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On the eve of his fiftieth birthday, Femi Anikulapo-Kuti was as cool and calm as ever, as easy going as any peace-filled man should be.
Clad in a simple t-shirt and tie-dyed cotton pants, he was chilling at home, lounging around his living room, dividing his attention between the news on a wall-mounted flat screen TV, his three constantly beeping three cellphones and an old, rustic trumpet he cuddled and blew intermittently. He looked like a big five-year-old boy at play, home alone, quietly doing his homework while waiting for lunch.
Speaking before his ‘Femi Kuti @ 50’ party on June 23 at The New Africa Shrine, his nightclub where Afrobeat fans gather weekly to watch, dance and worship at the feet of the musical maestro, he said: “I feel truly loved at a time like this. I feel really honored that my family, friends and my fans have decided to throw this big party for me. I think it is a sign of how much love I have.
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“I can’t complain. I have had an eventful life. I’ve learnt to understand the fact that life isn’t easy, so I don’t expect to take anything for granted. When I think of the suffering masses out there globally and even in my country, I can’t complain, my brother.”
At 50, Femi can truly be called his own man. Increasingly absent from media reviews of his songs are comparisons to his old man, the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who created the Afrobeat music genre in the 1960s. Fela died of complications arising from HIV/AIDS in 1997, at 58, and was constantly a thorn in the flesh of the civilian and military authorities of his time.
Fela spoke truth to power with his music. Femi’s music is equally acerbic, except that his beats are faster and more energetic, appealing to a younger, broader spectrum of Nigerian, African and international audiences.
Afrobeat is Nigeria’s contribution to world music. It seems that the style and substance of this music genre—even from Fela or Femi wannabes—is well suited to preaching and about the ills of society. It could be down to genetics though, for the Ransome-Kuti family has always been radically outspoken—Femi’s father and uncles were constantly in and out of jail on account of their political activism and brushes with the law; his grandmother famously led riots and campaigned for gender rights and female taxation in the 1920s in her native Abeokuta town. But the question for Femi remains: he is certainly a chip off the old block but is he as good as the great Fela?
“Nobody gave me a chance in the beginning, especially when I left my father’s band to form Positive Force [his own band]. So I was determined to prove them wrong. And if you come from a big heritage as mine, with a big father and a big family and everybody says you are going to fail for whatever reason, you can imagine the pressure… so I started from rock bottom; the fear of ever being poor again motivates me now. Also when I started to understand the greatness of my father—he was so courageous, he was larger than life—I was like ‘Wow, will I be able to live up to this heritage?’ I had so many worries along those lines. The determination to excel and succeed inspires me. I don’t know how to relax anymore probably because of the fear of my beginning, and knowing the consequence of failure. So I’m always on the move, I’m always practicing.”
Femi and his band are constantly on tour, playing around the world. His weekly shows, The Sunday Jump, at the Shrine are always jam packed, especially when he is in town.
Yeni Kuti, Femi’s sister, choreographer and matriarch of the shrine, said: “This is the only place on African soil where you would find street urchins and students, working-class professionals, tourists, diplomats and expatriates swinging in harmony to the soulful, frenetic rhythm of Afrobeat music.”
“Femi is a living legend. He has taken Fela’s legacy to another level,” Ayoola Sadare, an Afrobeat fan and convener of the annual Lagos Jazz Festival told FORBES AFRICA. “How many Nigerian artists have gone global successfully? How many Nigerian artists have received three Grammy nominations?”
“I know for sure that the difference between Femi and many other artists in Nigeria is consistency, dedication and sheer hard work,” Nseobong Okon-Ekong, entertainment editor of ThisDay newspaper told FORBES AFRICA.
“Very few are willing or prepared to do what it takes to achieve… Femi resumes at the shrine every morning after doing his school runs, he is always practicing with his band, always working on new stuff. That’s why he will keep being ahead of the pack.”
Beneath Femi’s affable mien is a fiery and politically astute mind constantly soliloquizing about the extant features of the global order and the sour political economy of his country: Africa’s most populous and fastest-developing market.
His greatest fear is the prospect of Nigeria falling apart, going to war. He says the global recession is frightening, trusting that Europe would eventually be propped up to rise above its present economic woes.
“You see, when Europe is telling us there is no money then we need to be worried. Africa has always understood no money; Africa has always understood poverty and all that. We need to be very frightened of the global corruption we face and the way politicians have made a nuisance of life generally.”
There is no peace in life now, he cries.
“Look at the current upheavals in the Middle East, terrorism, spats between America and Iran and all this talk about nuclear warfare, you just wonder whether there will ever be a time in our lives when we will ever discuss good things.
“I am worried about my children and their future. What kind of society would they be living in, in Nigeria? See the scandals, see the corruption; we are still discussing the things, the ills of society my father was discussing when I was in my teens. It’s incredible! See the poverty in the north, we have 150 million people so we need to be scared; see Somalia still talking about hunger, starvation, strife—all these things are really alarming.”
For someone with merely a secondary school education, it is amazing that Femi is arguably one of Nigeria’s foremost social commentators and critics. His articulation on and off the stage is impressive. His decision to quit school at 16 in favor of a full-time music career alarmed everyone—especially his mother and education-proud relatives—but pleased his father, who eventually owned up to being the source of the infamous counsel.
“The poor boy has learned enough academic nonsense, now he will begin to learn music and plenty of African sense,” Fela said then, defending the decision and, as always, promoting his penchant for homegrown knowledge.
“Yes, Fela was highly educated. He studied music in university in England but he believed school did not help him. He wanted to use me to prove a point and he said so himself before he died. He said that I did not need to go to school, read or write music to be a good musician. I think he just believed raw talent was better. How he came to that conclusion, I still don’t know. Only he knew why his formal education in music did not help him,” Says Femi.
In any case, Femi‘s lack of tertiary education did not mean the end of learning for the young man. His father exposed him to global cultures and imbued a disciplined work ethic in him.
“He expected me to still do my work, he expected me to go and practice every day and he gave me a lot of books to read. I was reading big books that my mates had no idea about their existence: I remember some of them like Stolen Legacy by George James, Black Man of the Nile which I read about four times, The Scramble for Africa, I just went crazy reading books.
“I was reading anything. Chinese history, the autobiography of Malcolm X… my father used to take me to this massive bookshop in Chicago and there I would just get lost reading books all day… I spent my entire days in this bookshop. I was reading about American history, African history, I was reading books on Egypt. In fact, I got a nickname there—Professor—because I wasn’t just reading books, I was questioning them, so if I didn’t agree with the author or something he said in a book, I would ask questions or question it… so I would always query things…we would argue and debate and just thrash out issues from the literature I was reading.”
His political and musical influences are somewhat obvious. Apart from his father, who insisted he listen to jazz, he also admired Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. So his musical tutelage under his dad meant also listening to Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, and generally American music from the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s.
“I didn’t like jazz in the beginning but my father insisted on me listening. Initially, it seemed so bitter in my ears but when I listened more and began to understand, I came to a crossroad where I had to decide whether I truly wanted to be a musician because I was amazed with what Dizzy and Charlie Parker were doing with their musical instruments. I thought it was impossible. It seemed like they were aliens. I couldn’t believe that any man could perform with such dexterity on their musical instruments. I was used to single note melodies and I just could not understand how they could be so creative, and I just came to a point when I told myself ‘Wow, I will never be able to play like this.’ That experience kind of gave me the inspiration to say to myself, ‘Okay, I cannot be a Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie but I can still form my own voice and style musically.”
Clearly, his father’s eclectic ways were a key influence. He however credits his late mother for his cool headedness.
“It is not my fault the press don’t ask about her but if they bring it out she dominates my story. So yes, my father was the superstar, he did all the singing and the fighting but I know that if not for my mother, I would not be who I am today; our family would not be where it is today… my parents were an interesting pair… My mother loved my father. She said she fell in love with him from the moment she met him, but she knew he was a womanizer and she still loved him ‘till the day she died.”
Was her demise the saddest time of his life? Not exactly, he replies. The day his younger sister and his mother died were probably the worst days of his life, he says.
“The day my mother died I had a concert and I had to fulfill it because I had already spent the money. That was very tough…”
“My junior sister’s demise was very hard on me too but I had to brave the situation, being the first male child in the family, the responsibility of her burial arrangements fell on me, and I had to take very fast decisions to quickly console everybody, forgetting that I was also in pain, it took me a very long time to understand that I was in real grief and I still mourn her even now.
“Even my mother, sometimes I wake up and I want to go and say ‘good morning’ then I just realize that ‘Oh, she’s gone.’ I think those two loses of very close family members still haunt me.”
An unpretentious, modest man, any talk of his potential net worth almost annoys him.
“I am worth more than all the money in the world because money can’t buy love. You could be rich and nobody cares about you. People are going out of their way to try to make my party happen; they are trying to give me a happy birthday. Left to me, I would be very nonchalant about it, because I wouldn’t care whether I was 50 or not.”

Fifty Cheers For The Musical Maestro

He grew up in a world where doing business was a foreign concept and capitalism a dirty word. This was the world of Mozambique in the 70s and 80s where Moreira Chonguica’s worldview was formed by the regime of socialist-communist leader Samora Machel, who favored state-owned corporations over the private sector.
“The word business did not apply to me because of the context I grew up in. I never thought about business,” says Chonguica, 35, when thinking back to his youth.
So when he started playing the saxophone as a teenager, it was meant to be a hobby, not a career. It took him many years until he realized that he could make a decent living from his passion. Today, he is actively marketing himself as a brand, by associating with big corporations like Woolworths and Vodacom.
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Chonguica always felt at home in the world of jazz. Every afternoon after school, almost religiously, he visited the local library to browse through leading jazz magazines like Downbeat and Jazz Times, learning about the international world of music. He came to know about festivals, master classes, the music business and the evolution of sound technology.
“I thought, ‘Hello, there is something here that I am missing.’ I started questioning myself and I understood, ‘Ah, music is a business!’” he recalls.
Reading musicians’ biographies became his obsession. Chonguica wanted to find out all he possibly could about the person behind the voice, the business behind the musician.
“From watching music videos on TV, I always thought being a musician was just fun. But when I started reading about the successful artists of that time, like Bryan Adams, Sting, Michael Jackson, MC Hammer, Run-D.M.C., Vanilla Ice. It dawned on me that they are musicians, but they are also companies,” he says.
That’s what he wanted to achieve, as well, one day, he thought.
Chonguica did not only look behind the scenes of music. He also studied the careers of famous sportsmen like basketball star Michael Jordan and the business success stories of multinational corporations like fast food chain McDonalds.
“Michael Jordan created a fingerprint, an identity, a lifestyle. I understood that it’s not only about your success as a sportsman. It’s the way you talk, the way you dress, what you drink, with whom you collaborate. My perspective had changed completely. I started looking at music the same way as at sport,” he explains.
One day the penny dropped: he had to turn himself into a trademark.
But until then, Chonguica had a long road ahead. How was he going to grow his fledgling music career into a thriving business? Step one, was to leave poverty-stricken Mozambique, which had just emerged from more than two decades of bloody internal conflict. He enrolled as a music student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa in 1997. Living for the first time in a market-driven economy, Chonguica woke up to a sobering reality: combining his dream of being a jazz artist with making money would be extremely difficult.
“I suddenly realized that it would have made much more sense to study economics or engineering or architecture. I got a fright. I thought I have no future. I didn’t want to be just another poor musician.”
In a panic, he played with the thought of de-registering from his studies. It was a drastic decision for someone whose relationship with music had begun early on in his life, pretty much before he could walk or talk. His father, a medical doctor who ran the national health ministry’s pharmacy department, was an ardent music lover. The turntable in the family’s living room in Maputo’s Polana neighborhood hardly stood still.
“My father had a huge collection of LPs. Miles Davis, Fela Kuti, Johnny Clegg, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, James Brown, Pink Floyd, the Police and lots of instrumental jazz. Every evening when he came home from work, he put the system on loud,” says Chonguica.
Chonguica, the boy, listened, and his devotion to music grew. He soon attended a state-subsidized music school where he was introduced to the saxophone—an instrument he never put down again. It was this deep-seated relationship with music that made him years later, as a student, change his mind once again.
“I realized that a musician is who I am. I decided that I have to make it work. I have to change the game. I cannot just play saxophone, I have to turn it into a business.”
And so he graduated with a degree in jazz performance and ethnomusicology and started to play and tour with top South African jazz artists, such as Jimmy Dludlu and Alvin Dyers.
“I purposefully attached myself to the big names, toured with them and played at the top jazz festivals in the world,” says Chonguica.
“It’s like when you’re a soccer player, you want to play with Real Madrid,” he says in reference to the Spanish football club, one of the top performing clubs in the world.
A trip to the United States in 2000 opened his eyes to the world of music even further.
“I saw musicians making a lot of money, getting the right publicity, becoming famous. It was ‘wow’. My perspective of how the music business works totally changed,” he says.
His role model became Quincy Jones, who over five decades in the entertainment industry not only excelled as a jazz trumpeter and performer but became one of the top record producers of all time, working with pop icons like Michael Jackson.
“Quincy Jones is my hero because he shaped and changed the world with music. He built an empire,” says Chonguica.
Back in South Africa, Chonguica changed tack. He didn’t want to be a member of someone else’s band anymore. He wanted to become an artist in his own right, build his own brand. He teamed up with Woolworths and was a celebrity model for the retailer’s winter men’s collection. He became a brand ambassador for Laurentina Premium, an SABMiller beer, Vodacom Mozambique and Mozambican airline LAM, and has collaborated with Nokia, J&amp;B and Mozambique’s largest commercial bank BCI.
“I am marketing myself differently [from other jazz artists]. I am creating concepts of myself, buzz words. Someone will say ‘I know that guy. I want to book him’,” he explains.
He also created an independent recording label, Morestar Entertainment, and produced several albums of conceptual African fusion of jazz, cleverly keeping tabs on his musical output as well as his earnings: “I own everything I do.” Three South Africa Music Awards (SAMA) and another two nominations later, Chonguica’s records can be downloaded from all major music websites, like iTunes, SoundCloud or ReverbNation, giving Chonguica a global presence.
But it’s the branding that has kept Chonguica financially afloat much more than income generated from performances or music sales, especially since the global financial crisis hit in 2008.
“The first thing that’s affected in an economic downturn is entertainment. There are less jazz festivals, reduced budgets for musicians. I came to the conclusion that I can’t depend on festivals and gigs to make money. It’s not sustainable,” he says.
Chonguica’s advice to young musicians: Create our own concepts. Brand your band, young man.

Brand Your Band,  Young Man

She should have been a psychologist, but she ended up as a Bollywood film star instead.
Tarina Patel was born in Cape Town and schooled in Durban, South Africa. Like many in her family, she moved to Mumbai, India, to study medicine. In her first year she realized that it was not for her and returned home, where she majored in psychology and law. After earning an honors degree in clinical psychology she headed back to India.
Instead of working at one of her father’s medical centers in India, Patel became a model leading her to an, often precarious, acting career in Bollywood, where, according to Patel, there’s no security, tough competition and the people often abuse their power.
The unglamorous side of the industry is filled with struggle and rejection and if you’re not made of strong stuff, you’ll get swallowed. Patel jokes that her psychology background helps her survive.
Her academic family wanted her to do her Masters in Psychology at Yale University in the States and couldn’t understand why she had become an actress in India. They now travel to film shoots with her.
“With success comes a certain amount of acceptance,” she says.
Patel may not have any formal training in acting but feels that her modeling career more than prepared her for Bollywood. She has starred in numerous films including, Bhool Bhulaiyaa, in 2007. Ask her what her biggest film was and she’ll tell you that she’s yet to have one. She doesn’t feel like she’s reached the pinnacle of her career.
Last spring, Patel ventured into the unknown, yet again, as a guest star in one of South Africa’s popular soapies, The Wild. Playing a Bollywood diva, Patel took to it as easily as she did to her life in India but admits that she prefers films. Despite being on a break, she also managed to squeeze in a dance performance on South African Idols.
Patel is married to a former deputy director general at the South African Department of Trade and Industry, now turned businessman, Iqbal Sharma. Her life is a constant balancing act.
“My husband has always been my partner in every way, always encouraging me to fulfill my dreams and not worry about anything else,” she says.
The South African beauty wants to produce, which seems like the natural next step.
“It will be my first feature film that I’m producing, so you can understand my desire to do the maximum pre-production, rather than jumping in blindly and learning a lot of very expensive lessons along the way!” she writes from a shoot.
Patel is constantly on shoots and is in the process of filming a documentary on her life in the industry. She owns the rights and is trying to sell it.
“Being in the industry, particularly in India, it must be the most difficult and trying industry in the world,” she notes.
Being in Bollywood, one needs to speak Hindi. As a Gujarati—who grew up in South African boarding schools and speaks fluent English and Afrikaans—Patel had to teach herself the new language while modeling. No small task.
Patel finds life in India very exciting. Her face changes when she speaks of it; she’s both excited and serene. Weeks before the interview, she was in London three times over a three-week period and was everywhere from Moscow to Dubai for four months before that. As you read this, she’s somewhere in Europe hard at work. Patel jokingly says that Johannesburg is like a village and a farm compared to Mumbai. Why Bollywood?
“I didn’t stop and think about it… I just did [it].”

From Cape Town To Bollywood

&nbsp;
Tayo Oviosu is a trained engineer with a penchant for venture capital and private equity. His journey to spearhead Nigeria’s first mobile money company and foremost mobile money transfer service has been long and winding.
Oviosu was born and raised in Lagos, then moved to the States in 1994, aged 16. He earned an electrical engineering degree from the University of Southern California. Later, he began with a couple of start-ups where his entrepreneurial spirit was born. Regardless, he went to work for Deloitte Consulting where he led a number of system integration projects. The thirst in Tayo was far from quenched and stirred him to seek formal business knowledge at Stanford University, where he obtained his MBA.
While at Stanford , the thought of moving back to Nigeria drifted through Oviosu’s mind.
“Many people had warned me that Nigeria was still too much about who rather than what you knew,” he says.
This was a major deterrent for him and instead, he started thinking of what he wanted to do long-term.
“I concluded, I wanted to help build an ecosystem of early stage venture capital in Africa, help build entrepreneurs and see businesses come to life,” he says.
Oviosu thought of ways to marry his tech background with these lofty aspirations and this led to his next venture with one of Silicon Valley’s priced tech houses, Cisco Systems, where he helped develop strategies for businesses’ investments in Africa. This project brought him back to Africa. As an early stage venture capitalist, experiences with colleagues and business partners—while carrying out the project in South Africa—drew his entrepreneurial fantasies closer to Nigeria.
“I get a real kick out of bringing ideas to life,” he says.
In 2008, Oviosu took up the gauntlet and returned to Nigeria. Loaded with ideas, he joined Travant Capital Partners, a private equity firm, within which he executed investment strategy in West Africa and also spent time identifying opportunities within the Nigerian market.
A few months into his involvement with Travant, Oviosu knew the time was now.
“I was more convinced about Nigeria and the opportunities that are present in this country more than ever,” he says.
Of all these opportunities, one particular issue stood out for him—having to carry cash, to make payments and transactions, was rather frustrating. This led to the quick realization that there was very limited access to financial services in the country.
A huge number of Nigerians are unbanked, but an estimated 60 million of the country’s 160 million people, have mobile phones.
“This got me thinking—what if the phone became the primary means of electronic transactions,” he says.
That is where the mission to bank the unbanked, for profit, started.
Oviosu raised seed capital from friends and family, while he nursed the idea and hunted for the right people.
“Learning to navigate and operate in Nigeria is indeed, an art, one I’m still yet to master. However, if you’re passionate enough about a course, you will overcome any hurdles,” he says.
Oviosu’s passion did the trick and in 2009, Pagatech, the company that was to make his fortune, was born, a direct consumer mobile payment service. Its first product offering, Paga—a direct to customer mobile service—was launched in February 2011. The service allows users to send cash, pay bills and make payments using the cellphone or the internet.
“I’m extremely motivated about what I can see Paga doing for Nigeria and that inspires my team and I to overcome any frustration that may come along,” he says.
“When I’m not working or thinking Paga, I enjoy listening to good music and dancing away. I’d like to be remembered as a fun guy.”
With more than 200,000 transactions, since it launched, 153,342 users and $16 million in transaction volumes, Paga has taken off like a rocket and there seems to be no stopping Oviosu now.

I’ve Got Your Number

The hustle of the noisy, crowded, streets of Lagos is spawning a raw sound that is catching the ear of the world. They call it Nigerian urban music and it could be a gold mine.
Twenty million people-a-month, in 98 countries, tune into Nigerian urban music on YouTube and the numbers are rising rapidly.
“Nigerian urban contemporary music is about young, powerful, trendy, attitude-driven Africans who are not talking about poverty, exclusion or famine. They are saying we’re the new world, the new way, get in with it or forget it,” says Obi Asika, CEO of Storm Records—a leading entertainment company—who also sits on the board of COSON—Copyright Society of Nigeria.
<div id="attachment_1136" style="width: 211px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1136" class="wp-image-1136 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/MI_Bubbles-Magazine-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />M.I</div>
Nigeria is in a prime position to take advantage of this music. It has some of the finest recording studio technology in Africa and a thriving home market on which to test new sounds. The only problem is corruption and rampant music piracy, which threatens the growth of this vibrant Nigerian music.
Asika says the deterrents to growth are regulation, copyright and piracy issues, which leave artists with a lack of income from record sales.
“It is a constant battle but we are making a lot of progress,” he says.
“If you give Nigeria the same resources the Americans have, we will have full domination of the entertainment scene. This is a fact because they don’t have the story. We have a unique story, a unique culture, a unique urban identity and it is in high demand.”
One of the problems is the average Nigerian musician’s recordings can be bought at the side of the road in Lagos traffic, for a pittance. It means concerts and live shows are the moneymakers.
<div id="attachment_1137" style="width: 194px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1137" class="wp-image-1137 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Tu-Face_Now-Musik-184x300.jpg" alt="" width="184" height="300" />Tu Face</div>
For this reason, the United Sounds of Africa—a music project taking African talent on a seven city tour of North America—was created. On tour will be: Tuface; M.I; Jesse Jagz; Ice Prince; Brymo; Timi Dakolo and J.Martins. They will play in Atlanta; Houston; Washington; New York; Los Angeles; Chicago and Toronto.

Twenty Million People Can’t Be Wrong

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Technology is changing the entertainment industry so quickly that it’s difficult to predict where the next media fortunes will be made. There is no shortage of entrepreneurs in this field, one of whom is Emma Kaye. Kaye is a leader in African animation and filmmaking. Her credentials are undisputed—she’s the co-founder of Triggerfish Animation Studios, producers of the award-winning Sesame Street and founder of the Sithengi Cinema Festival in Cape Town. But her focus has shifted from producing content for television and film to finding new ways to distribute entertainment content.
The late Steve Jobs epitomized this type of entrepreneur. The introduction of the iPhone was the game changer: Apple sold 128 million handsets earning the company an estimated $76.6 billion. The smartphone fueled the surge in mobile application use, changing the pricing and the distribution of entertainment forever. In 2008, a year after the iPhone’s launch, 18 billion apps were downloaded from the iTunes store earning the company $4.3 billion. Soon after competitors Larry Page and Sergey Brin—the founders of Google, created the Android platform increasing the amount of app content available to cellphone subscribers.
Kaye watched the evolution of mobile devices, then abandoned the old media platforms she’d relied on and immersed herself in new media; first as the CEO of Breakdesign and then as the founder of Gate 7 New Media, a mobile media, entertainment and content company. Under her stewardship, Breakdesign became one of Nokia and Adobe’s top seven global Flash Lite developers.
She was frustrated that there was a lot of generic content to download which had little relevance for Africa. She wondered whether people were downloading this content only because it was available or whether they were demanding it. So she co-founded Mobfest—Africa’s first user-generated mobile content platform. The first channel, Novel Idea, is a text-based mobile entertainment channel featuring serialized fiction—a first in Africa.
But it didn’t ease her frustration—soon, she had started a new mobile app called bozza.mobi.
“I have worked in the mobile industry for a considerable amount of time and during that time, there was a big gap in the market for content that was relevant for an African community. At the same time, there were barriers to media platforms for people who could produce relevant content. Although there was no shortage of content, there were barriers to producing and distributing that content on a mobile platform,” says Kaye.
She decided to conduct a proof of concept in Khayelitsha in Cape Town and Alexandra in Johannesburg, South Africa. She worked with individuals who could produce content but found access to traditional media prohibitive. The feasibility study was launched on MXit using seven minute mobile spec video content. Within three days, there were 40,000 downloads. Three months later, this number had risen to 170,000.
After the successful proof of concept, Kaye secured investments to build a customized mobile application. Aimed at feature phones, with plans to upscale to smartphones, the application features music, videos and poetry from across the continent.
Move over Nigella! Bozza.mobi recently launched Africa’s cooking channel. Users of bozza.mobi have been glued to the popular episode on ‘how to cook a sheep’s head’ in South African townships. In this particular episode, an industrial blowtorch is used to burn the sheep’s hair, turning it into easily removable ash, which is scraped off with a stone or pot scraper. The head is then thrown into a big water tank to wash off the remaining ash. Then it is cut in half, cooked and served to the restaurant’s customers.
For Kaye, bozza.mobi is about access to self-expression. With over 300 artists, filmmakers and poets on its growing database and with new channels being released daily, bozza.mobi offers these individuals and groups a mobile platform through which to distribute their music, films and poetry. Check out the show about a Congolese woman who used a rundown caravan as her hair salon. She uses bozza.mobi to teach hairdressing. By offering tutorials, small businesses can earn revenue—50% of their channel earnings—while users get free access to content.
The provision of free local content has advantages for handset manufactures too. When Nokia was looking to sell their 3250 series in Europe, they asked Kaye for help.
“We worked with Nokia on creating relevant content for a particular demographic in Europe. We created the interface and content relevant for the skateboarding community. It contained video, news tips and travel guides. Because the content was relevant, the Nokia 3250 series phones sold out,” says Kaye.
Handset manufacturers are now embracing local application development as part of their growth strategies. Ericsson ConsumerLab recently found that the emerging app culture in high-growth markets is driving the uptake of mobile devices. The study showed consumers are not buying smartphones for their superior hardware such as the touch screen, memory capacity, attractive design and resolution size, rather, they want app functionality and faster internet access.
For this reason, Samsung is partnering with app developers such as bozza.mobi, which is working on a new version of their application to be released in six months’ time. Samsung is teaching bozza.mobi developers how to develop apps for different platforms. The improved version of bozza.mobi will be rolled out in Nigeria and Kenya. In Nigeria, Kaye has partnered with IT company, Iroko Partners, founded by Jason Chukwuma Njoku. The firm distributes Nollywood movies online—its services have been well received by the diaspora in the States, England, Canada, Germany and Australia.
Due to the fact that apps are becoming an integral part of cellphone users’ daily lives, Kaye says the new version will also serve as a commercial tool to facilitate informal trading in African communities.

On The Up And App

With a vernacular peppered with swearing and a touch of South London charm, Jason Njoku, 31, made headlines in April when Tiger Global, a $9 billion private equity fund, led an $8 million funding round backing his latest venture, Iroko Partners. It was one of the largest, early-stage deals ever announced by an Africa-focused tech company and catapulted the London-born wunderkind businessmen into wonderland.
Further venture capital funding followed and Njoku is now at the helm of a company that is redefining how Nigerian films are distributed and paid for. This is changing the economics of the industry and tapping a massive latent demand for African content around the world. It may sound easy, but it wasn’t.
“Before Iroko Partners there were at least 10 projects: Some multi-year projects; some lasting a mere few months; many more never left my mind. I think I’ve always been somewhat non-linear in what I do,” he says over lunch near the company’s London offices in Clerkenwell.
“I’ve always liked working on interesting things.”
Growing up in South London shaped him.
“I grew up in Lewisham Deptford: solidly working class, a council estate kid if there ever was one,” he says.
A defining moment in his life was when he moved north to study chemistry in Manchester.
“I had just kind of hung around with other young, black kids, so it was kind of peculiar when I went to university, launched from one community, which had its own dress code, ideals.”
In this university, he saw an opportunity. Graduating in 2005, he threw himself into launching a magazine for students called Brash—backed by loans from friends, goodwill and youthful enthusiasm. This was, he recalls, on the cusp of the transition from print to digital, when so many of the United Kingdom’s larger media groups were struggling to understand new distribution channels and new revenue models. It was also before Facebook had hit Britain, in earnest, offering vast potential in the student market.
“I spent a good three years making every mistake there was to make about how to run a business,” Njoku says.
“We were very popular, but we just never figured out how to make money. Most normal people would have just given up a year in. I’m pretty persistent, so I kept going for three years until it gave up on me. I ran out of money, I ran out of friends who would lend me money. I was forced to stop.”
What this taught him, however, was his pain threshold.
“I got a feel for what kind of person I am,” he says.
A short hiatus in formal employment, as a recruitment consultant, followed, but soon Njoku was back for another round, co-founding Roll On Friday, a blog network and news site for young professionals in banking, law and consultancy. The thesis was that these individuals had disposable income, time on their hands and, crucially, they defined themselves according to their professions. This shared identity creates a powerful sense of community and a well-defined market opportunity.
“The only problem was that we launched the same week that Lehman [Brothers] decided to wreak havoc upon the world,” Njoku laughs.
“A big driver of our traffic at the time was redundancy watch&#8230; That was driving us traffic, and then we would try to sell that traffic to the law firms. I called the recruitment department of every legal department in the UK and started pitching to them, and they said: ‘Hey, you should read your own site. No-one’s hiring.’ I spent two years trying to figure out that.”
In 2008, he went to Nigeria.
“I have never been part of the Nigerian community as such. The Nigerian community is nothing like the black [British] community. It’s completely different in every way, shape and form. So when I went to Nigeria I thought, ‘Wow, there’s lots of music.’ The first inkling I had that something interesting was going on in Nigeria was the music because the music is everywhere. When I went into clubs, I was expecting to hear American hip-hop and R&amp;B, but I was hearing local music. I bought 100 CDs, never listened to them, sort of sat on the idea,” he says.
After his return, it was clear the blog network was defunct. Once again, the project had been popular, but Njoku and his colleagues had not worked out how to turn popularity into cash flow—the eternal problem for digital media businesses. “Distracted”, he turned to other ventures—a T-shirt company and a web design venture—to pay the bills.
“At that stage, I moved back in with my mum. From 2002, to leaving [home], to being an aspiring student, in 2009-10, moving back in with my mum was kind of humiliating. I guess it’s kind of the hero’s journey. Delusions of grandeur.”
It was there that the idea for Iroko Partners was seeded. His mother, who he remembers mainly watching British soap operas on the TV, was now watching Nollywood films on DVD. His Nigerian friends were raving about D-Banj, who was selling out venues in London.
“I figured there was something going on with this Nigerian community,” says Njoku.
He went looking for more Nollywood films, which have a thriving secondary market in London’s Brixton Market.
“I tried to buy them online, but couldn’t find any. So I went to the store. But to try to identify a Nollywood movie was impossible. There was no identification on the movie sleeves. There seemed to be no kind of formalized, organized distribution. I thought hang on, this thing seems to be very popular, but there seems to be no distribution around it,” he says.
He called his friend Bastian Gotter—now Iroko’s chief operating officer, but then working as a trader at BP—and, after an abortive attempt to sell a few DVDs online, his friend told him to stop talking and head to Nigeria.
“I had no money. But he said, ‘Fly out to Lagos, see what’s going on out there.’ So I jumped on a plane and spent a month going to the markets, see what people are doing working out how is this thing structured? Who are the production houses, where are they? How do you speak to them? What language do they speak? I was expecting to find Viacom, and I didn’t find anything. I thought, how can something so popular have no distribution infrastructure?”
Moved by hand through traders in the chaos of Idumota Market on Lagos Island, the production, distribution and marketing of Nollywood films is run on grounds so ruthlessly commercial they make Hollywood studios look like arthouse independents. Around 200 movies are made per month, all on a miniscule budget, shot on location in houses, offices and streets. In sheer volume terms, Nigeria produces more movies than any other country except for India. Estimates of the industry’s value range from $200 million to $500 million, and its structures have baffled economists and executives for years.
Whereas stripped-down cinema is, in the West, an artistic decision, in Nollywood it is simple economics. The movies sell for a dollar or two on DVDs, so volume of production, volume of sales and trimmed-down costs are essential. The average film is made for less than $20,000, with bankability assured by big name actors and stories of disaster and redemption.
It is this sheer ruthlessness that fuels the industry’s creation myth—that opportunistic traders acquired a large stash of blank VHS tapes just as the national broadcaster was being dismantled. With an oversupply of filmmaking skills suddenly in the market, and a realization that the tapes were worth considerably more with content on them, an industry was born. The films have developed artistic merit, but that was the industry’s afterthought.
As the Nigerian diaspora spread across the world, the films have followed, brought in bulk or pirated, turning up on market stalls in the US and Europe. But they have also become disseminated across Africa. As Africa’s most populous country, few others have had the demographics needed to support a film industry for domestic consumption. Nollywood has filled the gap. It has even begun to take hold in the Caribbean. Its global audience is big—very big—but as Njoku found, there are few formal mechanisms to exploit that audience. Having been offered hundreds of films on a hard disk in London, he knew that the films were getting out, but the original producers were not benefiting.
“I did some research into Nollywood, and all anyone talks about is piracy. When you go into the main market, you have to go through the pirates to get to the actual real producers, or people who sell them. I thought it didn’t make any sense. So I started talking to people about licenses. I said, ‘I’m thinking of licensing for the internet.’ Some of them were trying to sell me the whole license forever for $1,000. I was like: ‘That’s madness, and I honestly don’t think you know what you’re selling me,’” he says.
In an approach he has maintained since, Njoku decided there was no benefit in starting out by exploiting the relative ignorance of the market. Even so, it had started to clarify exactly what he could bring to the industry. He flew back to the UK with an idea forming.
“I told Bastian, this is the steal of the century. I can’t think of anything else that is as popular in the world without some kind of systematic marketing machine pushing it. Hollywood, Bollywood, there are systematic marketing machines that push these things. Nollywood doesn’t have these things. So I was like, there’s this massive dislocation in the value. Something needs to fill that gap, and we’ve got a decent shot at figuring it out.”
The approach was to use YouTube’s brand new partnership program for content providers. After banging on the door in the UK, Gotter’s family connections in Germany got them a shot at pitching to YouTube Germany.
“At first, they thought, this crazy Nigerian movies thing?,” Njoku says. “I said that’s fine. Look at what’s on YouTube.”
Fans of Nollywood movies had been uploading them for years, slicing them into 15-minute chunks and watching them by the millions.
“They gave me the partnership on a Tuesday, the following Sunday I was in Nigeria. I flew back to Lagos, said ‘Hey, let’s try and license some movies.’ We licensed about 50 movies in September 2010, and we put them up on YouTube. And nothing really happened. It was like $20, $30 a day, just nothing was really happening. So I went back to Lagos, licensed some movies, came back again.”
“About November, Bastian said, ‘Look, for this to work we need to go all-in, get on a plane, just live in Nigeria, figure this thing out from top to bottom.’ He liquidated all his life savings, sold his stocks and shares, borrowed money from his dad, gave me everything, which was about £60,000. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it properly. All in!”
In hindsight, it is difficult not to see this as a sound investment. In early December 2010, they launched the NollywoodLove Channel. Within four months they were Africa’s biggest content partner on YouTube, they were cash flow positive and had 25 staff.
The piracy problems they mitigated was an ingenious and rigorous system of proof. First they took the full title, cast list and executive producer credits for each film, added the film classification board’s censorship certificate and then, finally, filmed a ‘confession’ from the producer stating that the film is his or hers to sell.
“Right away, we built a $1 million business on YouTube. The idea was: it’s the deal of the century, we’ll get this content—we won’t buy it forever, we’ll buy it for a short time, we get one-year licenses—we’ll put it online and we’ll take it from there. We weren’t too interested in writing reports or business plans, we just thought this is valuable, we’ll get as much of it as we can. In the first six months, we had bought 800 movies, and we were like, we just need more content. Content is king,” says Njoku.
If Viacom could exist in almost any content marketplace in the world, they figured, it could work in Nigeria—so they set out to become Viacom.
After a year of struggling, suddenly there were six months of money. Njoku thought about cashing in his chips.
“I can now go and do whatever I want to do. But at the same time, it was always like, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We’ve got to go hard and fast. So we bunkered down in Lagos and focused on building as big a company as possible as fast as possible.”
Then the venture capitalists started emailing. For all its great potential and size, few people have really made money in the Nigerian tech scene.
One of those asking for a meeting was Kinnevik, a Swedish investment fund that was an early stage investor in Groupon. The company has been investing in Africa since the 1990s, including in the early stages of the mobile phone market, and saw potential in Iroko’s ability to package content in an exciting frontier market.
“I think the challenge in Africa is not the demand,” Henrik Persson, the company’s head of investments says. “I think Africans want to consume the same things as people in the rest of the world. I think there’s a lot of activity on the retail side, but the challenge is to find the packaging of the product and the distribution of the product so that you can reach the consumer and get paid by the consumer in a seamless way. I think the companies that are successful at doing that are successful in Africa.
“I think you need to find strong entrepreneurs who can work in this environment, and you need strong characters to do that. I found that in Jason and his team,” adds Persson
For all the rough-and-ready attitude, the company has clearly matured, adding 30 people internationally in offices in New York and London.
“We’ve got four guys from Harvard, MBAs, in New York. We’ve got Wharton, we’ve got Stanford. We’ve got the smartest young people trying to figure out how to maximize the value for this humongous market,” Njoku says.
The audience is still growing. Users have to register before they view any content, which adds value for advertisers, but deters casual viewers. More than 620,000 people have now signed up to the service and it is on course to hit a million sign-ups by the end of its first full year of operation. It has moved into music with the Iroking Service and added a premium, paid-for content stream. More importantly, it is making money. This has allowed Njoku’s team to keep investing and price potential competitors out of the market by paying well above the going rate for licenses.
Today, film producers are coming straight to Iroko, in the knowledge that they will be paid quickly and reliably, creating a revenue stream for the industry that previously never existed. Iroko has also showed that it is willing to take on pirates, initiating legal action against Afrinolly, a rival streaming service that, it claims, is using unlicensed content.
The temptation to cash in seems to have subsided and Njoku seems to be enjoying the role of mogul.
“I had a company which I could personally have made a lot of money for myself. I could have bled the company and focused on monetizing it for me—making sure I drove whatever car I wanted, lived where I wanted. I could have done that. The original business on YouTube didn’t need 30-40 people. It needed five. You buy the movie, you put it on YouTube, you sit back and you make money. And that business, as long as the competition isn’t too fierce, will basically run itself forever. Bastian and I were of the opinion that it could and should be much bigger than this.”
And still it might be. Eighty five percent of the current audience is in the diaspora, which helps the company tick over, “because we can sit in Lagos and make global money”. But there is still the rest of Africa to look at, something Njoku calls an “800 million person gorilla on your back”.
Gradual improvements in broadband availability and affordability are bringing the service into the reach of more and more Nigerians and more Africans.

London’s  Mr Nollywood

“I was born into business,” says coal mogul and media magnate Quinton van der Burgh.
“I knew I wanted to be a businessman from a young age. An entrepreneur is born, you know inside yourself what the passions are and where you want to drive yourself in the future.”
His eyes light up as he talks of working for his father’s supermarkets. Through this job, the Simba Chips Company gave him a pile of Ghostbusters stickers for which children clamoured. So, always the entrepreneur and scholar of the science of scarcity, he priced the stickers according to market forces—high prices for scarce stickers, lower prices for common ones. He bought one of his teachers lunch and she allowed him 10 minutes during lunch break in which to do his deals.
“I was on a sales mission. I told him [his classmate] that if he didn’t come to school with the money the next day he’d be in trouble.”
This landed him in the principal’s office and was one of the reasons why he was kicked out of school.
Van der Burgh felt that school was a waste of time and spoke to his family about entering the business world. He moved to England on a holiday visa and began trading shares under a friend’s name, for commission. After two years, he managed to get his business visa. London is where he learnt difficult lessons. He lived with 14 other guys and learnt how to wash his clothes and cook.
“A few people took me for my money, so I was down and out a few times,” he says
When he lost investors’ money, he pleaded with his boss to give him one month to make it back. He made an excuse about having a problem with his bank account to borrow £50 ($78) from a friend.
“I learnt my lessons on how to be cleverer about my next transactions and from there I grew and grew on my own,” he says.
Van der Burgh learnt the hard way.
“I’ve gone bankrupt a few times, not so much in my later years but in my early years when I was naïve to the fact of how business works. It’s tough when you think you know it all but you don’t, that lesson is the best lesson you can learn and take it into your next business development.”
That’s how he made his first million by the age of 21.
“I always wanted to have a Ferrari by 26. By 32—when I could afford one—I realized that I didn’t need one, but it was my goal and I couldn’t go against what I believed in,” he says.
From Ferraris to bowling alleys, he knows what he wants.
“Growing up I was a Richie Rich fan and I thought that it was a fantastic idea to put a bowling alley into the house. It was a bad idea when it came down to building the house. It worked out to be 10 times the price but worthwhile when you have friends over and it’s a fantastic game when you have a competitive nature&#8230;.”
“I’m an average bowler, I’ll get there one day,” he says.
Another one of his ambitions is to be the richest man in Africa by 2022.
When he returned from London he bought equity in the family-owned investment holdings company, Burgh Group Holdings, of which he is chief executive officer. He works in close partnership with his father, Stan, and his brothers, Stanley and Wayne. Burgh Group Holdings has a portfolio of several companies including mines; a plant hire company; an earth moving equipment company; several hotels and commercial properties, as well as a production company.
Experience has taught him to have fingers in many pies.
“I diversified into a variety of different businesses where I tried to spread my risk because I never wanted to be in that position again, where I had nothing. It’s a terrible feeling, to go from something to nothing and have to build that up again. That was my best lesson,” he says.
His next big idea was being a television and film executive producer.
“I’m passionate about the creative aspects of media. Had I studied I would have liked to have learnt about the media game, filmography and how to become a director or a good producer,” says van der Burgh.
“But you need to understand the industry and everything I have learnt to date has been the hard way, from other people and having to understand the industry, the market and how things are done. I attach myself to experienced people, that’s how I learn very quickly,” he says.
He stays away from what he calls ‘passion projects’—films for South African viewers—because the majority of such movies die. He believes that the South African film industry needs to emulate Hollywood.
“I just change a few things around, cast aspects, the story line and where it’s going and then we can make 90% of our money back and we can double our profits in international markets&#8230;
If you just produce for this country you’re going to be breaking even, if not make a loss, and that just doesn’t appeal to me. I’m passionate about what I do but it has to make business sense,” he says.
With Sharp Shooter—a documentary about photography—behind him, his most recent venture into the entertainment industry is Clifton Shores. He funded and starred in the unscripted reality series, shot in Cape Town; under the direction of Hisham Abed, who directed The Hills and Laguna Beach. The series follows four American women—alongside South African cast members—who come to Cape Town to work for Quintessential Events, Van der Burgh’s events and marketing company. It aired in South Africa in late August. He has two movies, a thriller and a romantic comedy, in the pipeline.
One day, he wants to produce films in the filmmaking hub of Los Angeles in the States. For now, he lives between Cape Town, Johannesburg and Witbank, where he can keep an eye on Eskom power station Duvha—to which he supplies coal—through his back window.
His mining interests lie in Eyethu Coal, Iyanga Coal, I.M.E.C, Zingaro and Twin Cities Trading. Between 60 and 70% of his mines’ coal is sold to Eskom—South Africa’s energy provider, for which they also wash coal.
Van der Burgh is always looking for innovative business ideas.
“I thought to myself ‘half our profits are going out the back door to contractors for transport’. I knew we needed a turnkey solution and a new and sustainable strategy so we started doing it ourselves.”
“Our multi-billion [rand] family mining development has great partnerships; which trust and like us for being hard workers. We work according to the trust of the handshake. I’d rather cost the money than make money, ruin a relationship and have a bad name. We have not one bad name, I say that with confidence,” he says.
He is not interested in easy business.
“I don’t want to sit in my office and just collect a check. I want to master business and create new innovations,” says van der Burgh
With the launch of swimwear range, Wet Peach, in South Africa, van der Burgh says that he’s looking into launching a fashion channel. He’s also dabbling in the music industry.
The entrepreneur describes himself as being down to earth.
“I don’t enjoy people with money, they are full of themselves&#8230; although I am a prankster and like to have fun,” says van der Burgh.

The Born Businessman

Emilia de Sousa is small, but tough. She’s had to be. Founding “Old Fashioned” Fish And Chips, South Africa’s biggest fish &amp; chips franchise, has been a struggle every step of the way. It has been a long and painful road from a tiny corner shop in the east of Johannesburg to 350 stores in South Africa and millions of rands.
It all began when the South American-born de Sousa started helping her uncle in his corner shop as a teenager. De Sousa was from a family of immigrants who came to South Africa from Curaçao Island, on the coast of Venezuela.
The little fish and chips shop taught de Sousa the basics: discipline and hard work. She worked behind the till, mixed the batter, peeled the potatoes, fried the fish and fed her dreams.
“You know when I had this shop, every single day people used to ask me ‘Why don’t you franchise? Can I buy this one?’ and I had this thing in my mind, [that one day] I will franchise because there were so many people [asking for it]”.
She began franchising the business in 2005, after opening her first store 10 years earlier; shortly after the release of Nelson Mandela, when many people were packing up and leaving, fearing new leadership under a new government, de Sousa embraced the change and even attended Madiba’s first birthday in freedom, following his release from Robben Island.
“…When Nelson Mandela came out [of prison] I actually met [him]. I met him at Sacred Heart College… Now I think I should have taken a photo,” she laughs.
At the time when many were skeptical about the incoming government and scared for their safety, she stuck to her adopted country.
“I was never frightened. I have got this thing that ‘when it’s your time, it’s your time. It doesn’t matter where you are’. And this is such a beautiful country we’ve got, I’ve travelled a lot and this country is still the most beautiful country to me,” says de Sousa.
It is a beautiful country, but it was also harsh on young de Sousa. To complicate matters she was a mother at 16.
“As a single mom for 27 years, I [have] also started my life tough. I had to bring up three kids on my own. I never got a cent from maintenance or anything like that. I’m the type of person [who says] ‘Don’t just sit down and cry about it. Do something’.
“I’ll never forget I went to court for maintenance and the [female] prosecutor turned around and told me, ‘You must pay your husband maintenance, he says he is not working’. I turned around and said ‘What a lie… Cheers my friend. Never see me again’. The tears were running down my face I couldn’t believe what she had said to me,” says de Sousa.
Following her divorce, the young mother had begun selling second-hand clothes to make ends meet and it worked out well. Soon she was back to the original plan, opening up her own fish and chips shop like she had once done with her uncle, selling quality food at low prices.
“I don’t believe in ripping people off, if you look around [in a mall], say they are selling their handbags for three or 2,000 [but] nobody is in the shop. But if they had cheaper bags, that are still good [quality], there would be more people in the shop… It’s the same with food, but some people just want to make money.”
One of her problems in the early days was making money.
“I did have very hard times [starting] the business and I used to work hard [trying] to put money together… I remember I went and borrowed money and these people charged me about five times more and I paid them back… I paid them all that money,” says de Sousa.
As the money problems were solved, grim, violent, reality visited her business. A gang of robbers sneaked into her shop and attacked her.
“When I got to work the door was closed, they were waiting inside for me because I had the money. There were three of them, the first one pulled out the gun, the second one ran with the money and the third one stabbed me in the back and just missed my heart,” says De Sousa.
De Sousa almost bled to death, but somehow survived. Through it all, she vowed that there was no time for tears.
When it comes to business, she claims she has the magic touch. A food lover, she says she has never failed in any business that she has started.
Her son Nicholas, Operations and Marketing Director, agrees.
“She might not have our degrees and all that but she can do everything that we do and she does it much better than we do. And I’ve met the likes of the Gordon Ramseys and Richard Bransons, but still, when I look at men like that, and I look at my mom I swear they’ve got nothing on her,” he says.
The next step is to make her business a world-wide brand. Surely, a woman who survived poverty, cheated death, negotiated loan sharks and loneliness would be odds on favorite to do anything.

No Time For Tears When You’re  Fishing For Dreams

Flamboyant, young, handsome, sociable and most of all: successful, beyond most people’s dreams. With his Panama hat on, sipping a drink at his rental house’s swimming pool only four steps from Luanda’s beach, Thomson-Payan looks like an actor in a gangster movie: too smooth to be true. But he’s the real deal.
Thomson-Payan owns Electrix Group which makes more than five times Thomson-Payan’s initial $200,000 investment each month. The annual turnover at Electrixtel, the telecommunications arm, is $15 million. .
“In five years, we’ve had well over 1,000% growth or between 100 and 200% growth per year.”
Electrix created its construction company, Topson SA, two years ago. Its services company, ESS, counts Schlumberger, ConocoPhillips, Trafigura and FMC among its major clients.
Thomson-Payan’s granduncle was former Colombian president Alfonso Lopez, while his father was a diplomat and a successful international entrepreneur. With a background like that, you could say he was born for success. But that’s not the whole story.
“I first came to Angola in 2007 after my friend, who lived there, told me to check it out. I was sick of working in a corporate American office. When I arrived, I was stupefied. There was so much to do.”
Thomson-Payan went to Babson College, the top entrepreneurial school in the States.
“I always knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. When I was 10, my dad told me to work for my own car. By the age of 15, I’d saved enough money by doing odd jobs. That’s when it started.”
When he was 19, Thomson-Payan moved to Shanghai and lived there for a-year-and-a-half.
“I studied Mandarin nine hours a day. Then I started an outsourcing company called China Source. We still have a three-person office there.”
China Source’s bigger clients spread the word. Suddenly, things moved forward fast.
“One day I received an email from a guy named Marcelo Claure. I had no idea who he was. It turns out this 35-year-old guy owns $7.5-billion company Brightstar—the largest mobile phone distributor in the world.”
Thomson-Payan met Claure in New York.
“He asked: ‘So where do you see yourself in five or 10 years?’ I bit my tongue and said: ‘Running my own company or running yours!’ I was 20 or 21 at the time. He gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse—to become his right-hand. I worked with him as a senior business development manager, and we grew from 35 countries to 54. We worked crazy, crazy hours. Sometimes from 7am to 4am. But it was an amazing experience and education… amazing.”
In his second year at Brightstar, Thomson-Payan started studying law at Florida International University in the evenings. Meanwhile, he was itching to start something new.
“Africa was the only part of the world that Brightstar hadn’t conquered. This continent is a difficult market to break; you have to be very hands-on here. After my visit to Angola, I raised some capital among Swiss and American investors, friends of friends. We then started Electrix.”
Electrix now has between 100 and 120 employees, 95% of them Angolan; 25 stores in Luanda, Malange and Lubango; and store-within-a-store contracts with supermarket chain Nosso Super and gas station chain Pumangol. Cellphone brands distributed by Electrix include Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel, Apple and HTC.
“In the retail industry, we’re the fastest growing mobile phone distributer and the only one with our own brand.”
Electrix sells airtime, internet, cable and satellite TV, digital cameras and computers and it’s launching a gaming division. The company buys large chunks of airtime at discount prices from Angola’s biggest cellphone players, Unitel and Movicel.
“The beautiful thing about Angola is that there’s no landline infrastructure. Mobile phones are not a luxury, literally everybody needs one,” says Thomson-Payan.
Smartphones aren’t hot in Angola. Eighty percent of Electrix’s phones are sold for under $50.
“The large majority of this country lives under the poverty line. You’ve got to fit into that market. This is one of the reasons we’ve partnered with a company and brought in our own brand, BLU, with a price range of between $12 to $250 for smart Android phones.”
Electrix understands the Angolan market. BLU has a 30-day battery.
“Imagine that, in a country with major electricity problems!”
In July, Electrix implemented electronic recharge systems that look like credit card machines.
“We sell a few $100,000 per week’s worth of Unitel and Movicel recharge cards to Pumangol and our other retail clients. But they are high-risk, because you’re basically moving cash. These machines will allow us to distribute airtime instantly without risk and minimal operations. Credit cards haven’t hit the Angolan market strongly yet.”
Competition is the drive behind these revolutionary ideas.
“Five years ago in Angola, in a business where Brightstar makes a two percent margin, we were doing 80%. Crazy! But margins have gone down a lot; competition has grown. When I started, to differentiate Electrix, I literally filled my big truck with phones and drove off to the provinces, where margins are a lot higher.”
“When the market matured, margins went down and no one wanted to drop their prices anymore. My competitors started giving clients credit. So I told my biggest clients: ‘Look. You guys have the cellphone stores. What are your main costs?’ The answer was always inventory, which for an average cellphone store can go up to $35,000 or $50,000. So I’d say: ‘I’ll put in the inventory and we’ll go 50-50 on the store and become partners.’ That meant I gave them credit, but now I owned 50% of the retail business. So I was making my margin in the wholesale, plus 50% of the retail margin and could control my debtors. As a result, we’re now the largest retailers in the Angolan cellphone industry.”
Unlike many foreigners operating in Angola, Thomson-Payan has never had an Angolan business partner.
“I suffered for two years because I didn’t have anyone to lean on, but now I don’t need to lean on anybody because all my contacts are my own.”
Thomson-Payan says the toughest aspect of doing business in Angola is the bureaucracy.
“Many people will say corruption. But there are two ways to get things done here: corruption and relationships. The second option is actually better. Let’s say you want to get your stuff out of the port quickly, so you pay someone 500 bucks. But as soon as someone else comes and pays him 550, he’s not going to give you any more love.”
“I know a guy at the port, he’s a good friend of mine. I called him from Europe because I knew he was getting married and then I brought his wife’s wedding dress over. That guy will remember that for the rest of his life—it’s a true relationship. He’ll always be there for me and I’m really there for him. I try to build genuine relationships that in the long run are so much more valuable for both of us.”
Thomson-Payan was in the right place at the right time.
“After 15 years of independence war and 27 years of civil war, Angolans need absolutely everything. They’ve got the money to pay for it, but no one here to provide it. If you’re here and can offer first-world service, the sky is the limit. Angola is a perfect storm for business.”
Electrix opened a new office in Johannesburg, South Africa in July. The company is scheduled to start operations in Mozambique in the next three months.

A Good Call

Adam Molai is a tobacco entrepreneur. The Zimbabwean born-and-bred entrepreneur is the co-owner and executive chairman of Savanna Tobacco who has enjoyed a life that has rarely been dull. He studied in Canada and Britain; he did his articles in accounting, owned and operated garages, a stationery and copy shop, as well as a chicken farm. It was a friend who introduced this non-smoker to the tobacco industry.
As the land reform program of President Robert Mugabe forced out large-scale white commercial farmers, in favor of black workers, Molai realized that it would be a gamble going into business with his white friend when he founded the Zimbabwe Tobacco Growing Company. Now he is the director along with his wife. In 2002, he acquired a tobacco threshing plant with some partners. It did not make sense to Molai and his partners that the plant was being grown in Zimbabwe, shipped overseas and the finished product imported into the country. He decided to do something about it.
Savanna Tobacco launched its first brand of cigarettes in 2004. Two years later, it had brought in high-speed manufacturing equipment and won both bronze and silver at an international brand competition. By 2008/2009, the company had grabbed the largest share of the Zimbabwean market and was importing new and specialized equipment. This was at a time when Zimbabwe could not import paper from Germany to print its money.
<div id="attachment_1107" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1107" class="size-large wp-image-1107" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Cigarette-Packer1st-of-its-kind-in-Africa-1024x678.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="314" />Cigarette Packer,1st of its kind in Africa</div>
“We felt proud to be heads and shoulders with the big multi-nationals,” boasts Molai.
The company introduced the contract system to the country as a way to help boost the tobacco industry. It worked like this: there is an agreement between the contractor and the grower; the contractor supplies the grower with all the inputs and the grower grows, reaps, cures and delivers the crop. The grower receives preferential interest rates and the contractor is guaranteed a crop. This system got around the problem of finding finance to buy tobacco inputs in US dollars. Although the contract system is still operational, alongside the auctions, Savanna pulled out when they felt the financial system was capable of providing finance. This year a commercial bank in Zimbabwe—MBCA Bank Limited—made available $65 million worth of lines of credit to support the industry.
Zimbabwe is the largest producer of tobacco in Africa. It exports to China, South Africa, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Indonesia and Germany and imports some tobacco from Malawi and South Africa.
China is the biggest producer of cigarettes and has the largest tobacco company in the world. It started using the Zimbabwean leaf in the 1980s and in 2005 Tian Ze Tobacco Company was established in Zimbabwe. Chinese companies came in and financed small-scale farmers under the contract system. Their presence has since increased the price of tobacco per kilogram. This year, the average price increased to $3.67.
Molai feels that China has played its role in the growth of the industry but that the relationship with China needs to be symbiotic and not perpetuate the mere exportation of raw tobacco and jobs.
“China protects their market more than anything else. We’re running with people that are already at the half-way line&#8230; You’ll never win, you have no chance,” he says.
Around 100 countries produce tobacco; the major producers are China, India, Brazil, the United States, Turkey, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.
Zimbabwe has some domestic issues that were raised at the National Tobacco Workshop held last year. These included the poor conditions of amenities and accommodation at the auction floors, constant power cuts, deforestation, the limited credit and poor infrastructure.
The industry however does not have to worry about tight regulation in the marketing of cigarettes. The global legislation on tobacco has decreased global consumption over the years. The World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control—which is “the international health treaty that guides national efforts to counter the tobacco epidemic…”—now has 168 signatories. Zimbabwe is not one of them.
“I make no apologies for it,” says Molai, “we are strong marketers.”

The Golden Leaf

Chid Liberty is not your typical businessman, particularly not the kind you would expect to find in Liberia, a nation where big business has always been dominated by a cast of outsiders: middle-aged Lebanese men renting out overpriced apartments and selling American imports in slick grocery stores catering to high-maintenance humanitarian workers, Indians trading in electronics, rice and pharmaceuticals, and multinational companies exploring and exploiting the sea and land for oil and minerals. Nor is Liberty your usual “been to” young Liberian who has returned with a degree from a US university to take up a high-level position within a government ministry. Liberty, born in Liberia and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after his family was forced into exile in the 1980s during the military rule of the then president, Samuel Kanyon Doe, came back to his homeland with a grand ambition: to sow the seeds of an industrial revolution in a nation whose economy has been dependent on natural resource concessions and foreign imports throughout its history.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft wp-image-1095 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/20120710_ChidLiberty_010-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
In 2009, Liberty and his business partner and best friend from Milwaukee, Adam Butlein, set up Liberty &amp; Justice, the umbrella company that founded the Liberian Women’s Sewing Project (LWSP), the first certified fair trade factory in Africa and the first garment factory in Liberia.
“One of the core reasons we started our company is because we thought that what every developed economy has done so well is started really large industries that employ masses of people with low skills and education,” Liberty says.
Liberty and his partner focused on developing a project for women, as numerous development studies they read pointed to the important role that women’s employment can play in poverty alleviation within communities. In contrast to NGOs that train women to make handicrafts and tie-dye, Liberty combined a commitment to social justice with a shrewd business sense and approached large buyers from the United States.
But starting up a business in a non-existent industry in Liberia wasn’t easy. When Liberty began searching for funding for the project, he was often met with a harsh response.
“You talk to your first two or three people and you say, ‘Hey I am trying to put a couple of hundred thousand dollars or a couple of million dollars to build a factory in Liberia’, and they say, ‘Are you crazy?’ which is a response I got quite often,” says Liberty, a dapper man who punctuates his sentences with expletives.
Liberty and his partner started the business with a paltry amount of personal savings and raised an initial round of $600,000 partially from friends and family, but mostly from angel investors. The business that started with 30 women making T-shirts in a factory in Sinkor, Monrovia now employs 250 women, 100 in Liberia and the rest in a recently-constructed factory in Tema, Ghana. With customers like Godiva chocolate, the US-based apparel companies Haggar and prAna, and the Japanese company Itochu Corporation, Liberty says he expects the business to generate $40 million in revenue over the next year. He says he will need around 2,500 workers to fulfill his current demand and is looking at the possibility of expanding to other countries in West Africa.
Vamoma house is an odd retro geometrical cream and white building off Monrovia’s main thoroughfare, Tubman Boulevard. Like many of Monrovia’s large structures it was a battlefront during the war and was left looted, pierced with bullet holes and used as a mass gravesite. The presence of the factory on the first floor is testament to the progress Liberia has made since the end of the civil war in 2003.
Inside, women are busily cutting red cloth and stitching together a batch of T-shirts for an order. Along the two production lines, the women sit dressed in yellow aprons and black hairnets beneath fluorescent lamps and look intently at the pieces of red cloth they run rhythmically through the machines. A short, middle-aged Filipino woman named Loderena Rojas, who has spent the past 30 years working in the garment manufacturing industry in her homeland, stands at the front quietly watching over the workers. Liberty’s factory looks like one you’d expect to find anywhere in the world, only smaller. They will be moving into larger premises—an old Volkswagen distribution showroom—in the bustling downtown commercial district of Waterside in the coming months.
The women earn $100 a month, a modest wage, but well above the average annual income per capita that rests at $400 a year, in a country with an unemployment level at almost 80%. But the workers also receive $30 a month for transportation and a bag of rice, along with healthcare and an annual savings matching program that rewards them dollar for dollar with what they manage to save in their bank accounts. The women of LWSP hold a 49% stake in the factory, which is all part of Liberty’s business approach. For Liberty, worker ownership plays an important role in creating a productive workforce, particularly in the Liberian context, where it’s mostly outsiders and the elite who have benefited from successful businesses.
“Worker ownership and partnership with the Liberians, having them own a piece of company really changes the conversation. There is a ‘boss man culture’ here because it has been a chief-based society—you won’t get rid of that—but in terms of getting workers to take responsibility, if people feel that they are a partner in the company, it changes the paradigm. We have gotten timeliness and productivity out of workers that are unheard of, and we haven’t gotten it out of fear, which is the tactic they use in Asia.”
Fifty-two-year-old Leona Monger, a petite woman wearing fine gold-rimmed spectacles and a red headscarf who lives in a slum known as Vai Town, is head of the workers’ union and has held her position at the factory since it was established. While Monger says there is room for improvement in the pay, she says her wage has allowed her to keep her three children in school and set up a small provisions store.
“I see a future, not only for me, but for the younger ones who have just started. There are a lot of incentives that will enable us workers to improve our lives,” Monger says.
Unlike economies of developing countries throughout Asia that have been buoyed by investment in the manufacturing sector, Africa is still viewed by many foreign investors as a continent whose only value exists in natural resources. A survey released by Ernst &amp; Young earlier this year focusing on Africa’s perceived “attractiveness” to investors found that despite the fact that foreign direct investment grew by 27% between 2010 and 2011, there “remain lingering negative perceptions about the continent”, namely that Africa is unstable, corrupt and a risky region for investors, but these perceptions were held mostly by those who are yet to do business on the continent. For Liberty, the lack of investment in the manufacturing sector is due to misconceptions about the capabilities of African workers.
“I think the number one thing keeping the multinationals away from labor intensive industries in Africa is a complete mistrust of African human resources and African human capital,” Liberty says, adding this perception is often underpinned by racist stereotyping. “People say African workers’ hands are too big, they are too lazy, or they don’t respect time. I don’t think that can be true—if you can walk six hours to fetch water in the heat, laziness isn’t the issue.”
Under the leadership of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was re-elected for a second term in November, the government claims to have attracted $19 billion worth of investment, mainly in the form of oil, mineral and agricultural concessions. But Sirleaf and many in the government and the business community say more needs to be done to ensure sustainable and equitable economic growth that will create jobs for Liberians.
“No country is going to get growth if you don’t have it [the economy] driven by exports or some kind of manufacturing,” says Monie Captan, president of the Liberia Chamber of Commerce. “We have to identify specific sectors, plan properly, and invest in these sectors. It is not going to happen by saying it.”
For Liberty, Liberia must move beyond its economic concessions for the sake of its future security and survival.
“There are also issues of political instability. As long as you are not employing people and are only giving jobs to a few lucky well-paid people, others will feel like they are getting nothing,” he says.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a recent policy paper expressed concerns about youth unemployment. The death toll of Liberia’s civil war made it one of the youngest nations in the world with 70% of the population below the age of 30. The IMF says that with 50,000 youths joining the labor force every year, the 90,000 jobs that the National Investment Commission estimates will be created from concession agreements over the next 10 years will do little to address the problem.
Liberia also faces major infrastructural challenges that make investment in manufacturing a challenge, among them poor road conditions and expensive and limited access to electricity—a consequence of the destruction of the Mount Coffee Hydropower Plant, for which the government only recently received funding from international donors to restore.
While Liberty acknowledges his factory is a small step towards Liberia’s industrial revolution, he is optimistic the nation can change the fabric of its economy through carefully developed government policy, investment in infrastructure and more open-minded foreign and domestic investment.
“I am positive that it will happen and at the end of the day the economics need to make sense. Currently, it doesn’t make sense, from a purely capitalist perspective… but we have labor at competitive rates, and with the infrastructure we should be able to compete with countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia and we should be able to get there in five to seven years if we are aggressive,” says Liberty.

A Thread Of Hope…  And Liberty

At the Careers in Africa Summit in London this May, the queues alongside recruiting stands wound around the Hilton Canary Wharf within minutes of opening, as 1,500 pre-selected, high-quality African candidates gathered for a matchmaking event with global companies looking to source African talent from the Diaspora.
Over the road, the Wharf itself was unusually busy for a Saturday afternoon, as global banks desperately worked through their scenario planning after the carnage on European markets. Once, the UK financial services industry in Canary Wharf and the Square Mile would have hoovered up many of these candidates. The city has been a magnet for global talent for decades, picking up not only the best from British universities, but those in Asia and Africa as well.
Now, that seems to be changing as resurgent African markets attract global businesses desperate to find new sources of growth, and as entrepreneurial members of the Diaspora look to return to capitalize on opportunities back home.
“The general atmosphere [in Africa] is much more optimistic,” says Wynand Smit who left a risk management job in a UK bank to return to South Africa to work for Rand Merchant Bank earlier this year.
“This is in stark contrast to the gloomy atmosphere in the UK where the focus, in my experience, was much more on the uncertain EU situation and potential future impacts,” he says.
The opportunities on the continent, as well as family considerations, led him to return after a successful few years in London and the Netherlands. However, for others the conditions in developed markets are a compelling reason to head back home. London’s slide—and the slowdowns across the rest of Europe and the United States—has come at a time when African economies have proved their resilience in the face of global economic turmoil.
The UK banking boom in the early part of the new millennium saw the sector expand from just over 5% of the country’s GDPin 2000 to more than 10% in 2009, when the country’s recession began in earnest. A royal flush of new, strict regulations, economic downturns in almost all developed markets and the existential threat to the Eurozone, which makes up the UK’s largest trading bloc, drove many institutions to the wall. The bloodletting that followed has been brutal.
According to figures compiled by Bloomberg, there were 58,000 job cuts in London’s financial services industry in 2011 alone. 2012 has seen that pace maintained, with bank after bank responding to the continuing pressure from regulators to build capital by cutting costs and headcount. Trading firms have seen losses mount as stock indices continue to be battered by the ongoing turmoil in the Eurozone; and corporate finance houses have seen their client base retrench in fear of a second recession. The Royal Bank of Scotland alone has slashed 30,000 jobs since its nationalization in 2008, and more cuts are still to come as the slim hopes of an economic recovery in the near-term fade away.
Hugo Lambrecht, who manages the African finance and banking practice at CA Global Headhunters, says that he has seen both the number and the profile of candidates change over the past few years of recruiting. Whereas before, the company’s focus was on finding expatriates for roles on the continent, the last two years have seen an upsurge in returnees—of the 280 people his team have placed in that period, around half are returnees. With a lack of experts in transaction banking, corporate finance specialists, investment professionals and chartered accountants, it is a good time to be in the executive search space in Africa, Lambrecht says.
It is not just finance that is benefitting. The compelling demographics of the continent continue to underpin growth in the fast-moving consumer goods and the financial services sectors across most economies. One major constraint for these businesses, historically, has been their ability to source executive talent with the financial and management skills required to operate in global companies, and the understanding of the complexities of relatively unstructured African markets.
The economic downturn in the West, combined with a growing understanding amongst multinationals and businesspeople that African markets are now a far cry from their mid-90s gloom, has created what Richard Putley, managing director of Executives in Africa, calls “a perfect storm”.
Putley’s company specializes in sourcing executive talent for international companies operating in Africa, particularly the retail sector, where knowledge of local market conditions is of paramount importance. What most companies are looking for, he says, is somebody that you would call ‘business bilingual’.
“This is a person who has the ability to work for an international company to ensure that the global policies and procedures that are in place for an emerged market are translated into a language that can be understood and delivered on a local level.”
These are individuals like Olu Kolawole. After spending the bulk of his career in the US, Kolawole had risen to become director of construction at Pathmark Stores, a supermarket chain. But just over a year ago he decided to abandon the relative sanity of the West Coast to head back to his native Nigeria and the chaos of Lagos. He admits that he was driven in part by a “nationalist instinct” and a feeling that “it was time to give back”, but equally the strong and visible opportunities in his home country were an attraction.
“You also see the challenges of being back in Nigeria—challenges in terms of constant utilities, challenges in terms of security, both of life and property. But then you decide that at some point, with the growing uncertainties in the economy and job security in the US, you start to really consider the opportunities in Africa,” he told FORBES AFRICA.
“When the opportunity came to come back, I really sat down and thought about it, but you know, you look at my career path over the last 10 years, which was rapid in the States, and you see that you’ve kind of peaked.”
With mergers and acquisitions trimming workforces in the US retail sector and growth in the industry slumping from 7-10% pre-crisis to just 2-3% in recent years, the chance to reboot his career with a move to a fast-moving market was too much to turn down.
“You realize a lot of these global brands see the African continent as the next frontier and you want to take a pioneer role. You know the lay of the land, you know what modern retail is supposed to be like,” he says.
Kolawole is now chief operating officer of CoolWorld Electrical Retail Stores, a subsidiary of international consumer goods giant PZ Cussons. It has not been all plain sailing. Business processes can be frustratingly slow or nonexistent and corruption “is at a level that you’ve never understood before”. The city has its inconveniences including interrupted power and security concerns. But even so, Kolawole has no regrets—yet. His role allows him to make changes to the way things are done and bring in his own best practices, and his remuneration package allows for a good quality of life, despite Lagos’ reputation for exorbitant prices.
“You have to negotiate your terms properly before you take the plunge. Nigeria is an expensive place but there are companies here willing to pay top dollar for talent. When you are negotiating a salary, you have to really negotiate properly and make sure you have everything taken care of. If you miss your utility payments or something, and you miscalculate, it really affects your overall income,” he says.
After three months, he brought his family over, including his two children, aged 10 and 12.
“It’s probably been tougher on the kids because they’ve lived their whole lives in the States. They still ask me when we’re going to go back,” he says.
The answer is: no time soon.
For some returnees, however, the motive is altogether more altruistic. OB Sisay spent 15 years in London working as an analyst in political risk consultancies and investment funds until September last year when he left his job and began the process of moving back to Sierra Leone.
Currently flitting back and forth between the UK and the country of his birth, Sisay is setting up a number of small enterprises, including a farm and a transport business and taking over his family’s holdings. Salaried jobs are hard to come by but once he has established a domestic cash flow he and his wife will up sticks and head to Freetown. Most of his family fled the country during Sierra Leone’s civil war but after years of stability and a new government that has put development top of its agenda, they are beginning to come home.
“We have a country to develop. You can’t all sit in the UK, earn huge wages and come on holiday for three weeks. The country has a huge shortage of human capital and so a few of us kind of think that the pocket has to take second place to the country. One of my cousins has quit his post as a gynaecologist at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and he’s back here, he’s got a clinic. Another one is back here to work for the procurement department. The attitude is that we want to develop our country.”
The move is proving incredibly rewarding.
“Every morning before I get out to do my running, I’ve made a difference to one to three people’s lives, whether that’s someone who has come to me with a problem with their children’s education, somebody comes in sick, they’re in hospital and they need money. It’s not that much money, but I feel as if I’m making a difference. Whereas in the UK I get up, put my suit on, make big speeches, get congratulated, get paid very well and come back home. Meanwhile, Africa is still where it is. Somebody needs to fix it,” he says.
There is commercial opportunity, he acknowledges, as Sierra Leone builds from scratch during its post-war reconstruction and as international money finds its way into the country. But being a part of that development is far more compelling and exciting.
“Everything means a lot more. The elections mean a lot more; policymakers’ decisions mean a lot more. I don’t want to come back here in 10 years with kids who barely speak the local language, who only claim they’re Sierra Leonean because their parents are and I find myself a stranger in my own country,” says Sisay.

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