It came like a bolt from the blue. On the evening of October 20, 2006, Tabitha Karanja the chief executive officer (CEO) of Keroche Brewery Limited was working late in her brewery head office in Naivasha—65 kilometers from Nairobi. Her husband, Joseph Karanja had just gone to Nairobi hospital where he was to undergo minor surgery the next day.
Karanja was winding up so she could rush to see him. As she was leaving, a fax arrived. It was after 5pm and she was curious about who sent a fax so late in the day. Her curiosity turned to shock in seconds. It was the tax man. The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) demanded KSh 1.2 billion ($14.117 million) in arrears to be paid within 14 days.
The competitive Kenyan brewing game is tough and like many entrepreneurs, Karanja had weathered many storms. Detractors allege that Keroche products were not prepared hygienically; once she invested in a multi-million dollar plastic bottling plant which was made obsolete overnight by a law banning plastic packaging. On a radio at the office, in the press of busy day, Karanja would hear politicians attacking her beer in Parliament.
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“One member of Parliament alleged that our drink was killing three people in his constituency every day. Considering Kenya has over 220 constituencies, how many people is that?” she asks.
Karanja fought back, she wouldn’t allow anyone to denigrate Keroche products unless they had evidence from the government chemist or the Kenya Bureau of Standards.
It meant the feisty Karanja was often in the media, if she was not threatening to sue the government, she was complaining about raids on Keroche depots by administration police or damage to her billboards by the competition. She has been to court six times to defend her beer business.
This was a world away from her humble beginnings in the age-old story of an entrepreneur spotting a gap in the market. Karanja and her husband, who were traders of manufactured goods, started out as rookie brewers in a cut-throat market. They found themselves in competition with multinational giant, East African Breweries Ltd (EABL).
Their strategy for the alcohol business was simple—to supply beer to thousands of villages in Kenya.
“The brewers who were there, only catered for the upper end of the market and people in the villages were left to drink whatever they could make—the traditional drinks. So we thought, why not make a hygienic and affordable alcoholic product. Our first product, a fortified wine, was released in 1998,” says Karanja.
Karanja says the rough waters have merely made her more determined.
That is, until the brush with the tax man crushed her spirit.
“That was the day I understood why people collapse when running a business. You wonder why a businessman who was getting into his car just died or collapsed in his office.”
On that fateful October evening, Karanja saw the future and it looked terrible. Her eight-year-old brewery, the business she had shed sweat and tears to build, was about to die.
The tax demand did not include interest and penalties. In total she owed the KRA around KSh2 billion ($23.8 million).
“I thought these people wanted to kill me so my employees could find me dead the next morning,” she says.
It got worse. After reading the fax several times, she called the KRA Commissioner’s office in a panic, but she could not get through. It was late in the evening and the government office was closed.
“KRA claimed that the business licence I was given in 1998 was wrong. I was paying 45% tax but they were demanding 65% backdated to 1998. You know how powerful the tax authorities are, not only in Kenya but everywhere in the world. I was literally shaking!”
At the back of her mind, Karanja knew it would be difficult to get a lawyer to fight KRA. Unable to get through to KRA, she went to visit her sick husband. She did not break the news to him that night, instead she went home and had one of the longest nights of her life. She did not sleep a wink.
“I was feeling awful; I panicked because I knew these guys had cornered me. My spirit was devastated,” she explains as her voice breaks.
When she informed her lawyer about going to court, he was hesitant.
Two days later, the lawyer broke the news of court action to her husband on his release from hospital.
“I remember I called the KRA Commissioner and told him I was not going to die. I am strong and I was going to fight!”
Karanja wanted the matter settled out of court but her efforts to get any of the KRA officials before the 14-day deadline were unsuccessful.
“I wanted to show them that they were wrong because I had all my facts,” she says.
It did matter. Time was running out and she knew, if she waited, KRA would freeze her bank accounts and take over her business. So she went to court and fortunately the 14-day order was stopped and after one year the case was thrown out—she had won. After all the pain, angst and fear—she had won.
That was the most horrifying point in her life. There were days she was filled with doubt and fear.
“Fortunately, the judge ruled that it was misuse of power and nobody could explain the KSh1.2 billion ($14.3 million) figure. Furthermore, I was the only one required to pay yet there were 10 other players. I am sure if we did not win that case, Keroche Breweries would be no more,” she says.
In the year she was battling KRA, there were money worries too. The bank was in the process of approving a KSh500 million ($5.9 million) loan for a new plant she wanted to set up for the launch of a new beer called Summit Lager.
“There was so much at stake—our business, our dreams, our investments and other entrepreneurs who looked up to us…”
Fortunately, the loan was approved in December 2007. But her struggles were not yet over, with an on-going case in court, things turned sour when Kenya experienced post- election violence following elections in December 2007. The equipment had been delivered and installed but business only started in June 2008.”
Despite the turmoil in the country, for banks it was business as usual. By February 2008, the bank was knocking on Karanja’s door. She had to start repaying her loan and the interest.
“The bank had warned me they would repossess the equipment if I did not start repaying the loan. I borrowed KSh10 million ($118,835) from a friend without a clue of how I would repay the rest in the coming months,” she says.
Karanja borrowed from the same friend twice.
“I struggled for months. I was entirely dependent on the products and we did not have extra money.”
For three months Summit Lager beer did not move off the shelves.
The sales from a vodka mix, launched in 2007, were not adequate to service the loan. While the company was in the process of growing the Viennese vodka brand they noticed a gap in the beer market—the same market where EABL enjoyed a monopoly.
“People only had one choice. We decided to produce a premium beer product and that is how Summit Lager was born.”
Keroche was in direct competition with EABL’s cash-cow—Tusker. Even the mighty South African Breweries Miller (SABMiller) had been unsuccessful in the Kenyan market and now Keroche found itself staring the giant down.
With a big loan to repay, Karanja was hell-bent on hanging on. She tried every trick in the book and even hired marketing professionals from the competition to help push her products but they too were unsuccessful.
“I understood them; we were fighting a losing battle. The people in the bars were being paid not to sell Summit Lager, our posters were defaced, a client would ask for Summit but they would be told the drink is not available.”
Frustrated, Karanja decided to do something radical. Together with her husband, they went to the market and talked to the distributers in 10 regions around Kenya and offered them an incentive—for every two crates they sold, they would get one free. They also went to the Parliamentary Committee to complain about the unfair competition.
“There is a time we had one million liters in the tanks and had nowhere to take it. Our business was 100% financed by the bank and it would not have been long before they [the bank] came for us.”
Karanja went before the Committee and EABL officials were summoned. She only wanted one meeting because she felt it was a waste of her time.
“I left the meeting disgruntled and told them [my staff] we should fight it out in the market so that I know I was defeated out there instead of a boardroom.”
The courts and then Parliament: it was a long way from the humble beginnings of Keroche. The seed capital was KSh100,000 ($ 1,176) which came from family savings.
The money was used to buy a second hand bottling machine that produced 200 bottles a day—around 10 crates.
“We could not approach the banks but as the business grew, we started attracting financiers,” she says.
When they needed additional capital, the local banks could not loan them the money, so in 2006 they approached Barclays Bank Plc in London for a KSh500 million ($5.9 million) loan. With all that was going on, Karanja, was in constant touch with her bankers. In 2009, her bankers almost gave up on her and a risk audit team from London was sent to look through her books—they spent one month there.
“We were put on a business support program because they also panicked when they saw we were unable to move any beer.”
When having a discussion with one of the auditors, he asked Karanja why she had decided to compete with a multi-national like EABL.
“I remember pleading with him because he was the one who was going to write the report. I begged him to give me an opportunity so that I could prove that a local entrepreneur could make something better than Tusker. I also challenged him to tell me why there should not be a competitor to Tusker.”
The bank official seemed to agree but he was very skeptical. He told her that her business would not last long.
“He gave me three months before I went under. For me to compete with Tusker I had to make a superior drink and I am convinced without doubt that our quality is superior!”
To date, Keroche has two beer brands, two ready-to-drink vodka brands, four spirits and three wines. With a current 5% market share, by end of 2014 Keroche is looking at controlling 20% of the market. Keroche currently owes the bank less than KSh200 million ($2.4 million) and is looking at borrowing KSh1.5 billion ($17.9 million) to expand by producing soft drinks.
<h3>What Did She Learn From Taking On A Giant In The Industry?</h3>
“Whatever you feel you want to start, you must know exactly what you want to do otherwise when you face one challenge, you will run away. Secondly, whatever you are doing you must offer a superior quality and be convinced beyond doubt that it will succeed.”

Beer, Sweat and Tears

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

Feisty and Cheeky—A Woman With No Regrets

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Sighting a Moseme Road Construction yellow truck on the Johannesburg freeways during the 2010 FIFA World Cup preparations was a given. Travelling along the N1, the N3 or near O.R. Tambo International Airport, you were bound to bump into one—or a big board bearing the company’s grey triangular logo. The company is only one of a handful still standing after the near collapse of South Africa’s construction industry after the 2010 World Cup infrastructure boom.
“We were one of the few wholly black-owned civil engineering companies at the time that got the biggest contracts,” marvels Ernest Moloi, who is the sole owner of the company.
His business is now picking up after having to retrench staff and close down other business units. “I had to reduce the business and refinance it with R48 million ($5.8 million) of my personal funds,” says the maverick who explored at least 10 business ideas before settling on civil engineering.
Moseme currently employs 250 staff, with business units that include asset holding, property development and Roadfix, which develops asphalt that can remain in potholes for up to 20 years. The company is based in Brakpan on the East Rand of Johannesburg.
<div id="attachment_889" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-889" class="size-large wp-image-889" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CTP4567-680x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="714" />Enerst Moloi</div>
Since the economic meltdown and drastic slowing down of infrastructure development after the 2010 World Cup, Moloi has been travelling throughout Africa in search of business opportunities. He has managed to convince the Ugandan government to build a toll road from Kampala to the corridor of Kenya, and preparations are underway.
“First the government had to come up with legislation for that and then a feasibility study,” he says about an original idea that he pitched to the government. In property development, Moseme is planning to build shopping malls outside South Africa. They are holding discussions in Botswana and Uganda about the ventures.
Moloi founded his business from humble beginnings, through bold moves and determination.
“I asked a neighbor if I could build her two back rooms to use for generating extra income and she agreed,” he says.
He then gathered a few guys from the neighborhood who were  unemployed, bought building material and had them do the work while he managed the project.
“They did such a great job that the client was very pleased, and that was the beginning of my entry into the world of construction.”
This was in 1994, at the advent of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) when the South African government was making efforts to empower historically disadvantaged individuals. Moloi took advantage of the socio-economic climate and used his
limited experience to seek government tenders.
“My first tender was for R25,000 ($3,000) to build a clinic in the informal settlement of Orange Farm, in the Vaal vicinity. I did not even own a car and therefore travelled by taxi every day from Soweto to the site,”
he says.
For someone who had been unemployed, this was big money. “Instead of paying myself a salary, I opted to pay only the workers as I had already figured, because I was the big boss, at the end of the job the balance of the money would all be mine.”
As it turned out, he had miscalculated the budget and ended up not getting a cent. That was his first and biggest mistake which he will not forget for the rest of his life.
“Since then I always engage an accountant in all my business dealings prior to signing any contract,” he declares.
The one lesson learnt from the experience was to treat himself as an employee and pay himself a regular fee. He said that this is a common error by most emerging entrepreneurs. They see the price value of a contract and then think that it will make them rich overnight.
Moloi’s next contract was valued at R45,000 ($5,400). It paid him enough to buy an old Honda Ballade. Life was better as he could get to work quicker.
Several contracts down the line, Moloi made his first million. Instead of getting excited by rewarding himself with a flashy car and a home, he resisted the temptation to show off with expensive material possessions. He continued his modest lifestyle as a tenant in his mother’s back yard in Soweto.
“I had to plough the money back into the business by purchasing the necessary equipment to operate it properly and efficiently,” he explains.
Today, Moseme is one of South Africa’s four biggest, wholly black-owned civil engineering companies. Its growth strategy was for a long time bolstered through joint ventures with some of the large construction companies, among them Murray &amp; Roberts and Group Five. At the height of the 2010 FIFA World Cup preparations,
the company’s order book was over R500 million
($60.1 million).
Moloi appreciates the good intentions that underpin the BEE legislation, especially since he has benefited from it. However, he feels that in civil engineering, not enough is being done to ensure that the intended beneficiaries garner the big contracts.
“The updated BBBEE (Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment) scorecard removed the HDI clause which gave black contractors an advantage with the 10% black-ownership rating. That killed a majority of black-owned companies because that was the only advantage they had to help them grow,” he says.
The new level rating is virtually color blind and therefore gives white-owned businesses the advantage because they are far more established and resourced. “This is throwing us outside of the market as white businesses can also source business in the private sector, which is predominantly white-owned anyway,” he says.
Moloi’s suggestion to government is that it strategically award contracts to black-owned companies that have made it in the industry on the basis of joint ventures with emerging contractors. This, he believes, could be the solution to combat fronting and therefore, gradually eliminate domination of the industry by white males.
His other concern is that fronting denies true black-owned companies the opportunity to develop, adding that already established black-owned companies should be supported.
“We are hopeful that the recent announcement of R800 billion ($96 billion) infrastructure development by Pravin Gordhan, Minister of Finance, will bring more work and we will be able to rehire.”
For Moloi to succeed as an entrepreneur, he credits his personal philosophy of patience and being thick-skinned. “Don’t be afraid to fail, and before pursuing a business idea set goals and do your homework.”

Following The Yellow Brick Road

About 20 months ago, when Harvard-educated but little-known Inati Ntshanga was thrust into the position of CEO of South Africa’s state-owned regional airline, very few noticed.
One of the main reasons, of course, was that 18-year-old South African Express (SAX) had always been in the shadow of its bigger and much older brother, South African Airways (SAA), which has been a dominant force in the continental airspace for more than 75 years. So much so that SAX’s resilience has gone largely unnoticed, notwithstanding the fact that in its short life, not only has the airline survived several one-time competitors that have since gone under, it is now also debt free.
<h3>Now SAX wants to conquer Africa.</h3>
Whereas SAA has gone, cap-in-hand, to the South African government to beg for R6 billion to fund operational costs, its growth strategy and fleet renewal, SAX will be using its own balance sheet to raise the R4.5 billion it intends to spend on 15 new aircraft for its new growth plan. Seven of the aircraft have been delivered, while the rest will arrive between now and 2015 to coincide with the end of current leases of the “oldish” aircraft that the airline still has on the tarmac.
Most of SAX’s old fleet was acquired when jet fuel was in the $20-$30/barrel price range, airline industry analyst Linden Birns points out.
“With fuel today soaring above the $130/barrel mark, the economic model for these planes no longer holds any validity. Not only are they unable to generate sufficiently low seat-mile costs—the standard measure of the cost of production in the airline industry—but they are also rapidly losing their residual book value as demand for these aircraft in other markets has fallen off a cliff.”
In addition to several domestic routes—Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein, George, East London, Kimberley, Pietermaritzburg, Upington and Phalaborwa—SAX also flies to neighboring Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“All of them are profitable,” according to Ntshanga. He is now adding Malawi, Ghana and Uganda to the list and is in negotiations with several other African countries that subscribe to the idea of “open skies”.
While the continent has been slow to embrace open skies—an international policy concept calling for an easing of restrictions, for the liberalization of rules and regulations and for minimal government intervention in the airline industry—Ntshanga says those who have already done so are seeing the economic benefits.
He points to the latest International Air Transport Association (IATA) report, which analyzed the relationship between a country’s level of connectivity to the global air transport network and its level of productivity and economic growth, across 48 developing and developed countries during a 10 year period.
Not only is aviation a major industry in its own right, employing large numbers of highly skilled workers, the report said it is also an essential input into the rapidly growing global economy. The study found that greater connections to the global air transport network can boost the productivity and growth of economies by providing better access to markets; enhance links within and between businesses; and provide greater access to resources and international capital markets.
Noting how air traffic demand increased as economies grew, the report concluded that global economic growth has been a key driver of growth in air traffic demand.
<h3>This has not been confined to</h3>
North America, Europe, South-East Asia, Australia, Latin America and India, Birns points out: “If you want [further] proof of this, just look at
how the size of the South African domestic market grew with the advent of our low-cost airlines, kulula.com, 1Time and Mango, in the 2000s to see how the liberalized regulatory environment gave rise to mushrooming growth.”
&nbsp;
<h3>THE PROBLEMS OF THE AFRICAN AIRLINE INDUSTRY</h3>
The rest of the African continent, though, is uniquely different, something Ntshanga is ready to concede upfront, if not to acknowledge that his ambition could even be thwarted by it.
SAX’s home base, South Africa, and the other countries the airline has been flying to until now adhere to high safety standards. The same can’t be said about many of the other countries on the continent, where carriers are notorious for their tendency to skimp on safety. The most recent IATA statistics reveal that in 2010 Africa had 7.41 accidents per million flights, the worst among the world’s regions and 12 times worse than the global average of 0.61.
Other common complaints usually cited by established airlines’ indifference to Africa are:
&#8211;              too few airports;
&#8211;              inadequate investment in infrastructure;
&#8211;              inconsistent government policies and laws.
Birns explains some of them, and their impact: “The artificial barriers to market access, known as the Bilateral Air Transport Agreements, which are applied in Africa, should be reviewed and liberalized. These agreements currently prescribe which airlines may operate on given routes, the number of flights each airline is permitted to operate on the route, and in some cases, even stipulate the maximum weekly or monthly capacity each designated airline may put into the market. The net effect is that airfares on intra-African routes remain artificially high. And with the global and regional economies under pressure, fewer people can afford to fly. If free or freer competition was permitted, fares would come down and the market would grow exponentially.”
&nbsp;
<h3>THIS IS AFRICA’S NEXT BEST AIRLINE</h3>
“But the challenges do not mean it can’t be done,” Ntshanga says. He has confidence that he’s doing the right thing and is poised to strike gold.
The reason for his calm confidence, and some would say rather rapid expansion?
“Africa is, in fact, low hanging fruit for us… Our market research says we’ll be profitable within two months—and that’s even before those markets reach maturity.” Besides, the economist-by-training reckons, Africa is poised for unprecedented levels of growth, even though that’s admittedly off a low base.
Birns says SAX’s Africa route expansion strategy is “a good one in principle”, but to be sustainable it requires focus on markets with sufficient demand for business and tourism traffic.
That word—focus—is what Ntshanga says SAX swears by. “We have a very good, tried and tested model,” he says.
SAX doesn’t have its own distribution and handling systems but uses SAA’s for a fee. A lot of other services, including ground handling, are outsourced, leaving the airline with a staff complement of only 1 100.
While others still prefer jets, Ntshanga says SAX is opting for 50- to 100-seater aircraft that use turbo propellers but consume relatively less fuel, are as quiet as jets, are just as fast, and are more comfortable. Add to that the fact that the destinations the airline flies to are within a three-hour distance to and from South Africa.
“The lure of money, which often looks like easy money,” is one cause, Ntshanga believes, why other airlines fail. “You won’t catch us flying long routes, or very busy routes where we are a small boy playing with the big boys. We focus, we don’t straddle,” he says.
Birns believes SAX “never competed directly” with Nationwide, Velvet Sky, Sun Air, Flitestar or Phoenix—all of which went under—but was competing against SAA and Comair (the BA and Kulula operations) and 1Time. “It’s precisely because the high-density mainline routes are so fiercely fought over that SAX deliberately operates on different gauges and networks to the others.”
Birns thinks Velvet Sky went out of business “largely due to its failure to have sufficient economies of scale to offer a comprehensive domestic and regional service. Nationwide failed, not because of the engine incident and subsequent grounding—these were factors, but not catalysts of the failure—but because once it resumed operations, the shareholders and management failed to appreciate that they needed to invest heavily in restoring brand credibility and market confidence. They assumed, wrongly, that they could simply pick up where they’d left off and all would continue as if the crisis hadn’t happened.
“SAX is feeling the same economic pressures as every other airline around the world, ie. rampant fuel prices and soaring user charges, levies and taxes. We would be naïve to think these won’t negatively impact SAX’s bottom line. And like every other airline, SAX will want to invest in the latest available technology to help it keep those additional costs in check,” he says.
With humility, but also with authority, Ntshanga goes back a couple of years, before he was appointed CEO. Then, he was part of a crack team that achieved an important strategic tilt—developing and implementing strategies that led to the doubling of revenue and saw SAX become solvent for the first time since the airline’s inception 18 years ago. And that’s when everyone got up and noticed.
Ntshanga believes it’s a matter of time before others see that SAX is no longer the Cinderella operation that was established back in 1993 by black investors Thebe Investments (51%) and a Canadian consortium (49%), only to be sold to the government a few years down the line because it wasn’t doing that well.
Back in the day, SAX would fly to Bloemfontein twice a day. Today it flies there 10 times a day as well as to destinations across Africa dozens of times every month.
“This is Africa’s next best airline,” Ntshanga says.

Every Cloud Has A Golden Lining

Thabo Molefe, famously known as ‘Tbo Touch’ in entertainment circles, is not your typical, hunky, media personality. In all frankness, mention of his name rarely inspires dreamy emotional reactions from adoring fans. And even though he does his fair share of kissing babies and dishing out top-notch prizes on his many media platforms; the lion’s share of the coverage is about his “annoying” American accent, tabloid titbits of his personal life and how he is supposedly the world’s biggest name-dropper; hell-bent on importing American culture to Africa.
As someone who is no stranger to his drive-time show on South African Metro FM, and the many television shows he has hosted; I was not surprised or put off by the strong American influence which marks his speech and content. With Touch, it is definitely all about hip hop, basketball and “swag”.
“What a lot of people do not know is that my family has a very strong exile background,” he says. “My connection to the US is enforced by the fact that I was raised there, schooled there and I even lost blood there,” he continues, explaining that his father, Vernon Molefe, was assassinated there because of his political activism.
“My father had a project which saw him working with South African struggle icons. Through the Nelson Mandela Education Fund, he facilitated troubled South African kids to be taken to the States to be educated , away from the horrors of the apartheid uprisings. So one can say that I feel indebted to his cause,” Touch elaborates. He says his father was shot seven times in 1992, and that his murder remains unsolved to this day.
“I was taken in by Bishop Noel Jones who became my guardian, as a way of paying homage to my late father,” he says.
The month of July is of significance to Touch. This month brings to a climax his plans of returning to permanently live in the United States, and as he puts it—this time he’s going there to make huge investments, and not to look for hand-outs, like before.
“I feel that I have come full circle as Tbo Touch. In as much as I am grateful for the opportunities that I have been given by the national broadcaster (SABC) since my return to the country seven years ago; I feel it is time to take my radio show, The Touch Down 3-to-6, to New York, where it will be broadcast live on a daily basis for the next three years. This has never been done on African radio before, and what it basically means is that instead of calling up big name artists like Jay Z or Mary J. Blige and speaking to them telephonically, I will have them live in studio interacting with our South African listeners,” he says with palpable excitement.
“This has taken many months to set up. My team and I have been at pains to get the national broadcaster’s buy-in, but now I can announce that it is all systems go. We have set up our own studios in New York, and we have engineers on-site working around the clock to make sure that the show runs seamlessly. The radio show will also feed content to other programs as well. Top American broadcaster Ryan Seacrest has been doing it for years; I feel it is now my turn to do it for South Africa.
“No one can debate the fact that New York is the hub of the entertainment, and more specifically, music industry, so really one has not achieved global recognition until you have a New York footprint.”
While this is clearly great news for him as a broadcaster, Touch says he won’t be the only one benefitting from this new arrangement.
“One of the main reasons I am this excited about the venture is because the show, even though broadcast from New York daily, will continue to play African music.” For many decades, Africans have been flooded with American music and culture, so it is about time someone takes ours to them.
“I am hoping this will give local artists another avenue to be exposed and “picked up” by the real captains of the music industry—the kind of artists that practically live on the Forbes’ richest lists. And I am hoping this will be an opportunity where collaborations and meaningful partnerships between those artists and African artists can be fostered,” he says.
Music and radio are not the only elements central to Touch’s relocation; television station SABC1 has also commissioned him as an NBA Basketball sport correspondent, which means he will be courtside every week, linking fans to the game and its icons.
“The culture of basketball and the NBA has been continually growing around the continent since the late 90s, sadly though we could only watch re-runs and old games, but now we will stream it to the continent with no serious delays. As a game that I personally love as well, I am also very excited that I will be experiencing it up close and sharing that experience with the sport’s many African fans,” says Touch.
Not only does Touch seem to have the entertainment side of things well-covered. He is also gearing up to become a businessman in the hospitality industry, which may come as a surprise to many.
“My relocation will also coincide with the launch of a restaurant franchise I am opening up in Manhattan with my business partner Jeff Christie. The restaurant will have a special twist—its main commodity will be trading in wine from South Africa, and we will also have a live-streaming camera linked-up to another franchise in Cape Town, so that patrons on either side can have a kind of shared experience,” he explains.
“The restaurant’s music catalogue will also consist entirely of South African and African music. So I am working very closely with the South African Department of Tourism on this project, as I believe that the restaurant will have an impact on more people wanting the actual South African experience,” Touch says. He needed to raise $450,000 to get the business on its legs, which he did subsequent to getting many doors slammed in his face.
Asking him whether he will consider living in South Africa again, seems a bit foolhardy at this stage for a man with his kind of plans, but alas it has to be asked. “My concert production company, called Touch Lives, will continue to be based in Johannesburg. Touch Lives hosts four major concerts every year, and I will be here for each one. I also have a two-year-old son who will continue to be based here, even though his mother and I have come to an agreement that he will spend some time with me in New York. In many ways South Africa is still my home,” he concludes.

Touching African Lives From The Big Apple

On a small street off Tubman Boulevard, the main thoroughfare in Monrovia, five red and white umbrellas shade stalls tended by five young men, all of them university students. In between classes, they sell mobile phone scratch cards and exchange grubby Liberian and US dollars. One of the students, 27-year-old Lorenzo Garmonyou, wakes up at 6am every morning and retires at around 1am in a cramped room he shares with his five brothers who also toil on the same corner.
Garmonyou is an economics student at the African Methodist Episcopal University. Like many young Liberians whose education was delayed during Liberia’s long and brutal civil war that ended eight years ago, he is struggling to put himself through school. From his small earnings he puts aside $2 a day to pay for his tuition and keeps a dollar to live on. Garmonyou is uncertain about the future in a nation whose economy is yet to create jobs for the few Liberians who are trained and educated.
Many unemployed graduates like Emmett Chea, a 24-year-old with an economics degree, complain that a culture of “nepotism” makes it difficult for qualified graduates to attain experience and jobs. He says they are yet to really feel the benefits of the billions of dollars of investment that came into Liberia during President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s first term. Analysts and government officials say that while there is a lot of work ahead to make Liberia’s economy one that benefits ordinary Liberians, the future still looks positive for Africa’s first republic.
Since Sirleaf’s election victory in 2006, Liberia has been relieved of its $4.6 billion debt by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under the debt waiver of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPCI). The country has drawn close to $19 billion in investment mainly in the form of mining, agricultural and oil concession agreements, from major companies such as ArcelorMittal, BHP Billiton, Union Sime Darby and oil majors like Total and Chevron.
With single digit inflation, a projected economic growth rate of 9.4% for 2012, up from last year’s 6.9%, there is an upward trend. All the more remarkable, so soon after a war that saw Liberia suffer one of the severest economic collapses recorded by any nation.
Despite this significant economic growth, Liberia remains among the poorest countries in the world, according to the United Nations Human Development Index. This is underscored by the extremely low rate of employment: only 15% of workers are employed formally and 79% of those employed are without a steady income, according to the Ministry of Labor. With 70% of the population below the age of 30, youth unemployment is regarded as one of the biggest threats to Liberia’s future.
In the wake of last year’s tense election, Sirleaf, now into her second term, acknowledged the need to create jobs and development.
In her annual address to the 53rd Legislature, she asked:
“How, then, do we transform our old economy from a plantation or concessionaire economy perceived to run for the benefit of a few, to a modern, inclusive economy?”
This big question is one that alludes to the difficulties of the past. Liberia’s 14-year civil war killed 250,000 and left the nation’s infrastructure in ruins. It drew into sharp focus the role economic disparities play in fomenting conflict.
Critics of Sirleaf’s government emphasize that income distribution has remained virtually the same since Liberia’s Poverty Reduction Strategy was introduced in 2008, with recent World Bank figures showing three out of four Liberians are still living below the poverty line. While there have been reports of a growing middle class in Africa—a recent report by the African Development Bank estimated that 4.8% of Liberia’s population can be considered middle class—this is the lowest percentage on the continent. The government is currently undertaking a project called Liberia Rising 2030, to replace the Poverty Reduction Strategy, with the goal of making Liberia a middle-income country over the next 18 years.
Liberia’s economy has been plagued by inequality since the nation was founded by freed American slaves in 1822, known as Americo-Liberians, who returned to Africa to create a new land of Liberty. Instead they ended up subjugating the native population and subjecting them to forced labor on plantations. Under the leadership of President Winston V.S. Tubman during the 1950s, Liberia had the highest economic growth rate in the world through its exports of iron ore, rubber, coffee and cocoa; yet it also had an extremely high poverty rate.
Liberia’s rapid economic growth and lack of national development led Robert Clower to publish an economic study on Liberia titled Growth Without Development that is now a seminal text in the study of post-colonial third world economies. During this time, growth merely benefited the few Americo-Liberians living in major cities such as Monrovia and excluded the rest. Yet even today, Liberia’s recent infrastructural restoration and development—electricity, paved roads, hospitals and running water—can be seen mostly in the seaside capital, Monrovia.
“Liberia traditionally has been a concession-based economy,” says Chairman of the Liberian National Investment Commission (NIC) Natty B. Davis.
“It’s an economy that produces what it doesn’t consume and consumes what it doesn’t produce to a certain extent.”
Davis says that granting major concessions to multinationals is to fuel economic growth to help reconstruct the country’s shattered infrastructure.
The civil war destroyed an estimated 75% of Liberia’s infrastructure, and left behind a generation of lost youths with little education. The war saw the end of the Mount Coffee Hydroelectric Dam, Liberia’s only source of electricity, which looters later stripped. The Liberian Electricity Commission started running again in 2010, but uses costly giant diesel-powered generators and charges 54 cents per kWh: the highest rate in Africa and among the highest in the world. Next month, with the backing of European partners the government will begin a four-year project to restore the dam to pre-war status that will cost an estimated $180 million.
Matt Jones is the director of a USAID-sponsored project called the Sustainable Marketplace Initiative. It works alongside the NIC and focuses on creating entrepreneurs in post-conflict countries. Jones says that energy is key to diversifying Liberia’s economy and creating opportunities for local businesses.
<div id="attachment_873" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-873" class="size-large wp-image-873" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/9-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Ebeneezer T. Williams, 34, a university graduate and young entrepreneur who owns a profitable small printing business in downtown Monrovia, faces problems because of lack of electricity</div>
“It would be so much easier and cheaper to start a business here if you had access to electricity. People often rarely break even because their fuel bills are so extraordinary,” he says.
Jones argues that the major concessionaries will not necessarily create the jobs needed to cure Liberia’s unemployment problem, but will yield opportunity.
“Right now is a golden opportunity for Liberia. All of these big multinational companies are coming in and these local businesses have the biggest opportunity they have probably ever had to get contracts. These international organizations are actually very willing to talk to these businesses, work with them, try and get contracts with them, but they are still not going to bend on their standards,” says Jones.
Vaanii Baker, Program Officer for Investment Climate with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), says it is essential that Liberian businesses find a way to link up.
“If the country cannot figure out how to plug those small and medium enterprises (SMEs) into the growth that’s happening with the large concessions, they’re not going to realize the job growth that’s desperately needed in Liberia. The job growth is more than an economic issue in this country. With our recent history, I think it is more of a security issue as well,” says Baker.
Jones and those in government hope that increased levels of foreign investment will help fuel the rise of an entrepreneurial culture in Liberia, and in turn, economic growth. He sees signs of a more stable business climate emerging.
“The post-conflict situation has also played a role in this [lack of an entrepreneurial culture],” says Jones. “I think that people didn’t really have the opportunity to be an entrepreneur even if they wanted to and I think that people here are starting off on a basic level. But I believe that every single month and year after the conflict is just that much more positive for entrepreneurs and the commercial sector.”
<div id="attachment_875" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-875" class="size-large wp-image-875" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/3-1024x698.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="323" />Students gather on the University of Liberia campus. University graduates are faced with a high rate of unemployment in Liberia</div>
Chid Liberty is a successful Liberian entrepreneur who co-founded a garment business called Liberty and Justice that exports its products to the States. He argues that entrepreneurship has a fundamentally important role to play in addressing poverty and rebuilding Liberia’s economy. Liberty’s father was the former ambassador to Germany under Samuel Doe, remembered by many as a brutal dictator. During the 1980s, Liberty and his family went into exile, but he returned to set up a business. The business employs 250 women in Liberia and Ghana, and is looking to expand. He says in order to meet his current demand, he would need to employ 2,500 workers.
“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. There is no way that we are going to send all of these people back to university to get degrees to become journalists—give that up; the farm and the factory are the two places I think we need to place this lost generation of people,” he says.
Liberty says that Liberia needs to create an entrepreneurial class to generate jobs and bridge the deep economic divide in Liberia.
“Income inequality and people not having jobs are the biggest threats to Liberia’s security and all of our livelihoods.”
Building this class has become a focus for the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Last year, the ministry officially launched its first micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) policy called “Poverty Alleviation and Wealth Creation through Small Enterprise and Development” and is working with the NIC and its NGO partners to help entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground.
Yuri Sobolev, the resident representative of the IMF, says that creating value-adding industries is the way forward for Liberia.
“Only the formal sector can create gainful employment opportunities, and value addition is the only way employment is going to be generated. For that you need better infrastructure,” says Sobolev.
“The government needs to create and enable environment [for the growth of businesses], physical infrastructure such as roads and electricity, to strengthen the rule of law with regard to business, contract enforcement and property rights.”
The government has made efforts to improve the business climate. With the help of the IFC it has set up a Business Reform Committee, with five committees focused on areas of the business environment that need to be reformed: electricity, finance, tax rates and procedures, customs and corruption. Liberia is also expected to connect to the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) undersea cable system in October, which will bring its slow internet speeds up.
“While Liberia has many challenges ahead of it,” Baker says, “there is no reason it cannot become a middle-income country by 2030 and rival the booming economies of its West African neighbors.
“There is awesome potential for Liberia—it’s limitless. We’ve seen the development Ghana has had over the last few years… Within the next 10 years, if the government does the right things and puts in the right infrastructure, both soft and hard, in place, there is no reason why this country cannot surpass Ghana in terms of economic development and growth.”
Clair MacDougall is a journalist currently based in Monrovia, Liberia.
<div id="attachment_874" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-874" class="size-large wp-image-874" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Monrovia_1-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Monrovia, Liberia</div>
<h3>Liberia’s Gold Rush</h3>
In Sinoe County, in south-eastern Liberia, a handful of companies are
exploring land which is known to have large gold deposits; but which, due to the 14-year civil war, has remained untouched except by artisanal miners. The exploration area falls within the Biriman Craton, which holds gold and diamond deposits and extends through Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Mali and Burkina Faso. While exploration is in its early stages, companies believe they could strike upon larger deposits in coming years. 
“We believe the gold potential here is enormous—just look at other countries that fall in the Biriman Craton. Our target is to be mining by the end of 2015,” says Tim Illingworth, manager of Hummingbird Resources, a company operating in the region. 
Hummingbird Resources was founded in November 2005 and was listed on AIM in December 2010, raising $40 million. Hummingbird has a land package of 7,000km2 in Liberia and has currently only explored around 1% of that. The company reported finding 1.765m oz gold in September 2011, which they say dramatically increased on February 1 after a find of 2.052m oz, bringing the current total up to 3.817m oz. The company, founded by Dan Betts, claims it has made the largest gold discovery in Western Africa in the last year. Hummingbird currently holds a three-year exploration license and is in the process of negotiating a 25-year mineral development agreement with the government.

Liberia:  It Could Be Awesome But…

Adrian Gore, South Africa’s undisputed king of health insurance, has done pioneering stuff before—as a matter of fact that’s all he has done since the day he founded Discovery 20 years ago—but none as daring as his latest venture.
In a world where Africa has become China’s happy hunting ground, Gore is hunting in the opposite direction.
Discovery recently bought 20% of Ping An Health Insurance, a wholly-owned subsidiary of China’s biggest, and the world’s second largest, insurance company.
“It could have been a much bigger stake, were it not for the strict Chinese foreign ownership rules that prescribe that outsiders can own a maximum of 20%,” says Gore.
Discovery is hungry for global expansion. It surpassed expectation in their forays into the United States of America and Britain, buying up Destiny Health in the US and 50% of Prudential Health in London.
China offers a compelling opportunity and a vast number of customers. China has more than 1.3 billion people, compared to the 50 million in Discovery’s home territory of South Africa. China spends R2 trillion ($237.6 billion) a year on health, South Africa’s R250 billion ($29.7 billion) pales by comparison.
Gore is the first to admit, though, that medical insurance is not something the Chinese do, or know, but all this is about to change.
“The health market in China is going to be huge, one gets a sense that if you get in early you can help shape the system,” says Gore.
His confidence stems from the Chinese government’s plan to introduce major health reforms, including health insurance.
“Chinese private companies are already buying health insurance in huge quantities, while individuals are already starting to buy what they call social health insurance. There are many Asians that understand this stuff. It’s more effervescent.” And sure to help the situation is the strong culture of self-medication and check-ups among the Chinese, what Gore says is an established “prevention mindset”.
Discovery’s entry into China is through its flagship Vitality product, which according to Gore, is the world’s largest incentive-based wellness program.
Vitality encourages healthy behavior that reduces long-term healthcare costs by rewarding members who do things that improve their health by going to the gym, eating healthier and getting regular health assessments. Gore believes Vitality helps to reduce both the occurrence and severity of diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
“I feel very strongly that business must have a social purpose. I don’t mean that in a soft, CSI [corporate social investment] way. Business is about progress. We try to create progress for society. A business must straddle innovation and prudence at the same time.”
“I actually think—and I’m not drawing parallels—the Apple obsession with products, is similar to ours. When we started out, our competitors in the medical aid space used to go to boardrooms. We sold our products on the road. I’m a product junkie. I find that inspiring. I’m an actuary by training, but I’m not inspired by money, but by progress.”
Also, he says, gone are the days where people put money in, and never got something out. In China, Discovery and Ping An have already struck deals with China Airlines and fuel retailers for discounts.
“Health and life insurance are typically grudge purchases. Our fundamental success in this market has been making health insurance sexy, cool, accessible and different,” says Gore.
To mark their entry into the market, Discovery and its partners are targeting in excess of 100 million Chinese who are in the middle to affluent bracket; 80% of whom pay for healthcare out of their own pocket. The good news is that Discovery is not going to do the on-the-ground slogging; the potential risk may come with vast cultural differences.
Ping An—which has 70 million customers and is serviced by close to half a million brokers—will do all the selling. Discovery will focus on building the underlying insurance company.
Gore maintains there’s no pressure to make this venture immediately profitable.
“Our approach, generally, is that you don’t bet family jewels in any one transaction. So, at end of the day, if something goes wrong, it doesn’t dramatically affect us. We haven’t committed huge amounts of capital. It’s as aggressive as we can go, but on the other hand, if it’s a complete and total failure, it doesn’t dramatically affect us.”
“If you’re building the underlying insurance company, that takes time. We’ve grown our earnings per share at 25% a year for 20 years. If China takes time, I won’t be concerned.”
Put to him, that his shareholders may have gotten used to quick gains and may no longer be the patient bunch they once were, when they started, Gore maintains: “Our shareholders—and I’m one of them—are long-term focused.”
One of few African successes in China has been Tencent, an internet business owned by South African multinational Naspers. Last year, China alone contributed R2.1 billion ($251 million) to Naspers’ core headline earnings of R5.3 billion($634 million). Interestingly though, Naspers CEO Koos Bekker could only attribute his company’s success to “simply, bloody luck.”
Gore says his industry “is slightly different. You’ve got to do the basics well, build quality relationships with your partners, regulators, and so on. It’s a tough market, and you’ve got to be brilliant”.
“We’ve spoken to a lot of people. We’ve done a lot of work. We’ve got a good feel for all the issues. In China, the relationships and trust are very important. The advantage of being an African company is that you do those things anyway.”

Gore The Mandarin

When businessman Wandi Nzimande was a Wandi Nzimande student in Johannesburg back in the early 1990s, he and his boyhood best friend, Sechaba ‘Chabi’ Mogale, had to help out at Nzimande’s parents’ second-hand clothing store to earn extra pocket money. The job was pretty uncool, and in a bid to find ways of making this unfashionable chore bearable, they got into the habit of changing and redesigning some of the old rags to better suit their personal style. When more and more fellow varsity students started buying the reworked wares off the two friends’ backs, the duo discovered that they were onto something big.
It was 13 years ago that the brand, Loxion Kulca, was born, and through incredibly trying times—due to the competitive nature of the fashion and leisure industry, the counterfeit trade and their own internal wrangling—Loxion Kulca lives and is sold by over
1,000 retailers across Africa.
“Getting into fashion had actually never crossed my mind,” says Nzimande. “I was at university studying mathematics and preparing for an academic career,” he explains.
It was only when he started spending more time with Mogale that he started developing an interest in black ghetto culture and how fashionably edgy it was. “Chabi had lived most of his childhood in the States as part of a family who had been in exile. Upon his return, he brought with him a wealth of magazines, videos and vivid stories and images of how the culture was where he came from. As a young boy who had never been outside South Africa, I was hugely fascinated, and I shared with him my own ghetto stories from having lived in Soweto all my life,” he says.
After their peers started buying more and more of their brand, they decided they were going to turn this into a business, after all. “We started coming up with fresh designs, as opposed to amending the second-hand stuff from my parents’ store. We took the money we were making and started producing beanies and light-knit jerseys, and those sold as quickly as we could make them. We hired seamstresses and sooner than we knew it, we started becoming inundated with orders as word of mouth about our brand spread like wildfire,” Nzimande remembers.
In 1997, their partnership with popular youth radio station YFM catapulted their popularity to dizzy heights. Hot kwaito artists and anybody who was considered to have any kind of street-cred was sporting their label. “At that point, getting celebrities to endorse our brand was important to us. We were on red carpets, we were in newspapers and on television, but we were clearly missing someone with a long-term strategy who would help us move from being just a fad into a fully fledged fashion empire,” recalls Nzimande.
The duo approached the late Brian Abrahams, the man who was then one of Johannesburg’s most experienced clothing franchisers. Abrahams had been responsible for licensing brands such as Wrangler Jeans and Caterpillar to South Africa in the 1970s. “Abrahams had his doubts about our brand and if it would have longevity, but he put his doubts aside and taught us everything we needed to know about the corporate side of running a fashion business. Chabi and I were the creatives; Abrahams became the third partner and came with an incredible network of contacts,” says Nzimande.
With Abrahams’ vision and support, Loxion Kulca became a national retail operation. They grew their range and from just beanies, T-shirts and jerseys, they ventured into shoes and eyewear. Then in 1999, former fashion house Sales House commissioned them to supply 150 of their chain stores. By 2003, their annual turnover was reported to be around the R80 million mark ($10 million at the time). Then trouble set in. “Abrahams died unexpectedly after being involved in a motorcycle accident and that deeply traumatized us. A legal battle between us and his family over his share of the business ensued, and then Chabi and I began having serious differences regarding how we wanted to move forward with the business,” says Nzimande.
Mogale decided to resign from the business, adding more uncertainty to the future of the fashion label. “The Abrahams family and I reached an understanding out of court, and it was agreed that Abrahams’ son, Gideon, was to take over where his father left off,” says Nzimande. But it would be an uphill battle to restore the label to its former glory. Newer, fresher labels had come up, and the business was not making anything near what it used to generate in its heyday. “We had serious trouble with counterfeiters. Many of our retailers backed out of our contracts because at any point, there would be five or six hawkers outside their shop doors selling fake Loxion Kulca items for a song,” says Nzimande.
Realizing that winning the war against the counterfeit trade was not likely to happen, Nzimande and the younger Abrahams decided on a revamped business model for the brand. “We are now fully a licensing business. We have a global copyright to our brand, so what we basically do is license our brand out, and the ‘licensee’ becomes responsible for the research and development, the design, manufacture and distribution. Once they collect the money made from the merchandise, they then pay us our royalties. We decided on this model as a way of making sure that the brand does not die and that it gets consistently revitalized and energized.
“Right now, our brand is carried in over 1,000 eye-wear stores across the continent and in over 500 clothing and shoe retailers. As Loxion Kulca, we also help develop new fashion enterprises and partner with up-and-coming fashion designers. We have decided to step away from any campaign driven by popular culture as we feel the brand has stood the test of time. That is proving to work as 2011 was our biggest financial year to date,” concludes Nzimande.

Getting It On With  Edgy Ghetto Styles

Tara Fela-Durotoye, known simply as Tara, is the CEO of the largest and pioneering make-up company in Nigeria, House of Tara. In 2003, her bank manager assured her that a loan of N500,000 ($3,125) to set up her first store was on the way. She had paid a non-refundable deposit of N150,000 ($937) to secure the store with high hopes of the loan.
Tara’s university friends, who liked the way she did her make-up, encouraged her to start the business.
“I didn’t see any opportunity at that time for me, and because it wasn’t an industry that existed in Nigeria, it didn’t seem like something that was possible. I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to pay to have their make-up done,” she says.
All this changed when people she made up agreed to pay whatever she asked. The next step was to start a business.
“I was so passionate about building a company, I didn’t want to build Tara; I wanted to build people, who would then build the company, who would then build the industry. But I didn’t know how to go about it because I didn’t have experience. I have never worked in a big organization, but it’s something I want to live for: a company that Nigerians would be proud of, a company that Africans would be proud of.”
The banking system in the country wasn’t much help at the time. In those days, they would rather have lent to the oil and gas industry.
“At that time, the industry was new and the bankers didn’t understand what we were doing; they didn’t even believe that it was possible. They didn’t realize that in the US, for example, the cosmetics industry generates revenue of $150 million a year. The banking industry in Nigeria then didn’t have that understanding and hence if I came to ask for a bank loan, it was impossible for the banks to give me one because they didn’t understand my industry.”
On the day the bank said ‘no’ to the promised loan, Tara was devastated. Her resolve to win through came from an earlier disappointment. “I always wanted to be lawyer; my father was a lawyer… plans had been made for me to go study law at Cambridge University,” she says.
Before she could dream of flying to England, the plan was dashed. She came home from school one day and her mother told her that her father, a Cambridge University alumnus, had suffered a stroke and he needed to be flown out of the country.
“I know that you were supposed to go to school in a few months, but I don’t think that is still possible until we know what is happening with him,” her mother said. It meant she had to study law at the University of Lagos instead.
The painful experience made her the determined person she is. Before graduating as a lawyer, she pursued her business dream with a vengeance, and five years after graduation, Tara had a name. She was well known for doing the make-up for elite weddings in Nigeria. She created her own product line, “Tara”, but this was not enough for the feisty businesswoman, who wanted to expand—a desire that once again put her on a collision course with the bank managers.
Luckily, this time around she had strong weapons: a thriving business and a mentor who introduced her to a manager of another bank. Her mentor said: “I have heard your story many times and I know that it is a very compelling and very inspiring story to share. The MD will buy into it and I’m sure that you are not going to leave there without getting the finance. Make sure you don’t ask for N500,000 ($3,125)—this time, you are seeing the MD of a bank; open your mouth wide and God will fill it.”
With that, Tara went to the bank, made her presentation and God indeed filled her mouth, to the brim, with N15 million ($93,750).
“I did get the facility, I did pay the loan back and today the banks are chasing us,” says Tara, whose company started with just a box and is now worth $3 million.
Today, House of Tara is the official make-up company for the ARISE Fashion week. Apart from being first and foremost a make-up and beauty company, it also has a training institute which empowers young ladies to be independent by giving them all-round training in the business of beauty. To date, it has churned out 1,000 professional make-up artists and 2,000 trained women. The company has 11 branches spread across the country and 12 more will be opened before the end of the year. Maybe Tara could soon be looking for yet another bank loan.

A Loan Denied, Alone She Struggled

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

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Côte d’Ivoire is back in the committee of nations after post-electoral violence plunged the country into civil war in December 2011. The commodity-rich West African country is the world’s largest cocoa producer and net exporter of crops including coffee, banana and pineapple to the European Union (EU).
Côte d’Ivoire is also a leading agricultural economy with oil deposits. It accounts for 45% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the eight West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) countries.
The return to political stability and the economic optimism in the country have been great motivation for corporate high-flyers like Fabrice Sawegnon— Côte d’Ivoire’s brightest spark in advertising and CEO of Voodoo Communication. Now he, along with others, can dream and plan big about expanding enterprises and taking Africa to the next level of economic growth.
It almost did not happen though, for Sawegnon. His company was headed to the scrap-heap, along with many other casualties who also suffered in business, as a result of the post-election uprisings. Voodoo lost about 80% of its revenue in that period. A contract came just in time to avert the demise. The sizable deal was from President Alassane Ouattara’s office for the production of presidential campaign billboards.
“We won the contract to produce billboards during the campaign. The communication strategy deal for President Ouattara continues to date,” said Sawegnon.
Voodoo currently leads the pack in Côte d’Ivoire’s advertising industry with an annual revenue of $20 million. The company is expanding and recently opened offices in Benin, Cameroon, Gabon, Mali and Niger. Another office is due to open in the DRC.
On the day of his interview with FORBES AFRICA, Sawegnon—the pioneer of Afro-centric advertising concepts in Côte d’Ivoire—sits in a plush office fitted with all the décor suited to an executive’s taste. He is ebullient and speaks passionately about advertising. He cuts an image of a CEO on top of his game.
This is a long way from 1999 when, at 28, he set up office determined to be a non-conformist in an industry dominated by Western views and opinions. He used the name  ‘voodoo’, derived from fetish cult worship in Benin, to provoke and draw attention.
“I have always been an inveterate entrepreneur. The idea to start my own company came when I was an employee at McCann Erickson. Prior to 1999, the advertising and marketing industry was dominated by Europeans. The name ‘voodoo’ was meant to give a clear African cultural reference point, ostensibly to position the company in the industry. We believe that advertising hinges on two things: technique and cultural bias. Success did not come on a platter,” explained Sawegnon.
Several European advertising firms approached him for partnerships. He turned them down because he believed an Afro-centric ad company should guard its “independence jealously”.
Voodoo has 300 employees across Africa. The thrust of the engine is a crop of enthusiastic creative and artistic employees who, under the leadership of Sawegnon, have powered the company to its current success. Sawegnon, a quintessential ‘local’ breed businessman, is giving the multinational advertising giants, such as McCann Erickson, a run for their money. Voodoo holds big accounts such as France Telecom (Orange)—which operates both fixed land lines and mobile telephones in Côte d’Ivoire; Western Union; Castel beer and Attijariwafa bank—a subsidiary of a Moroccan bank.
Work teams are structured to achieve optimal effectiveness. A dedicated team of marketers and creative staff is assigned to each account. Sawegnon said the team approach had helped them to deliver sterling performance to clients across the continent. Adding, “I believe in using raw talent that can be molded to produce the desired results. Talent can be cultivated when the environment is conducive.”
To demonstrate his determined commitment to Africa, Sawegnon recounted how he queried “made in America” ad campaigns that promoted a soft drink company showing white children playing in the snow at Christmas while the target public in Africa did not necessarily identify with the cultural ethos.
“I was told that it was appropriate to show such ads in Africa since experiencing snow was considered to be an aspiration of African youths; and that African people dream of visiting countries that experience snow in winter. Of course, I did not believe a word of that assertion.
“I told my colleagues at Voodoo that if a Chinese firm beat us to the game in Africa, it would be because we had lost our cultural finesse. Foreign companies might have a capital base to play with, but they couldn’t know Africa better than us,” he said.
Sawegnon considers his high work ethic as central to his rise from humble beginnings to a successful entrepreneur. He also received personal satisfaction from seeing his staff enjoy the fruits of their labor, saying, “I feel proud to watch my executives drive sleek cars and living the dream.”
He lives by the philosophy of passion and teamwork. The latter because he believes “a person working alone cannot succeed”. Sawegnon encourages young entrepreneurs to participate in creative ventures, However, he concedes that, “although you need teamwork, you equally require visionary leaders capable to chart the course for the team.”
Sawegnon views the sharing of experiences as one way to encourage entrepreneurs to forge ahead in hard times. He is convinced that there is space for Africa’s emergence. He said that youths needed to “show ambition” and aim to reposition the continent. He believes that there was still hope that talent could still be cultivated and that a new crop of corporate leaders could be developed.
Formidable success in advertising has not been a cause for Sawegnon to take things easy. In 2009, he diversified into publishing, with two magazines titles: Tycoon, a soft sell magazine, and Life magazine, which spotlights Ivorian celebrities.
“Tycoon features profiles of business leaders. It is a qualitative magazine which does not touch on the monetary aspects as this is deemed to be culturally unacceptable in our country. Highlighting values is closer to my heart. I am the publisher but I sometimes write the preface or editorials,” he explained.
Sawegnon also invested in an event management company that specializes in billboard advertising. As if that were not enough, he is poised for his next project: the launch of Côte d’Ivoire’s first television station, Life TV, once the Ivorian government issues audiovisual licenses later this year. The plan is ready for him to branch into private television programming and production in a country ripe for business following 12 years of political and civil strife.
The success he has achieved in business makes Sawegnon more keenly aware of the responsibility to give back.
“Those of us who have succeeded owe it to society to give back, especially towards empowering youth and helping to spur micro development initiatives in Africa. As entrepreneurs, we create wealth through job creation and add value to the microeconomic effort. I sincerely believe that if all of us entrepreneurs played our part, our efforts would snowball into a powerful force that would propel Africa forward.”
Sawegnon is a graduate of the prestigious École Supérieure de Commerce of Abidjan, where he majored in marketing. He joined the ranks of Young &amp; Rubicam in 1994 as product manager at Metallivoire Jal Afrique (roofing materials, roofing sheets and paints).
The battle for the soul of advertising in Côte d’Ivoire is not yet over, but Sawegnon has made his intentions clear—to conquer the country and the rest of Africa.

Category: Entrepreneurs

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