrand as an article clerk.
“My father wanted me to extend the 30 years of family tradition by joining his practice but I knew, I absolutely knew, that there was no way that was going to happen. I couldn’t do it. One of the partners at the time recognized this and privately told me that in this industry he could see I was like a bird with its wings clipped.”
During this time, Saad was seconded to a small company that specialized in pharmaceutical wholesaling. The owner was impressed enough to offer Saad a job, which he accepted. Little did either of them know that this offer from an underperforming small business would launch the career of one of Africa’s great entrepreneurs and spawn a global pharmaceutical giant.
“We sold to markets and to people that other companies ignored. It was an eye-opener. Not many whites had ever been to a township let alone done business there. But this was where the huge potential was. I was a rep in the townships and I learnt a lot of life lessons in those days. My future thinking was modeled in those early days.”
Saad’s experiences at the grassroots of the pharmaceutical industry proved invaluable. It forged within him a philosophy that holds true in the doctors’ rooms of a remote township, as well as in the boardrooms; people don’t want to compromise when it comes to their health, but at the same time the price of medicine is crucial.
When interviewing Saad, the first few minutes are uncomfortable. He is clearly suspicious of a stranger probing his thoughts, but as the conversation progresses and the line of questioning moves to subjects that are of interest to him, with which he is comfortable, there is very little that can stop him from extolling the world according to Saad.
“When I was a rep I’ll never forget being in the surgery [rooms] of a township doctor and presenting him with two products; one was in fancy packaging and the other in a rather plain brown box. I suggested that he could give the first to his medical aid patient and the other to his cash customer, after all they were essentially the same and were based on the same active ingredient. He looked me in the eye and told me that a patient is sick no matter what his or her status, and that he wouldn’t treat them differently. He’d made his point, and I wouldn’t forget that.”
Saad became a 50% shareholder of his employer, QuickMed, and convinced the owners that the ownership of intellectual property was the only way to, not only grow the business, but to save it. He then set about employing the spirit of entrepreneurship that was to become a hallmark of everything he’s done since.
One of the early moves was to persuade Covan, a small, family-run business that manufactured eye drops, to merge with QuickMed to form a new entity named Zurich.
Zurich flourished in the early 1990s, as Saad threw himself into the business. Turnover doubled and suddenly the company was the focus of the attention of larger companies. Prempharm (today Adcock Ingram) couldn’t resist dominating the upstart and bought Zurich for R75 million ($9.1 million) in 1993.
With the purchase price came a restraint of trade on Saad. He wasn’t too worried at the time, with R20 million ($2.4 million) in his back pocket at the age of 29 and thoughts of early retirement, this technicality was a small price to pay. It was a time for reflection and planning.
Saad’s passion for the pharmaceutical industry was apparent, but education was also close to his heart. Varsity College was a private tertiary education institution that was managed poorly and under threat of closure. The idea of the college as a business opportunity was offered to Saad and his partner from QuickMed, Gus Attridge.
For a nominal sum they acquired the business. They set about restructuring the top-heavy overhead base, removing the founders and offering incentives to learners through aggressive advertising campaigns, not normally associated with the business of education. Potential students were offered a money-back guarantee should they not pass their exams, provided they attended a full program of lectures. The business began to thrive.
The business had cost just R1.5 million ($182,500), Saad sold it to LeisureNet for around R100 million ($12.1 million) at a time when education stocks on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) were attracting significant premiums to the overall market. He had again turned a company riddled with inefficiencies into a success.
In 1997, as a wealthy young man, Saad teamed up with Attridge and Steve Sturlese to form Aspen Healthcare (Pty) Ltd.
“When I look back at the early days of Aspen my philosophy was based on the experiences gained during my days as a rep and partner at QuickMed. In those days, I’d asked whether the business was about moving boxes or owning intellectual property. It was so obvious that there was a market out there that was hungry for high quality but affordable products and that needed representation. Although this knowledge had been acquired through the little sphere of doctors that I serviced, I was convinced it could be applied on a bigger platform—even globally.”
During its first year of trading, Aspen recorded revenue of R105 million ($12.8 million). The philosophy was clear from the start: buy licenses from large multi-nationals for their non-core brands. These products were important in the life of the new company selling to a new market. It was a two-way street, the people were ready to buy pills they had never been offered before, the big players were happy to off-load them.
Aspen began to own intellectual property, such as patents, trademarks and pharmaceutical dossiers, without having the expensive overhead of manufacturing and its complications.
The management realized very quickly that they had a winning formula, but their ambitions were such that there was a real danger of being restricted by insufficient capital.
To rectify this, and make way for the grand plan, Aspen targeted Medhold Medical Ltd, a small company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Aspen concluded a reverse takeover of the business and thus became a public company. Records show that at the end of June 1998, Aspen’s annual turnover was just under R119 million ($14.4 million).
A year later, it was more than R522 million ($63.5 million) and the investment community was taking notice. The company’s stock was moving.
Then the audacious deal, that defined the Aspen approach to business, was unveiled. SA Druggists (SAD) had been the object of desire of Adcock Ingram but the deal had fallen through. Despite the mismatch in terms of size, Saad went to his financiers with his plan to purchase SAD for the princely sum of R2.4 billion ($292.2 million). Fedsure was SAD’s largest shareholder at the time and would keep the insurance and manage the healthcare part of the business. Aspen kept the pharmaceutical business once all the transactions were rubber stamped, Aspen realized approximately R1 billion ($121.8 million) from the divestments.
The financiers had backed the upstart Aspen, but there was institutional investor reticence to the deal which seemed to defy conventional business logic. Aspen’s bank asked that shares in Aspen be discounted, but this was not an option for Saad and so the company was saddled with R1 billion of debt with an operating profit of around R123 million ($14.9 million).
Since the SAD deal, the story of Aspen has been one of extraordinary growth. Strategic agreements have been a key part of the growth story, not least the link with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 2003, that allowed Aspen to market and distribute 40 branded products into the South African private sector.
Although the company’s phenomenal success has been based on its South African business, its ability to penetrate further afield, often a graveyard for others, has distinguished Aspen as a global pharmaceutical concern with which to be reckoned.
The Clinton Foundation chose Aspen as the first southern hemisphere-based company to provide generic anti-retrovirals (ARVs) for the United States’ government, while that country’s Federal Drug Administration pre-qualified the company for the provision of generic ARVs, funded by President Bush’s emergency plan for AIDS relief.
In 2005, Aspen secured the majority of the South African government’s ARV tender with an allocation of close to 60% of volume. At the same time, results showed that Saad’s company had generated an annual turnover of more than R2.8 billion ($336.5 million).
As the relationship with GSK became closer, and with an aggressive acquisition policy Aspen became truly global by expanding its footprint into the Asia Pacific region and into Latin America through an investment with Strides Arcolab Limited. In 2010, Australia was conquered with the massive R6.1 billion ($738.2 million) acquisition of Sigma Ltd pharmaceutical business.
I put it to Saad that perhaps the rapid expansion into so many new territories and jurisdictions would stretch the resources of a still relatively new player with a CEO who prefers not to travel too far from his home in Durban.
“I have a video conferencing facility,” he replied rather drily.
But there is clearly more to international success than the ability to talk to Rio de Janeiro and Sydney without leaving the boardroom.
“Most of my guys, the ones I’m in business with, have had start-ups and they understand my philosophy, the Aspen way of doing things. There’s no universal strategy, but on certain points there is no negotiation.”
This is where the media-shy CEO billionaire starts to become animated and I realized that to work under him is not for the faint of heart.
“I decided to bring all our people together from all our offices, from all over the world. So of course I chose Umhlanga Rocks for our conference! I stood in front of this group and told them that certain things were not negotiable. They must have passion for the business, and then people will follow them. At the same time, I told them it was essential to have humility and compassion, and that there was absolutely no negotiation when it comes to delivery. In business, you get leaders and you get managers, and there’s a very subtle distinction between the two. I want leaders, leaders are inspirational.”
Saad demands a lot of his people and clearly recognizes that as head of the company, as its inspirational leader, his behavior and his standards can never drop if his demands are to be adopted. When asked about his ability to maintain such a punishing pace, his stock response is “to rest is to rust”.
The choice of Umhlanga speaks volumes of the company’s grounding and of its CEO’s recognition of the importance of the South African part of the business. Again, the animation, even over the telephone, is palpable.
“We were told that we were mad to manufacture in South Africa. Some analyst asked me if I was doing this for my own ego. I pointed out as politely as I could that I was a shareholder and that it was the right thing to do. Today, I’m so proud to be able to have proved the doomsayers wrong. Today the billions [of rands] we invested in the Eastern Cape have produced one of the most competitive facilities in the world that sends products of incredible quality to over 100 countries. It’s up there with the very best.”
Saad is indeed a remarkable character.
On the one hand, there is a man that is driven by the old-fashioned values of integrity, hard work, passion, and one that has learned the traditional way of doing business. On the other, is a new-age thinker, one that recognizes that big business is built on layers of bureaucracy and structures but will not allow those structures to be an excuse for any of his team shirking a decision.
“At Aspen I will not tolerate a ‘cover-your-arse’ mentality,” he says with a hint of steely menace.
On the one hand there’s a CEO who is bursting with optimism for Africa and South Africa—who compares the high suicide rates of northern Europeans, who seemingly have everything, to those of the naturally optimistic African people who, in relative terms, have little; on the other, he is a sad South African who shakes his head and whose voice drops to a whisper when he tells of the union which has been enriched by Aspen shares at R6 ($0.7) (they are now R120—$14) and yet forgets the past when it comes to the negotiating table.
I wonder, when I hear him say he’d rather back a good leader in a bad industry than a bad one in an industry that’s thriving, if he might be in his own diplomatic way (and in the presence of a journalist) having a dig at South Africa’s government. I decide not to ask.
In March, Aspen’s interim results included the following highlights:
<ul>
<li>Revenue from continuing operations R7.5 billion ($903 million)</li>
<li>Operating profit R2 billion ($24 million)</li>
<li>Market capitalization R50 billion ($6 billion)</li>
</ul>
When I talk of money the enthusiasm for the interview starts to wane and there’s mutterings of most entrepreneurs that he knows not being in it for the money alone, which I believe, up to a point.
When I talk of personal goals and the future, his interest is revived.
“I still have lots of achievements that I need to focus on. It’s so frustrating living in a country where there’s great thought and great theory, great principles, but so little action. Maybe it’s my personality type but I just want people to stop thinking about it and just do it. If I was like that I’d never have gone into Brazil.”
At the end of April, Stephen Saad and the health minister, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, started the gruelling 240km Aspen Trans Karoo mountain bike challenge to raise funds for paediatric healthcare facilities through the Sifiso Nxasana Paediatric Trust.
“The children of Africa need the support of large organizations” were his simple words.
Saad completed the race, and when he arrived at the finish line in Sutherland his airplane was  waiting to take him home to his own children.

The Golden Wings That Couldn’t Be Clipped

The hard boiled trade unionist sat and wept before journalists as he told of his last attempt to save some of the 44 lives—including two police officers, lost in a violent and bloody week at one of South Africa’s biggest and most troubled platinum mines.
For a week in August more than 3,000 workers protested on top of Wonderkop Hill around two kilometers from the gates of Marikana Mine, in Rustenburg 122km north west of Johannesburg. Almost the entire workforce of 30,000 people downed tools in support of more pay for the rock drillers, who carry out the hardest and most dangerous work for the least pay.
The president of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), Joseph Mathunjwa, recalled the last few minutes before angry strikers rushed the police.
“Please leave this place; they are going to kill you… I kneeled there, I tried to plead with them… They said to me they think it’s safe to be on the mountain. ‘If we have to be killed let the police come and kill us… We want money that can keep our families going’ [they said],” Mathunjwa says.
Mineworkers in North West’s Lonmin Platinum mine began striking on August 10 for salary increases from an estimated R4,500 ($540) to R12,500 ($1,500). Many have blamed rivalry between AMCU and the biggest trade union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), for the tension that led to the fatal shooting.
AMCU denies this. It says the union was asked to intervene on August 13 and was merely doing its job.
“I never thought that the history of the Sharpeville massacre would happen in 2012, in a democratic society,” said Mathunjwa.
AMCU voiced their frustrations with their organization being wrongfully charged as orchestrating the massacre. Mathunjwa argued that they were a recognized union in some sections at Lonmin and had a membership of 7,000.
“Why involve violence now?”
Eddie Majadibodu, the head of bargaining for the NUM, saw the shootings and how police dispersed strikers in the aftermath on the following day to prevent more violence.
“The NUM wants a full public inquiry to determine exactly what happened,” he says.
It is one of the few issues upon which both unions agree.
The ministry of police spokesperson, Zweli Mnisi, says the matter has been a brewing labor issue, employee versus employer. The police were called in to retain order as the constitution does not call for barbaric behavior, he said. Two police officers were killed on the first day that violence struck, he says that the workers were in possession of illegal arms are and dared the cops saying: “You dare us, we won’t move. If you want war, we’ll give you war.”
“From our side it’s not the duty of the police to be labor brokers,” he says.
Police confirmed that 44 people had died on the night of August 16 when police first used water cannon and then bullets to stop a rushing crowd.
“The [Independent Police Investigative Directorate] IPID, who police the police, are onsite to determine who fired the first shot,” he says.
Lonmin chairman, Roger Phillimore, said: “We are treating the developments around police operations this afternoon [August 17] with the utmost seriousness. The South African Police Service (SAPS) have been in charge of public order and safety on the ground since the violence between competing labor factions erupted over the weekend, claiming the lives of eight of our employees and two police officers. It goes without saying that we deeply regret the further loss of life in what is clearly a public order rather than labor relations associated matter.”
Workers at Marikana risked dismissal by ignoring an ultimatum from Lonmin, the world’s third largest platinum producer, to return to work by August 17. President Jacob Zuma cut short a regional SADC conference, held in Maputo, Mozambique, to return home so he could visit Marikana.
As the sun went down on the day after the killings a group of women gathered around Wonderkop Hill and wept for their lost men.
“You have stolen our husbands, you have stolen our brothers,” shouted one distraught woman at police.
Only an inquiry will tell us how this happened.

A Week Of Bloody Shame

She is often portrayed as a tough and ruthless businesswoman, who doesn’t take prisoners. But face-to-face, Wendy Appelbaum shows she is anything but. Open, warm and witty, she makes it clear that being rich comes with the heavy responsibility of giving back to society.
With an estimated net worth of $183 million, Appelbaum is said to be the wealthiest woman on the continent. It’s a ballpark figure she dismisses as “complete rubbish”, while declining to comment further.
“I don’t think the point is how much you’ve got. The point is what you choose to do with it,” she says in her deep, guttural voice. “The more you have, the more responsibility you have to share it with those who don’t.”
She certainly takes this responsibility seriously. Philanthropy has been her focus and passion for years, with a large proportion of her charity work targeting women. Appelbaum has her fingers in many pies. She is a member of the Global Philanthropists’ Circle run by David Rockefeller’s daughter, Peggy, through her New York-based Synergos Institute; a member of Harvard University’s Women’s Leadership Board; the Helen Suzman Foundation as well as the International Women’s Forum and Women Moving Millions, an initiative started by Swanee Hunt, one of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt’s daughters, who motivated 100 women from all over the world to commit a minimum of $1 million for women’s causes, raising a total of $187 million in only a few months.
“For me it’s a no-brainer. It’s an honor and a privilege to give back to the society in which I live,” says Appelbaum, noting her surprise at how few rich women are involved in the world of philanthropy.
“If you look at Harvard’s reserves, or elsewhere, it’s an old boys’ club. It’s because for most of the world’s rich, charity is much more about status than helping the less privileged. Philanthropy is a sign of success. A sign that you have spare capacity. It’s what I call a pissing contest. Pure ego coming back in chunks.”
That needed to change, Appelbaum thought and co-founded the Women’s Investment Portfolio Holdings (Wiphold) in the 1990s, soon after the end of apartheid. A South African woman-controlled company that raises capital for major investments in large corporations, like Old Mutual and Nedbank, with the profits accruing to the trust.
“We were 11 women on the board. The timing was perfect. BEE [black economic empowerment] was becoming the sexy thing of the day. And when you coupled that with women… the deal flow was extraordinary,” Appelbaum recalls.
In just four years, Wiphold turned from an initial $60,000 investment into a $120 million debt-free enterprise listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
Part of Wiphold’s business philosophy is to benefit poor women. The management team tutored women in townships and rural areas in basic finance and business skills and helped them to form groups to buy shares. Her peers of that time describe Appelbaum as an astute businesswoman, who poured lots of energy into finding solutions to complex matters and new investment opportunities.
“Failure did not exist in her books,” remembers Wiphold group CEO Louisa Mojela.
“Beneath that toughness there is an element of softness, kindness and a huge heart to give to the previously disadvantaged. She treats her colleagues with a lot of respect and humility.”
Appelbaum left Wiphold shortly after it listed, selling her own shares so that previously disadvantaged women could fill her space.
“I thought there was enough strength in the company to continue without me. Although a white woman fell into the previously disadvantaged group at that time, I certainly didn’t feel it myself. I didn’t think I should benefit,” she explains.
Appelbaum looks back at that time with utter satisfaction.
“It was probably one of the most effective boards I have ever sat on. There is no bullshit with women. We don’t waste time out of politeness,” she says.
Men, by contrast, operate in business with an entirely different strategy to women, she believes.
“Men look at life differently. They are not as upfront and as honest as women. They compete in a relatively underhand kind of way.”
It is exactly this different approach to doing business that companies could enormously benefit from if they only realized how much a combination of men and women’s different visions enhances corporate environments, Appelbaum says.
“Women have intuition, which men don’t have, and probably a softer side to us, on a certain level, where compassion does come in, it gives you a much more interesting and varied vision of the world. Men see the big picture, women see detail. And it’s when the two work together that you get a much better outcome for the business. That’s why congruent boards are much more successful.”
Appelbaum, who is often described as being frank to the point of being blunt, certainly knows what she is talking about. In the past 25 years, she has sat on countless boards—most of them dominated by men. She was deputy chair of IT and retailing company Connection Group Ltd and is still a trustee of investment holding trust The Tribune Trust as well as director of Sphere Holdings Ltd, to name a few. Her very first seat, however, was on the board of her father, Donald Gordon’s Liberty Group, when she was made director of Liberty Investors Ltd, the group’s previously listed holding company.
When Gordon appointed his daughter in the early 1990s, he certainly didn’t expect to be challenged by her. You can be sure the feisty Appelbaum had no intention of a subservient role. She piped up at her very first Liberty board meeting, raising questions. Gordon kept a straight face but took his daughter aside as soon as the meeting was over, firmly instructing her never to question him in his boardroom again. Appelbaum remembers how she stood up to him.
“I said: ‘What do you think I’m doing here? If you want a rubber stamp go to the post office. I’m not here to rubber stamp everything’. Nobody else would take him on. I was always the one who had to do it.”
One of the things that irked her most about her father was that “he was a sexist”, she frankly admits. Apart from his own daughter, Gordon never appointed a woman to a management position. He also described businesswomen who didn’t speak much as “very clever”.
“I thought to myself, ‘Oh no, you have a problem.’ I never saw him put a woman in an important position, ever. It frustrated me,” says Appelbaum.
Her father’s condescending attitude was an eye-opener that led her to become a feminist, she says, with American women’s rights activist and author Gloria Steinem, one of her role models, who later became a friend.
“I’m not a bra-burning feminist. I associate closely with Gloria because she has been able to maintain her femininity despite her belief in equality. I believe that women are equal to men if not better. There is nothing, aside from perhaps hard physical labor, that women can’t do as well as men. Many women just haven’t had opportunities.”
South Africa has had a slow start to acknowledging women’s rights and equality. The first recorded woman to work in an office was Miss Letty Impey, who was employed as a secretary by Johannesburg solicitor Henry Lindsay in 1894. Her employment caused such scandal that Impey had to work behind a screen in the open-plan office because it was regarded as “not quite proper” for her to be seen. She even became somewhat of a showpiece as curious men visited the solicitor’s office, peeking behind the screen to catch a glimpse of the female staff member.
Much has changed since then for women, but not nearly enough. South African women continue to struggle for equity in both their personal and business lives. This becomes particularly apparent at management level and in boardrooms, says Appelbaum, who to this day often remains the only female representative: “There are still some boards who really believe that women should be seen but not heard and who are taken aback when you give them an opinion.”
It takes someone of Appelbaum’s poise and unshakable self-confidence to operate and make her mark in those corporate patriarchal environments. Perhaps it is the constant head butting with her father that taught her how to stand up for herself. Perhaps it is the security of her family background and wealth that make her undefeatable—although Appelbaum, who is in her early 50s, says she never once in her life felt she had to prove herself for being more than “just Donald Gordon’s heiress”.
She believes what made her strong and independent is that, apart from her stint as one of her father’s directors at Liberty, she was always an entrepreneur who worked for herself.
“I’ve never felt like a quota. If I wish something to be offensive, I make it offensive. Sitting on boards is not about making friends. It’s about doing the right thing for your shareholders. Corporate governance, for me, is absolutely paramount. But I think it does bother other women in that they feel marginalized.”
And so it became a vital imperative in Appelbaum’s life to help close the gender gap by blazing a trail for other women, something that is done far too little, she says, noting that few women who have made it in the business world care to promote their peers.
“You just have to take a look at some of the women-headed companies in this country and their female representation. You’d be deeply disappointed. Perhaps women don’t want to be seen as rocking the boat or showing prejudice.”
Appelbaum also complains about what she calls “repeat board seats”, where a number of select few women sit on multiple boards, causing the false impression that the gender glass ceiling has shifted upwards.
“If you look at how many women are exposed, it’s very low. There’s no point in one woman sitting on 10 corporate boards and filling out long forms of conflicts of interest prior to meetings. That’s nonsense. Women must get to the point where they widen the spread of individuals exposed at those levels. We’re making slow progress in giving women the equal opportunities they so rightly deserve.”
She believes the 2008 global financial crisis from which the world is struggling to recover offers an opportunity to women to re-position themselves in business and get breaks that usually wouldn’t be accessible to them.
“Companies are struggling due to the recession, and women tend to be much cheaper hires,” Appelbaum explains.
“One of the reasons for that is that women don’t have the confidence to negotiate for themselves. So they tend to get bullied. But they are getting the hires at the moment because their cost to company is lower. There’s a gap and they seem to be taking it. I think the glass ceiling is finally shifting a bit.”
Appelbaum had the benefit of growing up in a family environment where the glass ceiling didn’t exist, where entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen were passed down to her and her brothers, Richard and Graeme, every day.
“My father had a wonderful way of verbalizing what he was doing,” she says, joking that every dinner table conversation in the Gordon’s family home was like being at Harvard Business School: “It was like living in an MBA class.” It was her father who taught her how to identify opportunity and maximize its benefit.
Although a great admirer of her father, Appelbaum is keenly aware that he was far from perfect and has no illusions that her free business education came at a price.
“He wasn’t interested in your opinion; he was interested in you as an audience. My father needed to be told how clever he was all the time. There was that need for affirmation, which most serious executives need. They really need their ego stroked. That’s why, when you look at corporations, very often the succession is not there because they had a bunch of yes-men behind them, telling them that no matter what they did, they were marvelous. And they love that. My father was no different.”
While her brothers found their father intimidating, Appelbaum insists she never did: “I’m not easily intimidated, by anybody. In fact I can’t think of anybody that I find intimidating.”
It thus comes as no surprise that it is her—and not her two older brothers—who tends to be described as a chip off the old block.
“It’s not a bad old block to be a chip of. I am definitely the most similar to my father,” she laughs.
Coming from a family of European immigrants who arrived in South Africa in the mid-1920s with absolutely nothing, Donald Gordon knew from an early age he wanted to make money. Although his dream was to be a scientist, he decided to become an auditor instead, and one day, when auditing an insurance company, he noticed the firm was making profit despite the fact that it was badly run. ‘Surely I can do a much better job,’ he thought… and started the Liberty Group, which later became a major insurance and investment emporium.
Decades later, Gordon sold the Liberty Group to Standard Bank. All three of his children pursued their own business interests, but business associates say he would have handed the firm over to his daughter instead of one of his sons, had he not sold it. Appelbaum, however, says she has no regrets about the sale of the group and is skeptical that a close working relationship with her father—necessary to build up her succession—could have worked out in the long-term.
“I would have found it almost impossible to work for my father; because we are so similar, we used to argue a lot,” she admits.
Since then, she has proven herself many times as a businesswoman in her own right, with pretty much all of her ventures ending in success. She bought De Morgenzon—the Morning Sun—a wine estate in midst of the Stellenbosch winelands, 45 minutes from Cape Town, with her husband, Hylton. Their maiden vintage, a 2005 Chenin Blanc, became the first wine to get five stars in South Africa’s leading Platter’s Wine Guide.
“I’m an absolute perfectionist,” Appelbaum, who also breeds racehorses, describes her modus operandi.
“Whatever I decide to do, I will drive myself insane until it’s right.”
A game player at heart, which she says is based on her deep competitiveness, she was a provincial tennis player as a child and a provincial golfer as an adult, although she only took up the sport at the age of 30. Business to her is like a game, too, one that demands strategic thinking, passion, skill and stamina.
Going into the wine business has been one of the greatest challenges of her career. To produce a top quality organic wine, she has planted wildflowers between the vines for natural pollination, while Baroque music softly floats throughout the vineyard to bio-dynamically support plant growth. Appelbaum has also taken utmost care in selecting the right winemaker for the estate.
“I had four or five winemakers making wine for me. Not only did I look at the quality of the wine they made, but for a number of years, I interacted with them to see who I would get on best with. The winemaker is the one who grows the grapes to their best advantage. What I have to do as the entrepreneur is to give him every single opportunity to make the very best wine he can,” she says.
But there is one major component to wine making that is out of every farmers’ control: the weather. It’s an aspect, Appelbaum admits, she struggles with.
“For a control freak like me, the wine business is a hell of a challenge. It’s very frustrating,” she says.
That’s why she is as hands-on with the day-to-day running of her wine farm as her time allows. The Appelbaums live in a beautiful mansion on top of the highest point of the farm, overlooking the vineyards and the far-reaching, picturesque views of Stellenbosch’s rolling hills.
From here, Appelbaum manages the estate, admitting that she can be a little bit authoritarian.
“It’s my way or the highway. But only because I’m so sure of what I want.”
Her staff appear to appreciate her driven, forthright management style.
“What you see is what you get. She has a very transparent management style. She tells you things straight. She leads with integrity,” says De Morgenzon tasting room manager, Diana Renke.
Integrity is a trait Appelbaum rates highly, and it was when she auctioned a second wine estate, Quoin Rock Winery and Manor Estate, for $6.5 million in December and sniffed corruption that she decided to publicly take on a multi-million dollar industry—to protect her own integrity while fighting a battle for South Africa’s greater good. She laid a complaint with the National Consumer Commission (NCC) after discovering she had competed for the estate with a ghost bidder, someone hired by South Africa’s largest auction group, Auction Alliance, to drive up the price.
Suddenly, Appelbaum, who doesn’t like the limelight and chose not to keep her maiden name because she “did not want to be just associated as Donald Gordon’s daughter”, suddenly found herself in a very public spat with Auction Alliance CEO Rael Levitt.
“Mr. Levitt took me out of my comfort zone because he chose to fight me in the media. That fight with Mr. Levitt was a fight for good. For me, there’s either right or wrong. There’s nothing grey in matter. I believe that I have done South African society a great service because corruption is rife in this country.”
The outcome proved her right: in March, the NCC found Auction Alliance guilty of contravening the Consumer Protection Act by conducting a mock auction and fined it 10% of its annual turnover.
Appelbaum’s love for a “good” fight stems from a friendship with well-known anti-apartheid activist and politician Helen Suzman, who was a family friend of the Gordons and later in life became one of Appelbaum’s mentors.
“She was a no-bullshit woman; tough, clever and not intimidated by anybody. She encouraged me to be feisty and cheeky. She’d fight anybody as long as it was for somebody’s benefit,” remembers Appelbaum.
Appelbaum is a woman without regrets. If there were one, it would be that she never became a doctor—a profession her father, who wanted her to take up accounting, didn’t approve of. When she wasn’t accepted into medical school due to strict quotas on women at that time, she studied psychology instead, with economics as one of her subjects. But her interest in medicine became a lifelong passion, with a large chunk of Appelbaum’s philanthropic investments going towards health.
She is a trustee of her father’s Donald Gordon Foundation, one of the largest private charitable foundations in Southern Africa, which includes the Donald Gordon Medical Centre in Johannesburg. She is also a trustee of CHOC (Children’s Haemotology Oncology Clinics) and recently founded the Wendy Appelbaum Women’s Health Institute for the advancement and improvement of treatment for disorders affecting women.
Only now, much later in her life, has she found time to pursue her childhood dream somewhat: She recently enrolled in a course at Harvard Medical School to learn about the connection between human rights and healthcare.

Feisty and Cheeky—A Woman With No Regrets

Forty-five years later and now among Africa’s 30 richest people with a net worth to match–he is worth more than $545-million–Raymond Ackerman still bears the scars from the worst day of his life. The day still gnaws at his mind, fresh, like it happened yesterday. It has driven and defined his life.
“It was a Monday morning in 1966,” Ackerman, now 80, recalls. “Norman Herber, the chairman, called me in and just said you are out.”
The least Ackerman thought he deserved was an explanation. Certainly, for someone who had served the company with distinction, for the previous 15 years–at least as far as he was concerned. He had joined the retail group, Greatermans, as a 20-year-old trainee, rising through the ranks to become MD of its struggling groceries division, Checkers. He had built the besieged subsidiary from three stores to 85 by the day of his firing.
<div id="attachment_827" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-827" class="size-large wp-image-827" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/AV_00020165-766x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="634" />SOUTH AFRICA &#8211; Date unknown: Pick &#8216;n Pay Chairman, Raymond Ackerman (Photo by Gallo Images/Sunday Times)</div>
To Ackerman’s shock and horror, Herber was in no mood to explain, nor did he seem to think he owed anybody anything, least of all his underling.
“I said Norman, what went wrong? He wouldn’t explain. He just said ‘Raymond, I know we are close. But from today, you are out.’”
With his last paycheck, off went Ackerman to his wife, Wendy, who was at the time heavily pregnant with their fourth and last child. Although equally devastated, she would give her husband the best advice he ever got.
“Raymond, this is the best chance of your life–open your own business.”
But where was the capital going to come from?
As Ackerman pondered the question, he remembered an American businessman he had met during the time he was learning the ropes at Checkers. He had told him: “Business is 90% guts and 10% capital.”
For the next few months Ackerman and an accountant friend would go around speaking to a wide range of potential investors trying to convince them to buy into their business idea. About 40 backers would line up and the following year, 1967, a new retail group, Pick ’n Pay, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
Ackerman and company would start out by buying four small Cape Town stores, laying the foundations for what is today a US$6.76-billion turnover company.
Pick ’n Pay is now South Africa’s second largest food, general merchandise and clothing chain. The group boasts 775 stores, mainly in South Africa but also in neighboring countries: Botswana; Zimbabwe; Zambia; Mozambique; Namibia and Swaziland. The company is also in Mauritius. According to the latest annual report, 100 more stores are due to open over the next financial year. The company employs more than 38,000 people.
With that kind of achievement many men of Ackerman’s age would probably want to spend the rest of their lives in peace–traveling the world; looking after their grandchildren or simply tending the garden. The last thing you would expect from such an achiever is appetite for a new, if not hazardous, struggle.
Well, like an old war-horse sniffing gun-powder, Ackerman is bracing himself for a new war. In it, he wants to gallop ahead of younger stallions, including his eldest son Gareth, whom he anointed as his successor and chairman in 2010.
Ackerman discloses, during our interview, that he has drafted himself into a select and close-knit team that is working hard and spending a fortune on a battle plan to fend off marauding United States invader, the world’s biggest and ruthless retailer: Walmart.
Walmart–a multinational both feared and respected–bought a majority stake in Massmart, South Africa’s third largest retailer. It was an acquisition opposed by unions that went through a turbulent hearing at the Competition Commission in Pretoria. Many in the unions feared the company’s rough-and-ready approach to labor relations. Other South African retailers feared they’d be undercut and shoved out of the market by Walmart.
<div id="attachment_828" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-828" class="size-large wp-image-828" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/0000139705-821x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="591" />CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA ñ 28 May 2011: Businessman Raymond Ackerman receives an honorary doctorate from the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Cape Town, South Africa on 28 May 2011. (Photo by Gallo Images/Foto24/Nasief Manie)</div>
In the aftermath of regulatory approval, the US outfit made no secret of its intention to capture a much larger market share in South Africa by starting a price war with the likes of Pick ’n Pay.
“With Walmart coming, we want to be the best in every part of our business. We’ve redone our buying; we’ve redone our warehousing; and we’ve redone every aspect of our business. We are gearing ourselves for the fight, a very big fight.”
And fighting, it must be said, is something Ackerman is used to. After all he has spent a lifetime fighting his South African rivals OK and Checkers in the cut-throat world of supermarkets–where the cheapest baked beans can be a shot to the jugular.
I put to Ackerman that Walmart, with its deep pockets and huge operations around the world, could prove to be the toughest, if not most formidable, opponent he has ever faced.
“We’ve done our homework and will fight a good fight,” he says.
“I’ve studied deeply what they’ve been doing but I don’t want to get into that. I don’t think they’ve succeeded everywhere. We are looking at the weaknesses that we’ve picked up around the world, what countries they’ve done well in, what countries they’ve failed in. We are gearing ourselves to fight a good fight, not against a ruthless guy, but against a company that has shown that it’s got weaknesses.”
It also turns out that Ackerman’s much-publicized retirement, announced two years ago, never really was. Or, as he prefers to put it, he is “technically retired.”
Ackerman still goes to work everyday. He still arrives at 8am. In addition to attending to social responsibility programs, he advises the executive management team on administration and merchandising.
What happens when his son, Gareth, and his team don’t take his advice?
“I try not to interfere with the day-to-day running. They listen to some of my advice and sometimes they don’t. When they don’t take my advice I get upset but I don’t take offence. If I took offence, then they would feel that I’m interfering. It’s not easy, by the way. It’s not easy retiring when you’ve built a business from scratch.”
What some may call meddling or refusing to let go, Ackerman merely calls passion.
“I’m passionate about what I do. I want to build a company that will last forever”.
The only way to make a business last forever, Ackerman advises, is by sticking to good values–something he says he tells everyone who cares to listen to the story of his success, including the scores of entrepreneurs, business leaders and students he always gets invited to inspire and motivate.
It all goes back to advice a Professor gave Ackerman and his class back in 1949, at the University of Cape Town, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree. The lecturer asked all those who wanted to go into business so that they could make money, to put their hands up. Almost everyone raised their hands, including Ackerman. The professor then advised the class: “If you think making money is the purpose of business, you are going to fail.”
Ackerman took the advice and it is his motto to this day. It is something he says analysts always miss, whenever they examine his business performance.
“Analysts are meant to analyze a company by this triple line and corporate governance–but analysts will never ask me about what I do on social responsibility, what I do for my people. They just want to see profit…profit…profit. I want to build a company that will last forever. The analysts just want profit growth, profit growth, profit growth.”
“South Africa, in my opinion, needs desperately more businesses involved with triple line reporting. You must give back to the community. The more you give, the more you will succeed.
By giving, Pick ’n Pay removed an albatross from around its neck.
When Nelson Mandela came into power after South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, one of his first moves was to ask the country’s white business establishment to sell a stake to their black counterparts, in a program now known as Black Economic Empowerment.
Ackerman says he grabbed the opportunity with both hands, by creating franchises for black entrepreneurs. The result was a win-win solution that helped both black entrepreneurs and Pick ’n Pay grow. Ackerman converted some of his underperforming grocery stores into franchises and has been building scores of new stores in townships. Many of the franchise stores are owned by black entrepreneurs.
“It was a major shift for Pick ’n Pay, now half our stores are franchised. I thank Mr. Mandela for influencing me,” he says.
Ackerman’s relationship with politicians, though, has been strangely ambivalent–at best.
In the dangerous days of apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 80, when the country was in flames; many well-off whites were emigrating.
“Sure, I had misgivings about our decision to stay. Thank God we decided to stay with it,” he says.
In those difficult days, Ackerman met politicians. He vividly remembers a talk with Prime Minister, B.J. Vorster, who was in power when black students took to the streets and were mowed down in Soweto in 1976. It was on Vorster’s watch that more opponents of the apartheid regime were detained in a climate of racial conflict.
“It was quite an amazing thing, we wanted to promote black managers but it was against the Group Areas Act, [the legislation that apportioned land by race]. I went to see him [Vorster] and said we are doing it. He said, ‘I know you are doing it, and it’s against the law’. I said, ‘here are letters from ministers’ wives saying how courteous this or that manager is’. I showed him these letters that my wife had prepared. He turned around–I won’t forget that day–and said, ‘Mr. Ackerman, go ahead, even if you are breaking the law I won’t arrest you’. I asked, ‘do I have your word ? Can I have it in writing?’ He said, ‘go ahead, I won’t arrest you’. I said, ‘give it to me in writing’ and he said, ‘I won’t but you must do it’.”
In 1980, Ackerman went to see Vorster’s successor, P.W. Botha, a very stubborn man–who was called ‘Die Groot Krokodil’”, Afrikaans for ‘the big crocodile’, who oversaw the most violent years of apartheid rule. Ackerman wanted to discuss several issues, including a housing scheme he was contemplating for his black managers: “I asked him why we can’t have houses for blacks? Why not have a 99-year lease like they have in Sweden and Finland. He called in one of his ministers. I think it was Connie Mulder. After about a week of discussions, Botha came up with a 99-year-lease-hold, which was later changed to full ownership.”
Ackerman would also meet F.W. de Klerk, who was a senior Cabinet minister at the time.
“There was such a breath of fresh air about him,” Ackerman says of the man who would go on to succeed Botha, and later, release Mandela from prison.
“I’m not trying to say we played an enormous role,” Ackerman adds quickly, “but we played a role.”
Even in the so-called “new South Africa”, where there’s “tons of things going wrong,” Ackerman says he will, in his small way, continue to play a very positive role. That’s not to say he’s happy with everything that’s going on in the country.
For example, he wouldn’t mind being taxed more–a call that has been made by such people as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in part as a gesture towards reconciliation and redress. “I’d be happy to pay an extra tax to uplift and help entrepreneurs help businesses start,” Ackerman says, “but we’ve got to deal with corruption.”
He adds, however, that he always reminds people that corruption is not just in government, but also in the private sector, and that inequality and unemployment were “twenty times worse in the sixties and seventies.”
As a believer in entrepreneurship, in a free economy, he was delighted to hear South African President, Jacob Zuma, reject the calls for mine nationalization.
“You can’t create jobs through government. You need to excite the entrepreneur to invest capital and to invest in new things. I respect the fact that the government has by and large left a free economy.”
He is also delighted that government is not agreeing with the Congress of South African Trade Unions–the biggest workers union which is also an ally of the governing African National Congress–that labor brokers should be banned in South Africa.
“Unions hate labor brokers because when there’s a strike, the labor brokers come in and soften the strike and we can run the business without them. I hope he (President Zuma) doesn’t listen to labor unions. If he cuts out labor brokers he’s going to play into the hands of labor unions for strikes,” Says Ackerman.
So, when all’s said and done, what would this doyen of retailing and grandfather of 12 like to be remembered for?
“I’m not saying I’m different. I’m not saying I’m clever, I’ve just worked my whole life to rebuild myself after I was fired.”
The lesson for entrepreneurs?
“Find something you are passionate about, and make it your life’s work.”

The Pain That Put  The Fight Into A Tycoon

Tony Elumelu is in his office on the corner of a serene Ikoyi street, not far from the bustling Obalende taxi and bus park, in the heart of Lagos. Documents are strewn across a large desk and he looks busy.
“I was in a meeting in this office when I got the call. The first thing I did was to call one of my brothers, to mandate him to take charge. In crisis management, the first thing you do is get somebody to take charge,” he says.
It was a call that everyone dreads. Kidnappers had snatched his 84-year-old mother, Suzanne, from her farm in the Delta State. Elumelu, realizing the futility of panic, strove to deal with the situation calmly. By all accounts, there was nothing frenzied about his actions in the days following the kidnapping.
I ask if he expected something like that to happen. His answer is instant and forceful: “Not at all!”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-705" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ForbesAfrica_Elumelu_032012_-74512-768x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="632" />
Elumelu sums up the incident as “a symptom” of the prevailing despair in the country. Nigeria’s security agencies “were very supportive,” he says.
It all ended well, she was rescued four days later, and arrests were made. The message from the Elumelu family on Facebook says it all.
“The family wishes to thank Nigerians and friends from around the world for the unprecedented outpouring of concern, solidarity, love and prayers during the harrowing ordeal. We are most grateful to the Federal Government, the Delta State Government and the respective law enforcement agencies for their professionalism, diligence and bravery which led to her rescue. At this time the family requests for privacy to spend time with Mama, and recover from the emotional wounds and anguish of the last few days.”
Persuading Suzanne Elumelu to move to the relative safety of Lagos doesn’t appear likely. Elumelu says his mother insists on staying in her village. At that age, he adds, it is essential for her to be where she feels at home.
As Elumelu and his family recover from this trauma, the coming months promise to be hectic for him. There are three new hotels to be built: two in Lagos, and one in Port Harcourt. This will increase the number of hotels owned by his Transcorp Group to five, in which he acquired a controlling stake in 2011 through Heirs Holdings, his investment firm.
Then, there is the goal of taking over the entire import market for fruit juice concentrate by 2013. Elumelu says that until the opening of Transcorp’s manufacturing plant—the agri-business subsidiary run as Teragro Limited—in Benue last March, Nigeria imported all of its concentrate, costing the economy close to $1 billion every year. Teragro also plans to build fertilizer plants in Delta State.
There are also the two oil blocks, one owned by Transcorp, the other by Heirs Holdings. He expects that by 2013 both oil blocks would have gone into production. And then there is the power plant Transcorp is bidding for, under the Nigerian government’s privatization program. For this, the company has gone into partnership with US energy firm, Symbion Power. When the deal is done, Elumelu says the goal will be to increase the plant’s capacity from the current 300MW to 1,200MW.
Elumelu is a champion of the private sector and its role in redeeming Nigeria and Africa. Regarding the insecurity in Nigeria, he chooses to focus on how the private sector, by providing employment, can help create a less combustible environment.
“Where there’s hope people do not take to violence. Where there’s no hope people become vulnerable,” he says.
His story is by now a well-known one. In 1997, a group of investors acquired the distressed Crystal Bank Limited, and rebranded it Standard Trust Bank (STB). Thirty-three-year-old Tony Elumelu, who until then was executive director at Continental Trust Bank Limited, was appointed CEO of the new institution. Over the next few years he grew it into Nigeria’s fifth largest bank. In July 2004, the Nigerian Central Bank governor, Charles Soludo, announced a series of banking reforms, with the goal of creating larger, more robust banking institutions in Nigeria.
Elumelu led Standard Trust Bank into a merger (in Soludo’s words, “the first successful merger during the banking consolidation”) with the older and larger United Bank of Africa (UBA), and took over as CEO of the new entity, which adopted the UBA name.
Nuhu Ribadu, former chairman of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, recalls it as being the “gutsiest news of the year”. The merger was completed in 2005, and a year later the Elumelu-led UBA became the first Nigerian bank to hit a N1 trillion ($6.3 billion) balance sheet mark. The ‘whizkid’ had come a long way from the modest beginnings at STB—which had a N5 billion ($31.7 million) balance sheet in 1998.
The UBA phase was destined to wind up as it had started—on the strength of a policy pronouncement by the Central Bank (CBN). In January 2010 the new Central Bank governor, Lamido Sanusi, introduced a new rule stipulating that bank CEOs would have to retire once they had clocked ten years in office. Elumelu was in his 13th year as CEO—eight years at STB, five at UBA—so, at the relatively young age of 47, Elumelu was going to have to step away from the business in which he had made his name and fortune; from a bank he’d grown into a pan-African brand, with more than 800 branches in 18 African countries, and $19 billion in assets.
Two days after the CBN policy announcement, UBA named Tony Elumelu’s successor, becoming the first of the banks to realign. He recalls people telling him he was too young to quit, wondering what he would do with his life. He was the youngest of that set of CEOs to retire.
“But looking back,” he tells me, “there couldn’t have been a better time to start a second journey.” And thus began the second life of Tony Elumelu.
It has been almost two years since Elumelu left banking. I ask him to assess the bank he left behind. I’m especially interested in what he thinks about its 2011 results—the bank posted dismal results: a pre-tax loss of N28.5 billion ($180.8 million); the result of debt write-offs.
“Last year UBA decided to clean up its balance sheet … This has been demonstrated on the first quarter results,” he says
UBA posted, for the first quarter of 2012, N16 billion ($101.5 million) pre-tax profits, a 233% increase from the corresponding period last year. And its share price has more than doubled over the last month.
“Africa is beginning to contribute to the [UBA] bottom line. Africa contributed over 20% of the [first quarter 2012] profit. The harvest period is here.” UBA Ghana, he adds, currently generates profits of “close to $3 million monthly”.
He sees a bright future; referring to a new Standard &amp; Poor’s’ report that predicts a rise in GDP across several African countries.
“UBA operates in almost all the countries they mentioned,” he says.
There is an air of ruthless efficiency around Tony Elumelu—deducible, not merely from his rise in less than a decade from relative obscurity to a prominent place in the engine room of the Nigerian banking industry; but the sculpted jawline, and the flawless, understated cut of his suit. The credit for his fitness should go to the gym, not the golf course. He’s that rare type of CEO—the non-golfing one. And no doubt this is a man obsessed with getting things done—no fuss, no excuses. Just like Michael Jackson.
“If you saw Jackson’s last movie, This Is It, you saw a man who was so detailed and meticulous,” he says.
“He believed in hard work”—at this point his voice takes on greater forcefulness—“Look at the amount of practice, energy; everything he put into that show!”
In a country where all sorts of stories circulate about the personalities of corporate CEOs, the no-excuses-acceptable Elumelu would be lucky to escape unscathed. A hint of this may be gleaned from a tribute to him written when he was leaving UBA, and published in a hefty coffee-table book, The Power of Vision. “Sadly, he is misrepresented publicly as being an arrogant and hard person,” writes Owen Omogiafo, who worked as his executive assistant at UBA, and now works as director of resources at Elumelu’s Heirs Holdings.
One underlying theme in the tributes in The Power of Vision is the idea of Elumelu as a people-person.
“Talents I don’t have, I don’t regret; I surround myself with people who have them,” he says.
During the interviews he comes across as sober and soft-spoken, with tendencies  for much chuckling and laughter. A member of staff tells me one of the things she’s realized about him is how close he is to his family—his wife, Awele, and their five daughters. In the time I spend with him, sitting in on a meeting of senior management, and then interviewing him (twice), his mischievous, self-deprecating sense of humor shines through. When I ask him what talent he wishes he had, he says: “I think I’m very shy, but people don’t think so.”
On July 31, 2010, at the farewell party organized in Lagos to mark his retirement, Elumelu said: “As I retire from UBA following the regulatory pronouncement, a question has come up in the minds of so many of you here; what’s next for Tony Elumelu? I would like to share that with you today. I have two passions—entrepreneurship and philanthropy.”
Thus, were born Heirs Holdings, his investment company, and The Tony Elumelu Foundation, a non-profit organization keen to redefine philanthropy in Nigeria and abroad. In Elumelu’s words they were intended to “develop business excellence and leadership in Africa.” He shares the vision behind the transition.
“Upon my retirement from UBA it was a question of ‘beyond business’. I tell people I was born in Africa, bred in Africa, schooled in Africa, worked in Africa, still work in Africa, and achieved some level of financial and economic comfort in Africa, from Africa to—so you ask yourself, what’s next? What’s next for me is: I’d like to create more Tony Elumelus. If, due to our entrepreneurial drive we’ve been able to create 25,000 jobs, if we had 10 or 100 people like me, multiply 25,000 jobs by 100, it’s more impact. To me those are more sustainable and impactful ways of helping society than just donating money.”
Embarking on such a journey, he looked to the example of Warren Buffett.
“I decided, okay, it’s time to build a holding company that will monitor our investments in companies we’ve invested in. What we do here at Heirs is slightly patterned after Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett is a very astute and serial investor. I like his business sense. When it’s time to give back to society he’ll give, but time for business is business; they are two different things.”
From the “lean” nature of Heirs Holdings to its “highly strategic” approach to investing, imprints of the Buffett DNA are evident.
Joining Michael Jackson and Buffett, in Elumelu’s personal pantheon, is the man who’s arguably the most famous contemporary second actor—stepping down from running one of the world’s most successful companies to devote his life to philanthropy: Bill Gates.
“He changed the world to a large extent, and upon retirement—he also knew when to leave—he decided to give back to society. The learning point, for me, from Bill Gates is that this is a world of infinite possibilities.”
Leaving UBA freed him up to expand his perspective.
“UBA’s life was extremely busy but industry-focused: just on UBA and banking. And I was at UBA, more like, at operational level.”  But now, it’s a different type of life—more of a strategic life, looking at bigger pictures and interests,” he says.
Now he has a lot more speaking engagements within and outside Nigeria. Most recently, in April, there were appearances and speeches in Washington, D.C.: at the International Finance Corporation headquarters; the Global Philanthropy Forum Annual Conference and a meeting of the World Bank Group Advisory Council of Global Foundation Leaders.
I’m curious to know how things would have worked out had he not left UBA when he did. From the readiness of his answer, it’s clear that it’s something he has thought about.
“If I didn’t leave UBA when I did, two things would have happened: one; I’d still have continued to see life from that micro-perspective, and think this is just everything about life—competition&#8230; But today one has transcended to a different level where you look at your business interests, you look at mankind, you look at society, you look at the interplay of societal forces that shape the system, the economy of the country, the continent. You’re looking at advocacy, trying to make sure there’s good governance because good governance brings economic prosperity and social wealth. You’re also trying to do good; to give back to society in a more impactful way, to mentor others&#8230;”
Again and again Elumelu sounds like a business professor addressing a class. Words and phrases like “sustainable”, “impacting”, “good/better society”, “good governance”, “full potential” crop up regularly.
When I ask him what he would title his autobiography, the motivational speaker within him takes over.
“I like to make people understand that there is no glass ceiling, that you are who you want to be; that if I can, you too can&#8230; I was not the most brilliant in school, and I also did not have all the resources growing up, to have everything I wanted. But I had a determination, I had a purpose, nothing in my life happened by chance&#8230; and I think people can become what they aspire to be.”
In the end we conclude that the phrase “glass ceiling” is likely to feature in the title of the book.
At our second meeting he deflects my attempts to get him to declare his net worth. “It’s not how much we’re worth but the amount of impact we make. Why boast that one is worth a certain amount when there’s so much poverty around. I will assess my wealth based on the [number of jobs] I create through my economic investments,” he says.
As the curtains rise onstage for act two, Elumelu joins a set of Nigerian CEOs and billionaires who are redefining the rules of the retirement game. Gone, it seems, are those days when, after quitting the roles that brought them to national prominence, CEOs settled for a life of sitting passively on company boards; playing golf; attending social functions; chairing book launches—and handing out scholarships to indigent students. More retiring Nigerian CEOs, it seems, are carrying C-suite thinking along with them into the retirement zone.
“We’ve had a trend in the past where it was more of donating monies to society, but I personally believe that this is not the age and time for that. Donations are good, but to a large extent we should do it in a way and manner that is sustainable, we should make it have more meaning and impact,” he says.
Given a choice between giving out a million dollars in scholarships, and using the money to fund advocacy that could positively influence the government’s education policy and help expand citizens’ access to education, he insists he’d settle for the former.
“It might not sound too populist, and people might not even appreciate what you’re doing, but indeed it has the most significant impact for society,” he says.
After laughing at my questions about the possibilities of a third phase, Elumelu is ready with an answer. I realize that he’s assumed, rightly, that I’m hinting at full-time politics.
“I believe that everyone cannot be a king, and at times, you know, kingmakers are more powerful. I think that I’m very content with this second phase, more so that I’m able to combine business with advocacy, in a manner that is sustainable,” he says.
He proceeds to lecture me on “natural human progression”.
“There’s the age of acquisition, after that [there’s the] age of social order, social wealth, happiness for all—you need to think of how you want to be remembered and [helped] change the system. There could also be a third phase of, ‘you know what, let’s go and do it, let’s get things done’, but I think one has to know one’s limitations, strengths and capabilities. So instead of all of us being involved in government, we can be outside and support the government to achieve growth and prosperity.”
Around the world bankers are prime candidates for the backlash against the excesses of capitalism. I ask about what it means to be a member of the “1%” (and I’m interpreting this loosely; hinting at the fact that he belongs to the moneyed class). He laughs, and then sets out his thoughts on the state of the world. He draws from foundational economics philosophy—the work of Lenin and Marx—to make his point.
Elumelu thinks governments should take the bulk of the blame for the global economic crisis.
“To a large extent we are failing to hold those we should hold accountable for what’s happening—the governments that have failed to either create the right environment, or to block the loopholes&#8230; I do not think that the world should be negative towards successful businesspeople. What is important is the kind of governance framework we put in place to make sure that successful people do not exploit those who are not so privileged.”
He is standing up for his capitalist constituency, but in this new phase of his life, the larger society counts just as much.
“Why is it important to companies that a country has a huge population and huge purchasing power, that income per capita is high?” he asks. “Because those are predisposing factors to good business—it means it is in our collective interest that people who are at the bottom of the pyramid are also able to afford certain things.”
That task—of reconciling the hard-nosed demands of the bottom-line with the interests and well-being of the pyramid-bottom—it seems to me, is what the second act of Tony Elumelu is all about. And he is going about it with the same passion, and intelligence, with which he built one of the largest banking institutions in Africa.

The Warren Buffett Of Africa And His Harrowing Ordeal

In Aliko Dangote’s new book, Dangote’s Ten Commandements on Money: Lessons on How to Make Money from one of the World’s Richest Men, Nigeria’s richest man pays a visit to Kings College, Lagos. While there, signing autographs for a crowd of students, he notices a quiet 12-year-old student called Mike. In a manner reminiscent of Jesus selecting his disciples, Dangote reaches out to the boy and decides to mentor him. Young Mike spends the next four years combining school with keeping up with Dangote’s punishing cross-continental schedule, taking lectures from the billionaire, based on the ten commandments of the book.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft wp-image-599 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/136731838-194x300.jpg" alt="" width="194" height="300" />
That tale, albeit pure fiction, is an attempt to illustrate something that lies at the core of Dangote’s personality: his strikingly unassuming and down-to-earth nature; as well as his commitment to bettering others.
Those privileged enough to meet Dangote like to trade stories of his self-effacing manner: the billionaire walking unaccompanied from his jet into Abuja Airport’s arrival hall or mingling at the exclusive Ikoyi Club in Lagos.
Dangote is something of a folk hero among the powerful of Nigeria. At a recent event in Lagos, a federal minister spoke in awe of the billionaire; describing Dangote as a man who, if woken in the middle of the night, would effortlessly reel off numbers pertaining to his numerous businesses. The lesson there—this is a man not too big for the boring details of his businesses.
For a man who runs such a large empire, there is no hint of a harried existence. Newspaper and internet images reflect a man with a shy smile, framed by a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. More often than not, he is dressed in a suit; a rarity among Nigeria’s billionaire-entrepreneur class, who generally tend to favor national dress over the colonial look. He keeps his family life very private.
Dangote is a football lover, a long-time Arsenal supporter. In 2010, it was whispered that he was considering buying a stake in the London club, but Dangote denied this.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-601" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Governor-Amosuns-visit-to-Ibese-Cement-Plant-1024x687.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="318" />
It is tempting to believe that his acquisition, in 2010, of a $45 million Bombardier jet to celebrate his 53rd birthday was less an act of ostentation, more a desire to make his frequent long-haul flights more comfortable.
No doubt, beneath the calm, almost carefree, exterior is a restlessness that drives a relentlessly expansionary business instinct. He has, within the last few years, built the two largest cement plants in Nigeria and is at the moment on a continent-conquering factory construction spree.
Another interest is philanthropy; Dangote is often in the news for doling out sometimes mind-boggling sums of money to governments and charitable causes across Nigeria.
Between September and November 2011 he gave out more than N1 billion ($6.3 million). Six hundred million naira ($4 million) of this went, via the Dangote Foundation, to Nigeria’s north-central state of Kano for its Women Empowerment and Free School Feeding program. Another N500 million went to beneficiaries in at least five states drawn from across Nigeria. In 2011 the Dangote Group donated $6 million to Nigerian universities, as part of its corporate social responsibility initiative.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-602" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Ibese-Cement-Plant-1024x688.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="318" />
He has a knack for building close, intensely beneficial relationships with governments, and the ruling party, yet generally stays away from frontline politics. His closeness to former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo brought many benefits his way, including an honor. Dangote stirs up heated debate in Nigeria. To some, he is a cold-blooded capitalist and ruthless monopolist. To others, including most who work on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, he is the best thing ever to happen to the country’s economy. US diplomatic cables, released by Wikileaks, describe him as having “taken on the aura of an economic folk hero for some, villain for others.”
What everyone agrees on is how significant he is to the Nigerian economy. His cement company single-handedly accounts for a third of Nigeria’s stock market capitalization. Last September, Dangote’s name came up in a statement President Goodluck Jonathan made; one that would become famous.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-600" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Dagonte-Photos-2-1024x672.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="311" />
“Aliko Dangote told me that by December 2012, we would be exporting cement here. I am quoting him,” the president said, on national television.
Nigerians on social networking sites quickly adopted “Aliko Dangote told me…” as a catchphrase.
In reality Dangote is a man of few words and has little time for flamboyance but when he does speak, we would be foolish not to listen.

Category: Cover Story

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

More from Cover Story

The beauty that tumbled from war

A Maverick In Rude Health

A MAN FOR ALL NUMBERS, WHO TURNED $50 INTO $74 MILLION