The French-speaking country, perched on the western tip of the continent, boasts one of the best developed tourist industries in Africa, with six major game parks and reserves. Senegal is home to nearly 13 million people and has remained stable even as neighbors Mali and Guinea and nearby Côte d’Ivoire suffered military coups and political upheavals.
But Senegal had its share of political violence in January 2012. Dakar burnt when the constitutional court allowed incumbent Abdoulaye Wade to seek a third term in office. The 85-year-old’s decision violated the country’s constitution; protestors set fire to large parts of the city. In the end, Wade was defeated by Macky Sall.
In June, on his first official visit to Sub-Saharan Africa, United States President, Barack Obama, visited Senegal to strengthen business relations and encourage investment. Obama’s visit recognized the United States’ commitment to democracy, in a region where dictators and civil strife are common.
A few weeks later, in July, rating agency, Standard and Poor’s (S&amp;P) revised Senegal’s sovereign credit rating outlook to stable from negative. S&amp;P believes the Senegalese government will succeed in cutting its fiscal deficit and carrying out reforms that will lead to faster economic growth. Moody’s Investor Services rated the West African nation B1, before its planned sale of $500 million of Eurobonds in 2011. Moody’s rating is equal to the B+ rating by S&amp;P, along with Nigeria, Kenya, Mozambique and Zimbabwe to name a few.
Senegal earns most of its foreign exchange from fish, groundnuts, phosphates, tourism and services. The phosphate industry has struggled for two years to secure capital and its reduced output has hurt GDP.
In 2007, Senegal signed agreements with foreign companies for new mining concessions for iron, zircon and gold. Various foreign investors have agreed to modernize Dakar’s port and create a new special economic zone.
Its agricultural sector is subject to rainfall and changes in world commodity prices. Following droughts that cut agricultural output in 2011, the West African nation’s economic growth is expected to accelerate this year. According to a Reuters poll, Senegal’s GDP should expand to 4.4%; the International Monetary Fund (IMF) hopes the completion of infrastructure projects, recovery in its agricultural sector and mining projects will boost it further.
The IMF also expects Senegal’s current account deficit to decline, but remains fearful it could go high because of imports associated with investments in the energy and mining sectors. In September, the IMF urged the Senegalese government to maintain its budget deficit target—expected to be reduced to less than 5% of GDP this year—in order to ensure fiscal sustainability.
Senegal relies heavily on donor assistance and foreign direct investment, which in 2000 represented around 32% of overall government spending. Under the IMF’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries debt relief program, Senegal will benefit from eradication of two-thirds of its bilateral, multilateral and private sector debt.
The country rose from the ashes through an economic reform program following its economy’s contraction by 2.1% in 1993. A year later, with the help of the international donor community, Senegal began a 50% devaluation of the country’s currency; government price controls and subsidies were steadily dismantled. It made for a real turnaround with a real GDP averaging over 5% annually over a decade. Annual inflation was pushed down to low single digits.
Following the country’s 2012 growth at an estimated 3.7%. The African Development Bank (AfDB) believes that growth will accelerate this year and is projected at 5.1% in 2014. AfDB says the growth projections are calculated in the hope that the government’s socio-economic program will be implemented along with the continuation of a toll motorway, the construction of Blaise Diagne International Airport, which is expected to handle around 10 million passengers by 2020, and other infrastructure projects.
Dakar, the melting pot capital city, is one of the busiest cruise ship ports in Africa and is home to around 1.5 million people. It’s impossible to miss the imposing Monument of the African Renaissance statue, when in the capital. As the tallest statue on the continent it stands at 49 meters on one of the twin hills, known as Collines des Mamelles.
Just off of Dakar’s coast is Ile de Gorée—the small island is a big tourist attraction because of its history as a slave trading port.
Dakar also lends its name to the Paris-Dakar rally, which was established after Thierry Sabine got lost on his motorbike in the Tenere Desert during the Abidjan-Nice Rally, in 1977. He came up with a new route starting in Europe through Algiers, in Algeria, crossing Agadez, in Niger, before finishing in Dakar. Most rallies took this route, until security threats in Mauritania forced organizers to cancel the 2008 rally. The following year it moved to South America and has stayed there.
As a member of the West African Economic and Monetary Union, Senegal is working towards greater regional integration with a unified external tariff and a more stable monetary policy.
The economy continues to suffer from an unreliable power supply, with widespread blackouts in 2006, 2007 and 2011, which led to public protests and unemployment. The government is working hard to solve the problem. High unemployment forces many to flee the country in search of jobs.
The country is one of the few on the continent to have issued a Eurobond, that is debt issued in a currency other than the that of the country or market in which it is issued. Eurobonds are attractive to investors because of their small par values and high liquidity. Senegal issued a $500 million 10-year Eurobond in May 2011 at a coupon of 8.75%, to raise funds to improve infrastructure.
In June, Reuters said the country is likely to issue another $500 million 10-year Eurobond this year at an interest rate of around 6%. The IMF said the bond would help the country close its financing gap and reduce its reliance on costly short-term financing from the regional market.

Ashes To Eurobond

Four years ago, Anne Githuku-Shongwe watched her teenage son play a video game called Civilization. The game challenged him to rebuild civilizations and imagine different scenarios. In his mind, he became King Mansa Musa, the ancient leader of the Malian Empire. As he excitedly explained what he was doing, his mother got an idea.
“It all came together at that minute through observing my son. It was a learning by doing approach, and I saw how powerful the visual and interaction process was,” she says.
Even before she saw her son playing the game, Githuku-Shongwe wanted to create a platform that would shape the mindset of young Africans, by equipping them with life skills.
“Whenever, I saw young boys and girls on the streets in Senegal, Rwanda or Kenya, I would ask myself, ‘How can you teach them if they can’t use the traditional learning routes?’ Also, conversations with my children on their role models like Hannah Montana, Bill Gates or Beyoncé had me worried that the youth weren’t being exposed to positive African media content. I wanted to create a sort of virtual learning academy that could hold their attention span. Gaming using African content was the answer.”
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This saw the end of her 15-year career with the United Nations, as an advisor on Africa’s development, and she began forging ahead as an entrepreneur.
“A colleague made a $1,000 bet with me that I would be back in six months. He gave me big brother advice by using examples of people who had left cushy jobs at the UN and returned shortly,” she says.
Determined to have the last laugh, she began studying games and managed to get a grant from the Kellogg Foundation for research. Combined with her savings, she was ready to build her social enterprise.
“I knew that to reach the masses in an affordable way, we had to use mobile phones, as Africa has the highest penetration rate in the world, especially among the youth. The games are free for the end user, with partners such as Ford Foundation, UN Women, Nokia and Vodafone paying for the costs,” says Githuku-Shongwe.
Today, Afroes—a play on the words ‘African’ and ‘heroes’—creates African mobile and online video games and applications for fun interactive learning. Afroes has built a series of mobile games with more than 450,000 players in South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana and further afield in India, Indonesia, Guyana and the Caribbean.
Her first game, Champs Chase, was developed in partnership with the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund during the 2010 FIFA World Cup—to extend the Champions for Children campaign that protects children from abuse. The players took on the role of a character that had to save other children from harmful situations and predators.
Moraba is another award-winning mobile game that addresses difficult questions of gender-based violence and challenges players to contemplate their beliefs about sexual relations and sexual violence. The most recent release Haki: Chaguo Ni Lako, meaning Justice: the choice is yours, in Swahili, was designed to inform and empower the Kenyan youth to make wise choices when they went to the polls in March.
“We have made great strides, won several awards with the five games and have a full-time team of nine based in Kenya and South Africa, but it has been tough and we have many more milestones to achieve. Our biggest challenge is not only creating awareness on the power of ‘gamification’, but having our clients understand the cost of technology,” says Githuku-Shongwe.
She gets numerous requests from organizations to create games, but once the quote is received, many are surprised. And they still have to build the player-base through marketing and promotion.
“In the digital marketing world, it is a tough sell, but we know that you can push stronger engagement and brand loyalty through a ‘gamified’ product,” she says.
On every project, she works with a contracted team of 15 to 20 called ‘Mobiv8tors’, whose responsibilities are data collection, distribution, promotion and getting feedback from players.
Githuku-Shongwe is adamant that Afroes isn’t a short-term project but a marathon.
“When I meet a lot of techpreneurs in Africa, I sense that they are in a hurry for quick success to get the Facebook or Google effect. They come up with one product—it fizzles out and then move to grab onto the next one. We need to create digital solutions for the future of Africa by thinking ahead strategically. This requires a huge long-term investment and a motivation that’s bigger than quick success.”
Her focus is to build a learning academy that is gamified so as to push relevant content and introduce organizational learning for corporates, rather than be involved in game campaigns.
The question that remains is whether she collected on her $1,000 bet.
“I approached my former colleague 18 months after I began. He was shocked that I was still in the game and offered to take me out for lunch. It wasn’t a $1,000 lunch but I have proved I am here to stay.”

The Woman Who Gambled On Gaming

In his heavy French accent, a six-foot-tall businessman addresses a group of entrepreneurs.
“Do your ideas have conviction? Are they feasible? Eighty to ninety percent of ideas usually aren’t. You need to transform your vision and ideas into conviction for yourself then you can convince customers, financiers and the world,” he says.
It seems like the ordinary talk given by a seasoned executive to young ducklings in the world of entrepreneurship, but encountering Charles Sirois on this warm Nairobi evening is no ordinary experience. With his boisterous personality, this 58-year-old Canadian businessman, best known in the global telecom industry, is on a mission to grow entrepreneurs across the developing world. His first footprints across the African continent were through the Enablis Network, which he founded in 2004.
“I am fascinated by entrepreneurship and technology. Technology without an entrepreneur goes nowhere because it’s just a field of dreams. I have seen so many technologies that sit on the shelves because no entrepreneur ran with them to make them a reality. Entrepreneurs are able to transform an idea, a concept, and technology to an enterprise thereby creating a tremendous amount of wealth,” he says.
Sirois has indeed created wealth he began a paging business, in 1984, in a small, remote town in North Canada with eight employees and $150,000 in revenue annually. By 2001, his business, Teleglobe, had 16,000 employees in 52 countries.
Conviction in his ideas seems to drive his business. In 1990, Sirois had the idea that cellular would be the best communication network in emerging countries because building poles and hoisting cables would be difficult.
“I was sure they would go straight to wireless systems but everyone said I was crazy. As a result, I was the first foreigner to build telecom systems in China, Brazil, India, Czech Republic, Romania and several others. This was before Vodafone’s exploits. Again, I was the first person to adopt the GSM standard for mobile phones in North America, when everyone was on CDMA and quickly got involved in the development of satellites and undersea cables,” he says.
He made a famous $2 billion mistake and when FORBES AFRICA asks him whether this was one of conviction too, he laughs.
“I was so convinced of that idea that I didn’t listen to people around me. I believe in conviction but at times, one needs to take a break. I was wrong and it was painful,” he says.
The mistake was that he bought a company called Excel that had a sales force of one million people. He was interested in the retail business and thought it would be good to use an already existing multilevel marketing force to sell internet services globally.
“The operational risk was too high and I was slow to react. I made the mistake of not understanding that a concept can be right but complex. Managing one million sales people daily is complex. The pack of cards crumbled and we had to do a $2 billion write down. As the largest shareholder of Teleglobe, my balance sheet took a hit, coupled with the internet burst, even though we managed to sell off Teleglobe, including Excel, for $10 billion,” he says.
In 2003, having sold all his telecom businesses, he created a family equity corporation, Telesystems, that backs technology entrepreneurs.
“I firmly believe in technology and entrepreneurship so we have minority and major stakes in 20 enterprises. We hope that many of them will become global enterprises,” he says.
His convictions once again led him to present the idea of Enablis at the 2002 G8 Summit, in Canada. His task had been to find a new way to alleviate poverty in emerging countries. His idea was to have an organization that identifies and develops people with the entrepreneurship drive to increase their contributions. He says that job creation through entrepreneurs rather than governments is the best solution.
“Create a person whose nature is to create jobs first for themselves then for others; then develop the job creator and sustainable wealth comes about,” he says.
The G8 countries supported his theory and because he couldn’t let the idea sit on the shelf, he ran with it.
“I wanted money to build a prototype but the Canadian government said if they gave me money, I had to start in Africa. In 2004, I choose the easiest place, South Africa, and the easiest city, Cape Town. It doesn’t quite reflect the real cities of Africa but I had to start somewhere with the least resistance.”
He says that the Enablis Network develops better entrepreneurs through three pillars of identication, which is why they hold business plan competitions. Enablis develops entrepreneurs through a special recipe of networking, sharing experiences amongst peers, and capacity building through workshops, coaches and mentors. It also assists them with finance by providing endorsements and guarantees to banks so the entrepreneurs can secure loans.
“I strongly believe that a grant should never be given to an entrepreneur. They should build their business in the real world and this doesn’t include getting free money. It’s simply not how you develop a strong entrepreneur. It’s like developing an athlete—you need serious training, not a headache today or skipping training tomorrow. Provide capital by providing access,” he says.
The formula seems to be working as Enablis has grown from the five members in Cape Town to 2,600 in Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, Mozambique, Ghana and, just recently, Argentina.
“My goal now is to develop Enablis across South America, to create one family of entrepreneurs, who can grow and help each other by growing better enterprises thus creating wealth. I don’t get financial rewards from this but giving back my time feels good and exciting. Each time I make a trip through the continent, I get so energized sharing ideas and experiences. They don’t have to make the same mistakes I did and can grow faster,” he says.
Sirois says that entrepreneurship is about shared experiences. He says that it saves a lot of time in business if people simply share the solutions they have found to problems. He notes that Enablis has developed mentors from Canada, who use email and Skype once a month to exchange ideas and share with African entrepreneurs.
“African start-ups face the same challenges to begin as all others in the world with one exception—their access to resources is more difficult. Africans practice extreme entrepreneurship due to the current environment, but they are succeeding. Yes, there is war, poverty, disease but there are also good politicians, talented entrepreneurs and vast opportunities,” he says.
“If I could turn back the clock to do it all over again, I would begin in Africa as an entrepreneur.”

The Entrepreneur Coach, Who Lost $2 Billion

It’s one of those hot, cloudless days that make Cape Town residents smile inwardly at the good fortune that found them living in this particular corner of South Africa. About an hour outside Cape Town lies Stellenbosch, home to some of the country’s oldest vineyards, fruit farms and picturesque Dutch gable houses. Somewhere deep in the heart of this valley, there is a faint buzzing from warehouses filled with millions of flies, hatching, reproducing and dying. Down the corridor from the flies lie giant cement troughs filled with larvae, writhing and eating their way through rotten food, unaware that death is nigh. These larvae are destined to be processed into chicken and fish feed. For chickens diet of dried is lunch.
The man behind all of this at AgriProtein Technologies is Jason Drew. He is hoping to penetrate the South African agricultural processing market.
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“Flies feed on the blood from animal slaughterhouses, the fly larvae is in turn eaten by the chickens farmed for human consumption. Since the industrial revolution, chickens have not been eating fly larvae. In order to make the process sustainable, you have to close the loop,” says Drew.
The loop is focused on nutrient recycling, and Drew argues that it will become commonplace in years to come.
“If humanity is to survive without the starvation that has marked human history, until the last 50 years, it will most likely be a necessity. As we move out of the era of the Industrial Revolution and into the Sustainability Revolution, capitalists and environmentalists will become natural bedfellows, not the adversaries they once were in the old world order,” says Drew.
He is an environmental warrior incarnate. In his previous life, he led one of South Africa’s biggest online service outsourcing companies, Dialogue Group Holdings, to an initial public offering on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and then guided the company around the various perils of the country’s second online boom. Drew served as CEO of the company and presided over its growth to 3,500 staff members and into five countries in Southern Africa. In 2008, a 40-year-old Drew suffered two heart attacks. He ignored the first, but the second made him pay attention.
“My doctor told me ‘You may not believe in stress, but your body does.’ We had owned our farm in the Tulbagh Valley for many years. After my second heart attack, my wife insisted I leave the rat race and we move down there permanently,” he says.
Drew and his wife spent the next three years traveling around Asia, South America, Australia and the Middle East and investigated various ecological principles in agricultural methods. While in Saudi Arabia, he spent time researching the feeding and breeding of cattle in agriculture cooperatives and became fascinated by the flies circling the pools of blood in the animals’ slaughterhouses. The investigation led him closer to home to a chicken farm in the Western Cape.
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“I met the slaughterhouse owner and followed the process through to the lake of blood behind the shed, which was surrounded by millions of flies. It occurred to me that it takes as much water, land and fuel to produce the chicken that we throw away as it does to produce the bits we eat. And we throw away a lot.”
Drew learnt that the chicken farmer had been involved in some field work done by Elsje Pieterse, head of monogastric nutrition in the department of animal science at Stellenbosch University, who was investigating the recycling of animal waste by-products using flies.
“And so began my love affair with flies,” says Drew.
Drew was joined by his brother, David, and the pair joined forces with local entomologists, food nutritionists and the research unit at Stellenbosch University, an endeavor which would result in the establishment of AgriProtein Technologies.
The company is currently in the process of completing production trials and testing system elements, which are intended as input into computer-aided design for full-scale factory producing chicken and fish feed from s fly larvae. The factory will be based in the Western Cape and is due to be commissioned during the third quarter of this year. It is expected to be completed by the end of 2013 at an estimated cost of $6 million. Fifty percent of this capital will come from shareholders at AgriProtein Technologies, while the remainder will be sourced from new ones.
“We are hoping that once our model is proved bankable, we will be able to go into a debt-equity combination. This is a straight forward commercial activity, but one that also looks to repair damage done to the environment,” Drew says.
The dichotomy of capitalism and environmentalism as well as the near-hero status of the humble housefly were first explored by Drew in his 2011 book The Protein Crunch (co-written by David Lorimer). The theme was followed by The Story of the Fly and How it Could Save the World (co-written by Justine Joseph) in 2012. In his latest book, Drew theorizes that the fly could join the ranks of fish, pigs, chickens, sheep and cows as the sixth and most numerously industrially-farmed animal in the world. The Lord of the Flies could end up king.

The Lord Of The Flies

In just 18 months, a few modest farms on the plains of the Eastern Cape, South Africa will transform into the third largest wind farm in sub-Saharan Africa. The Dorper Wind Farm will produce 100 megawatts (MW) of energy a year.
For the owners of Rainmaker Energy Projects, it’s hard to imagine what 40 towering wind turbines will look like, but Luke Callcott-Stevens and Gavin James are spending R2.5 billion ($274 million) to find out.
“You build a wind farm in 18 months… after four or five years of hard work,” says Callcott-Stevens.
It was New Year in 2009 when James and Callcott-Stevens—friends since university—decided that they were tired of their jobs and wanted to make it on their own.
At the time Callcott-Stevens was looking for wind farm sites for Australian outfit Macquarie Capital, and James was a lawyer. Shortly after—with a third partner in tow, former Macquarie engineer, Doug Jenman—Rainmaker breezed into the market with government tenders in mind.
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That year, the South African government declared its intentions to buy renewable energy at favorable tariffs through its Renewable Energy Feed-In Tariff (REFIT) program. The program gazetted wind energy, promising R1.24 ($0.14) per kilowatt-hour (kWh).
“When we started this out, we couldn’t tell anyone what we were doing and who we were. We were all competing for sites, if you want to go into wind farms now you would have to go and buy it from someone else. But at that point in time we were in frontier country,” says Callcott-Stevens.
The rush to the wild wind of the west had begun with the force of a Californian gold rush. Many companies were looking for coastal sites near Cape Town in the Western Cape and Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, where wind is strong. Rainmaker went its own way inland into the Eastern Cape.
“I racked up 100,000kms driving in a year, just looking for different sites but we couldn’t find another that was as ideal as Dorper,” Callcott-Stevens says.
The site has 10,000 hectares of flat grassland on top of an escarpment flanked by a mountain range, which channels wind to Dorper.
“The whole escarpment is windy, but this is a particularly windy part of that windy escarpment because of this funnel,” he says.
Along with strong wind—which, coincidentally, is at its strongest in winter, when South Africa demands most of its electricity—a wind farm needs to be close to a distribution line to connect to the national grid, South Africa’s national power generator Eskom.
Unlike other companies, Rainmaker is in the unique position that if it wins more phase bids it does not have to look for new sites. With its space, Dorper Wind Farm simply has to construct more 125-meter-high turbines. It has the planning permission to put enough turbines to generate 560MW
Rainmaker has permission to use a 400kV transmission line, which could revive the Canadian Alcan smelter, in Port Elizabeth, which was abandoned because of the country’s power crisis in 2008.
This means that they have the capacity to feed over 1,000MW of energy into the grid.
All seemed lovely in the wind farm industry. In two years, the company struck a deal with an equity partner, Sumitomo Corporation and secured huge bank loans. The Japanese company, says Callcott-Stevens, is a good partner since it helped build one of the largest onshore wind farms in the world: Shepherd’s Flat Wind Farm in Oregon, in the States.
Then in February 2011, disaster struck when the government scrapped REFIT. It was declared an unfair and uncompetitive tender process. This meant a lot of people who had procured loans and deals with renewable energy companies were left high and dry. Government officials mooted a new tariff of 99c/kWh ($0.11/kWh), which meant for many the cost of building farms was just not feasible.
There was a lull for nine months. Rainmaker carried on acquiring loans and negotiating deals with wind turbine companies. Other companies were throwing in their towel at this point.
“We were committed, we were in, we had put our lives on the line,” says Callcott-Stevens.
In June 2011, the wind picked up. The South African Department of Energy (DoE) announced that R47 billion ($5,17 billion) would be thrown into the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Programme (REIPPP). The six-phase program picked up where REFIT left off. The government announced it was starting a new bidding process for private business investors to apply for tenders. Investors could procure spots to sell electricity back to the government, not at one set rate, but at a bid price of lower than 115c/kWh ($0.13/kWh).
Eight wind energy projects were chosen, Dorper Wind Farm was one of them. After 2015, REIPPP aims to provide 3,625MW of renewable, clean energy for the country. The largest coal plants in South Africa, like the under construction Medupi coal plant in Limpopo, will generate 4,800MW.
“The next round, we could see a further R7 billion ($700 million) in development and going forward you could theoretically have R30 billion ($3,3 billion) going into infrastructure development in this area in the coming future,” says Callcott-Stevens.
Renewable energy could be a game changer. Ninety seven percent of South Africa’s electricity grid, which has capacity to provide 43,000MW, relies on coal. Even then, it is struggling. Eskom has warned that with overdue maintenance this will be at 33,000MW. This winter could see rolling blackouts; during peak demand periods South Africans can use up to 38,000MW.
A coal plant is able to produce 40 times the amount of energy a wind farm can but new coal power plants will produce power at a higher cost than wind, particularly in South Africa.
According to Ayanda Nakedi, Eskom’s general manager in Renewable Energy, the cost of the rollling blackouts of 2008 was R75/kWh ($8/kWh). This is 84 times the cost of wind power today.
But people should be cautious with wind energy, especially when it comes to solving blackouts, according to Chris Yelland, director of EE Publishers.
“Let us just say that you build a 100MW wind farm. So when the wind is blowing flat out, the wind is going to generate its peak of 100MW&#8230;. The reality is it very often generates at an average of 20 to 25 percent. Although it may generate on average 25MW, for a considerable amount of time it’s producing below 25MW. And this makes wind a big problem, so when you may want the power, you may not get it, and when you don’t want the power, you might get it,” Yelland says.
Currently, South Africa lies near the bottom of the global wind power league. In three years according to Nakedi, it will have climbed to fifteenth. A large slice of this could come from the windswept optimists of Dorper Farm.
It may look easy but risk stalks a wind farm. Bids are not guaranteed.
“For every guy constructing a wind farm there are 20 guys who spent a lot of money, who are nowhere, who don’t have a project,” says Callcott-Stevens.
“We could be hit by a strike onsite, or maybe our turbines could sink in the sea, or we miss our dates when we have to be connected to the grid by, and we stand to lose a lot of money. That could significantly affect our returns over the long-term. There have been projects, in America, where blades have cracked on a wind farm. But these risks get less and less once you have been awarded status under the REIPPP up until the point when you have finished construction,” says Callcott-Stevens.
Further costly delays stem from the administration of REIPPP.  According to Yelland, the DoE needs to be cautious when signing 20-year long contracts under the REIPPP.
“Look at long-term supply contracts, like Eskom with BHP Billiton. It now turns out 10 years down the line that Eskom is locked into selling energy that they now regret. If we buy into these energies on a long-term basis the same could happen,” he says.
So far all phase bids have been delayed at sometime or other. But Callcott-Stevens says that the system has been merely ironing out its wrinkles.
“There have been problems and there are still problems but if you look at where we are coming from, South Africa was a totally regulated power market. It takes a long time to deregulate a market. They did this, relatively quickly; we signed our PPAs [Power Purchase Agreements] last November. Effectively power was deregulated in South Africa,” says Callcott-Stevens.
So, if you want to be a wind farmer, all you need is R2.5 billion ($278 million), an open desolate plain to put your mills on, a few years of patience to win over your investors and a bit of luck, from then on, it’s a breeze.

Reaping The Wild WInd of The West

Silas Zimu, one of the key players in South Africa’s fast-expanding renewable energy sector, says the seminal climate change documentary by Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, was the trigger for his new focus, the development of green energy in Africa.
Zimu, 46, took up the position of chief executive officer of the South African unit of Indian wind power company, Suzlon Energy in 2010, after years working for power utilities that relied almost entirely on coal.
“It changed my outlook so much I started searching for green solutions,” he says.
After running City Power Johannesburg, a parastatal electricity distribution company, for three years, Zimu came to Suzlon with 19 years’ of experience in South Africa’s power industry, including senior roles at the country’s power monopoly, Eskom.
He has now played a part in securing two of the government’s wind power contracts, which will involve billions of rands of investments.
Under his stewardship, the group, one of the world’s leading wind turbine makers, has already started building 66 wind turbines near Cookhouse in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. When the units are completed by 2016 it intends to sell power through Eskom’s national grid by 2016. It is the biggest renewable tender awarded in the first round of government tenders.
Suzlon will operate and maintain the turbines energy project selected during round one of the government’s Department of Energy’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme (REIPPP). The awarding of tenders through the program has been a long time coming, with the policy amended at least once, leaving potential investors somewhat confused for a time.
The Cookhouse Wind Farm is being developed in partnership with African Clean Energy Developments (ACED), described as a South African-based renewable energy project developer, owned jointly by Old Mutual-owned African Infrastructure Investment Managers AFPOC Limited.
Fulfilling government’s desire that South Africa, in terms of job creation and the local communities, benefits from the renewable tenders, the Cookhouse Wind Farm Community Trust holds 25% equity in the project. It is anticipated that the local communities of Cookhouse, Bedford and Somerset East will be beneficiaries of the trust.
“The strategy is to make Suzlon a company that embraces empowerment in South Africa, to manufacture in the country and have offices here. We have a locally-appointed team. We know the playing field and know what we should be aiming for, while understanding government’s renewable framework. The last few years have been tough, but this is the risk one had to take,” says Zimu.
This partnership was part of the awarding of the first government tender. Under the REIPPP, government has said it wants 1,850 megwatts (MW) to be provided by a variety of renewable power sources annualy; this includes wind, solar and power generated from biomass. It hopes to have this much on line by 2021, adding to the country’s current installed capacity of about 40,000 MW.
When Suzlon SA won its first tender, Zimu says friends and family threw a surprise party for him, but he says,
“I would like to celebrate when the first megawatt is generated”.
Zimu, who has a Master’s in engineering, has a 20% stake in Suzlon’s South African unit. It is part of Suzlon Energy, which is the world’s fifth biggest vertically integrated wind turbine maker. He sits on the executive committee of the global group, which is based in Pune, India.
The first project will import the turbines and steel towers to assemble the windmills but Suzlon energy SA is planning to form an operations and maintenance company that will be South African-based.
The intention is to build the steel towers in South Africa for a second project. Zimu says the group has already been awarded a second contract. It will be announced in the next few months.
“We are working towards financial close on that.”
South Africa plans three rounds of bidding for renewable energy projects in the second round Suzlon again secured the biggest allocation in terms of power it will produce. The two projects combined, when up and running, will make Suzlon the second biggest wind turbine company in the country.
South Africa’s desire to build up its green energy sector to reduce its reliance on coal, head off potential power shortages, and meet ambitious targets for slashing greenhouse gas emissions is attracting assistance from other countries. Zimu expects companies like Suzlon to benefit.
In March, Denmark said it would work with the South African government towards its meeting of its renewable goals. The Danish government said in a statement that before the transition from coal to wind energy can take place, wind resources must be mapped and the power grid regulated to allow wind energy to be exploited to the fullest possible extent.
“If we can assist a country like South Africa to convert to more renewable, energy efficient power sources, the climate as a whole will benefit. In 2009, South Africa’s carbon dioxide emissions constituted half of Africa’s total emissions,” says Martin Lidegaard, the Danish minister for climate, energy and building.
Currently South Africa boasts some of the world’s biggest coal-fired power plants and generates some energy from nuclear, natural gas and hydropower sources. While crippling power outages in 2008 forced Eskom to press ahead with two major coal projects, the country’s aim is to spread its power generation across a number of technologies to take advantage of the nation’s abundant wind and solar power potential. Ambitious solar, wave power, hydro and biomass initiatives are also being considered.
Zimu says that Eskom has the capacity to make all the grid connections and the Danish government may help government develop a policy on grid codes.
Zimu is leading Suzlon’s charge into other African countries.
“We have been awarded work in Mauritius and are interested in tenders in Kenya and Namibia,” he says.
It also presented submissions for work in Madagascar and has been invited to visit interested parties in Nigeria, Angola and Ghana.
“I think South Africa is showing other African states the way,” says Zimu.
Even so, other African countries such as Morocco and Kenya are developing ambitious projects of their own. In Kenya the $800 million Lake Turkana Wind Power project is billed as the continent’s biggest and is expected to generate 300MW of electricity.
However, GDF Suez of French and Moroccan company Nareva Holding plan to build a plant of the same size in the desert region of the North African country. Morocco is planning to have 2,000MW of installed wind power by 2020. Lesotho, the mountainous country landlocked by in South Africa, has its own ambitious.
On whether the costs of wind power compare favorably to those of other renewables, Zimu pointed out that solar is more expensive and says wind energy can compete with projects powered by biofuels.
“My vision is to go green, generate green energy [and] create green jobs”.

Money  In The Wind

The future of architecture is evolving before my eyes on the laptop of Luca Frattari. In a series of keystrokes the architectural engineering Ph.D., now a business development manager at software firm Altair, thins out the blocky outer shell of a new skyscraper into a willowy exoskeleton that would stand out even among the gaudier designs in the Dubai skyline. Its irregular lattice leaves room for giant, undulating pools of window glass. Yet when he runs a wind-flow analysis on the simulation, the building’s organic form wicks away stiff breezes far more efficiently than a rectilinear structure. And the reduction in outer material gives the building an excellent chance of going up faster and for less money.
More things should look bony. Millions of years of evolution have honed the skeleton into the perfect shape for survival. Our hollow, long bones are thick and strong where needed, and light and flexible where possible. Their excesses were purged long ago.
Adapting nature’s forms to human problems, a trend called biomimicry, is an idea that has taken root at engineering-intensive firms such as Ford, General Motors, Boeing and Airbus, all of them hungry buyers of technology to improve the shapes of the machines and structures they build. The biggest computer-aided engineering software firms, Ansys, Dassault Systèmes and LMS International, a Siemens subsidiary, have enjoyed double-digit revenue growth in recent years as large customers snap up their pricey suites of simulation and material analysis software. Unseen by drivers and frequent fliers, the straight angles and solid forms under the skins of autos and airliners have been replaced over the past several years by funky-looking ribs that are lighter and stronger than the original. For each hundred pounds trimmed off a car, drivers could save about 1% to 2% on fuel economy, which could add up to billions of dollars nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Even shaving 1 gram off a water bottle would eliminate 160 million pounds of material per year, assuming consumption of 200 million bottles per day, says Thierry Marchal, Ansys’ director of industry marketing for consumer goods.
Altair of Troy, Mich. has a lead over its rivals in a particularly interesting field called topology optimization, according to research firm CIMdata. Altair’s OptiStruct software simulates on metal and carbon-fiber structures the same trial-and-error forces that have shaped bone growth over millennia—but repeats them at semiconductor speed until an engineer arrives at a design that meets the need without any excess material. The process can lead to unique and sometimes nonintuitive shapes that are often 20% to 30% lighter than traditionally formed structures.
The privately held company, cofounded by CEO James Scapa, a Ford veteran, and two others in 1985, got half of its estimated 2012 revenue of $240 million (up 13% from 2011) from the auto industry but is growing 30% year over year in aerospace and electronics, three times the growth of its steady auto business. Airbus used Altair software to shed a thousand pounds off the A380 by redesigning 13 wing ribs on each side of the plane. Altair now works with more than 3,000 clients, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, NASA and the Department of Defense, but it is rapidly spreading the gospel of evolutionary perfection to a wider audience in consumer products and infrastructure and among commercial architects.
In October Altair released what it says is the first simulation and analysis software designed to be easily used by the engineering masses. Called solidThinking Inspire, it will be bundled into Altair’s flagship software package ($20,000 on average) or sold separately for $8,000. Early adopters of Inspire include auto supplier Key Safety Systems and the Pratt Institute in New York. Architects in the U.S. and Europe are planning high-rises to be unveiled later this year in Asia that will look like descendants of the biomorphic forms created by Antoni Gaudi and Frei Otto.
Altair got its inspiration for bone-based software 20 years ago when Scapa and his chief technology officer, Jim Brancheau, found Jeff Brennan in a lab at the University of Michigan. Brennan was a biomechanical engineer studying how humans bones grow; Scapa brought Brennan in to oversee what would become OptiStruct. Brennan spent the early 1990s schlepping a computer from one carmaker to another, struggling to get analytical engineers to accept his OptiStruct software’s counterintuitive visual results. After OptiStruct became part of Altair’s bigger HyperWorks software suite and no longer needed individual salesmen, Brennan eventually took over as CMO. “We brought Jeff in, and for years and years the competition couldn’t see why we did it—they said there was no market,” Scapa says. “Now they are trying to catch up.”
Altair says it has grown at a 14% compounded annual rate since 2004 but has no plans to go public. It is majority owned by its three founders and last raised money eight years ago selling an undisclosed minority stake to General Atlantic for $30 million. Scapa aims to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2020, a stretch goal that largely depends on how much Inspire broadens the user base.
Even if Altair fails to hit the billion-dollar goal, it will be an aesthetic victory for the rest of us as more buildings, cars, trains and gadgets take on the swooping curves beloved by nature.

The Evolution of Everyday Things

It is 117 years since the first motor car came to Johannesburg, South Africa. According to historian Anna Smith’s book Johannesburg Firsts it was a Benz Voiturette that was driven around before a large crowd at the Wanderers track in Johannesburg. It was described as the “rage and topic of all Europe” and a noiseless carriage. Voiturette is the French word for a small car, and this first vehicle to arrive in Johannesburg struggled to make walking pace with its wheezing engine.
Now, years later, the truly ‘noiseless’ carriages are on their way to South Africa. They will come in the shape of an electric car called LEAF, which is an acronym for Leading, Environmentally-friendly, Affordable, Family car. However, one of the concerns about electric cars is that, because they tend to be so noiseless, unwary pedestrians do not hear them coming when crossing roads.
Like the wheezing Voiturette, this car is also a “rage and topic” in other parts of the world. It came onto the market in Japan and the United States in 2010 and the following year in Canada and Europe, where it has won the Car of the Year award. In February its global sales topped 50,000.
The LEAF is made by Nissan and will start selling in South Africa later this year. It is a fully electric five-door hatchback with a battery range said to be 175km. Production has begun in North America and Europe, after the car was initially only produced in Japan, and there are two more models in the pipeline.
Nissan says the improvements in the new models include an extended driving range, greater recyclability, more interior space, better charging performance, more equipment and, of course, a greater choice. Subtle styling changes to the nose of the car have improved its already impressive aerodynamic efficiency.
Government, business and conservationists are hopeful that it will start a trend away from South Africa’s carbon-belching road traffic towards a greener system. It is aimed also at reducing the country’s heavy reliance on imported and ever-more expensive oil.
If it takes off, the car could also see the construction of intermittent ‘filling stations’ with solar-power backup along the highways where drivers could recharge their cars. The idea is to make the least possible use of the coal-fired power grid, thereby further reducing reliance on climate-changing energy.
Nissan South Africa is working closely with the government to prepare the infrastructure, most notably the recharging network. To initiate the joint project, the company has given the Department of Environmental Affairs four of the cars to test over three years.
The use of solar power to recharge the cars is part of the test. At the project’s launch in February, the department’s minister, Edna Molewa, said a 15 kilowatt solar tracking device has been installed at Environmental Affairs’ new green building, which is still under construction. She said the installation would produce enough electricity to charge the cars and to feed excess electricity into the power grid as a way of offsetting the carbon footprint of the building’s construction.
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“Any carbon footprint of the vehicle is thus neutralized through the use of free solar energy generated by the tracker. Where charging is required overnight this is offset by the excess energy that the trackers produce during the day. The amount of electricity utilized for charging and running of the vehicle is carefully monitored and logged and is offset against the amount of electricity generated by the solar tracker.”
“It is envisaged that in future, these tracking devices will be installed on the major commuter routes for the direct charging of vehicles in real time. An e-transport location analysis will be conducted in partnership with other government agencies to inform the roll-out of the solar e-cars installation package at key transportation and commuter hubs countrywide, such as key government precincts, Gautrain stations, O.R. Tambo International Airport, key commercial centers and business districts,” she says Molewa.
The move towards greener vehicles is seen also to present opportunities for making the automotive and related industries greener. South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry has already gazetted the Electric Vehicle Industry Strategy, which is meant to guide investment into car manufacturing.
Other partners in the project are the Departments of Transport, Energy, and Science and Technology, South African Revenue Services, Eskom (the electricity supply commission), municipalities and other car manufacturers and suppliers.
Molewa said in her speech at the launch of the LEAF project that transition in the design and production of alternative propulsion systems should be aimed at maintaining and increasing South Africa’s global market share in the automotive sector, while meeting its commitment to decrease its carbon footprint.
South Africa is listed as the 18th largest vehicle manufacturer in the world, though in Africa it is by far the biggest, accounting for 80% of the continent’s output. The industry contributes around 6% to the gross domestic product and employs more than 230,000 people in manufacturing, distribution and sales.
For Molewa, the first step towards capturing part of the green-car market is for South Africa to develop and grow the market domestically. Hopes are pinned on such development to provide jobs. Molewa even speaks of the transition to a low-carbon and sustainable economy as a likely new engine of development.
But with the transportation sector said to be globally responsible for 30% of carbon emissions, and with the number of vehicles on the world’s roads edging towards one billion, a prime objective remains to reduce the amount of climate-changing gas coming from exhaust pipes. The LEAF project is a part of this objective.

Pull Over And Fill Your Tank  With Sunshine

Daniel Guasco and Wayne Gosling left South Africa for the United Kingdom, but only met when they both returned to South Africa to do an MBA at the University of Cape Town. These two entrepreneurs launched South African group buying website Twangoo, which was purchased 125 days after it opened, by the global leader in the industry, Groupon.
The name Twangoo comes from a Chinese term Tuangou, which means ‘team buying’. The story goes that for years in China, several people would approach a vendor as a group to get discounts. This strategy has been recreated online and is a booming business, according to tech website webgeekly.com: “Websites like Groupon are making a killing by taking small percentages off each offer purchased.” Groupon is a portmanteau derived from ‘group’ and ‘coupon’.
Guasco and Gosling first got the idea after attending a launch at the Silicon Cape Initiative, in Cape Town. The event is based on Silicon Valley in California, where many global IT companies were born.
“At the launch, I saw a number of very successful online tech entrepreneurs and a lot of talk about what’s happening online. And I couldn’t write a word of code [and was] not tech-oriented in any way. Both our backgrounds are entrepreneurial [… ] In 2009, Groupon was just starting to come onto the radar and really becoming big in the States. And then on January 3, the evaluation of Groupon came out with a billion US dollars […] We then went on to form an alliance with some other MBA guys and formed a partnership with them to start up what was then known as Twangoo here in SA,” says Gosling.
With R10,000 ($1,130) between them, they launched Twangoo in 2010 and within 125 days they were bought out by Groupon for an undisclosed amount.
“The cool thing about Twangoo [and] Dan and I is that we’ve never met the guys that bought the website. We never met the guy that helped finance us. We only met afterwards, once we’d sold the business […] The developer is actually Russian. It shows it can be done if you put your mind to it,” says Gosling.
Groupon was launched in 2008 by Andrew Mason, a final-year university student, who had caught the eye of entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky. He recognized Mason’s potential, after the student created a social initiatives platform, which evolved into Groupon.
“Ironically, when we started Groupon, we were thinking of it as this sort of discount site that will be the business model, the tail that wags the dog. But we hear from so many of our users how great it’s been for their lives, that it’s helping them get out of the house or the city and really enjoy their lives […],” Mason had said in an interview with ChicagoBusiness.com.
However, despite being CEO for four and a half years, Mason was fired in February, after the company had a number of disappointing quarterly earnings. The New York Times reported that Groupon was valued at $16.5 billion, when it went public in late 2011. By February, its value had dropped to $2.97 billion. Many shared the sentiment that Mason’s dismissal was long overdue.
On a global scale, however, Groupon is expanding—it has websites in 49 countries, but only one in Africa for the time being.
“It’s part of the bigger Groupon picture […] I think South Africa is still such a huge opportunity. I think the other challenge, as well, is mobile. We’ve launched quite a big initiative in South Africa around mobile,” says Guasco.
It hasn’t been a smooth ride starting an online-based business in a country such as South Africa, which, according to the World Bank, has 6.2 million internet users—12% of the population.
“Either the internet connection doesn’t work at home; it’s obviously very costly so it’s limited us to some degree, even though it’s taken off really well in this country. It’s still a challenge given that you need a smartphone type-enabled phone to really allow you to benefit to how Groupon is currently positioned,” says Gosling.
If they plan to expand across the continent, they need to take note of the other top nine internet users in Africa in 2012: Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia and Uganda
Groupon has a lot of competition in South Africa alone, which shows that the middle class is growing and spending.
<h4>Other Top Group Buying Sites In South Africa</h4>
• www.dealclick.co.za 
• www.ubuntudeal.co.za 
• www.studentspecials.net 
• www.salewine.co.za 
• www.wicount.co.za 
• www.citymob.co.za 
• www.24hoursonly.co.za 
• www.onedayonly.co.za 
• www.wekidunot.co.za 
• www.sacoupons.co.za 
• www.daddysdeals.co.za 
• www.cityslicker.co.za 
• www.collectivecow.com 
• www.ucit.co.za 
• www.schweetdeal.co.za 
• www.youdeal.co.za 
• www.vuvuplaza.co.za

Mob Shopping Makes  The Wallet Thicker

When Raphael Afaedor and Tunde Kehinde met a few years ago, they exchanged business cards for more than one reason.
Ghanaian-born Afaedor quit his job as a business development manager at Notore Chemical Industries to start an e-commerce company. Shortly after that , he was contacted by the Samwer brothers’ German-based incubator, Rocket Internet, to bring their African ambitions to life.
“I thought e-commerce was an area that required people with a specific type of experience and know-how. I believed I was one of those people. My heart was also bent on building something from scratch. So, I took the opportunity,” says Afaedor.
Nigerian-born-and-bred Kehinde—who worked as a business development manager for multinational beverage company Diageo and later launched a dating site for African professionals in the diaspora—had a constant itch to do something bigger on the continent.
“The opportunity came up when I found Raphael: a strong co-founder, a good financial backing and a chance to do the project in my own country. We immediately went for it and decided to launch Kasuwa, now Jumia,” he says.
Their ideas aligned and the timing couldn’t have been better for these two Havard Business School MBA graduates.
Together, they set off to pioneer the internet revolution and to organize retailing and the e-commerce market place in Nigeria differently. They rolled out two services: Sabunta and Kasuwa. The former is an online fashion store and the latter sells general merchandise. These services were merged to house a wider range of merchandise. This saw the birth of, the now-well-known, Jumia.
At the Jumia head office in Lagos, there is a beehive of activity: a young, energetic workforce taps furiously at their keyboards and engages customers telephonically, in a bid to build a one-stop shop for Nigeria’s ever-demanding consumer market.
At one end, doors are being opened to receive ordered goods. Products range from clothing and cosmetics to electronics and household merchandise. Merchandise is hand delivered from a warehouse in a matter of days, regardless of their location within the country.
Nigeria has more than 45 million internet users, around 28% of its population, which makes it the African nation with the highest number of internet users—followed by Egypt and Morocco, according to the latest internet world statistic figures. The introduction of mobile phone data and fixed wireless access services coupled with higher computer and internet literacy rates in the past few years have contributed to this boost in online shopping trends in Nigeria. According to Funke Opeke, CEO of Main One Cable Company—which has laid a 7,000km fiber optic cable linking West Africa to Europe—this number is about to increase.
“At least one in three people in Nigeria could have direct internet access during the course of 2013.”
Nigerian consumers, however, have shown little confidence in online purchases in the past for fear of fraudulent activity. A few players are taking advantage of the burgeoning e-commerce space, which helps local brands get their merchandise online. As a result, similar services in Nigeria, such as Konga and DealDey, have emerged in the past few years. These websites provide an alternative shopping experience for Nigerians.
“Lagos is the prime location to be in. The numbers are here, the banking systems are better developed here and there is a lot of activity,” says Afaedor.
Despite a growing popularity in Nigeria, the journey was hardly a walk in the park for the two business partners. As many Nigerian start-ups will agree, challenges are inevitable.
The operational costs of doing business in Nigeria, with infrastructural deficits, was more than a concern. So was finding and building a competent team.
“In our case, it was necessary to have a mind shift and focus on the bigger picture. The opportunities are here in Nigeria. This was a gap we identified and had to fill, regardless of the existing bottlenecks of doing business in Nigeria,” says Afaedor.
Barely a year old, Jumia now boasts around 50,000 online visits a day, with a daily subscriber base of more than 150,000 and is already ranked as the seventh most viewed local content site in Nigeria. It has grown significantly with new product lines and brands on its site with a good consideration for Nigeria’s online payment skeptism, which has been cleverly allayed by introducing a cash-on-delivery feature.
While their ultimate goal is market domination, the immediate concerns for Afaedor and Kehinde are new services, brands and products and to sell everything any Nigerian could possibly need. As it turns out, the fastest moving goods are fashion products, particularly clothing items.
Besides bringing a wide range of products to Nigerian households, Afaedor and Kehinde are also focused on building a dynamic in-house team.
“We pride ourselves in making this a great place to work as service is key,” says Kehinde, who co-manages a team of 200.
E-commerce is here to stay as Afaedor and Kehinde are on a mission to mitigate the tedium of shopping. So, click away as shopping is about to become faster and more convenient.

Shop Without The Drop

Entersekt never would have been established in 2007, were it not for the audacious claims by a B.Comm student and the activities of an unknown bank fraudster, which stirred up the emotions of four electronic engineering students: Christiaan Brand, Dewald Nolte, Altus van Tonder and Niel Müller.
The Stellenbosch-based software house is a fast-growing African player, which wants to establish itself in the States, the United Kingdom and beyond. Most of the major South African banking groups have already signed up Entersekt, which has been certified by Visa, MasterCard and American Express to integrate with their 3-D secure payments system. It has become an ally of the domestic banking industry in dealing with online fraudsters.
Bank corruption is one of the principal cyber-crimes in the world. According to the South African Banking Risk Information Centre, the South African banking industry incurred losses of R263.3 million ($29.6 million) in 2009/2010 for card fraud. These fraudulent activities increased by 53% in 2010/2011 to R403.1 million ($45.4 million).
According to Schalk Nolte, chief executive of Entersekt, independent statistics from IT Web show that web phishing in South Africa amounted to R320 million ($36 million) in 2011. In the second half of 2012, bank fraudsters used online banking to harvest around R100 million ($11.3 million) illegally. The country has registered 3% of the world’s phishing activities, while 46% occur in the States and 19% in the United Kingdom.
Dewald Nolte remembers how, during a challenging week filled with tests, a self-assured B.Comm student confronted him and a group of engineers, while they strolled to the Langenhoven Student Centre for a meal.
“Here I am, relaxing, and you poor guys are working so hard but I’m still going to make a fortune, much more than you engineers,” he said.
Nolte, Brand, van Tonder and Müller, who all possessed an entrepreneurial spirit, became more committed to pursuing a successful business career after the encounter. The group met weekly to brainstorm the inception of the right business. Their ‘aha’ moment came through default, not design. Brand’s mother became victim of an online banking fraudster and lost R20,000 ($2,250). Brand couldn’t believe how this was possible in an age of one-time password (OTP) access logins and online security systems.
The four students worked around the clock for over a year in a virtual garage to mastermind Entersekt.
Their enormous investment of time and money to invest seed capital for the establishment of Entersekt, conjures images of Bill Gates, the Beatles and the 10,000-hour rule mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. He claims that 10,000 hours are needed to secure greatness and mastery; Mozart, The Beatles and Gates are some examples. The Beatles performed in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times between 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time. Gates spent 10,000 hours programing on a high-school computer in 1968, aged 13.
The four students amassed their 10,000 hours by developing a prototype, which was conceptualized into a company in 2008. Its revolutionary technology was registered at a patent-office in the same year.
The pioneers needed the intervention of two more leaders to propel the idea from their virtual garage to the commercial marketplace.
Earlier in his career, Schalk Nolte was one of 33 expatriates sent to Nigeria by Vodacom to manage a possible new venture. The deal was eventually scuttled because of shareholder concerns. Twenty eight of the expatriates remained in Nigeria to form a new management company to run V-mobile Nigeria. With Nolte at the helm of network expansion, they grew their clients from 300,000 to a couple of million, while the numbers at the base station increased from 300 to 2,500.
Nolte was approached to join Entersekt, after it had been patented but was not yet commercially formed. He realized that banks wouldn’t do business with a virtual garage start-up.
“We had to establish a presence and an address and the technopark in the technological hub [of Stellenbosch] was appealing,” he says.
Through Schalk Nolte’s acquaintance with Ramzi Mansour of Carita Investments in Nigeria, he set up a meeting in Centurion between Mansour and Dewald Nolte.
“He decided to invest in us not only because of the idea of our business but because of the people. He said he could see the passion in our eyes,” says Dewald Nolte.
Securing the finances was a considerable challenge for the students, who lacked collateral, especially in 2008 when the global recession was in full swing.
“We had to pull through tough times, pay ourselves nothing and invest everything into the seed capital of the company to succeed. In hindsight, it proved to be the right way of doing it,” says Schalk Nolte.
In internet banking a two-factor authentication system is used based on something you know, your username and password, and something you have, a cellphone. Unfortunately, such an authentication system, which relies on browser communication, can be defeated.
In the real world, people are sent a phishing e-mail; if they click on the link, they will get routed to a fake banking website, which fools them into entering their username and password. This fake site, in real time, runs a script and enters the credentials into the real bank account. When the real bank receives the credentials it sends an OTP or asks the user to generate this OTP on the token. When you enter your OTP, it is intercepted by the man in the middle, who now has access to your username, password and OTP.
The beauty of Entersekt’s system, however, is that it uses industry-standard electronic certificates to create a secure out-of-band communication channel, based on mutual authentication between a bank and its customers’ mobile devices, according to Nolte. These certificates are deployed using a light-weight application that is available for hundreds of cellphone models on the iOs, Blackberry, Android Windows Phone and Java platforms. An electronic transaction initiated through any channel (online banking, card-not-present and via the ATM) is sent to the bank customer’s mobile device for confirmation before the transaction takes place.
In the OTP system it goes via the internet, where the fraudsters have access, while this system is beyond the reach of fraudsters as customers respond to real-time requests for transactions by selecting ‘accept’ or ‘reject’. The bank retains control over the process of registering users and all communication is encrypted end-to-end and cannot be intercepted by any other party, says Nolte.
The result is true out-of-brand, two-factor authentication that counters phishing and other kinds of fraud. This system has cut online banking fraud for Entersekt’s clients to zero and annually re-issues certificates per client.
“We have found that our contracts become a net saving for the banks and not a cost increase.
When Entersekt sold their technology to Nedbank, the crime moved to other banks.
“It’s like a burglary in your street. If you increase your security and use more burglar-bars, the criminals might target your next-door neighbors,” he added.
Although the company has established a local footprint—with eight of their 10 clients based in South Africa—it has received international recognition and the demand for its services is growing. Entersekt has patented their technology in the States, United Kingdom, China and India and is aggressively pursuing markets in Nigeria and Kenya.
“We were nominated at the world’s biggest security conference in San Francisco in 2011 as one of the top 10w most innovative companies globally. We are 18 to 24 months ahead of our competitors in terms of technology,” says Nolte.
Protection to safeguard their assets is one thing; expansion to ensure a bigger global presence is a different proposition all together.
“We have a staff presence and a small office in London and we are about to open an office in Atlanta in the States… We have to be where the new ideas, the standards and the concepts are created,” he adds.

Delete Fraud. Enter.

Sola Owoloja has been working in the business for five years; he understands how to please. He had to transport a comb from New York to Johannesburg. It must have been a very special comb. He naturally said: “Yes”. You have to.
The patron staying at a Johannesburg hotel had left the comb, given to her by her dying mother, in a hair salon in New York. West Chauffeurs got in touch with the New York hotel and within 48 hours the comb was hand delivered to the patron.
Running around, chauffeuring, catering to and cajoling the rich is what makes concierge services pay. On another occasion, a patron asked to deliver an elephant across the Atlantic to the United States as a gift to his daughter. Luckily, the request was not followed through, again Owoloja would have said: “Yes”.
“Integrity is very important. If you make a promise to your guest, you have to keep that promise. We made a promise to our guests. We will bend, we’re flexible. We’ll do anything to keep them satisfied,” says Owoloja.
In 2008, Owoloja and Kagiso Dumasi saw a gap in the market for a concierge company in South Africa that would cater for the needs of wealthy travelers. Owoloja oversees the operational, financial and recruitment side of the business, while Dumasi looks after the marketing.
West Chauffeurs can make dinner reservations; find scarce theater tickets and presents in a hurry, as well as deliver combs.
Nigerian-born Owoloja learnt early on at home, in Lagos, that you have to do business however you can.
In Lagos, while in his twenties, he dabbled in the supermarket business with a friend. He moved to South Africa with the hope of running an oil services company, but failed. He moved back home but later returned to South Africa to start a business with the little entrepreneurial experience under his belt.
“When the chips are down, in the face of adversity and massive challenges, you need to still inspire people to get them to see beyond the challenges of the day,” says Owoloja.
Their Johannesburg business prospered through a link to Quintessentially, a global luxury lifestyle company, known for its high net-worth clients.
With a little help from the National Empowerment Fund, West Chauffeurs increased its fleet from two cars to eight, after making more than R1 million ($108,800) in its second year.
They relocated from the central business district of Sandton to another affluent suburb, Melrose Arch. This opened up the business meetings market. The company had to swear its drivers to secrecy as many deals were struck on the road.
Towards the end of that year, an opportunity came to run the travel desk for two new five-star hotels in Cape Town but it all went downhill from there. The two found that they had expanded too quickly.
They had entered into unfamiliar territory, in an international tourist city that has well-established hotels. West Chauffeurs found itself exposed, a small business that relied too much on the hotels for guests for business. The two new hotels were unable to fill up enough rooms to secure business for West Chauffeurs. The Johannesburg office had to keep Cape Town afloat.
“For a small company, expansion should be managed very carefully. We were profitable in our first year, but we did not think through that move carefully. We expanded very quickly without the structures to manage the expansion in terms of cash flow, record keeping,” says Owoloja.
At the end of each month the business was short of around 65% of their costs, which they had to source from the profit made during the previous year.
“It dried up very quickly. We tried to get overdrafts, personal funds to pay salaries but it was quite difficult. We picked up heavy losses in Cape Town but yes those are lessons learnt. They were painful,” he adds with a chuckle.
Owoloja says a big mistake was for the company to go without a management account and financial statements for nearly a year.
But that’s all in the past now. In early 2011, West Chauffeurs packed up office in Cape Town and focused on business at its headquarters in Johannesburg, where the company was doing well.
They signed a contract to run the travel desk for the five-star African Pride’s Melrose Arch Hotel located in the trendy precinct. Again, they struggled with being too small and having to run a high occupancy hotel with demanding clients. The hotels patrons were skeptical about making use of their services because they were much smaller than established car rental companies.
Through it all, things started to look up. The company now turns over nearly $800,000 annually.
“We went from nothing to quite a bit. There’s this very nice feeling that comes with making things work,” says Owoloja.
West Chauffeurs currently has twelve cars and employs 17 drivers and consultants. They drive clients from First Bank of Nigeria, Liberty Life and Barclays, to mention but a few.
One of their biggest achievements was beating more established companies to drive members traveling with the British Lions during their rugby tour to South Africa in 2009.
The softly spoken Owoloja says they are wary of leaping without looking, the scars of the Cape Town run deep. For now, their plans are to grow other services within the West Chauffeur brand in Johannesburg and capture the leisure market.
Surely, when the time is right, the answer will be: “Yes”.

The perils of the “yes” business

“And the Oscar goes to&#8230;”.
Five little words that caused writer and director Bryan Buckley to draw a deep breath:
“When you hear those words&#8230; and you happen to be one of the five guys it could possibly go to, it is, in itself, a crazy thought. It simply just doesn’t seem real. All the films could have easily won that night. And mentally you know this going into the evening. If I didn’t think we had put everything we had into our film, perhaps I would have been disappointed in myself and thought about what we didn’t nail in the film when the winner [Curfew] was announced. But I knew this wasn’t the case. It just wasn’t our night,” says Buckley.
<div id="attachment_1690" style="width: 209px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1690" class="size-medium wp-image-1690" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/162620158-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" />Bryan Buckley and Mino Jarjoura with Harun and Ali Mohamed, on the red carpet</div>
He was in Los Angeles, California, at the 85th Academy Awards, where he was nominated for best live action short for ASAD—a tale of refugees, in Somalia. Sitting nervously by his side were the two leads, 14-year-old Harun Mohamed and his 12-year-old brother Ali. The day had flown by, moments before they were walking the red carpet alongside the A-listers—including Ben Affleck, Daniel Day-Lewis and Ang Lee—and doing interviews.
“The BBC was the first to interview the boys. Harun stepped forward to the microphone and began to talk about his journey in English. How far he had come, had never been so apparent. He and Ali were constantly asked what celeb they wanted to meet the most at the ceremony. And without question Harun would say Jackie Chan and Ali would say Jean-Claude Van Damme,” says Buckley.
It was a journey that began with the filming of ASAD in Africa.
Buckley is the last person you would expect to make a film about Somalia. His business is big-budget Super Bowl (American football) commercials for a quarter of a billion dollars with an audience of more than a million. Conversations with Somali refugees motivated him to create the short film with little commercial value or audience.
It all started in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, in 2010, where Buckley was shooting a documentary called No Autographs for the UN Human Right’s Council. He left with that feeling of hope in the face of despair. A year later he wrote ASAD.
The film was set in Somalia and shot in Cape Town. It tells the story of a young boy who must choose between life as a pirate or that of a humble fisherman. The entire cast was made up of refugees who had fled to South Africa.
Buckley says the biggest problem in producing the 18-minute short-film was overcoming the language barrier as both leads, Harun and Ali, were illiterate.
“We knew language, with the whole cast, was going to be a barrier by virtue that we were doing the entire film in Somali and I didn’t speak a single word of it. Right off the bat we enlisted in two Somali translators [who helped the boys memorize the script]&#8230; Both the boys are exceedingly bright. They picked up on things so quickly it was crazy. And then I’d act out some stuff and they would study it and follow. Always bringing their own twist. of course, like any Hollywood star would.”
The filming was taxing and Buckley struggled to shoot scenes with the rebels.
“There was just so much emotion there between them [the rebels] and the boys. It was quite clear this wasn’t the first time these refugees had handled guns. I kept thinking what horrible ghosts were haunting them after every take. And how bizarre [it was that] our cameras were recording every second of this nightmare.”
The international acclaim came with praise from Somali musician K’naan.
“He is truly a man who has supported Somalia and its people’s plight more than anyone I know. He said, ‘ASAD is an important film. It makes human the inaccurate caricature of Somalia, showing real people, a community and life beyond a land of pirates and warlords,’” he says.
The film won numerous awards at various international film festivals, including the Tribeca Film Festival and San Jose Film Festival. The Academy Awards nomination was the cherry on top but the leads almost didn’t make their big moment in Hollywood.
“The fact that they [Harun and Ali] didn’t have travel documents and that they were Somali refugees did not help matters. ASAD’s producer Mino Jarjoura worked around the clock with [South African producer] Rafiq Samsodien to get the kids there. It took government officials from both the US and South Africa, along with UNHCR to pull off the task. And they did so, in dramatic and perfect timing.”
Regardless of the outcome the team celebrated making it to the Oscars with a toast. After the ceremony they attended the prestigious Governor’s Ball.
Buckley may have walked away empty-handed but he and his two young leads stood tall for one of Africa’s untold stories.

From Mogadishu to Hollywood

On March 1, 2001, a small bank opened in South Africa with the aim of providing easy and affordable banking services to its customers. Attracted by this alluring promise, in no time people were queuing up to open a Capitec account. Today, the bank has more than four million customers; clearly CEO Riaan Stassen’s move from the liquor industry to banking has been a fortuitous one.
Born in Cape Town, Stassen earned a Bachelor in Commerce Honors degree from the University of Stellenbosch. He then did his articles and CA qualification at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) before spending 14 years in the liquor industry.
The course of his career changed in 1995, when Stassen was asked to reengineer Boland Bank, a conservative regional bank established in 1900. After South African retail billionaire Christo Wiese bought Boland, it merged with Natal Building Society (NBS) and Board of Executors (BoE).
Stassen spent five years at BoE Bank, during which time he came up with a different banking concept: a retail bank for mid-to-lower income people. According to Stassen, the incumbent banks were failing in four areas: accessibility, affordability, simplicity and personal service. He left BoE with his management team and a goal to succeed where others had failed.
Stassen says that South Africa’s existing banks had never transformed to align with the cultural diversity of the country.
“So we saw that as quite a key opportunity for us to create that cement with our customer base,” he says.
Stassen and his team were approached by PSG Holdings, a company owned by South African millionaire investor Jannie Mouton, to manage PSG Specialized Lending, its micro-lending company focused on low-income customers. The name was changed to Capitec and the bank listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 2002.
It was no easy road for Capitec. The start-up capital was R250 million ($28 million), it listed with net assets of just under R400 million ($45 million), at R2 (around 2 US cents) a share. Within three months its market capitalization dropped to just under R50 million ($5.6 million).
The first few years of Capitec’s life were dedicated to developing an application platform that could handle high-volume, low-value transactions, efficiently and at a lower cost.
The system is run from Bellville—a small town just outside of Cape Town. From there the bank runs the administration that usually takes place at branch level, shifting the branch focus to its customers. The last fundamental of the technology component is the ability to conduct all processes in real time.
The bank uses fingerprint biometrics to counter fraud and is currently testing new ATMs fitted with the system. Capitec is also the first bank in South Africa to allow coin deposits at ATMs, further evidence of its focus on low-income customers.
Stassen says other South African banks are rife with high costs, lack of transparency and confusing jargon.
“We believe what a person needs from a bank is to move money, to park money and to get money,” he says.
Capitec’s solution to this is its Global One account—a single account that can be used for transactions, including online purchases, as a savings vehicle and as a way to apply for credit. Customers can get up to R230,000 ($25,700) in cash within minutes of applying for a loan. This amount is determined by an affordability assessment based on their monthly cash flow and is repayable over one to 84 months, also based on personal ability. The interest paid, 17% to 28%, also depends on the individual’s credit profile.
A big bone of contention in South Africa has been unsecured lending. In the past, borrowers were required to secure a loan with collateral. With unsecured lending, clients do not need this security, “In South Africa nowadays unsecured lending has become a swearword, and that’s absolute nonsense,” says Stassen.
He points out that as far as Capitec is concerned, it’s not about the assets a person has, but their cash flow.
“There are 20 million active credit clients in South Africa. There are 1.8 million credit clients who have any form of home finance, a mortgage grant. Only 1.8 [million]. So what are the other 18 million people doing to improve their standard of living?” asks Charl Nel, the head of strategic communications at Capitec.
Few deny the fact that South Africa, like most of the world, is a consumption-driven society as opposed to a saving one, or that defaults are part of the territory, but as it currently stands, over 95% of Capitec’s book is current. Despite citizens’ household debt often being greater than disposable income, according to Capitec’s interim results from September, its number of arrears had decreased to 4.4%.
“The profile of our credit client is definitely changing as we are seeing new credit clients with higher income levels attracted to our offer,” the interim report says.
According to a report by South Africa’s National Credit Regulator, unsecured credit in the first quarter of 2012 grew by 49.4% year-on-year. This is a rate far higher than any of the other types of credit.
Capitec has millions of customers, and Stassen attributes the bank’s success to widespread discontent with the big four banks among their customer base, as well as its strong proposition to customers. His is the first bank in South Africa to be open on Sundays, a move that persuaded one of its large competitors, Nedbank, to follow suit.
“We had to think a lot on our feet. We change things a lot. What we thought was going to work had to be changed slightly. And often in a very old, stale, established organization you get resistance and that’s dangerous because people kind of trip up the process,” says Nel.
How does the bank manage to make money and a success out of low-cost banking, especially when they have kept their prices unchanged for the past three years? As most business minds know, you can only undercut your competitors for so long before it becomes costly. Stassen says Capitec could only be priced significantly lower than their opponents if they took smaller margins or lowered their cost structure. Their solution appears to be running the bank like a production line.
“Stassen is an exceptional CEO. One of the best that I’ve come across because since he joined Capitec we’re really focused. They developed a great computer system and it’s a great success,” says Mouton.
Stassen admits that they were initially ignored by the bigger banks because they started off as a micro lending organization. When they began to look beyond this; their competitors believed their primary focus would be on the unbanked and the lower income market. Then around two years ago the more established banks started to take notice.
Capitec now has around 9% of South Africa’s banking market share and their most important objective is to attract primary banking accounts, those into which salaries are directly deposited. The bank also plans to launch a credit card at the end of this year.
The interim results stated that Capitec’s transaction fee income for the first six months of the financial year grew by 61% to R583 million ($65 million) year-on-year. Headline earnings per share grew by 35% to R7.02 ($0.80). Income from credit was R3.6 million ($403,000), which the bank says is due to growth in the unsecured credit market.
The management team at Capitec had been part of a share incentive scheme, allowing them to buy into the company. Last year, there were numerous reports and speculation as to Capitec’s health and suggestions that its captain, Stassen, was abandoning ship, and that other executives were offloading their shares too. When asked about it Stassen says: “It was very bad reporting”.
The truth of the matter is that Stassen sold most of the shares in his own name but that 95% of his investment in the bank is held by a company in his family trust. The private investment company owns more than R400 million ($44.8 million) worth of shares.
“I believe it’s extremely dangerous for executives to be over-extended to the company they run,” says Stassen.
He says this is because, when executives become over-exposed, they start making short-term decisions and manipulate numbers to protect the share price.
Last year, Capitec sought to raise funds through a rights issue, which increased the bank’s capital base by R2.25 billion ($252 million). The funds were for the extension of the branch network, with 55 to 75 new branches proposed for this year, and to increase lending.
Earlier this year PSG sold off some off its stake in Capitec to repay debt incurred in the purchasing of approximately R724 million ($81 million) from the rights issue last year. PSG’s stake in Capitec has dropped from 32.2% to 28.5%, and the company says it will not be selling off any more of its shares.
Then in February, the South African Public Prosecutor confirmed that it will launch a formal investigation into a black economic empowerment deal, from 2011, resulting in a consortium with ties to the country’s ruling party acquiring nearly R1 billion ($122 million) worth of Capitec shares. Nel says they will cooperate fully with the investigation.
Capitec is currently focusing on South Africa but will start identifying opportunities in other countries on the continent. Its long-term goal has always been to internationalize its banking model. Infrastructure is however a concern as the bank is highly reliant on technology. As the fastest growing retail bank in South Africa for individuals, winner of Africa’s Top 100 JSE Companies for the second time, forging into an under-tapped market and making the big dogs follow suit, could mean Capitec will lose its underdog title.
Goliath may not be down and out yet, but he is certainly taking notes on David.

A Plucky David Banking  On Beating Goliaths

It’s not easy to be a photographer, not when your father is a high court judge and there are four lawyers and two doctors in the family. Photographer Kelechi Amadi-Obi has made peace with the fact that he’s a bit of a black sheep in the family. And looking back, his family should have known all along that he was going to be an artist.
Growing up in the eastern region of Nigeria, in the city of Umuahia, he quickly developed a passion for drawing.
“It all started with reading comics and drawing Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk. I realized that I had talent with visual arts and I started to draw. My drawings earned me respect among my peers,” says Amadi-Obi.
With the encouragement of those around him, he was spurred on to improve his skills. Unfortunately in the neighborhood where he grew up, there were no museums, art schools or galleries where he could hone his skills.
“I would go to the local library to do research on drawing. The more I read and practised, the better I got and the quicker I improved,” he says.
<div id="attachment_1623" style="width: 235px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1623" class="size-medium wp-image-1623" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/supplied-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" />Amadi -Obi dressed as a barrister</div>
Even with his passion for drawing and the visual arts, his family put his career choices down to law or medicine. Amadi-Obi chose law and duly enrolled at university. Ironically though university exposed him to art in a way he had never encountered before.
“When I got to university I realized there was an active art scene there. I naturally gravitated towards artists,” he says.
The law student became the talk of his campus as his artwork surpassed that of the art students. Yet he kept hitting the law books and graduated to take up a job as barrister. He only wore his gown and wig for one year after being called to the bar.
“After my one year of service I started working at an art studio, where I exhibited my art and became a successful exhibiting artist. Photography came gradually. I used to make photos as a reference material for my paintings. I started making paintings of human forms and took photos of models in my studio with light coming from my window,” says the painter-cum-photographer.
“I learnt to use a camera and learnt to capture light in a very intricate and delicate way to achieve my purpose. The photographs themselves became artworks. I started associating with other photographers too. Once I finished taking images I would go to the darkroom to print my photos. I looked at the darkroom process and it looked very similar to my painting process, only it had quicker results,” he says.
His decision to settle in Lagos shaped his career forever. The city has not attracted many photographers but it has certainly attracted those with an eye for drama. The city exposed him to spectacular sites including the picturesque lagoons of the region, which span over 635 kilometers and cut across the southern part of the metropolis, linking the Atlantic Ocean and Lekki lagoon. But it wasn’t just the beauty of the lagoons, which attract so many artists that inspired Amadi-Obi. He also saw inspiration in the sprawling fishing slums that draw together the huge influx of people migrating to the region.
His photographic career took off in 2001, when a German friend invited him to exhibit at the Rencontres De Bamako or “African Photography Biennale”. Since the exhibition’s inception in 1994, it has caught the attention of jet-setting curators, critics and dealers. It has also popularized African photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé.
Soon after he was invited to Milan to showcase the collection he exhibited at the Biennale. But while Rencontres De Bamako has opened doors for many African photographers, it has also been a source of controversy.
“Some of the reasons for this controversy are familiar and echo long-standing issues in the presentation of African art to Euro-American audiences,” write Jennifer Bajorek and Erin Haney, who are independent curators.
They claim that such exhibitions perpetuate asymmetries of power and leave young artists and organizers feeling alienated from their work. To overcome these challenges artists are forming new alliances and building their own networks, which are not remote-controlled by the West.
Amadi-Obi is no exception. After his exhibition in Milan he established a career in Nigeria in collaboration with other upcoming photographers. Depth of Field, set up in 2001, is the brainchild of Amadi-Obi and five other photographers: Uchechukwu James Iroha, Toyosi Odunsi, Amaize Ojeikere, Emeka Okereke and Toyin Sokefun. This artist collective was formed to deepen the conversation among the photographers and aims to attract local audiences to their work. They critique each other’s work and share resources including a library, publicity platforms and web visibility.
The ace photographer’s online portfolio is stacked with fashion photos he took before he was commissioned to such a shoot.
“I wanted to shoot fashion but there were no fashion magazines. Still I would call models and take pictures of them like the ones I would see in Vogue Magazine. So I was making a portfolio with no clients.
“When someone in Nigeria bought the South African franchise of True Love magazine [to the country], they needed a photographer and someone recommended me,” says Amadi-Obi.
His work with True Love earned him recognition among mushrooming corporates looking to improve their image with slick photographs in company brochures, annual reports and on their websites. With commissions from companies such as Guinness, MTN, British American Tobacco, the Ford Foundation, Prima Garnet Ogilvy, Insight Grey, Flour Mills of Nigeria and Orange Drugs, his career is on the up.
His passion for photography has made Amadi-Obi a household name in Lagos. To be a successful photographer does not require extraordinary equipment, he believes. When he started his career he used a Mamiya RB67 film camera. Today, most of his images are taken with several professional lenses but he’s hooked on the Canon EOS 5D Mark II body.
“I am not particular with equipment. There was a time when I used to be crazy about cameras but I got tired because they keep changing… To get a good image you just need to have a good eye,” says Amadi-Obi.

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