“Is there anything that you haven’t done, that you’d still love to do?” I asked Zwelakhe Sisulu towards the end of the interview.
After a deep sigh, he pointedly and regrettably replied, in his trademark baritone voice, “The reason I got into journalism was because of my love for writing. Then I was diverted. I never did what was my first love. I hope that one day I’ll get a farm in some remote area, age gracefully and write.”
Well, it was not to be.
Just over a month later, death would put paid to that wish along with the hope of the journalist who was interviewing him.
On Thursday October 4, I was chairing a public discussion in East London, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape when, the Managing Editor of FORBES AFRICA, Chris Bishop, sent me a text message saying that Zwelakhe Sisulu had died.
It was barely a week after we had published, as part of our October issue, a nine-page focus on the increasingly volatile mining industry in South Africa. Five of the nine pages focused on the chaos in the platinum sector, while the other four were dedicated to manganese mining, looking at whether new players like Kudumane Manganese, of which Sisulu was chairman, were doing anything different to avert the crisis that the platinum sector was experiencing.
Sisulu’s encounters, and views, were the thread that held together the manganese article. Chris and I had subsequently spoken about going back to Sisulu, with the hope of possibly getting him to grace the cover of one of our future issues. The leftovers from my interview would form a good basis from which we could build a really strong lead story about the rise and rise of a journalist-turned-entrepreneur, who had so excitedly told me, “There’s nothing as exciting as being an African in Africa today”.
I knew that it would be one of the easiest stories I would ever be able to tell, for Sisulu himself was the master story teller. Like a good journalist, he had the amazing ability to tell so much, so well, in so few words. When, for example, I asked who had inspired him the most in his life, he gave a simple yet sophisticated reply, “It’s difficult to say, but the man I admired greatly was Oliver Tambo. He’s somebody who stood head and shoulders above everybody else. Joe Matthews looked through you like a prosecutor. Madiba tapped you with a jab. Oliver Tambo hugged you.”
I immediately got the picture, or rather, the message.
Like his hero Tambo—the man who held together South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) for decades in exile, while other leaders like Mandela were in prison—Sisulu appeared soft, yet his intellect was so sharp, his organizational skills impeccable and his determination steely.
Never the one to shy away from new challenges, in July 1978, a mere three years after kicking off his journalism career as a cadet reporter and merely 28 years old, Sisulu was elected president of the newly founded Media Workers’ Association of South Africa; the same year he was appointed news editor of the Sunday Post.
Two years later, he would lead the longest and biggest strike by media workers in the country, ending in successful wage negotiations, albeit the authorities would retaliate by forcing the proprietors of the newspaper he worked for, The Post, to close down.
As if that was not enough, Sisulu—alongside fellow journalists who had led the strike—would be banned for three years, placed under house arrest and would not be allowed to work as a journalist, attend public meetings or even go to townships other than the one in which he lived.
Following the lapse of his banning orders in 1983, Sisulu would get a Nieman Fellowship, a mid-career journalism award entitling him to a year’s study at Harvard University. And it was during this time, sitting among the audience listening to a speech by his hero, that he would not only rekindle his childhood memories of how warm Tambo was, but find other good reasons for admiring him.
“Oliver Tambo stood up and spoke. There isn’t a speech in the world that has made more of an impression on me than that one. The thing about that man was the way he would marshal his facts and use them as galloping horses. He was quite unequalled. I had always thought of the struggle in emotional terms. But when Tambo spoke I understood, for the first time, that there was actually a rational contestation, that it wasn’t just Amandla! Amandla!” recalled Sisulu.
On his return to South Africa in 1985, Sisulu was appointed editor of The New Nation, a new weekly publication sponsored by the Southern African Catholics Bishops’ Conference, one that, in more ways than the publications he had previously worked for, would become a bigger thorn on the side of apartheid’s apologists. Needless to say that more bannings, gagging orders and imprisonment would follow.
When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Sisulu became his press and private secretary, traveling the world with the revered statesman.
“No one would see Madiba if I didn’t want them to see him. The question rose to me very fundamentally when I was working for Madiba, do I want to be a gatekeeper all of my life?”
Following the historic 1994 democratic elections, after which Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president, Sisulu was deployed by the ANC-led government to the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the national public broadcaster, as its first black Group CEO, a position he would hold until 1997.
After leaving the SABC he would become a businessman, with stakes in a string of companies that straddle mining, energy, telecommunication and the media.
As more messages came through to my cellphone on that fateful day, from, among others, board members of a community television station that I chair and which Sisulu’s broadcasting outfit generously supports through funding, equipment and training, and as tributes continued to appear on social media sites from fellow journalists—who either worked with him or who were inspired by his activism as  a journalist—my mind raced back to our encounter a
month earlier.
From the bits he had told me about the years he had spent outside the limelight focusing on building his business empire, I could not help but be in awe of the kind of model entrepreneur he had become, in a continent so desperately in need of them. He told me the story of how he was working with government of São Tomé and some Chinese business people. The terms were that the São Toméan government wouldn’t pay a dime, but after 18 years would own
the station.
Brutally frank, as he was kind, provocative even, he sneered at ongoing suggestions for the nationalization of mines in South Africa. Not surprising for a mining magnate, I pointed out to him during our interview, but he insisted his reasons were more practical than ideological. He cited as examples telecommunications utility Telkom as well as the SABC.
“The major challenge facing this country is the management of public assets. Until and unless we perfect management of public assets, we must not even talk of nationalization.”
Not far from the auditorium, from where I had just received the news of his premature death, was the state of the art minerals polishing factory Sisulu had urged me to visit. Based at the East London Industrial Development Zone, the factory was very special to him, he told me. He was passionate about the project because it was, in part, his way of giving back to the Eastern Cape, the largely impoverished province that gave birth to both his parents, struggle stalwarts Walter and Albertina Sisulu, as well as other outstanding South African liberation heroes like Steve Biko, Mandela and Tambo.

It Was Exciting To Be  An African In Africa

Johanna Mukoki  grew up in Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Her family struggled to make ends meet—her father was a bus driver and her mother a teacher. To help out with their finances Mukoki spent her weekends selling ice cream, boiled eggs and raw meat on the busy streets of Soweto, Johannesburg. It was on these streets that she honed her entrepreneurial skills. It didn’t matter to her that she occasionally had to walk to school barefoot, when the kids would make fun of her, because it all added fuel to the fire, burning inside her, with the desire to prosper in life.
At home, although money was tight, inspiration was plenty. She was motivated by the books her father encouraged her to read, such as How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Convey. From a young age she learnt that the key to success was not just about having a gift but that it required hard work and determination.
“I told my mom that I was going to work very hard to make sure that we never had to struggle again.”
In high school, Mukoki traded in selling for a successful modeling career. Her protective father accompanied her to every TV shoot and beauty pageant and his support kept her going. With the money she made from modeling Mukoki was able to support her family for an entire month. She recalls a song her mother always sang that went, “The little things you do for me they so
please me.”
The promising entrepreneur completed her B.Com degree at Rhodes University, where she became the first black student to tutor accounting. Life was going well for Mukoki until she hit another crossroads.
In her final year of completing her articles at KPMG, formally known as Aiken &amp; Carter, she was approached by many firms, which wanted to hire her. In those days qualified, black, female accountants were in short supply. Each offer made was better than the previous and Mukoki came to a sudden realization.
“If these people really think that there is value in me then I need to work for me, I need to invest in me.”
Uncertain of which direction she would take, all she knew was that she didn’t want to become a grey auditor for the rest of her life. When Mukoki was introduced to Tibor Zsadanyi and Robert Wilke, her partners in the company, it was a match made in heaven. They all had the same dream and vision for the company. Travel With Flair (TWF) started with three members of staff and one green-striped couch; they have since grown into a leading travel management company on the continent with a staff of 550 people. It has branches in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal. If you visit their Pretoria offices you will find the original green-striped couch at the front reception.
“It’s a good way to remind one of where one came from. Those humbling experiences take you back and help you find your equilibrium,” she says.
For the past three years, TWF has won the ‘Africa’s Leading Business Travel Agency’ Award at the World Travel Awards. The company is worth an estimated R1.8 billion ($205.7 million) and credits much of its success to their ability to be pioneers in the industry. It was the first travel agency in the country to have SMS confirmation, e-confirmation and email boarding passes to passengers.
“Travel is dynamic and forever changing and if we are going to stay at the top we have to move with it.”
The road to creating one of the top travel companies in South Africa did not come without difficulties. Mukoki faced many problems.
“The first three years were a challenge. I would end up going without a salary because we had to pay employees’ salaries first.”
Being a black woman made acquiring finance from the bank difficult and there was also the challenge of finding regular clients. Their breakthrough came after they landed their first account with the University of Venda and business snowballed from there. Mukoki pushed on through the hard times because she believes that anything worth having needs to be worked for.
Mukoki’s hard work has garnered much recognition. Throughout her career she has won many awards including being named South Africa’s most influential women in business and government for the Tourism Sector by CEO Magazine and Top Woman of the Year in Business 2009/2010 at the Impumelelo Awards. She is also the first African to be appointed on the Global Tourism Board of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE), which represents Africa and the Middle East; she is also the youngest person on
the board.
When it comes to managing her team Mukoki tries to lead by example.
“I treat everyone from the cleaners to the senior managers with the same amount of respect. When you do that, people serve with a joyful heart.”
After 16 years of being in the business Mukoki can say that she has achieved what she defines as success.
“Success is something that you are doing daily that makes you [jump out of] bed in the morning and still pays your bills.”
Some of the best fashion advice she received came from author and talk show host, Felicia Mabuza-Suttle.
“Dress for the title you want and not for the job that you are in,”
says Mabuza.
To all aspiring entrepreneurs, Mukoki offers the same advice her father gave to her.
“He always used to say, ‘People are attracted to those that glow.’ That is why I always aim to represent the best version of myself.”

One  Who Glows

William Duk had every reason to be pleased with himself as he strolled along the lovely, long pristine beach at St Lucia in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province. He had celebrated the spectacular turnaround of his once-doomed business, by hiring a hotel, inviting 110 guests and marrying his bride, Briggie, in wild and convivial weekend in Umzumbe on the
south coast.
“We had a record sales month in April and I thought, ‘Great, I can I get married and have a honeymoon in peace,” says Duk.
“It was a nightmare. The honeymoon, wasn’t really a honeymoon.”
As the scores of guests clinked glasses in a final farewell at the hotel in Umzumbe, on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal, little did Duk know that tens of thousands of transport workers in ports and depots across South Africa were going on strike for more pay. For thousands of business people like Duk, who rely on imported materials, this was going to prove a cut to the jugular.
It had been a short career as an entrepreneur for Duk, who had graduated in accounting from the University of Cape Town in 1999. He left to cut his teeth in the one of the world’s liveliest financial markets.
“I went to London for two years to work with South Africans, Kiwis and Australians in banking at Lloyds and the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). We were all on contract and partying every night, you had to have a South African passport to get into Fulham and Putney in those days. On bank holidays we would spend five hours in traffic just to get to the M25,” he says.
“At the end of the two-year holiday visa I was marched out of RBS—they had a change of human resources and they said I had worked longer than my time. On these holiday visas you are only meant to work 50% of your time in your chosen profession. So, I got a part-time contract in a small technology services company. I was meant to leave the country after that, but my new employers convinced me to stay for another six months and then another six months and then I rolled out four- and-a-half years later. That time was pivotal; the London business was going into Europe, employing 200 people, and I was financial director. I was opening offices in Madrid and Paris for voice and data services like PABX and call centers.”
Duk flew home to Cape Town in 2006, with a pocket full of pounds, determined to invest in his future. He had always wanted to be an entrepreneur, like his father and grandfather, this was his chance and in many ways it bore out the Chinese proverb: Be careful what you wish for.
It all began with an investment in property. Duk went to Atlantis, a small town a short drive from Cape Town, to buy a factory from the Plantation Shutter Company, which made wooden louvered shutters for windows out of rare imported hardwood. The company was going into liquidation.
“I bought the building and spent the next few weeks looking for a tenant. I got a phone call from the silent partner, who I bought the building from, he said he was coming to Cape Town and wanted to meet. I looked through the financial information he showed me and thought this shouldn’t have happened. Working in a European company, you know how much working capital can be stretched. It was down to mismanagement, more than fundamental problems with the business,” says Duk.
“I bought in for a rand and took over the debts and liabilities. I didn’t have any cash—that was all tied up in property—I used the cash I had paid into the business for the building to finance a rescue plan. This was February 27, 2006: the doors of the business had been closed; 40 people hadn’t been paid for three months; suppliers were in the courts trying to get their money; there were 49 clients who had paid 50% of their deposit and expected their shutters to be installed before last Christmas. The business was a million rand in debt. It was as bad as it can get.”
It got worse from day one, as Duk tried to salvage what he could amid angry customers. He needed every ounce of his affable nature.
“My first job was phoning my clients and saying, ‘Hi, I am William from the Plantation Shutter company’ and they were saying, ‘Have you got our lawyers letters?’ I calmed them down and said, ‘Let me explain.’”
Duk was encouraged by the fact that 39 clients still wanted shutters, even though they had already waited for five months. It took nearly six months to placate the angry 39 and fulfil their orders. It took 18 months to turn around the business and by April it was selling a 1,000 sets of shutters-a-month and turning more than R40 million-a-year ($4.6 million). It was a dramatic turnaround that helped Duk win the Sanlam Business Partners Entrepreneur of the Year Award for 2012.
So Duk could be forgiven for feeling replete as he walked on the beach in St Lucia, on his honeymoon, on a sunny May afternoon. This warm feeling evaporated in a heartbeat as the strike by tens of thousands of dock and transport workers, in support of a 15% pay rise, hit home.
“I got an SMS saying we have got a problem with our timber supply,” says Duk.
In many ways, timber was the Achilles’ heel of the business. The shutters have to be made from durable Obeche hardwood, that will not warp, from the forests of Ghana. It has to be shipped from Accra to Cape Town and then transported by truck to Atlantis. In 2010, this supply line proved highly vulnerable in the face of a strike that was to cost South African business an estimated R7 billion ($803 million).
The upshot was that the factory in Atlantis ran out of wood and angry customers once again lurked in the wings. So, Duk was on the phone, on the beach, day in day out, in a frantic bid to keep the wheels of his business turning.
“So, it was all about buying time and putting a plan in place. If we were a smaller company we could have gone down the road to buy, but we were no longer a small company. We were consuming 320,000 kilograms of timber a year. I spent the entire day phoning timber merchants and suddenly the price had gone up 25%. I ended up negotiating with a few of these, but we couldn’t get enough, soon enough. We are a 21-day turn around operation. I ended up trying to juggle production and speaking to my clients around the country. I spent the entire day on the phone trying to put a plan in place. The worst moment of that day was realizing that everything we had worked for to restore credibility, in an industry not well known for its reliability, was at risk. We couldn’t afford to make excuses. For us it was going out and getting whatever timber we could at the best prices, paying 20% more than usual,” says Duk.
To make matters worse the supply of wood that Duk needed so badly was so near, yet so far. As the strike wore on, three 40-foot containers of hardwood from Ghana bobbed in Cape Town harbor, with no one to unload it. An email from the clearing agent said it all.
“Wait, hope and pray…. Here’s hoping the comedy of errors turns into that romantic comedy with a happy ending,” says the email.
The strike ended on May 27, 2010 but that wasn’t the end of the troubles for Duk and his timber. There was a scramble to see which of the tied-up freighters was to be unloaded first on the docks of Cape Town, as frustrated customers gathered on land. Duk says the problem was that the clearing agent didn’t have the captains’s cellphone number, so there were more delays as he had to wait for information through the shipping line.
“It went from bad to worse, the strike broke on the 27th and then we had to wait another two or three days for our containers to arrive on land,” says Duk.
“After two-and-a-half weeks of uncertainty. It was absolute relief. The ball was now in our court so we could put a plan in place….”
Duk took his wife to their favorite restaurant that night, a little older and wiser than they had been when they married just a few weeks before, after the strike that could have pulled down the shutters on his business.

Wait, Hope And Pray: How A Strike Can Ruin Your Honeymoon

“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.
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“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

Jonathan Liebmann is 29, owns 25 buildings and has lived on five of the seven continents. Now, he has made his nest in a small corner on the east side of the most vibrant city in Africa—Johannesburg.
Johannesburg city was established in 1886, as a farm where gold miners from all over the globe came to make their money. That is where it got the name Egoli—meaning place of gold. In decades to follow, it became the shopping mecca of Gauteng’s elite. Today, all the big banks and businesses have relocated to the northern suburbs and the new tenants are mostly African immigrants looking for a place to make a living; the streets are busy, there are shops at every turn and a multitude of languages in the CBD.
There is a sign that hangs between two buildings on his street, it reads Maboneng— meaning place of lights in Sesotho. It’s a fitting description for a beacon in the middle of a city plagued by crime, dilapidated buildings and grim life. Just down the road, there’s a men’s hostel where even the police are afraid to go.
Liebmann is rejuvenating the east’s run down image one building at a time. The corner coffee shops, restaurants, independent movie house and boutique hotel are abuzz as you walk the streets of Maboneng Precinct.
He has just bought his 25th building, which he will convert into apartments. We stand on the roof of the new building looking down onto another flat roof. Two recycling vendors are having lunch on a two plate stove, they are surrounded by recycled bags containing plastic bottles. This is one of the many facets of Johannesburg hustle.
You could say the streets behind Liebmann are a playground for his entrepreneurial mind.
<div id="attachment_1283" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1283" class="size-medium wp-image-1283" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/380-380_1-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Property developer Jonathan Liebmann, Johannesburg; 19 July 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
Liebmann’s entrepreneurial spirit is as young as many of the buildings are old. He made his first profit at 18, at a time when most people hadn’t even thought about buying their first car, let alone buy one. He had bought, renovated and resold an apartment and at 21 he turned an old factory into an office for rent.
“When I was 18, I realized I wanted to be involved in property. I went to university but while I was [there] I started investing in property on a small level. I bought my first apartment that I renovated, with the bank’s money, and then I just worked my way up from there… I enjoy being the pioneer and taking the first steps, so for me that risk was an attraction. And at the same time I was completing my accounting degree so I was working and studying as well,” says Liebmann.
Liebmann bought his own apartment at 20, after a year of nomadic life across the world, traveling and doing odd jobs from construction to telesales consulting. Traveling is something he learnt from a young age, as a child Liebmann moved almost ten times with his divorced single mother and older brother.
“I started thinking about how I could do my own large developments of [loft culture] and started looking for old factory spaces that would have the right type of aesthetic to do that and that’s when I found my first buildings in Maboneng.”
“I traveled all around the world after school and that exposed me to a lot to urban culture,” he says.
And since his return to Johannesburg—the city of his birth—he wants to inject new life into the city; artists, business and residents are following him.
While on his travels, Liebmann went from being a construction worker to a telesales person, skills he would later use in his chosen career.
You can tell from the moment you meet Liebmann that he’s driven. He’s sharp and has an air of confidence that could be interpreted as arrogance when he speaks about his work. He’s got that ‘I know what I want and I know how I’m going to get it’ tone as he tucks his brown hair beneath his ears throughout the interview.
Earlier this year, Liebmann was invited to the World Economic Forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
“I was selected as a global shaper along with 30 other young people from Africa. I learnt about the common objectives of African countries to collaborate with one another in an attempt for Africa to become the next frontier,” says Liebmann.
While we sit at a corner coffee shop, a number of people greet him as they pass by. Liebmann and his vision are growing in stature in this area of decaying factories and empty buildings, which is a living manifestation of the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.
Not only has it managed to attract people and money back into the city but it has also put his family back together.
His mother owns a coffee shop, his father owns a gallery and his step-brother works here too.
It’s a risky investment.
One minute one area could be the trendy spot where the masses flock and in a number of years may degenerate and experience flight.
His architect, Enrico Daffonchio says property goes in cycles in every city of the globe.
“There is a spectrum of different perspective [on its potential], however the spectrum of opinion from the cynics is reducing… Cities get renewed throughout history, it’s not a new thing. There are tax incentives to refurbish those areas. [So] there’s tax incentives and governments copy each other ,” says Daffonchio.
How did Liebmann get people to Maboneng and does he think they will stay?
“I think initially the challenge was changing people’s perceptions of the city. Yes, it’s a continuing struggle but it’s far easier as we grow block by block… I think Johannesburg is at the beginning of its curve of regeneration. There’s a long way to go [but] it’s certainly showing promise… You’ve got to build spaces that attract people back…”
Property economist and University of Capet Town lecturer, François Viruly says it’s not the government’s duty to upkeep the city.
“The role of government is primarily to ensure that an environment is created that encourages private sector investment in the CBD&#8230; I don’t think that there is anything wrong with the private sector owning buildings in the CBD. Urban decay is a problem that local governments have faced across the world. In South Africa, the decentralization of commercial space has invariably left CBDs with high vacancy rates.”
These are vacancy rates which Liebmann is grabbing with both hands—a dream he is creating one building at a time.

One Man’s Trash  Another Man’s Treasure

Montego Foods is cradled in the fourth oldest South African town, where the Sundays River meanders through the Great Karoo—a semi-desert region in the Eastern Cape Province. Many youngsters leave this quiet idyll for the noise and money of Johannesburg. It is the largest privately-owned employer in the Graaff-Reinet area. These days many more decide to stay and work for Montego Foods.
When Hannes Van Jaarsveld, aged 60, bought the business in 2000 it employed 11 staff, today it employs around 250—220 of which are in Graaff-Reinet. The increase in employment goes hand-in-hand with production. In its first month in 2000, Montego Foods produced 65 tons. It took time to break into the market and after three years the profit began to roll in. Now the company produces up to 200 tons per day and more than 3,000 tons per month.
The company expanded faster than Van Jaarsveld expected. It is worth R100 million ($12,2 million) and is family-owned: Johan (30) is the international marketing manager; Marco (33) is the production manager and Morné (36) is in charge of administration in Graaff-Reinet.
<div id="attachment_1280" style="width: 229px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1280" class="size-medium wp-image-1280" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Hannes-van-Jaarsveld-219x300.jpg" alt="" width="219" height="300" />Hannes van Jaarsveld</div>
This solidarity is the company’s greatest asset.
“There are no shareholders, it’s just the four of us,” says Hannes Van Jaarsveld.
“Our biggest advantage in the market place is that we’re a family-owned business, we can make crucial decisions on-the-fly. Each of us always knows what is going on in each department of the business. All four of us are very hands-on all the time. If there is a customer complaint it comes directly to Marco, who is one of the owners of the business, it’s not just a clerk who is a clerk or somebody. It goes directly to management,” he says.
“If we know a customer doesn’t have food on the floor, we will bend over backwards and get the food there because we know that every bag they don’t sell, is a bag we don’t sell. At the end of the day, that bag comes off your bottom line profit. We feel if you’re too big, you can’t do that. We would like to grow our business but we don’t want to lose that personal input and affection of the business,” says Hannes Van Jaarsveld.
At this stage, they are not looking at listing on the South African stock exchange.
The company, which holds more than 20% of the country’s pet food industry, supplies 1,000 South African stores and has 15 depots nationwide. It is looking to expand and exports to Botswana, Angola, Ghana and Zimbabwe. Their biggest competitors are Nola, Nestlé Purina and Royal Canine.
“If you don’t keep expanding your market, you might land up losing your market,” says Hannes Van Jaarsveld.
Montego Foods sells at veterinarians, pet stores and dog parlors. Supermarkets are not part of its strategy.
“Marketing-wise it would have been easier with regards to brand awareness, but logistically and sales-wise it’s easier to compete in the independent market than in the shark-infested waters of the grocery world,” says Johan Van Jaarsveld.
“The main reason being, mainstream retailers, when they start getting bigger, put so much pressure on you, as far as pricing is concerned at the end it’s not worth your while,” agrees Hannes Van Jaarsveld.
Five years after the Van Jaarsveld family purchased the company, they invested between R8 and 10 million (more than $1 million) in the extrusion and production side of the company. In 2010, they invested a further R18 million ($2,2 million) to increase production by 400 percent.
“Every time we increase capacity we go under pressure to meet the local demand. Now is the first time that we are starting to breathe a bit but we are still a bit restricted because the production side can handle a lot more than the milling side,” he says.
Earlier in the year, they approved further expansion, worth R25 million ($3 million), in the milling, grain storage and handling department. While still in the planning process, the project will take a year to complete.
“We could spend R2 million ($245,000) to cut around 30 to 40 jobs but that’s not what we want to do. We want to keep people employed,” says Hannes Van Jaarsveld.
A noble sentiment in these difficult economic times, from a company whose bite is bigger than its bark.

Aiming To Be  Top Dog

Samuel Kamau Macharia was among the first in his hometown to buy a transistor radio—villagers would congregate at his home to listen to the news or football commentary. This gadget would turn out to be the pillar of his businesses.
Nothing about the communications center hints at the secrets and wealth inside. Located in upmarket Nairobi, a stone’s throw from State House, one of the newest buildings in this neighborhood, is hardly worth a second glance. On the third floor, in an office the size of a swimming pool, sits an aging man simply known as SK—the initials of his first two cultural names.
SK Macharia, now in his early seventies, is the proprietor of Royal Media Services (RMS), Kenya’s most successful broadcasting media house valued at $500 million. It runs a television channel, Citizen TV, and 14 FM radio stations. Many agree that Macharia, balding but with a smooth face, is Africa’s answer to America’s Ted Turner—the founder of Cable News Network (CNN), the first 24-hour cable news channel.
Macharia has built his empire in less than 10 years, from one television and radio station in 2002, by thinking and acting local. RMS has a presence in six countries in East Africa—Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi as well as Zambia—where it broadcasts through transmitters and the internet. The company broadcasts 12 radio stations in vernacular, one in English, the official language, and another in Swahili. Most elitist media investors frowned upon this niche market since they believed that only English and Swahili speakers had buying power.
“What we have achieved is purely because of local productions,” says Macharia.
Nearly 70% of Citizen TV’s content is locally-produced, exceeding the 40% recommended by the government. This local thinking has helped Citizen TV overtake established private stations such as Nation Television (NTV), Kenya Television Network (KTN) and state-owned Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), which are now playing catch-up in local programing. According to a survey by Ipsos Synovate Kenya, a research and polling company, Citizen TV controlled 52% of the television viewership market in Kenya in the last quarter of 2011, leaving nearly a dozen rivals to the rest of the pie.
Only KBC had vernacular broadcasts and they were restricted to an hour a day. After Kibaki came to power in 2003, Macharia started providing each community with its own radio station and round-the-clock programing.
“The radios have played a crucial role in spreading information among the older generation,” he says.
These community radios have split the advertising market into niches, giving the national broadcasters a run for their money and offering marketers more targeted advert channels. And with 12 vernacular radios, the cumulative ad revenue is huge.
Former president Daniel arap Moi banned ethnic-based radio stations, except for KBC, for promoting ethnicity. Macharia has a different take on this.
“Anybody who says vernacular radio fuels ethnicity is foolish. Go to the UK, Russia or Canada and you will find radios broadcast in local languages. These are languages people understand. How do you get your grandmother to understand politics in Swahili and English? Even economic matters, they will understand better in their mother tongue. You can promote ethnicity in any language. Ethnicity is created and developed by politicians,” he says.
“Take the case of Rwanda—the radio that caused genocide was government-owned. If there is no private radio, the government can tell people to do anything. Our work is to entertain, educate and inform.”
Macharia’s love affair with the airwaves has not only helped increase radio listenership in the country, especially among the illiterate and semi-literate, it has also created 1,200 jobs.
While Macharia may find it hard to find political support for vernacular radio stations, Philip Ochieng, a leading columnist in the Sunday Nation newspaper vindicated him in a recent article.
“I know at least one Kenyan entrepreneur—SK Macharia of Royal Media Services—who seems to recognize the importance of tapping talent and expertise from all of Kenya’s ethnic communities and paying them well. In this way, SK understands capitalism much more than all our barons in the private sector and, especially, in the parastatal corporations. The talents help him to make money. But, in the process, he builds a company in which all communities invest at least some goodwill and trust. SK Macharia fights tribalism in this country much more tangibly than all our teachers, politicians and priests together,” he wrote on April 24.
In the radio world, RMS is the undisputed king—a broadcasting phenomenon renowned for a daring spirit, deft marketing and spectacular ad revenues. The company takes in more advertising revenue through its ubiquitous radio channels than any other group in Kenya, according to industry figures.
With transitional elections in March 2013, Macharia says RMS is sprucing up its news coverage and presentation, which blends a western style with an African human-interest angle. The imitation is sometimes comic—imagine a business reporter trying to copy Richard Quest of CNN or a weekend news anchor mimicking Zeinab Badawi of BBC.
“We hire the best presenters and anchors. If you are in broadcasting and you are top in the industry, we are ready to pay the price. You cannot maintain high quality unless you pay well and make them happy,” he says.
“For me to compete and beat NTV, KBC and KTN, I have to get the best raw material. If the competition works hard, I must work harder.”
Royal Media Service wants to continue leading the pack—it is one of the few media houses in sub-Saharan Africa to acquire a Ksh300 million ($3.5 million) chopper for news coverage.
Yet, barely a decade ago, Macharia was a non-starter. The airwaves had already been liberalized in the early 1990s, when he entered into radio. In the television market, KTN was market leader, followed by KBC and NTV. In just eight years, RMS has not only outrun its competitors locally but has a growing across the continent.
It hasn’t been an easy rise for Macharia. He tells the story of his life with a grin, relishing its effect on the listener. The FORBES AFRICA team arrived one chilly Tuesday in June only for him to turn us away, with a sad smile, in favor of a meeting with Kenya’s Prime Minister, Raila Odinga.
Macharia’s story starts in Ndakaini, a poor, central Kenyan village where he was born in 1944. When he was 10, he was separated from his parents due to a state of emergency and forced to herd cattle with nomads in Arusha, Tanzania. After things calmed, he trekked home to trace his parents. It was a life of struggle for Macharia’s family who worked on European settler farms for a pittance to feed and educate a family of five. Many times, he dropped out of school because of the lack of funds.
He did not attend high school and became an untrained primary school teacher, earning ten and a half US cents. Despite being an average student, his thirst for knowledge was insatiable. After teaching for some time, he decided to go to the US. Through the help of a clever travel agent, Macharia used a fake plane ticket to get a visa at the US embassy in Nairobi. He missed a government-organized airlift. Alongside other Africans and Indians he traveled by bus—through the thick forests of Uganda and the plains of Sudan to the scorching deserts of Libya—ending up in Benghazi, 50 days later, from where they took a ship to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.
“There was no bridge across the Nile, so passengers crossed the river on rafts—three logs tied together which floated and followed the current. Depending on how the log moved with the current, some people would find themselves far downstream.”
They then took a boat to Dover, where the group caught a train to London, from where he flew to New York. But he had underestimated the distance to the Seattle Technical College, where he was to study. So he took another bus.
“I did not have money to fly. I wandered around and ended up in a police station. The police had two choices: to incur the expense of shipping me back to Kenya or arrange for my transport to Seattle. They put me on a bus and we travelled for 10 days.”
Unbeknown to Macharia, the couple assigned to host him had divorced. He stayed at the bus station for nearly two weeks until the wife rescued him.
“I was given little food and had no heating—it was winter. Luckily the local priest learnt of my plight and took me to his house. I was later taken in by a volunteer family who did not have children,” he says.
Macharia cleaned supermarkets at night and worked manual jobs at manufacturing companies to make an extra penny.
After completing high school, he enrolled at the Seattle Pacific University where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. He enrolled in the University of Washington for a Bachelor of Science in Accounting. Macharia returned to Kenya in 1969 with two undergraduate degrees, a Master’s and a Certified Public Accountant qualification to boot. Then he started toying with business ideas from establishing a toilet paper manufacturer to a pulp-producing factory and later a credit card financing outfit. The turning point came in 1992, when Macharia experienced a nasty discrimination by KBC and started plotting to run private radio and TV stations. He was among the young crop of politicians fighting the Moi regime and supported opposition leader Jaramogi Oginga Odinga at the time, in Kenya’s first multiparty elections.
“I was his political and economic adviser. There was only KBC and KTN [owned by President Moi and other ruling party Kanu men] at the time. I paid for Jaramogi’s campaign commercials, but they were not aired on KBC and they did not refund me the money. And we believed Jaramogi would win. When he lost, it was a calamity for me. He lost the elections because KBC did not air his commercials and I told myself nobody would ever do that to me.”
So he naively applied to KBC, instead of to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, for a TV license.
“The KBC MD called me back and laughed at me. I went to his office and he laughed at me again with his legs on top of the desk.”
He re-applied for the license, this time to the office of the president, but his request was rejected. He knew he was paying the price for backing an opposition candidate.
“I replied and gave them seven days to give me the license or I [would] sue,” he says.
They did not. So he went to court in 1993 and fought it out until 1996, when he got the license. He started Citizen Radio late in 1998. The government closed it down in January 2000 because the radio station was critical of it.
“We were telling a little more truth than the government was willing to acknowledge. We stayed for a year fighting the closure and reopened in 2000. In April 2001, it was closed again and our equipment was vandalized to ensure the station does not restart. We went back to court and reopened in November through a court order,” says Macharia.
The suffering has made Macharia a strong advocate of democracy and media freedom. He says democracy cannot work without press freedom.
“The media in Kenya is now fully protected by the new constitution. Now, we can play a major role in democratization. Everyone is born alone, with his or her little brain. You are supposed to be free to use it to do better for yourself, your family and your country.”
Macharia says success in media business comes from out-of-the-box thinking and having the best people. More importantly, he adds, being able to pick yourself up after falling and moving on. In short, turning any failure into success.
But age is catching up and Macharia plans to make the company public to spread its ownership and secure its future after he bows out. He is not a believer in perpetuating family business.
“Africans are not like Indians who hand over their businesses to their sons and daughters. I have two sons who run their own businesses and my daughter works with me here at Royal Media. For a huge organization like this, the easier way is to go public,” he says.
Some say he has used his political networks to have his way in business, but he retorts that he doesn’t have better connections than most people. Even then, it bothers him that African leaders still look down on African entrepreneurs.
“It’s sad that after independence, most African governments still treat us as second-class citizens. If a sweeper comes from the UK and uses a telephone booth to call a minister and speaks the Queen’s English, the minister will be waiting for him at the door. For a black man, it will take 10 years,” he says.

The TV Dreams Of Africa’s  Ted Turner

It is one of the great economic stories of Africa. When Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975 it was one of the world’s poorest countries. Two years later, it was even poorer in the grips of a civil war which ended in 1992.
Thirty seven years after independence, the southeast African country is booming. Joana Prata Dias Teixeira Duarte, her husband, João Alberty and his cousin Miguel, are three entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of this by putting their shoulder to the wheel in the country’s grassroots growth.
The trio, of Portuguese descent, started up Sociedade Moçambicana de Participações (SMP), based in downtown Maputo, in November.
Already SMP holds stakes in several companies from construction to furniture and media to telecommunications. Mozambique is abound with investment and business opportunities. The country’s GDP is increasing and 38% of its population lives in cities, with this number growing every day. Maputo, the capital city, has a population of 1.5 million.
For the first time in decades, Maputo’s skyline is dominated by swinging construction cranes. New buildings are going up on every corner. If Mozambique needs anything more than food and water, it is bricks and mortar. This hunger to fill Mozambique’s infrastructure gap has seen a dramatic increase in foreign investment. In 2005, foreign investment in Mozambique was worth $108 million, by 2007, this figure more than trebled to $427 million. In 2010, foreign investment stood at $789 million.
This trio of spring entrepreneurs are doing their bit to contribute to this urbanization through construction company Mozago. They have built offices for Millennium bim Bank among others.
“Mozago is our money cow,” says João Alberty.
It’s not just new buildings. João believes that there is also a lucrative market in renovating buildings. This is for posterity as well as profit.
Mozago is renovating a building by the famous Portuguese architect Pancho Miranda Guedes, who designed hundreds of buildings—hotels, schools, colleges, churches, banks, restaurants and apartments—in Mozambique between 1950 and 1974.
João believes that there is a market in renovating the buildings of Guedes. The one they are working on at the moment will be a hotel. They are also renovating a warehouse in central Maputo, on the way to the airport, which will be their new headquarters.
They provide a service where there is a demand. Alongside the construction and renovation side of the business, SMP also focuses on interiors through another branch of the company—Intersection. The company specializes in office design and furniture and represents Haworth, a worldwide office furniture company. Intersection recently designed the interior of and furnished Nestlé’s new offices in downtown Maputo and will do the same for Mimmos—a nationwide chain—at the new Zimpeto shopping mall.
Mozambique’s growth and development is the company’s playground, while it is still a young company itself, it hopes to expand just as quickly. The company is also powering up and connecting the country through Antolux, which specializes in the installation of low and medium tension power networks, where they are most needed, in the provinces. Its focus also lies in telecommunication networks and solutions.
The trio sees opportunity where others might see despair. The coastal nation is often plagued by floods through tropical cyclones, which often sees the country divided and certain cities cut off. In 2000, Mozambique was declared a disaster zone that led to a major aid operation. Many towns were submerged completely and a mother was forced to give birth in a tree above the rising flood waters.
This is one of the perennial problems of Mozambique that these entrepreneurs hope to do business by easing. Many of the country’s bridges are flimsy and poorly maintained.
Edgar Cardoso Mozambique, of which SMP now has a major stake—is a company that specializes in maintenance and rehabilitation of bridges.
Then there is media. Exame Mozambique is yet another of their ventures. This Lusophone business magazine reports on the macroeconomics of the country as well as financial issues, business ventures, investments, consumption, technology and marketing. While the brand belongs to Editora Abril, a major Brazilian publisher and printing company based in São Paulo, SMP owns the project in Mozambique. This monthly magazine, which was launched in June and recently published its fourth issue, is sold in Maputo and Portugal—a large number of Portuguese nationals still seek employment in the country.
Duarte, of Portuguese descent, was born in Mozambique and is the driving force behind the magazine as regulations says media companies can be opened by Mozambican nationals only.
The Alberty cousins had visited Mozambique, from Portugal, on many occasions, before finally making it their new home.
The company sees this investment in the media as prestige to go with the building bricks and mortar.
“We have gotten really good feedback from our readers and the CEOs of companies we have featured. It is bigger than our expectations were for it in the beginning. The people here are looking for something that we offer. We use technical information and put it in a way that everyone can understand it,” says Luis Leitão, editor of Exame Mozambique.
João says that the magazine is forward looking and very deliberately chooses to cover the success of businesses.
“We are perceived by the readers and other businesses in a positive way,” he says.
As Meticais changes hands with the rise of their current enterprises, there is another new company in the making. João said it has got nothing to do with the other ventures and hinted that it is related to the beauty and wellbeing sector.
When Duarte isn’t doing business, she is trying her hand at golf. According to João, her mother’s side of the family has quite a reputation at the Maputo golf course where their trophies are on display. Duarte wants to maintain that proud tradition.
On the golf course trophies are the reward for Duarte reducing her handicap. In the business world contracts are the reward for her part in helping to rebuild the country of her birth.

Development To The  Power Of Three

It’s a scorching afternoon in the busy commercial hub of Osu, in Accra, Ghana. Nelly Hagan Aboagye is at her flagship outlet, working dilligently on her exclusive collection for the upcoming Ghana Fashion week, to be held in the first week of October. It is every Ghanaian designer’s dream, but for Aboagye, there is more to it all than meets the eclectic eye.
It all started a few months ago, when Aboagye—a trained surgical nurse, with a love for fashion— heard an advertisement for young, creative entrepreneurs in fashion, on the radio. After being shortlisted as one of the finalists, she worked on a few pieces, which were showcased at the final runway show. The judges awarded Aboagye the title of Young Creative Entrepreneur of the Year in fashion.
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The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. In recent years, she had hoped to monetize her skills in making bespoke fashionable pieces, which are dinstinguished by her trademark beading work. Each bead is delicately woven, by hand, into the fabric in a variety of elegant designs. This isn’t so much a time-consuming process as it is, the bane of a designer working on a shoestring budget with limited time. She made her first two pieces with only 30 Ghanaian cedis.
“I am a self-taught designer. Everything I know, I taught myself and I keep striving towards learning more to improve the quality of my work,” she says.
Runways welcomed Aboagye as she went on to showcase her pieces at the Young Creative Entrepreneurs tour of London and Africa Fashion Week in Johannesburg.
Following an astounding response to her collection, Aboagye, returned to Ghana to employ some man power and invest time in her fashion label—Duaba Serwa.
“Duaba Serwa, is simple sophistication. I prefer understatements to extravagance and believe there is beauty in simplicity. This is what you see, in every piece I make,” she says.
At 26 years old, this half Fanti, half Akuapem, high fashion enthusiast is very optimistic about the future of her infant business.
“I have always been against the idea of angel investors and believe in growing my business organically. Every item purchased for my work is drawn from money that has been re-invested into the business from my own funds, which are generated from sales,” she says.
At the moment, Aboagye and her team have at least 20 dress orders a week with each bespoke, hand-beaded piece, costing nothing less than $300.
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“My clients just love the beading work—the quality and attention to detail you get, when you buy any of my pieces—and are willing to pay for it. The sewing itself, takes about 15 hours. It’s the beading that occupies the bulk of my time and requires the most of my creativity. I take great pride in my work and devote all the time I can give to each piece.”
Months after her break, Aboagye, still finds it somewhat hard to take in.
“I was a nobody just a few months ago and now, the response to my work is just amazing. I’m working round-the-clock with my team and there is no room for anything else but taking Duaba Serwa to newer heights and I want to do it differently.”
She is already planning for the future of her brand. Aboagye, who currently runs a small team of six, is working towards having a bigger factory, stores in major fashion hubs around the continent and opportunities to showcase her unique, contemporary African work on more international platforms.
“I’m thankful for my opportunities. I welcome new challenges and hope to be competing with much bigger names in fashion in the near future and I know it is possible,” she says.
Aboagye’s label has a thriving market on the ground. Ghanaian women are very fashionable and brand-conscious. The streets of Accra lend credence to this with beautiful fabrics and tailored garments visible in most of the metropolises. With her new recognition, aesthetically-pleasing work and business acumen, domination of the Ghanaian market could be as easy as threading her needles; however, Aboagye has fine intentions of bursting through the seams of her home country.
“I hope to have my brand doing just as well in many other countries very soon,” she says.
“On entrepreneurship, I believe in the future of any society that helps empower its youth. This is more than just making clothes,” says Aboagye.
She has employed a couple of orphans in her workshop, teaching them bead weaving.
“I want them to learn this skill and be able to run their own businesses in the future,” she says .
On her background in surgical nursing, she says: “Nursing has taught me to be very humble as it gave me a good perspective on how to treat and handle different people respectfully. This has translated quite well for the manner in which I run my business and deal with my clients”.
From holding scalpels at the cardiothoracic center, to turning heads at international runway shows, Aboagye is weaving her way into fashion aficionados’ hearts, one stitch at a time—all from a little outlet in the heart of Accra.

There’s Something About  Threading The Needle

Whenever Lynne Odhiambo and her husband, Harold, are out for dinner, one of her rituals includes holding a bottle of Heinz ketchup and caressing it passionately. For a moment she gets lost in thought, imagining what Henry John Heinz, the American founder of the H.J. Heinz food company must have felt knowing that his products were, and still are, a must-have item on many tables around the world. By the time the waiter interrupts her thoughts to take her menu, she knows that with each day that passes, she is a step closer towards becoming the Heinz of Africa and perhaps the world.
Lynne has a big dream, which started in her kitchen two years ago.
“We had been experimenting with different sauces that we [her and her husband] made in our kitchen and which we would often share with friends and family over meals. The sauces were always very well received and we were often asked why we were not selling them. The same friends and family became our first customers!” she explains.
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That is how H&amp;L Ventures (Harold and Lynne Ventures) was born.
The couple runs their business from their home located in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa—around 600 kilometers from the capital city, Nairobi. The husband and wife business is still at a humble start. They produce 100 bottles a week, each weighing 250ml, under the brand name Rojo.
“We started with a few hundred shillings to buy the ingredients and everything else was borrowed from the kitchen!” jokes Harold.
Why chilli? I ask.
“We love chilli on food, it is something we both grew up with, but as fast food has become more and more prevalent, we realized that the traditional condiment offerings that were common place in Mombasa, are no longer available. There was a time when if you went to a number of eateries in Mombasa, your food or snacks would come accompanied by a choice of a green chilli, red chilli, sweet and sour sauce and in most cases coconut chutney,” says Lynne.
The couple often wondered why the condiments were missing and realized it was because of the mix of cultures along Kenya’s coast. Mombasa was a major port in the European spice trade route.
“Our sauce draws on the coastal cuisine which is a mixture of Arab, Asian, European and African influences.”
H&amp;L Ventures involves the production of  the chilli sauces, their marketing and distribution. They have outsourced the cultivation of a variety of chilli peppers to a group of local farmers in Rabai, a historic area that is around 20 kilometers northwest of Mombasa.
Lynne uses a rare kind of chilli pepper, the Scotch Bonnet, which has a very unique bouquet—it is fragrant and very hot.
“Despite being one of the hottest chillies in the world, one only feels the heat after experiencing the taste. We chose Scotch Bonnet because we thought it had character and would add something distinctive and extra to our sauces,” says Lynne.
The couple admits that it is still too early in the game for them to feel like giving up. They are so passionate about Rojo that they have no time to worry.
“We have not felt like that but financial backing has been a major setback,” says Harold.
One of the major challenges has been the sourcing of the chilli peppers and the main reason why they decided to work with farmers in Rabai.
“It (Scotch Bonnet chilli) was only available in Uganda. Packaging was also another problem, we had wanted to package the sauce in glass bottles, and however, local manufacturers only supply bottles for liquor, so we had to settle for plastic bottles,” says Lynne.
Quality control issues are also a challenge as they are still operating from their kitchen at home.
“It has taken two years for us to settle on the right formulations, because we had to work with meagre funds.”
The business has a long way to go, like Heinz which started in 1869, Harold knows one day Rojo will compete with Heinz and may not take a century that it has taken the Heinz brand. Africa has a rapidly growing population and middle class. The rising concern about processed foods, which is leading to an increasing demand for organically grown food, is encouraging for their growing business.
“We envision that once we are operating at optimum capacity, the business will be realizing good margins. Our strategy is to remain an artisanal manufacturer, by getting into a niché in the market,” says Harold.
The food industry in Kenya and most of East Africa is largely dominated by international food brands and this is the segment the Rojo chilli brand is eyeing. In a years’ time, they would like to be the condiment brand of choice at every barbeque, table, in every household and restaurant. For now, the business has three employees including the couple who are part of the H&amp;L Ventures. Lynne and Harold know that their business is growing and is hot—literally!  <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1258" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/dreamstime_l_2958187-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />

It’s Heinz Time  We Become Millionaires

Out-of-home advertising, such as billboards, is big business worldwide and is growing each day. The figure sits at $26.4 billion—an increase of 8.3%—in 2011 alone. Pinto saw a gap in the market when he watched thousands of unbranded delivery trucks sitting in traffic: why not use their perfectly unmarked platforms as a moving billboard?
Most trucks have Global Positioning Systems (GPS) that track their routes and location, which is the perfect tool for targeting local and national consumers.
“We have GPS units in all our advertising trucks so we know where they are at any time. Every month we produce an operational report that provides details of all the travel times of the advertisement on the truck.”
Pinto said that the advantage of this medium is that companies can choose which areas they wish to target such as the East Rand specifically or a road such as the M1 between Johannesburg and Pretoria or the whole city. Advertisers can choose the area they want to target and later move the same signage to another area, which allows them to monitor any change in consumer behavior. He points out that South African retailer Woolworths has taken advantage of their national distribution to brand themselves.
In South Africa, billboards dominate the outdoor advertising landscape. Primedia Outdoor, a leading South African media group, owns 15,000 advertising panels across the country and claims that motorists and commuters spend around 30-45 minutes daily, in weekday traffic and weekly peak hour traffic volume is as high as 277,726 commuters. This is a large market.
Pinto researched the outdoor advertising market in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom and discovered a gap for the African advertising landscape.
Securing the rights to prime spots for billboard advertising is expensive. But trucks on the road are already using the routes and he believes that commuters will be drawn to an eye-catching billboard on the move.
“We have a large, varied fleet available, so whether the customer needs a print space of six meters wide or 15 meters wide we have three different size options for them to choose from,” he says.
“They are billboards without a fixed steel infrastructure and are very cost effective at about a third of the traditional cost of fixed billboard advertising,” says Pinto.
While street pole advertising can also be effective, Pinto said that it is becoming another piece of “street furniture” that is severely cluttered.
The concept doesn’t add to a carbon footprint as the trucks he uses are already on the road for commercial carriers.
“Given that trucks are already on the move, one may as well make use of them. They go everywhere,” he says.
He lists the advantages of truck-side advertising after conducting market research:
<ul>
<li>85% more reach and 20% more frequency than conventional media</li>
<li>91% of people report that they notice fleet branding</li>
<li>52% successfully record the adverts</li>
</ul>
Although the business is just getting off the ground—it was launched on September 1—advertising agencies have expressed interest and he has signed a number of business agreements with them and trucking logistics companies. For the trucking companies, it is another source of revenue and means little down time as the boards can be fitted within a few hours.
The key to managing the operation is the ease of construction and safety features. It takes two to three hours to fit the trucks with the tension frame that holds the signage.
“A truck can travel at 160 kilometers an hour with an 18 meter panel and it won’t come off,” says Pinto.
These can be fitted over the weekend when most trucks are not being used. It takes only an hour to switch one panel for another on a fitted truck. The panels are manufactured by local printers. The advantage is that the panels can be removed and displayed at different locations or routes depending on the needs of the campaign. The client also retains ownership of the panel as opposed to painted signs on trucks.
As for the threat from social media platforms, Pinto believes that the way to go is to integrate OOM advertising with social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to enhance the product offering rather than seeing them as competitors.
“We plan to work with those platforms. Their success is our success.”
He has agreements with companies in Johannesburg and Cape Town but says that within a year he will be offering the service in three cities using at least 100 trucks. Pinto admits that starting a new venture is difficult.
“Starting anything is really difficult but if you believe in your product, and you can get another 100 people to also believe in it, then success will come.”
Although born in Johannesburg of Portuguese decent, Pinto speaks with an American accent and has visited 22 countries after studying business management and philosophy at the University of Pretoria.
“I guess I just watched too much TV when I was young,” he says.
He is a firm believer in global entrepreneur Richard Branson and is an enthusiastic member of his Centre of Entrepreneurship in Johannesburg. He quotes Branson as saying: “Do good, have fun and the money will come.”

Moving  The Message

The South African government has taken a big step towards fracking in Africa’s biggest economy that is likely to lead to months of heated debate and court battles.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves extracting natural gas from shale rock layers deep within the earth. The process requires vertical and horizontal drilling and the injection of pressurized fracking fluids, water and sand to extract the gas.
Oil companies see fracking as a potential boost for energy exports, jobs and foreign investment. Conservationists argue it will destroy ecosystems found in the semi-desert landscape of the Karoo, where much of the shale gas is located.
On April 29, 2011, the minister for mineral resources, Susan Shabangu, placed a moratorium on applications to explore fracking in the Karoo while her department conducted investigations. That ban on exploration was lifted on September 7 and the Investigation of Hydraulic Fracturing in the Karoo Basin of South Africa report, which the cabinet based its decision on, was released four days later.
Derek Light, an attorney for farmers in Graaff-Reinet, was unhappy with what he called a hasty decision to lift the moratorium.
“The task team could not have effectively performed its function in such a short a time. It should have performed a strategic environmental assessment in the broadest possible terms which would have enabled them to make a well-informed decision that would be in the best interests of the people of this country,” says Light.
Light was pleased to see that the report recognized the importance to revise the country’s regulatory framework, in order to control fracking.
Jonathan Deal, chairman of Treasure The Karoo Action Group—the official opposition to fracking in South Africa—says that the country’s first reaction was “let’s frack” instead of investigating other forms of energy.
“There is natural gas, offshore, in reservoirs which do not need to be fracked in order to remove it,” he says.
“We plan to lodge an appeal if and when exploration licenses are issued,” Deal says.
Ferrial Adam, a Greenpeace Africa climate and energy campaigner, also believes that the country should consider other forms of sustainable energy.
“Greenpeace’s research on ‘Advanced Energy Revolution’ scenarios shows that it is possible to create 50% of electricity from renewable energy by 2030, if we have the same political determination that government seems to put into fossil fuels,” she says.
Adam says that in a dry country like South Africa this decision by government is short-sighted.
“Contamination of groundwater aquifers and surface waters can occur due to fracking operations and through the disposal of waste waters. Small amounts of carcinogenic hydrocarbons are harmful to humans. In some cases, this waste water is minimally processed before being dumped into surface waters feeding public water supplies, or is held in ponds that may lead to releases of the chemicals into the environment.”
The head of Living Planet Unit, WWF South Africa, Saliem Fakir, says we can only see the outcome of fracking by looking at extractive industries at present. The track record for communities is rather dismal. The national coffers and private industry may benefit but the problem of impoverishment could be the inheritance of the local setting. Fakir pointed to countries like Nigeria, a country where Shell is active, to show how countries that are rich in oil can be poor.
“Extractive industries have boom and bust cycles. They often attract lots of labor and people from outside that leads to conflict, social pressure and displacement of local interests, the truth is that resource rich countries tend to have high levels of inequality. Elites tend to capture the rents and leave out the poor. We may see a similar phenomenon with shale gas if the extractive process suffers from poor governance and oversight,” says Fakir
Bonang Mohale, chairperson for Shell South Africa, was pleased with the details of the report.
“The suggestions made by the task team are in line with our exploration plans for the Karoo Basin,” says Mohale.
“South Africa needs energy now. Approximately 10 million people in South Africa do not have access to electricity. At the moment, South Africa is a net importer of energy. This means that South Africa needs the full range of energy sources. In combination with other energy sources, including renewables, gas could help secure South Africa’s energy future, while creating sustainable and permanent jobs for South Africans.”
Shell is preparing to submit a comprehensive environmental, social and health impact assessment (ESHIA) that is in line with the National Environmental Management Act. Shell promises to continue working closely with the people of the Karoo and South Africa to address concerns and ensure that they benefit from shale gas exploration.
Group Media Manager for Sasol Limited, one of the biggest energy companies on the continent, Alex Anderson, says that Sasol gave up its fracking license last year.
“We concluded an extensive technical study of the area and then decided not to pursue further exploration activities in the assigned TCP area. The decision was based on subsurface technical and operational considerations and was unanimously taken by the partnership,” said Anderson a few months back.
“Sasol has taken note of the decision by the South African government to lift the moratorium on shale gas exploration in the Karoo region. We continue to be very interested in the upstream oil and gas business landscape, which includes the shale gas in the Karoo and elsewhere. As a consequence we continue to monitor these developments with interest and if new opportunities present themselves we will actively evaluate and pursue if they are attractive from a technical and commercial perspective,” says Anderson.
The report commissioned by the department of mineral resources indicated that during the exploration phase, only normal exploration, would be allowed. This excludes hydraulic fracturing but instead includes a process whereby drilling, geophysical and geochemical mapping can take place.
The report spoke of the economic potential fracking would bring to the country. According to the United States Energy Information Administration there is an estimated 485 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas in the Karoo Basin, which could reduce the national dependence on other fossil fuels. It mentioned the environmental and socio-economic implications of water use. and the disposal of the fracking fluids. The task team said that due to the high volumes of water to be used and the possible contamination of water with the fracking fluids, they would need to conduct further research into water sources.
The report called for aa re-evaluation of South Africa’s regulatory framework to ensure that any possible negative impacts would be alleviated. A monitoring committee will be appointed to ensure a comprehensive and coordinated framework and the supervision of operations.
Now the conservationist and protestors await the application for the first exploration license and will see the applicant in court.

Between A Rock  And A Hard Place

Peaceful, organized and quiet on a Sunday afternoon. That was election day in the otherwise bustling and chaotic seaside capital of Luanda.
“I’m so proud of my country right now. Angola has shown it can organize itself, if it wants to,” says IT engineer Jose Tomas.
The August parliamentary elections were Angola’s second since the end of the civil war (1975-2002) and the third since independence. UNITA (The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) almost doubled its 10% take from the 2008 elections, while new coalition CASA-CE won 6% of the votes. The MPLA is down 10% from its 82% landslide victory in 2008. Voter turnout at 60% was low. The African Union (AU) deemed the elections free, fair, just, transparent and credible. European observers were also positive.
“The margin of the MPLA victory, the AU observer mission’s judgment and the continued presence of Dos Santos as president spell continuity. The MPLA still has an absolute majority in Parliament. The increase in opposition MPs will have little impact on law-making and is unlikely to affect international business interests,” says Markus Weimer from independent think tank Chatham House
South African managing director of telecom company MCS Angola, Ryan Ellerker, thinks the peaceful elections and MPLA’s victory will have “a definite positive effect” on Angola’s business climate. He has already seen projects previously on hold being restarted.
“That shows confidence in the market, in the country and its political stability,” he says.
Managing director of insurance broker AIBA Rupert Weterings, who grew up in Zimbabwe, echoed Ellerker’s view.
“The positive political climate combined with the fact that Angola is one of Africa’s most resource-rich countries makes one realize that Angola is open for business.”
In the run-up to the elections, Angola’s largest opposition party UNITA held nationwide street protests twice against perceived fraud, lack of transparency, unequal funding and lack of media space. Other opposition parties have voiced similar grievances.
But Unita’s protests took the shape of cheerful campaign gatherings and a healthy wake-up rather than a threat to the status quo. Opposition parties may contest the election results within the framework of the law, but Weimer does not expect a different outcome.
The street protests of Angola’s budding revolutionary youth movement and disgruntled war veterans, which unlike the political opposition protests were forcefully repressed, dwindled as the elections drew near. Many of the veterans—who demanded long overdue social subsidies—were paid last-minute. The youths, who have suffered physical violence and threats, generally chose to voice their discontent in the larger and safer framework of opposition party’s manifestations.
In other words, time does not seem ripe for change.
According to Weimer, the government’s goal for the next five years will be to empower the Angolan private sector—particularly the small- to medium-sized businesses—agriculture and to increase formalization of informal businesses.
“After 10 years of national reconstruction, the top government priorities are now job creation and the reduction of poverty and inequality, which are crucial for medium to long-term stability,” he says.
The key to achieving these aims, according to Weimer, is the “colossal task” of diversifying the Angolan economy. “Colossal” because a staggering 97% of Angola’s exports are currently petroleum products, while the oil sector only employs around 1% of the population. In order to achieve all this, mass education is crucial, Weimer warns.
One essential factor must not be forgotten: President Dos Santos turned 70 three days before the elections and is widely expected to retire within the next few years. Vice-president Manuel Vicente, the former CEO of Sonangol, is equally widely expected to follow in his footsteps. But for that, Weimer said, “Vicente will have to develop his own support base and popularity.”
“The transition process may well take a few years still, but a smooth presidential succession is essential for continued stability.”
For now

Business As Usual  After Polling Day

When Her Royal Majesty, Queen Mother Semane Bonolo Molotlegi of the Royal Bafokeng, woke up one morning to the news that miners were refusing to go underground demanding higher wages from one of the mines in which her 300,000-strong community owns shares, she immediately called the Royal Bafokeng Holdings CEO.
South Africa had made world headlines on August 16, when 34 miners in the small mining town of Marikana, in the North West province, were mowed down by police in the most brutal shootings to have hit the country since the days of apartheid.
For someone who says she’s not only unfamiliar with the workings of the corporate world, but is not involved in the family’s business affairs, didn’t it occur to her that she was crossing the line when she made that call?
Clearing it all up during our interview, she insisted that she was merely sharing a concern as “our mines are in the villages. If something like that [Marikana shooting] could happen, things would be worse in our case.”
Hers was to merely advise the CEO: “Try to be proactive. Maybe you should consider giving it [the wage increase] to them.”
Whatever the CEO was going to do with her advice, she would maintain, was entirely up to him.
As the nominal head of the royal family—their net worth is estimated at more than $5 billion—Queen Molotlegi presides over a range of mining, telecommunications and financial sector assets.
Their investment arm, the Royal Bafokeng Holdings (RBH), has substantial investments in platinum mining companies, Implats and Royal Bafokeng Platinum, and in ferrochrome miner Merafe. It also owns 1.97% of Vodacom SA, a cellular communications company with a 54% share of the South African market. RBH’s financial sector investments include a 15% interest in diversified financial services holding company RMB Holdings, as well as a related 15% interest in RMI Holdings, a company that owns stakes in some of South Africa’s largest and wealthiest insurance companies.
Royal Bafokeng also owns Platinum Stars, a team that plays in the richest football league on the African continent, South Africa’s Premier Soccer League.
“It’s all on behalf of the Bafokeng, whatever we get from the assets is of community benefit,” she says.
And it’s been like that at least from the day she joined the family after tying the knot with her children’s father in an arranged marriage back in 1963.
“My husband would get the royalties, then use the money to build infrastructure like schools, roads, bridges and clinics. When he passed away, and our eldest son took over, he continued from where his father left. And when my eldest died, too, his younger brother, who took over, followed from where his brother left.”
The Queen Mother insists she doesn’t get treated differently. She gets a salary and, like everybody else, has to work for it.
She has to submit to her boss, Kgosi Leruo Tshekedi Molotlegi, her third son and the present King of the Royal Bafokeng, who is currently running all royal affairs.
“He is in charge, I don’t meddle. I respect the fact that he is in charge,” the Queen Mother says.
What, then, is your role? I ask.
“Do I have one? I don’t think so. I jump from one role to another. I’ve ended up advising. If something is brewing, I intervene,” she says.
The Bafokeng Nation, as they prefer to call themselves, is a tight knit community, which Queen Molotlegi says has one of the most advanced political and administrative systems around.
The highest decision-making body is the Supreme Council, a kind of Parliament comprising of 92 representatives.
Twenty members of the council are elected regional representatives, while 72 are from the hereditary council of herdsmen drawn from the 72 villages that make up the Setswana-speaking nation.
The council sits at least twice a year, ostensibly “to discuss the needs of the people” and then take decisions either by consensus or through voting. The CEO of the nation’s investment company is often invited to attend the council and to report back.
Before the Supreme Council sits, the various regions hold public meetings called “makgotla”, where they thrash out matters to be taken up by their herdsmen and regional representatives to the Supreme Council.
It was at one of the Supreme Council meetings, more than 10 years ago, that the Queen Mother says the Royal House took a decision to move away from taking royalties and to get into owning mines as well as other forms of active investments. Years later, this would be followed by diversification into financial services and telecommunications.
“Knowing that mines are going to deplete at some point, does it mean we would also perish as Bafokeng? That’s when we formed RBH, realizing we can no longer have our eggs in one basket.”
As would be expected of a traditional leader, the Queen maintains the Royal House has done very well to keep its subjects—or rather, the nation—together and happy.
Not that it’s been easy.
“You are never able to please everybody”, the Queen Mother says, citing times when some “bad potatoes” from the kingdom would ask “Why don’t we take all the money and share it among everybody?”
“Some people came forward to say, ‘We know that land can secure bank loans, so can we please get our piece of land’.”
A staunch Christian, she says she “prayed and prayed”—until everyone saw sense in her and her family’s point of view.
“We had to unfortunately say we can’t do that because this is communal land. We had to ask: ‘What if you don’t pay, when the banks would have gotten in?’ The bank would take over your land.”
The land issue hasn’t come up again, leaving her with enough time nowadays to focus on her charity work, which she does through her own foundation and educational trust.
She also spends a great deal of her time going to schools to encourage learners to study.
A patron of South Africa’s national women’s football team, Banyana Banyana, she often goes to some of their matches to encourage them.
She is also the patron of Girl Guides Association of South African—the voluntary, girls-only organization, which teaches good citizenship, practical skills and moral values.
Like the girl guides, she finds herself wanting to do good, but in a world that is full of contradictions and competing priorities.
While, for example, she believed workers should just be given the wages they were asking for, to avoid a bigger crisis, her fellow investors at Impala Platinum and Royal Bafokeng thought it was something they could not afford—if they were to keep the mines sustainable and preserve the thousands of jobs their mines provide.
There is little doubt, though, about the fact that one of the things that motivate her—apart from her professed primary objective of wanting to do all things good for her nation—is the urge to stave off danger and to avoid seeing fingers pointing at her family.
And for that she relies on her own deep sense of pragmatism, and her apparent adroitness at handling conflicts—something that is missing in South Africa’s mining industry at the moment.
But that’s not to suggest she isn’t aware of her family’s privileged position and her particular place in it.
It was when I walked into the room where the Queen Mother and I were going to do the interview, that I almost immediately formulated an impression, a positive one at that. I even murmured to myself: “Mothers don’t come as simple, warm, graceful and mature”.
It was after our hour-long conversation that I realized, that beneath this benign, seemingly unsophisticated, naïve look, in fact, lay a royal who—while not oblivious to fact that she’s privileged and occupies a place in society that’s high above most—has found a way of juxtaposing humility and pride, and of looking well after her family.
Isn’t she good at her role? Whatever that role is.

The Platinum Queen

The year was 1994. South Africa’s political climate was changing; a new president promised democracy and opportunities for all. For Romeo Makhubela life was just beginning. After years of teaching, he decided to register at business school. He put down the chalk and left the classroom, and today he is the CEO of a 100 percent black-owned investment company, a world away from high school teaching.
This epiphany turned him into one of the country’s emerging financial services providers. The reason Makhubela was in the classroom in the first place was no surprise. For most black South Africans at the time, that was the highest you could reach. You could either be a policeman, nurse or teacher.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like teaching. He had studied for a Bachelor of Commerce degree and topped it with a teaching diploma, which led him to become a commerce teacher for final year students, in the North West province of South Africa.
“The most exciting part as a teacher, especially a high school teacher, is when the [matric] results come out, and you realize that the investment that you made [has paid off]. I remember one year ‘I’ had a lot of distinctions and for me that was so fulfilling because you could see people going to university, some are now working and you know that you were part of that product,” says Makhubela.
“I started teaching in 1990… Around 1992 or ’93 I started noticing that a change was coming in South Africa and clearly businesses would start transforming and there would be huge opportunities, especially for people who had a Bachelor of Commerce qualifications,” says Makhubela.
It was never easy, amid the political turmoil of his country. During his university studies, Makhubela was also politically active.
“I matriculated in 1983. Things were quite tough at that stage; I think the upheavals were starting… It was terrible in those days and I had [to take] a break in ’84, then in ’85 I started doing my Bachelor of Commerce degree ’till around ’88. There was one year where we didn’t write exams because of the [political] problems.”
“Politics then was something that you just couldn’t avoid because there were a lot of injustices in this country… Especially at [university] because you started seeing the world and seeing that certain things weren’t correct… The way some lecturers conducted themselves, I can tell you one example; [In our first year] the one [lecturer]… just came and said ‘Look this is such a big class, I’m not used to teaching [so many people] and I can assure you that in third year 80 to 90% [of you] will be gone’. And you sit down and say ‘How could you make such a statement?’.”
Today, he is no longer in politics; he sits at the head of Vunani Limited. The eight-year-old company was launched in 2004 following a management buyout from African Harvest. In 2007, the company listed on the JSE AltX Exchange raising R175 million ($21.4 million). They currently have offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town, in South Africa and Harare, Zimbabwe.
He worked his way to the top, starting out at an insurance company as a graduate trainee, then he became a financial analyst for an asset management company and after around six years in the asset management field, he was recruited as chief investment officer for a life insurance company. And now he is heading Vunani Limited, an emerging company that wants to leave its mark as South Africa’s leading black-owned financial services provider. Vunani Limited is listed on the JSEAltX; it is currently listed 19th in the financial services sector, with R204.5 million ($24.96 million) of market capitalization. The company has a diverse portfolio, which consists of Vunani Fund Managers; Vunani Capital; Vunani Technology Ventures; Vunani Securities; Vunani Capital Markets and Vunani Properties. Now it is going up against the best in the financial services industry and is forging its own way. One challenge they, like many other companies, are facing is growing the industry.
Makhubela’s focus now is on getting his countrymen to start putting away more for a rainy day.
“One of the biggest gripes about South Africa is that if you look at our saving ratio, it’s quite low and clearly that tells to the culture or the environment from which people [come from]. My sense is that, maybe in the white culture it’s much better because at least that kind of information was instilled but in the broader black community… the kind of savings that you generally see within [them] would be pension funds, which is forced, because when you work you get your pension fund automatically.”
Last year, South Africa’s minister of finance, Pravin Gordhan, said that South Africa’s savings rate was low and that it “needed to increase its saving rate if it were to become the ‘China of Africa’”.
Makhubela agrees.
“Savings are critical… look at the Chinese for example. The savings rate there is extremely high—but you could argue that it’s influenced by a number of facts because they don’t have a proper social system… But that helps because if you look at the global crisis we are experiencing now… the Chinese have played an important role in terms of lessening the impact of the global crisis because of their savings.”
According to The South African Savings Institute (SASI), South Africa is the lowest ranking member of BRICS when it comes to saving.
“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) statistics show that since 2001, compared with its BRICS counterparts, SA’s rate of national savings has remained flat… In China, gross savings are over 50% of GDP, in Russia 30% and Brazil over 18%. In South Africa that figure is about 16.5%… It’s 72nd in the world behind Algeria (3rd), Morocco (25th), Nigeria (27th), Zambia (32nd), Namibia (34th), Botswana (42nd) and Lesotho (62nd)”.
The poor argue that saving is the last thing on your mind when you are living from hand-to-mouth, while the middle class chooses to splash out, so where does that leave the future of the fund management industry?
Makhubela says that when the rate of unemployment decreases, and more people start earning and being forced to save, then the tide will change. But while there is no growth in savings right now, Makhubela and his team are looking beyond borders, with Zimbabwe under their belt, they are also currently setting up in Namibia.
From marking exam papers to signing off millions, Makhubela is trying to teach one of the greatest lessons in life—how to save even when it hurts.

Category: Entrepreneurs

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