The construction of one of the world’s most futuristic buildings, in terms of kindness to the environment, happened as an afterthought to the R22.5 billion ($2.6 billion) deal that four years ago saw UK-based multinational cellular operator Vodafone gather a 65% controlling share in South Africa’s Vodacom.
Vodafone’s Innovation Centre, at its headquarters in Midrand, Johannesburg, opened at the beginning of this year. It is a seemingly unremarkable single-story, glass-and-wood structure designed to accommodate only around 12 researchers; but it has been awarded six stars by The Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA)— the only such rating achieved in this country and indeed all of Africa. The six stars denote it as a world leader.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1290" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_7120-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
The idea for the building took shape shortly after the mammoth cellular-phone share deal, when the two companies’ technical teams were to be integrated. According to Suraya Hamdulay, Vodacom’s executive head of corporate citizenship, the interdisciplinary task team planning the merger decided it would be nice for the innovators to do their research inside an innovative building.
The whole exercise fitted with Vodafone’s stated intention to, by 2020, reduce its carbon emissions by 50% against its 2006/7 baseline of 1.23 million tons, and to reduce emissions in its emerging markets by 20% in 2015 against a 2010/11 baseline.
It was decided to locate the facility in South Africa because—being both an emerging and a developed economy—it would help consolidate the group’s efforts across the board.
With its six-star rating, the Vodafone facility is at the spearhead of a growing trend in South Africa—as in most of the world’s developed countries and a few developing economies—towards environmentally friendly building practices. The global tendency took a decisive turn in 2002 with the launch of the World Green Building Council, a federation of national councils that was joined by South Africa’s in 2007.
The GBCSA says, on its website, that buildings are estimated to consume 40-50% of the world’s energy through their construction and operation. Green buildings can more than halve the energy use of conventional buildings, with similar reductions in potable water usage, runoff to sewer and solid waste. The council’s purpose is to promote green building, act as a resource center, develop and operate a green-building rating system and improve knowledge and skills through training and education.
The features that had it award the Vodafone Innovation Centre its highest rating are remarkable for their novelty and also for their simplicity. Designed with the help of WSP Environment &amp; Energy South Africa, part of a leading international company, the innovation started with the very choice of a site and its preparation.
The building, reminding one somewhat of an unassuming wildlife lodge, is situated on what used to be a parking lot serving Vodacom’s adjacent headquarters. In the construction, as much use as possible was made of waste and discarded materials. Soil excavated for the foundations and second-hand tiles and reject stock bricks were used in the landscaping of the mainly indigenous garden and its pathways.
The whole purpose was to limit the use of concrete and cement to a minimum. Three layers of compacted soil separated by recycled plastic membranes form the foundations. Gabions resting on the layered foundations support the floor. Outside, air is cooled as it filters through the rock-filled wire-mesh baskets that form the gabions and serve to ventilate the building through vents along the sides.
The double-paned glass walls serve a variety of purposes. They reduce heat from outside and allow hot air trapped between them to escape through vents in the roof. By letting in natural light they limit the use of electric lighting. Bright light is dimmed by the building’s extended eaves and automatic blinds shut out direct sunlight. The see-through walls also create a sense of translucency, especially for those working inside who are able to look out into the garden.
Rain water from the roof goes into tanks from which it is used to flush the toilets and irrigate the garden. Inside the building is a small atrium serving as a wetland through which water from the sinks and basins get purified and re-used to flush the toilets.
The air-conditioning is done by an intricate system of solar tubes on the roof that pipe water into an absorption chiller and cooling coils from which it is passed through pipes in the floor and through cooling grids that are mounted in pot plants for the condensation to wet the plants. A spread of 292 photovoltaic panels, generating 230 kWh a day, drive fans that cool air by blowing it over the cold pipes.
No power-storage batteries are used. Through what is called virtual storage, excess electricity is diverted to Vodacom’s adjacent building to reduce its use of Eskom (the national electricity supplier) power by day. At night, the favor is returned in decidedly unequal measure by passing back such small amount of Eskom power as the Innovation Centre might need.
Even though it is mainly solar power that gets used, everything is designed to limit consumption. LED lighting is linked to motion sensors so that when nobody is in the building the lights will automatically switch off. The researchers work on laptops as they have been found to be the most power efficient.
“We are engineers, we have to have coffee. So we looked around for the most power-efficient coffee machine we could find,” says Etienne Gerber, the center’s program manager.
<h4>There&#8217;s a big new trend in building</h4>
The trend towards greener building is gathering pace in South Africa, as in a good many other countries, despite hard financial times. Since its establishment five years ago, the Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) has already awarded 23 star ratings to buildings around the country. A further 34 buildings are in the pipeline for registration. 
Rosanne Mitchell, the council’s marketing executive, says as consumers become more discerning and environmentally conscious, they will be the drivers of sustainable design and construction as well as greener building occupation. The building industry itself is changing. Green building practices used to be implemented by only a few companies. Now these are practically standard practice. 
Vodafone’s Innovation Centre in Midrand is the only building to have been given six stars. Five more buildings have been awarded five stars for excellence, and seventeen have received four stars, which is for best practice. 
The five five-star buildings are the Standard Bank in Rosebank, Absa Towers West in Johannesburg, the Aurecon Century City Campus in Cape Town, Millennia Park in Stellenbosch and the Sisonke District Offices in Ixopo, KwaZulu-Natal. 
The GBCSA has over 1,000 member companies broadly representative of the private and some public sectors. Apart from developing its rating system, it has put more than 3,000 people through green building courses and accredited 400 green-building practitioners. 
Mitchell says there are strong indications that more and more the construction industry and the corporate world will see green building as an inevitable part of business as usual. As with fire safety standards and disability access, sustainability will soon be taken for granted. 
According to several recent surveys, it will become just the way we build.

Africa’s Greenest Star

Mara.com is an offshoot project of the Mara Foundation, one of Africa’s largest non-profit social enterprises, which lends support to emerging African entrepreneurs at the forefront of their journey. Mara Online will be the continent’s first online mentorship network and will connect young, budding African entrepreneurs to established enterprises and businessmen.  “Mara.com will be a transformational project and will nurture an ecosystem for African entrepreneurs and youth while improving skills and emerging talent,” says Thakkar.
“The idea for the Mara Mentors site started as an offline venture by Mara Foundation. We mentored 120 companies but felt we could have more impact and reach more people across Africa and other emerging markets. Through this initiative we want to share knowledge and expertise with the next generation of business leaders in Africa. The mentees will be given guidance by some of the brightest and best minds in the industry who have already volunteered to be mentors.”
The Mara.com platform will have three dimensions to it: mentorship, jobs and dating.
Mara Mentors will put young African users in touch with well-established and successful entrepreneurs from across Africa—mentors who will offer insight, expertise and experience into a wide spectrum of industries. The mentors on the network will also provide mentees with access to networks and will transfer knowledge and experience to those who are up-and-coming in order to help them transform ideas into sustainable enterprises. At their own discretion, the mentors can at some point opt to meet in person with the mentees and provide support with funding and infrastructure.
Mara Jobs, on the other hand, will provide a user-friendly platform for employers and prospective employees across Africa to post jobs and resumes as well as to promote careers and employment opportunities across all industries.
“With more than 5,000 people employed across Mara Group’s companies, we understand the difficulties of the hiring process in Africa today. We want to use the knowledge we have gained and give the employers and the job seekers a better user experience,” says Thakkar.
Mara Dating will help young Africans find love and companionship. However, according to the Mara.com team, access to Mara Dating will only be possible after registering with Mara Mentors or Mara Jobs, thus attracting a wide spectrum of youth and inspiring the next generation of African entrepreneurship.
The website is being developed by designers and programmers in Silicon Valley, Bangalore, London, Dubai and a few cities in Africa. It will be free to all users, but the network’s complementary jobs and dating sites will utilize third party advertising and other revenue-generating models to financially support the platform. In addition, revenue generated from Mara.com will be channeled to the Mara Foundation towards financing its other social enterprise initiatives such as the Mara Launchpad (a group of business incubation centers across Africa), Mara Launch Funds (which provides small start-up funding for small businesses and start-ups across Africa) and the Mara Entrepreneurship Academy.
Thakkar tells me Mara.com will kick start some innovative initiatives. Considering that Africa is transiting from personal computers to smartphones, the website will base its foundation on mobile and feature phones to fully get adopted by the target audience. Mara.com is currently launching in Nigeria, but the platform will go live globally in December.
Thakkar started trading computers at age 14, after immigrating to Uganda following his escape from the 1994 Rwandan genocide with his family. He parlayed that small computer trading operation into a pan-African conglomerate, the Mara Group, which has interests in everything from real estate and tourism to financial services, information and communications technology, renewable energy and manufacturing, with revenues of around $100 million. Through his Mara Foundation, he says he gives back millions of dollars annually towards grooming and mentoring young African entrepreneurs.
“With Mara.com, I want to ensure that other successful African business leaders have a platform to groom and support young African leaders,” says Thakkar.
&nbsp;
ADAPTED FROM AN ARTICLE ON FORBES.COM

Africa’s First Online Mentorship  Network Is Born

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

The TV Dreams Of Africa’s  Ted Turner

Wupperthal, in the Western Cape Province, is home to the oldest shoe factory in South Africa. And if a hall of fame for prominent sales agents were to be built, former President Nelson Mandela and musical legend David Kramer would arguably feature with the founder, and German missionary, Johann Gottlieb Leipoldt, who started the enterprise in 1836.
Leipoldt and a fellow German missionary of the Rhenish Missionary Society, Theobald von Wurmb, founded the town of Wupperthal in the remote Tra-Tra valley on the edge of the Cederberg Wilderness in that year.
The factory is still housed in the original building set up by Leipoldt. Some of the tools and lasts are originals brought from Germany in the early 19th century.
At the height of its popularity, the shoe factory created jobs for between 42 and 46 skilled cobblers to manufacture the famous Wupperthal handsewn veldskoene (traditional Afrikaans soft suede shoes), which are famous for their comfort and good craftsmanship. Kramer and his love for the red suede shoes, which were his trademark, made those veldskoene famous with his Volkswagen TV advertisements. The veldskoene were also immortalized by his song about ‘rooi veldskoene’.
Mandela and Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the then minister of welfare and population development, visited the Wupperthal shoe factory in the late 1990’s and Mandela received his leather shoes from Arnold Gertse, the manager of the factory.
Mandela promptly put his new gift to use by wearing it.
By faxing the outline of their feet to the factory, customers can still order the shoes for between R320 ($38) and R400 ($47).
Tourism is a growing industry for Wupperthal, particularly during the Namaqualand flower season in August and September. There is cross pollination between international tourism and the shoe factory. The shoe factory is arguably Wupperthal’s most famous export product, luring thousands of visitors from Europe and Asia to visit this secluded valley.
And when they come to Wupperthal, they usually ask for directions to the shoe factory, where many of them purchase a pair of individually crafted shoes, like Mandela and Kramer did before them.
This factor has become a pivotal one in the survival and growth of the shoe factory, which has survived 176 years of economic turmoil, hardships and several logistical challenges.Tourism minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk announced in April that 8,339,354 international tourists visited South Africa in 2011. One of the two most visited provinces was the Western Cape. The United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and France were South Africa’s top-five overseas tourism markets.
Bishop Emanuel Temmers, a former minister at the Moravian Church in Wupperthal, who pastored the church from 1904 to 1951, was a major force in transforming the shoe factory to a thriving international business, according to Willie Strassberger.
Strassberger and his eldest son, Heinie, masterminded the idea of establishing sales agents in other parts of South Africa, Namibia and even Germany. The comfort of the shoes, their longevity and the fact that they are easy to wear, were major selling points. Successors to Strassberger and his son used the same marketing ploys.
Mark Densel, former manager of the shoe factory, marketed the Wupperthal shoes internationally with some success at the turn of the century. The shoe factory still has an outlet in Clanwilliam. Denver Grauman, current minister of the Moravian Church, said the Wupperthal Shoe Factory had outlets in many other towns and also in Namibia, where the shoes were extremely popular.
Gertse, though, bemoans the fact that challenging logistics is limiting their growth. The isolated village is 300 kilometers from Cape Town and only accessible by a gravel road from Clanwilliam over Pakhuis Pass.
“When we make one trip to Cape Town to buy leather, glue and accessories, it will cost us R2,000,” he says.
“It is vital for us to establish a shop in Cape Town,” he adds.
Apart from Colin Zimri, who has been at the factory for over a decade, most of the other workers are third-generation craftsmen, like Mervyn Valentyn and Gerhard Farao. Gertse, who has been at the factory for 37 years, started his apprenticeship at the age of 16 under the close scrutiny of a shoe-master of decades—his uncle Piet Gertse.
“The establishment of other cheaper competitors on a massive scale, like those produced by China, has become a threat to the continual growth of the Wupperthal-shoe,” says Gertse.
The factory building still belongs to the Moravian Church, but the proceeds from the purchases benefit the workers as well as a community trust that was set up to support the 1,500 inhabitants of the town.
One of the dangers besetting an entrepreneur in a secluded town is what one can call “Waiting for Godot-complacency.”
It is passively hoping for divine intervention without benefitting from a business plan and a marketing campaign, and without putting the proverbial nose to the grindstone.
But Gertse and the Wupperthal community have been proactive. They partnered with influential friends in order to grow the factory.
Bishop Temmers said a few years ago, Chris Nissen, a former Western Cape leader of the ANC, invested a few hundred thousand rand in expanding and growing the shoe factory.
Nissen’s father in law was Martin Wessels—a former administrative head of the Moravian Church in South Africa—and as a benefactor, Nissen assisted the factory in order to maximize its impact on job creation and sustenance in Wupperthal.
Bishop Temmers said the shoe factory has survived some potentially crippling setbacks. One of them involved the Strassbergers. There was a little-publicized fall-out between Willie Strassberger and the Wupperthal community. Strassberger left Wupperthal after the break-up with inhabitants, and Heinie established a shoe factory copying the Wupperthal template in Clanwilliam.
“That was a major setback for the Wupperthal shoe factory, partially because Strassberger’s shoe factory is much easier accessible than Wupperthal’s factory,” said Bishop Temmers.
Gertse is aware of the challenges, and therefore Wupperthal’s shoe factory has branched out to other forms of leather sales that includes handbags and purses. Most sales of shoes, handbags and purses are to foreign visitors.
Homesick ex-pats in England, Australia and Germany, regularly order shoes, part of the life blood of the famous factory. But that’s not enough.
Wupperthal’s greatest challenge is to ‘take the shoe factory to the people if the people cannot come to the shoe factory’.
They also have to embrace the change in the foreign tourism landscape by focusing a marketing drive on the new emerging markets.
The increase in the country’s tourism arrivals in 2011 was driven by a 14.6% growth from the emerging markets of Asia—with a 24% increase in arrivals from China and a 26% increase in arrivals from India.
Van Schalkwyk recently promised that South Africa would continue to invest in marketing the country to India and China, adding that South African Airways’ launch in January of direct flights between Johannesburg and Beijing would add to the growth.
Gertse says the greatest single challenge to the shoe factory is to improve its visibility amongst Capetonians and foreign tourists to the city.
They are contemplating plans to establish a ‘Wupperthal-foothold’ in Cape Town, an outlet where they can sell shoes in order to take the oldest shoe factory in the country to the global community.

These Shoes Are Made For Walking And Walking

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

Development To The  Power Of Three

As my car comes to a halt at a red traffic light, the newspaper vendor approaches, waving the latest broadsheet.
“Take one,” he pleads. And when I decline: “How about some change so I can eat tonight.”
Thabo Dube has been selling newspapers on one of Cape Town’s main traffic intersections for more than a decade. But in the past couple of years, he has fallen on hard times.
“I used to be able to make a living from this job, but now I also have to beg to make ends meet,” sighs the lanky father of three, as cars speed past.
As a newspaper salesman, the 43-year-old doesn’t earn a fixed salary. Instead, he buys a stack of newspapers at a reduced vendor price each dawn and takes home whatever profit he makes from sales that day. If he can’t sell the whole stack, he barely cuts even. Some days, he makes a loss. Dube is feeling what many international media experts have been preaching over the past few years—print is becoming an endangered species. The future of news is digital. Instead of buying a daily newspaper or taking out a subscription, more and more people read news on the internet, tablets or their mobile phones.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1251" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/dreamstime_s_24379043-300x244.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="244" />
It all began in the United States and Europe where the growth of the internet and mobile media access has already sparked the demise of the news industry as we know it. Traditional print media are struggling to make profits. Countless newspapers and magazines have had to lay off staff. Some publications have gone out of circulation. Although African print media have not yet experienced the same slowdown, they are on a straight path towards digital media consumption, experts say.
“The way people consume media in Africa will change dramatically,” predicts Justin Arenstein, manager of the African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC), an internationally-funded initiative that sponsors digital media projects on the continent and consultant to the world’s top search engine provider, Google, as well as the Knight Foundation, a US-based foundation that supports innovative journalism.
What is a fact in the States and Europe is becoming equally true for Africa. Today’s consumers don’t go to a single place for their news. They prefer to access information in ways most convenient to them: by scanning through different sources of content digitally, reading bits and pieces from various publications instead of reading one newspaper indiscriminately from front to back. Readers don’t want editors and journalists to tell them what’s pertinent any longer; they would rather search for specific sites and content that is relevant to their lives, depending on what topics or geographic areas interest them most. That’s especially true for the tech-savvy, digitally literate young generation that demands content to be audio-visual rather than printed black on white.
Print publications in Africa have started to feel the pinch.
“Newspaper and magazine sales are dropping. Publishing houses need to understand why and come up with alternative solutions to maintain a healthy revenue stream,” suggests Dawn Rowlands, CEO for sub-Saharan Africa at digital communications group Aegis Media. There is only one solution to prevent losses, she says: “Print needs to evolve to content provision.”
That means getting content to people should take priority, while the platform used to reach readers is secondary.
That’s easier said than done. The convergence from print to digital has been, and still is, a difficult road for most print media houses. Although newspaper owners realize they have to expand their business model to include digital media, they are not too sure how to make it work and how to monetize it. There is also a great reluctance to change, despite the fact that profits are tumbling. Most publications’ attempts to keep up with the digital revolution have been half-hearted, defensive and often even arrogant.
“It’s a head-in-the-sand approach. Although many African newspapers have developed an online presence it has financially not been that successful,” says Rowlands.
The focus remains on print, with online editions being the poor, low-quality cousins.
In the long run, ignoring the digital trend will not pay off, Rowlands warns. Although people may continue buying a newspaper on a weekend for a leisure read, she is convinced that print media as we know them will vanish within the next decade. The lesson for many print media houses will therefore be a tough one: those that don’t adapt will die.
“Eventually we will see the death of traditional print media in Africa, maybe in the next 10 years,” predicts Rowlands.
Only media houses that reconsider how they approach consumers and that reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms, such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices, will have a chance of survival. Learning from the progressive downfall of print media in the States and Europe is a good way to stay ahead of new developments, experts suggest. No need to reinvent the wheel.
“If African media take heed of what’s happening up north, of what hasn’t worked and where the pitfalls are, they have a good opportunity to build something great,” says Arenstein.
Unsurprisingly, owners of print media hold a more moderate view. Print is far from being dead, insists the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). Contrary to conventional knowledge, newspapers remain a large and thriving industry worldwide, despite the rise of digital media: between 2005 and 2010, daily newspaper circulation in Africa rose a whopping 30%, according to WAN-IFRA statistics.
Another study on “The Future of Print Media”, conducted by US publication Capstone Report, states that the “death of print” remains a limited phenomenon in Africa… for now. In 2011, print circulation in many markets on the continent was stable or slightly up, in part because of rising literacy levels. Literacy—which increased by more than 12% in the past decade among African adults—usually leads to a boost in disposable income and this creates potential new newspaper audiences.
But despite relatively upbeat current data, experts warn the respite won’t last long. Even though African news markets have not fully matured yet, they will be faced with similar challenges to the States and Europe in the next 10 to 20 years, cautions the Capstone Report. Already, African audiences are moving online at a remarkably high speed. The common challenge for print media hence becomes trying to keep up.
The good news is that the predicted death of print does not equal the death of journalism or quality content. People will always want to read good content. What will change is where and how they want to read it. In Africa, mobile news delivery—and not website-based delivery like in the States and Europe—appears to be the medium of choice.
“Consumers in Africa leapfrog. They don’t follow the same path as Europe and the United States,” agrees Rowlands.
She believes the next few years will show huge change on the continent as prices of internet connectivity and technology come down, with smartphone penetration on a rapid increase. This means that people all over the continent have more access to digital news and social networking tools.
Platforms like smartphones and tablets are the future of publishing in Africa because they allow people to look beyond national borders and access the content they want, when they want.
“The appetite for online content is growing because people like to go online to find alternative content that they can’t necessarily buy at their local newsstand,” says Susan Hansford, business development manager at South African publisher Primedia Online.
“People love technology. It’s going to move really quickly. Some experts predict smartphone prices will drop to $20 within the next five years,” says Rowlands. In countries like Kenya or Nigeria, China-produced replicas of Apple iPhones are on sale for a mere $40—nearly half the price of an original iPhone.
Although $40 is a lot of money for an ordinary person living in Africa—in Kenya, for example, the average monthly income is about $60—increasing numbers of people save up for a mobile phone with advanced functionality, especially as prices for 3G and data bundles drop.
“Comparatively speaking, smartphones are not that expensive anymore. For someone living in a rural area, for instance, using a smartphone is often a more affordable and effective way to communicate with the outside world than the money and time it would cost to use public transport [to meet someone in person]. The argument that technology and connectivity are too expensive is a red herring,” says Arenstein.
In some parts of the continent, the digital revolution has already started. Kenya and Nigeria are fast becoming hotspots for digital media uptake and development. In both countries, mobile phones are increasingly used as the primary transactional device for news gathering, communication and banking. Mobiles are also used for other data sharing, like news and information about election monitoring, disease outbreaks, stock exchange fluctuations or weather forecasts for farmers.
Being at the forefront of the digital age has not happened by chance. Both the Kenyan and Nigerian governments have invested in digital development as part of their economic growth strategy by opening up competition in their telecoms and data sectors. This has forced mobile providers to lower the cost of their services, thus ensuring that larger parts of the population can access them. Both governments have also pumped resources into IT skills development so that their own population can develop new platforms, instead of having to hire foreign skills or relying on innovation buy-in from the developed world.
Private businesses in both countries have become keenly aware of the need to invest in digital content. Kenyan media houses, for example, formed a national digital journalism task force earlier this year aimed at developing a nationwide data-driven digital news model that will help the country’s media industry stay up to speed with new technologies.
The impact of what is happening in Kenya and Nigeria reaches beyond their borders. Kenya, for instance, is building a regional hub of technology and media innovation with its east African neighbors Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. Nigeria is doing the same in West Africa, to a lesser degree, by cooperating with Ghana.
“Change is coming, and we must be prepared for it. Technology always wins, no matter how much you fight it. So instead of resisting it, the print media must devise a way of embracing it. When television came, we all thought it would sound the death knell of the radio, since it is capable of capturing sound and picture. But television has not displaced the radio. Instead the two have been complementary,” says Nigerian Broadcast Production Services CEO, Tolu Ajayi, at a recent panel discussion about the future of the country’s print media.
At a slightly slower pace, Egypt, Tunisia, Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania are developing into digital hubs. Angola, Mozambique and Zambia also experience massive digital growth, even if those countries are still at the infant stages of digitization.
“They are big markets that navigate away from print, even though their media mix is currently less focused on smartphones,” says Rowlands.
For now, people here consume news mainly via mid-range mobile phones, such as WAP-enabled phones with internet access or handsets with radio access. They also increasingly use text-messaging services to access news and information.
“From Zimbabwe in the south to Senegal in the north, using mobile for content exchange, for business or private use, is starting to have a massive impact on people’s lives,” says Arenstein.
Only countries with poor IT infrastructure, like those situated in central Africa that remain without direct access to undersea cables, such as Chad or the Democratic Republic of Congo, continue to lag behind.
Surprisingly, Africa’s most developed nation, South Africa, is not at the forefront of media digitization with most of the country’s newspapers lacking investment in new technology.
“I don’t see the same degree of creativity in South Africa [than in Kenya or Nigeria],” says Arenstein, who consults media houses all over the continent. “South Africa needs to catch a wake-up call. It is lulled into dismissive complacency, believing that their [well-established] print media market is too big to fail. Yet [being a developed economy], South Africa almost falls victim to the same market conditions as the US and Europe.”
Arenstein is convinced that Africa’s most southern nation is at a tipping point at which it needs to make a massive switch to mobile media—and it needs to do it fast if it doesn’t want to miss the bus. “Convergence is definitely happening, with or without South Africa,” he warns.
Latest statistics prove Arenstein right—sales of some of the country’s daily newspapers decreased by up to 17% in the past year, according to the South African Audit Bureau of Circulations. This is just the beginning, the bureau warns, as the newspaper industry will further lose to digital products in the next few years.
“We are seeing print publishers either struggle with circulation or circulation is flat,” says Hansford.
But not all is doom and gloom in the South African news market. There is one paper, which has not only kept up with the times but been at the forefront of convergence. The weekly Mail &amp; Guardian (M&amp;G) was the continent’s first news website when it launched its online edition 19 years ago. Today, the M&amp;G is Africa’s first newspaper available on Kindle, apart from the fact that it can also be downloaded onto a rage of other mobile platforms—a tenth of the M&amp;G’s subscriptions are currently for Kindle and iPad users.
“Our strategy is ‘digital first’,” says M&amp;G online editor Chris Roper.
When the M&amp;G launched a new version of its website a few months ago, Roper said its readers increasingly demanded and made use of its multimedia elements, partly because bandwidth constraints are being eased.
“We didn’t do it as a response to slowing circulation figures [of the print publication], but because we believe in innovation, in getting content to people. It’s the news that’s important. The platform is less important. We provide whatever the content demands,” he says.
Multimedia has become a vital component in the creation of news. And so have social media.
“Journalism is becoming more inclusive. The audience also contributes. Today’s readers want much more than simply being presented with content. They want to engage intelligently with the publication, be able to comment, contribute and influence the choice of content,” says Roper.
On the M&amp;G website, readers can comment on articles, are invited to contribute content to a news story or join conversations and debates with journalists on Twitter. As its next move, the paper plans to run an ‘open newsroom’ by making its weekly news diary available online so that readers can make suggestions for what stories should be pursued. The M&amp;G is one of the few South African newspapers whose print circulation numbers have increased.
For many print media owners, one of the biggest stumbling blocks of the digital revolution has been their struggle to come up with new ways to make a profit. Traditionally, print publications make most of their money from advertising—much less from subscriptions and individual sales. But the advertising-driven model is becoming outdated fast as more readers consume digital content. And a new, equally profitable way of attracting advertisement revenue still has to emerge. Initiatives to put up paywalls to protect content have only shown moderate success.
In the meantime, advertisers go where the money is: they are quickly moving from print to online. It’s a vicious cycle. As more readers consume content online, print circulations decrease, followed by losses in ad spending and a slump in profits.
There is an upside, though. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and beginning to offset some of the decline in print. The internet is an attractive medium for advertisers because it allows them to match ads more carefully to different audiences and measure accurately how well their money is spent. Websites can track the exact number of people who have visited the site, clicked on an ad and bought the product. Internet advertising is also seductive because online ad rates are far cheaper.
That’s another reason traditional media are losing out. The ad revenue loss experienced by print is nowhere near making up for the ad revenue gain made by online.
“At no time in the foreseeable future will digital advertising revenues replace those lost to print, making the search for new business models, including paid-for online access for news, a key goal for many newspapers,” says Riess.
Print owners will have to figure out many aspects of their business in a media world where only one thing is certain right now. No matter how long they manage to hold on to their old ways of doing business, sooner or later, they will have to say goodbye to print and hello to digitization.

From Newsstand  To The Palm Of Your Hand

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

The Platinum Queen

South African mining is in tatters after weeks of spreading violence and chaos that has cost R4.5 billion ($544 million) in lost production and threatened many of the country’s erstwhile prosperous mines.
More than 1,000 soldiers have been posted to Marikana and a tight police cordon thrown around the operation.The Lonmin strike has seen one shaft mothballed and 1,200 contract workers sacked.
This is the bitter aftermath of the shootings at the Marikana operations of Lonmin, near Rustenburg north west of Johannesburg, in which 45 people were killed. In the weeks that followed, the wildcat strikes and wage demands spread. It is a sign of dangerous times that Anglo American Platinum (Angloplats) decided to suspend its Rustenburg operations, on September 12, to protect its workers from intimidation—a blow to the international image of South African mining.
“Well, it has been hurt, it has been damaged. You can’t have such a serious incident during a democracy. We have to work towards making sure that we bring back the image and the sanity of the industry,” says Susan Shabangu, South Africa’s minister of mineral resources.
Then there were more wage demands at nearby Implats, strikers stopped workers going underground at Royal Bafokeng Platinum, there was a wildcat strike by 15,000 workers at Gold Fields in Carletonville, 79 kilometers west of Johannesburg; at Marikana 28,000 thousand workers refused to go back and marched with weapons as peace talks failed and wage offers were rejected. The workers want a minimum of R12,500-a-month—triple the current wage.
The unions couldn’t call the workers back and the management appeared powerless to dismiss—often a swift way of squashing an illegal strike—for fear of even more unrest.
The biggest upshot of all this is the highly regulated labor relations procedures—which has helped keep the number of mine strikes down over the years—has been bypassed, at best, mocked at worst. In the past, under the eye of independent mediators, the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, wage demands went through extensive talks and delicate mediation. Only an irrevocable breakdown would lead to a strike certificate and a legal walk out. Even then, at best there would be at most a day or two of posturing on the picket line, or even a last minute deal before a drill was downed.
“They are opening up the entire mining industry to pay demands and illegal strike action, you are not going to be able to control illegal strike action&#8230; My biggest fear is that we are not working towards a long term solution,” says the national spokesman of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Lesiba Seshoka.
The first bitter legacy of Marikana is growing distrust and animosity between workers and management in an industry where the deeper underground you work, the less you get paid.
“Let’s be fair, when CEOs get millions we say nothing, when miners ask for twelve thousand Rand everybody make a noise. The manner the economy is structured doesn’t benefit everyone,” says the president of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), Joseph Mathunjwa, on August 31.
During question time in Parliament in Cape Town, on September 13, President Jacob Zuma blamed Lonmin for the unrest at Marikana saying the living conditions in the hostels left a lot to be desired and the company should have built family homes instead.
“Lonmin acknowledges that living conditions are not ideal but it is working towards better living conditions. We accept the criticism, but improving living conditions is a long process,” says Lonmin spokeswoman Sue Vey.
The second legacy of Marikana will be higher costs for mining companies, at a time when they can ill afford it, as workers appear to have proved they can ask for more wages when they want. In mining, most pay negotiations are run, in an orderly fashion, through the Chamber of Mines every two years. Gold and coal miners do this; there are proposals to bring platinum into these pay talks, but it may be too late.
Peter Major, a mining analyst with Cadiz Corporate Solutions, who has studied South African mining for more than 30 years, believes costs in platinum mining are likely to soar.
“Profit margins have fallen from 50%, a few years ago, to 10% now, quite simply the industry is running out of rope… We are getting to a point where people won’t be able to make money even at these platinum prices&#8230; It is terrifying, costs have been going up around 20% a year and these wage demands are likely to send these costs soaring even higher,” says Major.
In the angry chaos of South Africa’s mine, costs may prove the least of its problems.

The Jewel In The Dirt

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

I’ve Got Your Number

When Ruth Obih completed her legal studies she could see law and nothing else.
“I wanted to be a lawyer so badly, I was bent on it! That was my passion,” she recalls with a smile.
It didn’t work out that way for Obih. After practicing for a year, her first legal firm decided not to retain her. It was a blow to her dreams, to say the least. Few knew then, including her, that this set back was to put her on the path to a fortune.
Obih forgot law and made a 180 degree turn into fashion. She enrolled at the London College of Fashion and returned to Nigeria with her newly acquired skills.
“People always admired what I wore. So, when you tell me you like what I’m wearing, I’d tell you I sell it,” she says.
Fashion whiled away the time, but Obih yearned for more.
“I get bored really easily and always set new tasks for myself. On achieving them, I move on to my next task,” she says.
So it was back to London, where Obih enrolled for her Qualified Lawyers Transfer Test (QLTT) in the hope of practicing law again. While studying, she interned at a property law firm and became intrigued by the business of real estate. With no formal training in property, thoughts of using her legal skills in the real estate business flooded through her mind.
In 2006, Obih started 3Invest Limited UK, in London—a company focused on providing legal advice and property for those wanting to invest in real estate. A good response in London, led to thoughts of how this kind of service would fare in Nigeria.
Obih moved back to Nigeria later that year. She registered 3Invest Homes in Lagos and began hunting for properties to market with her legal advice.
In January 2007, Obih made her first big sale—a property worth millions of naira. She moved money from her thriving fashion label—Ruru Tunics—to secure the deal.
“I never went to the banks to ask for a loan. I almost have a phobia for that,” says Obih.
Sale after sale, 3Invest grew in leaps and bounds, as did Obih’s ambition.
“Yet again, it was time for me to do something different, I had toyed with the idea of starting a real estate advocacy platform using radio,” she says.
It took a number of approaches to radio stations and months of uncertainty. In the end, Obih’s proposal was accepted leading to the launch of Nigeria’s first real estate radio show, in March 2011, called Real Estate on Air.
“This show, is geared at empowering the Nigerian populace and helping them make better informed decisions when investing in real estate, the program is a one-stop shop, for real estate in Nigeria,” says Obih.
She also runs a real estate blog, driving traffic to the radio show.
With a fashion brand; a growing real estate business and a radio show under her belt, Obih is not done yet.
As a business woman, Obih describes herself as shrewd and dynamic.

Law, Fashion, Property, Radio, Success

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

On The Up And App

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

A Good Call

It must be lonely at the top, sometimes. Since Kenyan geek, lawyer and political activist Ory Okolloh became Google’s policy advisor for Africa in early 2011, she is one of the few women in senior management in information technology (IT), a still largely male-dominated industry.
“The absence of women in technology is a challenge, not just in Africa but across the world,” Okolloh sighs. Through her work at Google, she wants to change that—by getting more Africans online, encouraging the creation of local internet content relevant to Africans and creating opportunities for young Africans to become developers and entrepreneurs.
Google, in a clever way of growing its own next generation of potential employees, is focusing on attracting women to the IT sector through close collaboration with universities, fellowships and internship programs. As a result, the number of women in IT should increase, Okolloh believes, and should translate into women taking up leadership positions.
<div id="attachment_960" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-960" class="wp-image-960 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/369-198_1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Ory Okolloh, Johannesburg; 7 June 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
“You need to build a pipeline first before you can look at how to get women into the higher, more visible roles,” she says.
She also hopes her own career path—after growing up in a relatively poor family in urban Kenya, she graduated from Harvard Law School in the United States, then accepted a high-powered position at multinational tech giant Google—will be an inspiration to other African women: “I hope I come across as very normal, so women can look at me and think, ‘I can do that too’.”
It was at Harvard that Okolloh discovered the power of the internet.
“I started blogging, which as a woman, gave me a voice and a space that I didn’t have to negotiate with anyone,” she says. Freedom of speech, liberation from patriarchal structures and participation in current political and social debates were no longer abstract concepts. Okolloh could exercise them every day and perhaps, most importantly, without intermediaries.
It was a realization that gave her life a new course. In 2006, she co-founded a parliamentary watchdog site Mzalendo (‘patriot’ in Swahili) which increased the accountability of Kenya’s government by recording bills, speeches and other official documents and making them available online. A year later, when the east African country was engulfed in violence following disputed presidential elections, Okolloh created yet another site, Ushahidi (Swahili for ‘witness’) that collected and mapped eyewitness reports of violence. The open source software created for the website has since been used to track violence in Eastern Congo, monitor elections in India and Mexico and map crime in the middle-American city, Atlanta.
Although Okolloh describes herself as a nerd, she is far from geeky. Fashionable, witty, warm and charming, she says working in the IT sector doesn’t mean hiding behind a computer screen.
“I can’t code to save my life,” she admits. “I’m much more interested in how technology can change lives.”
Her role as Google’s Africa policy advisor allows her to pursue this goal. The 34-year-old spends her days jetting from one of the continent’s 54 nations to the next to convince governments and private sector representatives of the importance of internet access for everyone.
“I try to encourage them to adopt policies that lead to getting more people online, to put in place regulations and come up with initiatives that can give people more access to the internet,” she says.
Internet connectivity and expansion should be a key aspect of any African country’s economic growth strategy, Okolloh believes: “The internet needs to be treated as an ‘infrastructure’. It’s as core, as critical, as electricity, water or roads in terms of growing the economy.” Optimistic about Africa’s future, she trusts in the continent’s ability to generate economic growth, but is wary about how it is being harnessed.
“This is a key decade for the continent in terms of opportunities. The question is how we make it a sustainable, inclusive and transformative growth, not just a boom decade.”
One way to do this is to improve internet access—currently only about 10% of Africans are online—which will have a direct impact on people’s pockets, Okolloh says, because the internet gives everyone, even those without much capital, access to the world.
“That’s why I’m drawn to technology. It’s an opportunity for people without resources, particularly young people and women, to place their stake in the ground. Those who can’t get a loan, can’t set up a manufacturing plant, can’t get an agent, but have access to this platform where they can make something happen for themselves. You can’t create jobs for everyone, you have to encourage entrepreneurship,” she says.
That has certainly been true in her own life. A mother of three young daughters, it’s largely thanks to the internet, and a supportive husband, that Okolloh manages to juggle a demanding career, frequent travel and family life as well as she does.
“The internet is a key enabler for women because it gives them mobility, flexibility and connectivity wherever they are. It helps them juggle multiple roles, work from home, be more efficient,” she says.
But until Okolloh reaches Google’s goal of Africa reaching a level of connectivity that matches that of Western nations, she will have to overcome some major challenges. Although the necessary undersea cables have been landed to connect the continent to the world’s major data hubs in the States and Europe, transmitting data inland is still too expensive.
“We still have a long way to go to tap the internet’s full potential in Africa,” Okolloh admits.
Another obstacle to innovation is lack of regional integration, which would allow entrepreneurs access to all 54 African markets.
“For innovation to really flourish, as an innovator, entrepreneur or business, you need to be able to at least sell to the continent, if not worldwide,” she explains. The basis for this would be a regionally accepted online payment system, like PayPal in the States, to facilitate e-commerce continent-wide. To date, Africa doesn’t have one.
In addition to that, Okolloh, who was on the Forbes list of Names You Need to Know in 2011 and named by Foreign Policy as one of the world’s top 100 thinkers in 2010, is rooting for more local content creation including text in local languages and country-specific geo-mapping to create “an internet that speaks to you where you are”. Currently, local content is at a dismal 2%.
“I would like to see Africans not only consume technology, but produce it. It’s about making the internet more relevant to Africa but also about sharing our content with the world,” she says.
The more Africans use the internet daily, the more likely Google is to make a profit on the continent. Since the web-search giant started operations in Africa in 2007, it has expanded into South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Uganda and opened offices in each of them, employing a total of about 90 staff.
“We are still laying the groundwork, understanding the market. We will grow as a business if people are online and local content is online,” Okolloh says, predicting that Google will profit in Africa within this decade.

Google Her

They stretch for hundreds of kilometers. When it’s good, you feel like you are gliding over jet-black silk. But, when it’s bad, it’s like you’re juddering through dust and potholes. Driving an economy without roads is never easy. Especially when it comes to African roads, where transport costs remain among the highest in the world, according to independent analyst Andrew Maggs. The question is­: who pays for it?
The World Bank reports that only six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have more than a fifth of their roads paved. Those with the most tar roads may surprise many: Ghana; Botswana; Mauritania; Morroco; Niger and Ethiopia, far from the economic giants of the African continent.
This is a sign that Africa is crying out for investment in roads.
“At present, Africa’s road network is falling short of its function as a means to bring about greater regional integration and boost trade. For landlocked countries in Africa, transport costs, including road transport, can reach up to 75% of the value of exports. The cost of building road networks, and thereafter their maintenance, is costly,” says Maggs.
A key to investment is the Trans-African Highways System, he says. It comprises of nine main corridors on the continent, totaling over 59,000km, linking Cape Town to Cairo.
You could argue that Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the Romans did build roads that helped build an empire; roads which, to this day, still exist. On the other hand, they didn’t have to handle heavy low-load coal trucks or 16-ton wheelers carrying groceries from Durban harbor to Johannesburg along congested roads.
This kind of heavy traffic is the reason why the South African government built a wider, faster freeway through Gauteng. Now, it wants its money back. Whether they like it or not, drivers in Johannesburg are going to have to pay for the R18 billion ($1.8 billion) road the government built, stretching more than 185km around Johannesburg and Pretoria; a road that has undoubtedly eased traffic.
This has been fought through court and on the streets. The government wants people to pay R8.5 billion ($842 million) alone for a hated tolling system. On the front line is Wayne Duvenage, former Avis car rental agency owner and leader of the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance (OUTA).
“At this stage I want to set the record straight. We know we have to pay for the roads. Society ultimately pays for all upgrading and infrastructure development. The problem here is how we pay for the roads. As several companies started to engage with South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) we realized how onerous and cumbersome and how inefficient the system is,” says Duvenage.
There are 3.5 million people on the road in Johannesburg. In October 2007, all it took was an advert in six newspapers, which drew a mere 28 responses, to legitimize the road agency SANRAL’s project, the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP), he says.
No one complained when development began, before the 2010 FIFA World Cup, until the first tariff prices for e-tolls emerged, explains Duvenage. The public’s gripe is the annual R1.5 billion administrative cost, omitted by SANRAL, when the tender was gazetted. When people started adding this to the road cost of R1.9 billion ($190 million), to be paid back over 20 years, opinions started to change.
Gauteng drivers are not happy that they will pay on average R300 ($30) a month for a road for which they already pay a fuel levy and extra taxes.
Over three years, there have been numerous protests against e-tolls. Bikers have revved their anger on the highways. The South African labor union, COSATU, has blocked the traffic with slow driving, vowing to cripple the system. OUTA managed to win a court interdict banning e-tolls in April 2012. The court ruling was overturned by the South African Constitutional Court a few months later. SANRAL argued that if e-tolls were not implemented immediately the debt would be too great for the country to recover.
In mid-June, more controversy, Kapsch TrafficCom AG, the overseas company awarded the billing tender, told Bloomberg that it would get an additional annual revenue boost of R670 million ($67 million) through South Africa’s e-tolls. The announcement inflamed opinion yet again.
“Who could believe SANRAL’s claims that e-tolling is beneficial to South Africans when the only proven financial benefit to date is to Kapsch? Kapsch’s bold trumpeting of their revenue figures has unmasked e-tolling as a government-assisted [program to create] profits for a foreign-based entity,” says Duvenage.
According to Vusi Mona, SANRAL spokesperson, money will not be going overseas. All toll fees collected will go to SANRAL, except for the service costs of e-toll, which will go to Kapsch, as specified in their tender contract, he says.
Kapsch have posted an 18% drop in stock, since the delay. SANRAL has also had its fair share of knocks, their average monthly expenditure to pay for GFIP will amount to R601 million ($60 million). Credit rating agency Moody’s has announced a two notch downgrade of SANRAL’s rating. The company says it has had to suspend its marketing activities and limit the sale of its bonds to depress borrowing costs. Another cost to the public, SANRAL says, is that future road plans have been put on hold, despite a government bail-out of R2 billion ($200 million).
Had the interim interdict remained in place, parliament may have had to appropriate more money from the national revenue fund at the expense of tax payers, even those who do not live in Gauteng, says Mona.
The final appeal is to be held at the Supreme Court, on September 25 and 26. If successful, OUTA’s last roll of the dice against e-tolls could see it scrapped, leaving SANRAL to find another way of collecting the debt.
“We just don’t want to be ripped off. I think they planned this very sketchily; they didn’t do enough research. They didn’t engage properly. Now the chickens are coming home to roost,” says Duvenage.
The campaign against e-tolls is not as strong as they would have liked. Duvenage says people have had  problems digging into their pockets to win the fight. In legal fees alone, OUTA has raised R8.4 million ($840,000) but needs another R3 million ($300,000) to tackle the government in court. They need to raise R1 million ($100,000) by July 21, which the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, has decided to fund. Duvenage estimates the government’s legal costs run more than R25 million ($2.5 million), enough to pay for 1.8km more road on the highway.
“We are fighting a case that government has free reign over our taxes to spend our tax money in the courts and society has to go out with a begging bowl,” he says.
In response to OUTA’s call for more private money, Mona says OUTA is wasting public money by going against past court rulings.
In the meantime, SANRAL’s e-toll system was awarded first place in the 2013 Toll Excellence Award for Technology by the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association (IBTTA). It did not win a prize in the other three categories: customer service; operations; and social responsibility.
As the debate continues, more and more anger is being generated by rises in fuel levies, food prices and the general cost of living in the city. For many of Johannesburg’s citizens, the roadways provide the only reasonable means of travel to and from work.
There is no doubt the N1 is the envy of Africa, the question is will anyone pay for it? It is likely that they will have no choice.

Swallow The Black Brick Road

&nbsp;
I will go to school and study hard. I’ll be a success. I promise mama,” vows 10-year-old Lucky, at his mother’s grave. Lucky (Sihle Dlamini) gathers his few belongings, and like so many other South Africans leaves his rural Zulu village to the city.
Lucky (2011) is a poignant depiction of contemporary South African society and its problems. It explores the complex cross-cultural and racial relationships. It steers away from well-worn depictions of relations between black and white South Africans as depicted in archetypal post-apartheid South African films. The film explores the rainbow nation through relations between black and Indian South Africans. The film is in Zulu and Hindi with English subtitles.
Lucky’s arrival in the city is overshadowed by his uncle, Jabulani, (James Ngcobo) who has spent the schooling money—from the boy’s mother—on alcohol and women. He hands the boy an audio cassette with a final message from his mother. Jabulani says the youngster should make himself useful by finding a job instead. The boy sleeps hungry on the doorstep.
The film tracks the relationship between Lucky and Padma (Jayashree Basavaraj) who lives in the same building as Jabulani. She is his only hope of listening to the audio cassette. The Brahminic Indian widow, receives him with caution. She does not disguise her racial prejudices when she handles the audio cassette with a cloth and uses her walking stick to prod Lucky. The boy sleeps on her balcony, behind locked doors and drawn curtains, in a manner adopted by many South Africans in the face of poverty and guilt; Lucky is shut ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
Padma cares for the boy, but what seems to be a sudden change of heart, is actually a façade to receive a R200 government grant allocated for AIDS orphans. In return for cleaning her house, she sends him to school.
Together they undertake an emotional journey to Lucky’s village to escape from his neglectful uncle. Here they are met with the deeply-ingrained stigmas associated with AIDS, the disease which took Lucky’s mother. “Mother told me not to share food with you because you will spread the disease,” he is told by a girl from his village. Together with Padma, he goes in search of Dumisani (Vusi Kunene), a man who was believed to be dead and who might be his father. Dumisani, a funeral singer, is a constant reminder that in the midst of life we encounter death. The musical score, written by Phillip Miller, features African instruments and allows Kunene to explore his musical range.
Over time Padma’s maternal instincts overcome her Brahminic racism when she sells her belongings to help the boy. In a heart-warming scene, their bond transcends the language barrier when they talk about family, over Padma’s open family photo album.
This is award-winning writer and director, Avie Luthra’s, second feature film. It is based on the 2005 short film, by the same name, which won 47 awards. “Improvisation made the scenes and relations between the actors appear real and believable,” he says.
Willie Nel was well cast as the director of photography. The hand-held nature of the cinematography gives the film an authentic feel, allowing for a sense of voyeurism. “We wanted to strike a balance between documenting the story moments, and creating an intimate connection with our characters,” Luthra says. The camera attempts to go unnoticed, it hides behind grass, balconies, window panes and burglar bars. By doing so it simultaneously delineates the divide between characters to illustrate that understanding and compassion are needed for real reconciliation and to break down prejudice.
The film will be released on July 21 in South Africa; and is expected to be released in other parts of Africa in the coming months.

Category: Technology

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

More from Technology

Africa’s Greenest Star

Africa’s First Online Mentorship Network Is Born

The TV Dreams Of Africa’s Ted Turner