Unlike the more glorified test of man and machine (such as Formula One), rally racing has for decades been relegated to an inferior position in the hierarchy of tests of endurance. Yet this demanding sport actually predates F1; finding its roots in 1894 when horseless cart races dominated the city of Paris. Monte Carlo was the scene for the first official rally in 1911 and soon, city-to-city road races sprang up across France and Europe.
These races gave birth to those elements we still enjoy in modern rallying, such as time trials and the use of road books and route notes. Drivers had to weave between pedestrians and animals while covering distances as great as 1,178km—sometimes without any rest periods in between. Safety naturally became an issue, as the clunky vehicles got increasingly faster along those inhospitable tracks. The sport was banned in France for a brief period but soon, purpose-built tracks were developed and the sport came into its own.
A name we now associate with two-wheeled competitions, the Tour de France, began originally for rally drivers and kicked off in 1899. The most famous of all rallying competitions began decades later in 1977. Thierry Sabine was travelling through the Libyan desert on his motorbike when he got lost. Struck by the austerity and beauty of the landscape, he vowed to share his discovery with as many people as possible when he finally made it back to France.
Sabine mapped out a 10,000km route from Europe into Algiers, across Agadez and finishing in Dakar. To mark the birth of the Paris-Dakar rally, he coined the following motto: “A challenge for those who go. A dream for those who stay behind.”  But this competition became a nightmare for 58 competitors who, since the inception of the challenge, lost their lives in pursuit of glory. One of South Africa’s most renowned Paris-Dakar competitors, Alfie Cox (who’d made the transition from bikes to cars), narrowly escaped death in January this year when his Volvo XC60 suffered power-steering failure. The car burst into flames and both Cox and his co-driver, Jürgen Schröder, had to be airlifted from the scene. Unforgiving terrain and mechanical difficulties are not the only threats to competitor safety. The rally had to be cancelled in 2008 due to security issues in Mauritania and the competition shifted to South America in 2009. It has stayed there ever since.
Thanks to its challenging conditions, Africa has hosted some other, perhaps lesser-known events, such as the FIA African Rally Championships (which takes place in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Madagascar), the Kenya Airways East African Safari Classic, and the colloquially-termed Put Foot Rally.
Legend has it that the East African Safari Classic grew out of a conversation motorsport enthusiast Neil Vincent had with his cousin Eric Cecil. Vincent is attributed with saying: “I can imagine nothing more boring than driving round and round the same piece of track. But if you will organize an event where we can get into our cars, slam the door, go halfway across Africa and back, and the first car home is a winner, I’ll be in it.” In 1953, the competition took off under the guise of a tribute to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
The Put Foot Rally, unlike all the rest, emphasizes the social element rather than competition. It is aimed at bringing attention to tourism in South Africa and an appreciation for the wildlife and natural beauty that make up this fair land. But ultimately, rallying is about rivalry and economics—it’s a proving ground where manufacturers test their latest technology (which we as consumers benefit from). These competitions also generate financial rewards for the local areas hosting them.
Take the Toyota Kalahari Botswana 1000 Desert Race for example, which takes place on June 22-24 every year. Since 1975, this has been considered the ‘Comrades Marathon’ of all off-road events. At the launch of this year’s race, Onkokame Kitso Mokaila, Botswana’s minister for environment, wildlife and tourism, mentioned that the rally contributed “millions of pula” to their country’s economy with the bulk of the money being spent on food, transport, accommodation, entertainment and petrol. Businesses in the vicinity of the race route also mentioned increased sales during the annual event.
The technology required to build a car that’s capable of taking on extreme terrain is simply astonishing and begins with a frame that’s not only lightweight but capable of withstanding severe punishment. The frame doubles up as a roll cage and, according to FIA regulations, needs to be able to withstand up to 16.9 tons for a defined area. Driver and passenger safety of road-going cars has enjoyed many benefits, all as a direct result of the conditions experienced in rally (and other forms of) racing.
Keeping these cars in contact with the roads—where there is one—is the job of the suspension, yet this needs to allow enough ground clearance (spring travel is limited to 250mm) while still maintaining stability. Production cars make use of these developments, but naturally the emphasis here isn’t only on performance but also on ensuring comfort levels as well.
Four-wheel drive is crucial in rallying, yet the Paris-Dakar regulations stipulate that any form of electronic control is prohibited. As a result, manufacturers often opt for viscous locking for the car’s three differentials. One might think that, as these cars can’t travel as fast as their road-going counterparts, aerodynamics wouldn’t be a major factor—it actually is. A rally vehicle’s drag coefficient enjoys the highest priority in the design phase (which is obviously of great importance for road-going cars; ensuring high levels of fuel efficiency), all the while taking into account the need for short overhangs that allow easy entry angles when climbing over hills or obstructions.
Creating downforce, unlike in Formula One, is not a necessity as sand has high rolling resistance. In terms of bodywork, the carbon fiber shell on the 2012 Volkswagen Race Touareg for example, weighs in at a measly 50kg. Carbon fiber has now been extensively used in production cars where performance is key and many modern vehicles now make use of engines machined from lightweight yet durable aluminum.
Weight distribution in terrain that can easily flip a car demands serious attention. Typically, an equal weight distribution is placed over the front and rear axles and fuel tanks are placed very low to assist with an optimal center of gravity. While packing components in as compact a manner as possible, mechanics need to have ease of access to exchange parts or service the cars quickly. Support teams also need to carry as few spares as possible so they can be mobile and efficient.
Tire development goes hand-in-hand with racing and again, translates directly into the types of compounds available for production vehicles. Tires need to be capable of handling rough terrain, while offering resistance to wear-and-tear.
Stopping a standard 4&#215;4 has become easier thanks to the testing that goes on in rally races, which is why disc brakes have become an industry standard rather than the antiquated drum configuration. Thanks to these brave drivers and manufacturers, road-going cars have become exponentially safer and far more capable and will continue to do so in the future.

Pushing The Limits  Of Endurance

Kirsten Goss, a Durban-born entrepreneur, jewelry designer and mother has quickly become an award-winning African brand with stores in Johannesburg and London. There’s no stopping the strong-willed, go-getting Goss who has high aspirations and wants to continue expanding her exclusive jewelry chain with Cape Town also in her sights.
Goss has agents in San Francisco and New York and was recently the new face of Bombay Sapphire in South Africa. She now plans to expand to Asia.
A qualified jewelry designer and gemologist, her first flagship store was opened in London in 2002 and she recently opened another in Johannesburg. In 2009, Goss opened a state-of-the-art goldsmith studio in Durban where six designers craft her jewelry.
The London-based Kirsten Goss gallery is based in the trendy area of South Kensington on a picturesque cobbled path. Exclusive collections are heavily embellished, simple cuts which grab your attention. The pieces appeal to the independent, sophisticated woman who wants something unique. The exquisite styles are breathtaking, the gems dazzling; silver and gold jewelry with embedded precious stones.
Being passionate about the designs is important. Goss is meticulous about her work. She makes sure that every individual piece is handcrafted and personally designed, to fulfill her pride in the Kirsten Goss brand.
It took several attempts to catch the driven jewelry entrepreneur, who we managed to track down in Hong Kong. She explains her latest plans to break into the Asian market with a “pop-up” style fair.
When starting her business she took the risk and established herself as a small boutique firm which has now gone international. “We are doing an unusual thing, most people use the wholesale route to get ahead,” says Goss.
She said that her grandmother, Erica Goss, influenced her to start her own business.
“My role model is my grandmother who was a real frontier lady. She was a well-educated, typical Irish living in Africa, very frontier-orientated. She was somebody who was well-traveled. She taught me a lot,” says Goss.
“I started my business in London when I had a small child and then moved back to South Africa and visited London every month. My grandmother taught me you could live anywhere in the world. It’s all about passion, it’s all about ambition, it’s all about you and I think she was somebody who I drew a lot of inspiration from in my life,” she adds.
The designer’s Scandinavian and Irish heritage and her South African upbringing have all played a major part in influencing her designs. The use of exuberant colors clearly shows how she is influenced by her African heritage.
Goss supports a number of charities including the Make A Difference (MAD) Foundation; Sunflower Fund (leukemia); Save the Children, Enkuliso and Ekujabuleni nursery schools and the Wildlands South Africa. Her father was active in rhino conservation.
She was recently asked to design 12 pieces for the Spirit of Liberty exhibition in London. She has designed pieces for the Royal Wedding and Prince Willliam’s special birthday party.
“My dream is to have five to six galleries around the world in different locations and everybody knows that when going to a Kirsten Goss gallery they will find a truly unique piece,” says Goss.

An African Diamond  Sparkles In London

When James Mwangi boarded a commercial plane in Nairobi, bound for Monte Carlo, he was nervous.
This was a big trip to the Ernst &amp; Young World Entrepreneur of the Year 2012 Awards and the competition was tough. They call this award the Olympics, or World Cup, for entrepreneurs. It was a prize too far away in the mind of a 50-year-old like James Mwangi, CEO and group managing director of Kenya’s Equity Bank.
“I started wondering how I would be ranked when you hear stories of the personal wealth of these entrepreneurs. These people range from heads of industries like: the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world; the biggest ship building company in the world; supplier and producer of 90% of the world’s silicon chips—people with extensive experience—the majority of them are in their seventies,” he says.
Any fears in mid-air were confirmed when Mwangi’s commercial flight touched down in Monte Carlo on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Most of his competitors had arrived in their private jets.
“Not only did we not jet into the country, like most participants, we had to do a 45-minute drive to the hotel, while the others were lifted in helicopters,” Mwangi says.
“I was given a hotel room overlooking the beach on the 10th floor, overlooking yachts, more than 200 of them, expensive and luxurious yachts, at that. I realized that I am in a different place and not a usual place.”
So you can imagine the shock and surprise when the Nairobi banker, far from home, won.
“The whole hall was silent except our tables, with Nigerians and South Africans, of course.”
As they gritted their teeth and applauded, the illustrious competitors waited for the winner to walk to the front. Then, they waited a bit more.
“Instead of making my way to the podium, we started hugging and embracing each other with African joy and warmth. It was like thunder and something extraordinary had happened… We started singing the song, It’s Time for Africa and we were very excited about it—almost assuming that there was nobody else in the room until I was prodded by someone to make my way to the podium.”
Mwangi delivered the shortest acceptance speech in history, without protocol and almost incoherent, in his excitement. The roof-top drew back and fireworks crackled into the night sky over Monte Carlo—on the ground, Mwangi, the first African to win in 25 years of the awards, felt like exploding with them.
“This award makes a point that Africa is ready to be fully integrated with the rest of the world and what we hold are perceptions that are very far from reality. This is global recognition for Africans who are embracing the power of entrepreneurship to change the economic and social state of Africa,” says Mwangi.
Other African participants in these awards included: Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, group managing director of Access Bank in Nigeria and Braam van Huyssteen, founder and managing director of Tekkie Town.
It was recognition for the entrepreneur who opened up banking for millions of poor Kenyans through Equity Bank, in which he owns a 5% share.
Mwangi joined Equity Bank nearly 20 years ago when few gave a dime for its chances.
“The bank was declared technically insolvent and earmarked for closure when I joined in 1994,” recalls Mwangi.
Deposits were at Ksh22 million ($262,000), loans were at Ksh9 million ($107,000); there were 27 employees and losses were Ksh33 million ($393,000) against capital of Ksh3 million ($35,000). So the bank was technically insolvent to the tune of Ksh30 million ($357,000). He converted his family’s 15-year home loan of Ksh4 million ($71,000 in 1994) into capital, thus reducing the technical insolvency of the company to save it some interest.
“Instead of the traditional banking, we went to mass banking, high volume and very low margins. Consequently, we became relevant in terms of affordability. Through the use of technology, particularly that of mobile banking and agency, we were able to breach the last mile in terms of access to financial services,” says Mwangi.
“There was no way of going back to the family to say that we had lost everything, hence I had to work hard to redeem that which I had lost.”
Equity Bank grew and the deposits flowed in. Today the company has a turnover of about Ksh200 billion ($2.3 billion), with nearly 7,000 employees. It is listed on both the Nairobi and Uganda stock exchanges.
The Mwangi model is studied in several business schools including the Stanford Graduate Business School; Columbia Business School and Lagos Business School. Maybe, one day this method of making money at the bottom of the pyramid will be referred to by business graduates as “Mwangist” alongside Marxist and Keynesian theories.
It was the fruit of years of struggle for Mwangi. His father died when he was very young and his mother struggled to bring up her children alone. To raise money for school fees, Mwangi sold charcoal and fruit on the streets. It was his training ground for buying, selling and trading.
The blood of an entrepreneur ran through Mwangi’s veins from a tender age. As a young man, Mwangi formed a small company selling sand around Nairobi, in partnership with the current assistant minister of agriculture, Gideon Ndambuki. They had four lorries and a pickup truck; later they sold fruit and vegetables to hotels.
“Entrepreneurship is the cure for the African paradox of a continent with resources and human capital but that remains poor. The only ingredient lacking is entrepreneurship,” he says.
Anyone who can beat a fleet of high-flying entrepreneurs is surely worth listening to.

He Came, He Trembled,  He Conquered

If it weren’t true, it would sound too far-fetched to make up. The life of Penny Streeter, chief executive of healthcare staffing conglomerate A24 Group, is the archetypal rags-to-riches story of a woman who was left with nothing, didn’t give up, started small and made it big. She revolutionized the recruitment sector by turning it from a 9-to-5 business into a round-the-clock operation that dispatches temporary health professionals at as little as an hour’s notice.
Born in Zimbabwe to British parents and educated in South Africa, Streeter, who dropped out of school at the age of 16, ended up in recruitment by chance. After moving to London as a young adult, she trained as a beauty therapist but was soon looking for something more fulfilling.
“I decided this wasn’t going anywhere. I walked into an employment agency and told them I was looking for a job. They said, ‘Fantastic, we got one for you here’. That’s how I got into recruitment,” she says.
A go-getter by nature, Streeter was quickly promoted to branch manager. When the firm opened a second outlet, she hired her mother, Marion, to run it.
“We used to compete with each other about bringing in the most sales,” Streeter remembers. But one day, both mother and daughter were fired—they cost the firm too much in commission. They had worked themselves out of a job.
Irked by the limits of being an employee, Streeter decided to go it alone. She got a £30,000 ($46,611) bank loan. Her mother borrowed another £10,000 ($15,537). But their timing was bad. Within months of opening office recruitment company Elite Personnel in 1989, the United Kingdom (UK) went into a major recession. Demand for her services dried up almost overnight.
“It was a complete and utter disaster. The one day it was going well, the next day we had queues of people looking for jobs. We carried on and on, borrowing money, trying to dig ourselves out of this hole and eventually went bust,” she says.
By 1992, Streeter had lost every penny and was spiraling into debt. The furniture and cars belonging to her luxury offices in a posh part of London had been repossessed. But it wasn’t only bad timing that caused the firm’s failure. It was also “total lack of business experience”, Streeter admits. She had gone in, guns blazing and overspent.
To make matters worse, Streeter’s personal life suffered a tremendous setback. She went through a divorce which left her with nothing and—pregnant with her third child—was forced to move into a homeless shelter in a part of London her brother thought too dangerous to park his car. She had hit rock bottom.
Out of worry for the welfare of her children—“I thought, ‘How the hell do I ever bring up my kids in this environment? They are going to be drug dealers!’”—Streeter decided to give the recruitment industry another try in 1995, this time with only one asset: her determination. A value, she says, her parents instilled in her.
“At home, there was no such thing as can’t. I am lucky to be a confident person, so I had a strong belief that I could do it on my own. I knew I had to,” she says.
She started another venture, Ambition 24hours. This time, she took a different approach. Instead of getting a loan to kit out opulent offices, she rented a rickety desk in a corner of the office of a car parts dealership.
“I learnt everything from what happened [with Elite Personnel]. We didn’t buy anything. Every penny we earned we put back into the business,” she explains.
Streeter and her mother took turns working and minding the children. On weekends, they organized children’s discos to make cash.
“That’s how we raised income. We would literally earn some money to pay for a newspaper advert to recruit staff to our books and pay our phone bill. We knew we had to make instant money,” she remembers.
Ambition 24hours first recruited for the financial services industry, but Streeter’s big break came when she spotted a market gap in 24/7 medical staffing services.
“All the established agencies opened at 9 a.m. and closed at 5 p.m., including all weekend. But healthcare requires shifts around the clock, and you don’t know in advance that someone is going to fall sick,” she says.
Even though entering a market saturated by successful recruiters was a risk, her groundbreaking model took off fast, supplying round-the-clock services across England.
It was the business that within a few years would turn her into one of the most influential entrepreneurs of our time. Today, it has expanded into an umbrella group, the A24 Group, which houses a range of independently run staffing agencies, makes a turnover of £70 million ($109 million) and is said to have generated £5.5 million ($8.5 million) in 2011 alone. Streeter, who doesn’t like to discuss her net worth, and her mother Marion, are A24’s only shareholders.
Whoever imagines Streeter as a tough, aloof businesswoman in a tailor-made suit couldn’t be more wrong. The passion and love for life that drove the 45-year-old, back in the 1990s, radiates from her as she sits, dressed in a casual cotton top, a plastic pink watch studded with fake diamonds on her wrist, in her office in Cape Town, South Africa, where her business is now headquartered.
“It doesn’t feel any different, really I never set out to make millions and millions of pounds. I just wanted to provide for my family, run my business and do it successfully,” she says.
Despite making more profit in a year than most firms do in a lifetime, Streeter has stuck to her hard-earned motto of keeping it basic. A24’s offices are simple: functional carpets, plain beige walls, plywood tables and worn-out chairs. As pop music blasts through wall-mounted speakers, customer service staff outside Streeter’s unpretentious cubicle wear headphones in front of computer screens in an unadorned open-plan office, focused on attracting new business.
“I still live in the mindset of that first business. What happened then, could happen again. We’re going through a global downturn again. The same principles of don’t borrow, have crappy furniture, are still true in my business. We still have no borrowings at all,” she says laughing, “and we still have crappy furniture.”
Simplicity has become her philosophy.
“Think big, start small and keep things very, very plain,” is Streeter’s advice to young entrepreneurs. An original idea, a good business plan and hard work are far more important than large amounts of finance to get a business started. After all, she points out: “The majority of very successful entrepreneurs have started with virtually no money. The biggest driver has got to be you. People always look for others to motivate them. But at the end of the day, when you’re in business, you’ve got to be able to motivate yourself. And that’s hard.”
Needless to say, Streeter—who was named Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Entrepreneur of the Year in 2003 and received Britain’s highest decoration, an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for ‘services to enterprise’ three years later—drives the A24 Group with a keen eye for cost control.
“I have to make sure we’re not waking up tomorrow, the market has changed and we’re all out of work. It’s not just me now, it’s everyone I employ,” she says.
She likes to hold the reins tightly, so she’s set up a flat management structure, with herself as chief executive, a finance director and the management of the group’s agencies straight below.
“Flat management makes it easy to get to the heart of the business, without having to go through masses of chains of people. I want to be able to communicate directly with the person who can make the maximum impact and change on that business immediately,” she explains.
One of her most important decisions, she says, was to move the company’s headquarters to South Africa in 2004. With an £11 million ($17.1 million) investment plan, she set up sales and back-office resources on the tip of the African continent to supplement her UK facilities.
“My finance manager thought I had lost my marbles,” she laughs. But the move was much more than a romantic whim after a beautiful holiday to the country Streeter spent her teens in.
Although A24 was extremely successful in the UK—it was Britain’s fastest-growing private enterprise in 2002—the group had been suffering major staffing problems. Numerous employees had started to break away to set up their own agencies or join the competition, taking clients and databases with them.
“We were taking them to court to get injunctions. It was a very negative point for us. It cost hundreds of thousands of pounds,” says Streeter.
At the same time, Streeter struggled to find well-trained consultants, the group’s key asset.
“I realized that by moving operations to South Africa, I could protect the business from theft and regain with South African staff what I needed in terms of service. If we had remained in the UK, it would have been slowly eating away at us,” she believes.
Initially, it didn’t look like the smartest move. The business took a dip and two years to recover. But then, Streeter made her next move and acquired Nursing Services of South Africa, the country’s largest temporary staffing firm, adding another star to her shiny belt of agencies.
“When we came to South Africa, it was like going back in time. We found existing nursing agencies were arrogant, not flexible enough and had no service orientation,” Streeter recalls. Twenty-four-hour staffing also took off in South Africa.
Today, A24 is run from three centralized recruitment hubs in South Africa and the UK, plus smaller branches throughout both countries with 450 permanent employees and about 13,500 temporary personnel on its books.
But even someone as successful as Streeter makes a wrong call from time to time.
“I’m not immune to making wrong decisions. As CEO, you have to be able to make decisions really fast, right or wrong, and then you have to live with them,” she says, admitting that failing remains her biggest fear.
“If I’m wrong, I correct decisions quickly and hold my hands up to them. It’s better to make a wrong decision than no decision at all.”
That’s what happened in 2006, when Streeter decided to expand into recruiting services to the oil, gas, construction and engineering sectors, having set her eye on major emerging markets like the Arab Emirates. For almost two years, A24 invested heavily to prepare the launch of this new business arm. But when the 2008 global economic crisis began to unfold, Streeter knew she had to cut her losses: “We pulled out of the market immediately. Places like Dubai were starting to collapse. We could see we were going to run into huge payment issues. It was about knowing to get out at the right time.”
It was a hard decision to make, she says, but one that was once again based on the lessons she learnt from the failure of her first company in 1989, when she kept pouring money into a venture that had no chance of succeeding.
“You’re giving up business that is still there, which in a lot of ways seems ridiculous, but it’s about weighing the risks,” she says. She also shelved plans to expand operations into the United States.
Instead, Streeter decided to expand again on home ground. In 2010, she bought another competitor, the British Nursing Association, at one point the giant of the UK nursing industry, and its associated nursing agency brands Grosvenor Nursing and Mayfair Nurses, owned by Pinnacle Staffing, for a mere £2.75 million ($4.15 million).
“We’ve got that sick giant now, and hopefully we’ll get it back to where it was,” she says, without illusions about the complexity of rebuilding a struggling business.
“When you grow your own business, it’s your baby, you know it inside out. When you adopt other people’s children, they don’t do things the same way. It’s quite a learning curve and completely draining.”
Streeter clearly thrives on challenges, with acquisitions being her core expansion strategy. That’s not a new business strategy, but Streeter adds a twist: instead of fully merging the new acquisitions into her existing operations, she runs them in competition to each other. Each A24 agency operates independently, has different business strategies, different pricing structures and service models.
“I like starting new businesses and understanding their dynamics. I wanted to make sure we’re a bit like the soap powders in the supermarket: you have all those different brands but you end up buying the same one. I wanted the same effect for our agencies. The choice would always be one of our brands,” she explains. “I’m effectively trying to dominate and drive out competition.”
It’s also a way of keeping herself on her toes. Although she calls herself risk-averse, Streeter has a keen eye for new market trends and isn’t afraid of branching out. When she heard IT experts talk about the advent of another global tech bubble, she decided to invest in information and communication technology (ICT). She set up an IT development department to design tailor-made software for the group, giving it an advantage in speed and accuracy in the registration, management and booking of temporary staff.
Then, she took it a step further. A24 is developing management services software, which will be launched next year as a stand-alone operation within the group.
“In everyone’s business, technology is the driver now. If your technology isn’t right at the cutting edge you’ll be dead and buried,” Streeter believes. “Business is a real thing where what worked yesterday isn’t necessarily working tomorrow. I continually have to keep reinventing.”
Unsurprisingly, she has no intention of resting or retiring. Her business is like her fifth child, says Streeter, who has re-married and now has four children.
“The children see the business as their other sibling. When I told one of my daughters I was thinking about selling Ambition, she laughed at me and said, ‘You would sell me first’.”

No More Penny-Pinching  For Penny

Despite its problems, East Africa’s third-largest economy has enjoyed a measure of political stability. In 1986, pragmatic former guerrilla leader, Yoweri Museveni, overthrew President Milton Obote and his National Resistance Movement (NRM); he has dominated the political landscape ever since and is expected to do so for the foreseeable future.
This vestige of political stability, coupled with western-backed economic reforms, culminated in robust economic growth for the east African nation. Between 2006 and 2010, growth averaged an impressive 7.2%. Growth has been supported predominantly by coffee exports, household consumption and infrastructure development. The commencement of oil production, following the discovery of oil in 2006, will be a further boost for growth in years to come.
However over the past financial year growth has taken a knock and was the lowest it has been for several years. Official statistics show growth to have slumped to 3.2% in FY2011/12, down from 6.7% the previous financial year. Growth was weighed down by rampant inflation and weak external demand, primarily emanating from concerns surrounding the Eurozone debt crisis.
<div id="attachment_994" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-994" class="size-large wp-image-994" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/iStock_000001291877Medium-683x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="711" />The equator, exactly at zero degrees north or south, The line is also painted on the road.</div>
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects growth to improve to 6% in 2012 and rise to 7% in 2013. Growth is likely to benefit from less stringent monetary policy on the back of subdued inflation. This is likely to improve credit extension to the private sector that had been adversely affected through tight monetary policy pursued since the middle of last year.
Inflation last year spiralled out of control prompting the Bank of Uganda to raise the central bank rate from 13% in July to 23% in November. Inflation decreased to 18% in June, from 18.6% a month earlier. Declining inflation allowed the central bank some scope to ease the policy rate. The central bank rate was lowered to 19% in July, down from 20% in June. Despite falling inflation, the Bank of Uganda is likely to be cautious in its monetary policy stance in months ahead. Rightly so as core inflation still remains high at 19.5% as of June.
Fiscal policy will complement monetary policy and remain accommodative in line with the country’s infrastructural and developmental ambitions.
Macroeconomic policy will be further anchored through the IMF’s Policy Support Instrument (PSI) program currently in place. In June the IMF gave the program a thumbs up which will soothe investor concerns.
There are several risks to growth in coming years. Uncertain global growth given the lack of a comprehensive and permanent solution to the European sovereign debt crisis should keep external demand low and continue to curtail exports. About 22% of Ugandan exports are destined for Europe.
Slowed global growth should keep energy prices low. Conversely, inflation will soar in the event that oil prices rise significantly. Food inflation in particular will also be dependent on rainfall conditions. Poor rains drove food inflation higher last year and it remained sticky at 12.7%, in June.
The possibility of war between Sudan and South Sudan will also have a considerable bearing on Uganda’s growth. The two neighbors engaged in border conflicts earlier in the year and have threatened each other with full-blown war. In the unfortunate event of war, Uganda has pledged to support South Sudan. A war between the two neighbors would threaten lucrative trade between Uganda and South Sudan.
Uganda has been rocked by mass protest following the general elections last year, which threatened the county’s stability. Continued protest will disrupt production. The protests have been led by opposition leaders and aim to turn the government’s attention to rising living costs, unemployment and rising corruption levels. Worryingly though, the protests have turned violent and police heavy-handedness to quell the protests has been reported.
Investors will be watching the economy closely in months to come. Top on their radar will be how quickly President Museveni addresses protests concerns. Any escalation of the protest would be detrimental to the economy. Investors will also have an eye on the commencement of oil production slated for 2013.

Uganda — Buffeted But Breathing

When the chilling images of Ernesto Nhamuave burning to death on the streets of South Africa were flashed around the world in May 2008 there were howls of pain and outrage. While the wounds are still fresh, a group of African filmmakers has risked controversy to take the harrowing story to the cinema in a film titled Man on Ground.
An unexpected hand in this project came from Rosie Motene—a lifestyle TV presenter more at home with holiday homes and cocktails on the beach than violence on the streets.
“As soon as my stint with Studio 53 was done and dusted, I approached film director Akin Omotoso of T.O.M Pictures about my interest in film production,” she says.
<div id="attachment_990" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-990" class="size-large wp-image-990" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Hakeem-and-I-682x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="712" />Hakeem and Omotoso</div>
“Akin told me about Man on Ground; the fact that he had put it on ice due to a lack of funding and asked me if I had an appetite for this kind of project and whether I’d be keen to find a way of making sure the film happened. He felt strongly about telling that story and seeing the project to completion.”
Omotoso, a Nigerian working in the South African TV and film industry, was made for the telling of filming the story of Nhamuave having endured a good deal of xenophobia himself.
“Akin and a few other colleagues had already done extensive research for Man on Ground. The storyline was done, the wish list cast had already been identified and all that was missing was funding to get the production started. We agreed that the only people that were going to get paid were the cast and crew, so we went ahead and started sourcing money to get the ball rolling,” explains Motene.
Man on Ground, a tale of terror and violence, was never going to be a box office money-spinner so Motene realized they were going to have to be creative when it came to raising money.
“We decided to try out the new ‘crowd funding’ method, despite the fact that it had never been done locally before. Crowd funding basically means that you approach the everyday man on the street, ask them to make a donation and instead of them getting a return on investment they get a credit in the movie and get to attend the premiere event once the movie is released,” she explains.
South African low budget movies cost between R3-R5 million ($366,925-$611,540) to make; Motene and her team managed to raise only R1.9 million ($232,390) through crowd funding and a few generous corporate sponsors.
“Our budget was practically a joke, considering it cost about R20 million ($2.4 million) to produce (Oscar-winning movie) Tsotsi, but we decided to start production anyway with what we had and hope for the best. We had to call in a lot of favors from family and friends, and we had to think outside the box with regard to how we were going to make the movie look like a quality production despite our obvious financial restraints,” says Motene.
“We used friends’ houses for some scenes, family members as extras and for the fire scenes we went to a place in Lenasia (South of Johannesburg), where firemen do their training by blowing up things and putting out fires.
The film took 22 days to shoot. Even though Man on Ground did not get a big cinema release, it still fared well in the accolades department. Man on Ground picked up three awards from many nominations at the African Movie Awards in Nigeria in April. It was also screened at the Cannes, Dubai and Berlin film festivals as well as at Washington University. Motene and the team have partnered with the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) and have embarked on a mission to take the movie to all corners of Africa.
“The NFVF has a very cool distribution model where they take smaller films into independent film cinemas. As soon as we are done taking the film into South African communities through screenings at churches and community halls, we will also utilize the NFVF’s resources to take it into the mining communities and other remote areas using a mobile unit that can go into the deepest and most rural of areas,” says Motene.
Man on Ground tells a story of a Nigerian investment banker living in Britain. His mother begs him to go to South Africa to look for his step-brother. He manages to overcome his hesitancy, due to some personal issues he had with his brother, to go on a journey to find him. He is caught up in xenophobic violence that results in him being burnt alive. The film stars solid actors such as Hakeem Kae-Kazeem, Fana Mokoena and Bubu Mazibuko.
“Even though there was not going to be any financial gain on my part, or anyone else who invested in the film, I felt I had to be part of this project as my way of doing something about xenophobia. I find it pathetic that even though that particular uprising was said to have been started by South Africans, the majority of the 62 lives that were lost were mainly innocent people from South Africa,” says Motene.
“What’s even more disheartening is the fact that as South Africans, we were basically turning against the very people whose countries helped us fight apartheid.”
Twenty-two days of shooting could yield food for thought for years to come.

A Shocker On A Shoestring

It’s refreshing when you come across a foreigner passionate about Africa. The continent has become the new big market for multinationals all over the world. But Ewan Cameron, CEO of Lonrho Hotels is not jumping on the bandwagon, he’s had his sights set on Africa for a long time, and not only for business, he’s also ardent about the continent and its people.
“My interest in Africa came at an early age, I’ve always been interested in the people and the culture,” says Cameron.
<div id="attachment_979" style="width: 810px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-979" class="size-full wp-image-979" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/test.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="533" />Lansmore Masa Square, Garborone, Botswana</div>
Cameron has a long history in the hotel industry though he’s only 39. Born and raised in Glasglow, Scotland, he started out waiting tables and cleaning rooms at the Swallow Hotel and Conference Centre in Dundee, while he studied Business Sciences at the University of Dundee. After graduating in 1992, the Swallow Hotel Group offered him a position as front house manager of the hotel. His keen interest in hotel management won him a transfer to the Glasglow Swallow Hotel, where he became the business development manager. Then the United Kingdom’s two biggest hotel groups, at the time, Thistle Hotel Chain and the Forte Hotel Group, noticed him. Cameron went with Forte, because of its international exposure. Thistle is the biggest hotel chain in the UK but had no hotels outside the region. Forte has hotels all over the world. Cameron’s portfolio included some heavyweight clients like UBS, the Ford Motor Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers. He later took over new business development at Forte. In 1999, Forte bought the Holiday Inn franchise. And in 2002, Cameron moved over to head up franchising. This is where he got his real feel for Africa. He travelled extensively overseeing operations in the Middle East and Africa. Cameron worked closely with Southern Sun, which at the time was running some of its hotels under the Holiday Inn brand. But in 2008, Southern Sun cut ties with the Intercontinental franchise and dropped the use of Holiday Inn.
Cameron also decided it was time to cut ties.
“I tried for years to convince Forte to expand in Africa, but they were not interested, they wanted to expand in Asia and the Middle East, I wanted to grow Africa. I drew up a strategy for Africa and Lonrho liked it,” Cameron recalls. The Lonrho Group has been operating in Africa for over 100 years. It is invested in luxury hotels across Southern Africa. It also runs airlines and is involved in the agricultural sector. The group took Cameron’s strategy and made him CEO in 2010. Since then, he has wasted no time in implementing his ambitious plan. Lonrho has partnered with easyHotel Group to roll out 50 new hotels by 2016.
“There is growing demand in Africa especially for the business traveler,” notes Cameron. Lonrho has five-star luxury hotels in 16 countries in Africa. The group is now moving towards building more business-friendly hotels.
“These hotels wouldn’t have the luxury that our high-end hotels offer, but they’re comfortable for the business person going on a quick trip,” he says. His strategy is to open hotels with a fresh and modern design. They will offer all the services a businessperson needs, like a conference venue, gym facilities, a coffee shop for meetings and full Wi-Fi. Hotel managers are also being trained.
“Our managers should be able to link travelers to local businesses and help link them to potential clients and vice versa; the hotel needs to become a one-stop shop,” he says.
The new low-cost easyHotels have opened in some countries with rooms from $35. In June, Lonrho opened a hotel in Gaborone, Botswana. Another hotel opened in Beira in Mozambique in July. There are plans for new hotels in Nairobi in Kenya, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and Accra in Ghana.
<div id="attachment_981" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-981" class="size-large wp-image-981" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lonrho-head-office-photos-033-681x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="713" />Ewan Cameron, CEO of Lonrho Hotels</div>
Later this year, Lonrho will also open its first hotel in South Africa in the Johannesburg city center. The hotel will be situated outside the new Gautrain rail link from O.R. Tambo International Airport. In recent years, several international hotel groups have opened hotels in the affluent Sandton area, but not many have ventured into the city’s center.
Cameron is not one to follow the herd; he believes that not everyone travelling to Johannesburg wants to go to Sandton. He is also not too worried about going into areas that pose political and social risks. Lonrho recently purchased a second hotel in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). For decades, the country has been torn apart by war and civil unrest. This has not deterred Cameron who believes there’s rich tourism potential in the country’s capital. Cameron is certainly a risk taker but he does his homework and says he has an exit plan for every hotel the group owns. He works closely with the Mckinsey research group for facts, figures and other data on Africa. According to Mckinsey research, the DRC will be the fastest growing economy in Africa by 2026.
But not everyone has an appetite for risk. Tsogo Sun Holdings, Africa’s biggest hotel and gaming group, is not convinced there is a real demand for hotels in Africa. It already has a strong footprint in Africa with its Southern Sun hotels and feels more confident in South Africa than the rest of Africa.
“There are no volumes in Africa,” says Tsogo Sun CEO, Marcel von Aulock.
“African economies are small and there’s still very little corporate activity to propose new hotels.”
Tsogo recently posted a solid set of annual results. The group raised earnings 39% to R9 billion ($1.1 billion). Von Aulock is also no newcomer to the industry. He joined Tsogo’s finance department in 1999. Ten years later, he took over as the group’s CEO. He believes he understands the hotel industry and while he does see opportunities for further expansion on the continent, he feels the timing needs to be right.
Tsogo’s approach to the hotel industry differs from Lonrho’s. The group is focused on taking full ownership of hotels; it doesn’t just take over the management and operations.
“We want to own the land the hotel is standing on, we want to manage and operate it and own the brand, and it’s not always easy to do that. But we are not about taking the easy approach,” adds Von Aulock. The group recently closed its famous Southern Sun Grayston Hotel in Sandton after 30 years, because it didn’t own the land. The tenants raised the rent and Tsogo felt it was no longer feasible to remain on the property.
“This served as a lesson for us, that’s why it is more important now that we stick to our business model,” says Von Aulock.
But he concedes this is one of the main reasons it’s hard to penetrate Africa.
“Land is still a very controversial issue, the operating costs are very high. If we build a hotel in Africa, we have to set up our own power generation, our own water purification and sewerage systems—it requires a massive cash injection,” says Von Aulock. This is where Tsogo and Lonrho differ. Lonrho takes over existing hotels, rents the properties and provides the management and operational expertise to run the business.
Tsogo has also done well with its gaming business in South Africa, but says it has no plans to open casinos anywhere in Africa.
“Again there’s no market for gambling in Africa. The South African market is very different—our casinos here are doing very well, even in tough economic times, there’s still spending capacity in South Africa, not in Africa, there’s no middle-class in Africa and unfortunately that’s where the spending comes from.”
But Tsogo Holdings is not staying away completely. It’s still positive about future growth and says it will continue to look for opportunities. It owns 95 hotels in southern Africa, most of which are four- and five-star hotels. But last year, it ventured into the business traveler market opening a two-star StayEasy hotel in Lusaka, Zambia. The hotel is a nice fit for corporate travelers looking for tourist activities. It is attached to a shopping mall, another strategy Tsogo is exploring.
“We want our guests to have quick and easy access to any services they may need,” says Von Aulock.
Tsogo has also taken over distressed hotels successfully. The group recently bought The Grace in Johannesburg’s northern suburb of Rosebank for R85 million ($10.12 million). The iconic boutique hotel closed its doors in August last year after the operating company ran into financial difficulty. Tsogo Sun has spent over R20 million ($2.4 million) on refurbishing the hotel. The new 54 on Bath hotel opened its doors in July.

Staying In Hotels

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

It has been a lonely few months in Mozambique. In the dim dawn, before the sun grips the rugged streets of Maputo, Juliano Maquina, runs in the hope of Olympic glory.
In many ways Maquina feels left behind, the last man standing. He is the only Olympic athlete who has trained in the meagre gyms of Mozambique–while his compatriots tone up in well-heeled countries around the world. If he can fight to become the last man standing in London, it would all have been worth it and could boost boxing in the land of his birth.
Maquina is the first boxer from Mozambique to qualify for the Olympics for nearly 20 years. He weighs 49kgs and will fight in the light-flyweight division.
The fight for Maquina began long ago. Every morning, six days-a-week, he trains in a basketball court in Maputo with no ring, no ropes, not even a punch bag–the lot of a sport starved of cash. Against the odds, the boxer with the baby face stays fit and tries to improve his technique ahead of being thrown to the finest young fighters in the world.
<div id="attachment_939" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-939" class="wp-image-939 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lucas_sinoia_20120516_19-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="315" />Lucas Sinoia</div>
“My dream is to make it to three Olympics and three world championships and take silver in two of them. My family have supported me and I hope that a successful boxing career will provide for them,” says Maquina.
At the very least, the 18-year-old southpaw has time on his side and clearly the stomach for a fight. Maquina had to battle hard at the qualifiers in Morocco to make it to the Olympics. Three boxers fought for Mozambique, Maquina was the only one to qualify in Casablanca; by contrast Angola sent six boxers, none qualified; South Africa sent nine, two qualified. One hundred and fifty four boxers competed from 30 African countries.
Maquina also has a good man in his corner, Lucas Sinoia, who fought twice for Mozambique at the Olympics.
Sinoia, aged 45, was born in the rural Mutarara Province in Tete in the remote north-western corner of Mozambique, and fought at 67kgs in the welterweight division. He was the champion of Mozambique between 1985 and 1996 and worked in a bread factory, to keep boxing, because the pay was so poor.
The answer to penury came from the barracks. Sinoia joined the army, which gave him the money and facilities to train. The army has long been a cradle of the sweet science. Legend has it that Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel, used to punch sandbags for fun, on visits to his troops and was ringside at the big fights.
Sinoia thrived in the army and won a bucket load of medals leading to his qualification for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, as the youngest member of the national team, aged 22. He lost in the second round of the welterweight tournament to Spaniard, Javier Martínez, after getting a bye in the first. Robert Wangila, of Kenya, won the gold–the first Kenyan to win gold for his country in a sport other than athletics. Wangila, who fought 22 professional fights, died, aged just 26, from his injuries after a severe beating in the ring in Las Vegas in 1994.
Sinoia also qualified for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta where he built his reputation as a highly disciplined boxer.
The glory days in Atlanta were few, as Sinoia was beaten 11-6 in the first round by, Vadim Mezga, of Belarus. He retired in 1998.
Nearly 20 years, later Sinoia has put his own money up to start the Academia de Boxe Lucas Sinoia, in Maputo, where he coaches aspiring boxers, as young as eight. He is looking for the next heavyweight sensation, but has spent the last few months training the young Maquina.
“I have great hopes for Juliano, but fear that he will have a hard time. Apart from a small trip to Cuba and to Morocco for the qualifiers, he has no other international experience,” says Sinoia.
Together with trainer Braulio Montiel, from Cuba, Sinoia shares the job of coaching the national boxing team.
The Cuban connection is an old and powerful one. It began when Joao Caldeira, a businessman and President of the Mozambique Boxing Federation, went to teach Portuguese in Cuba in 1978. He stayed for five years and arranged for three Mozambicans, including Sinoia, to be trained in the Caribbean country which produced Olympic gold medallists such as the late Teofilo Stevenson. All three returned to become Mozambican champions.
The Cuban dash in the ring appears to be rubbing off on the young Maquina. He says his role model is the former Olympic gold medallist featherweight, Yuriorkis Gamboa, who is now unbeaten in 21 professional fights.
Sinoia and Monteil want to concentrate the meagre money, given by government to boxing in Mozambique, on training a small group of determined and talented fighters. They are looking to business for money to help the impoverished sport that could bring medals.
A successful international boxer could help coax this money from companies and revive what was once a glory game in Mozambique and a way out of poverty for many of the country’s poor.
In the 1960s and 70s, boxing pulled huge crowds and money in Mozambique. The hotbed of boxing with the seaside town of Beira and thousands took trains from all over Mozambique, as well as South Africa and Zimbabwe, for the big fights.
Money flowed through Mozambican boxing. The bets were big and boxers from across southern Africa travelled to reap the rewards of the ring.
These days of money and thunder may be a far cry from the quiet build up to the Olympics, on a shoestring, for Maquina, but there is hope. Already the victory in Casablanca has been hailed for putting Mozambique back on the boxing map.
Maybe the slender teenager, with the baby face and the sneaky jab, could stun the world in London. After all, the oldest saying in the history of boxing is the bigger they are the harder they fall.

The Lonely Last Man Standing

Heavyweight boxers David Haye and Dereck Chisora have been trying to get at each other for weeks now—on July 14, they will get their chance at West Ham’s Upton Park football ground in London. A crowd of 40,000 is expected, the biggest in Britain since Ricky Hatton beat Juan Lazcano in May 2008.
Both fighters will be unlicensed and angry; neither will earn any boxing ranking points from the fight—merely the grim satisfaction of winning what promises to resemble a street brawl. The British Board of Boxing Control has banned Chisora from fighting; Haye’s license has expired.
The first round of this street brawl was fought out on television, before a bewildered boxing world, at a press conference following Chisora’s loss to Vitali Klitschko for the World Boxing Council heavyweight title, in February at the Olympiahalle in Munich, Germany.
Was it real or staged? Many wondered. What is clear is that the two British boxers don’t like each other and it all boiled over in Munich.
It was the stuff the tabloids dream of. The Klitschkos’ manager, Bernd Boente, announced that no more British boxers would be given the right to challenge the world heavyweight champions, Vitali and Wladimir. This was a reaction to Chisora’s unbecoming behavior—to say the
least—before the fight.
First, Chisora slapped Vitali at the weigh-in. Then he spat on his younger brother, Wladimir, just before the fight.
After the fight it got worse. Haye, who had lost to Wladimir a few months earlier, was in the crowd of journalists at the post-fight conference. He objected to Boente’s statement about British boxers and demanded a rematch.
Sensing that Haye was stealing the show, Chisora responded by charging off the stage to attack Haye, verbally and physically. A brawl ensued amid the chaos of tumbling journalists, cameras and flying fists; Haye swung a camera tripod at Chisora. In the confusion, Chisora claimed he was glassed and said that he would either shoot Haye or hunt him down, or both. The German authorities detained 28-year-old Chisora and the British Board of Boxing Control banned him.
Chisora’s father, Paul, a contracts manager at a fireplace manufacturing company in Harare, was quoted in the Zimbabwean newspapers as saying: “If it was me, I could have kept my cool. He is still growing up and did not have anyone older who could restrain him.”
The two camps fixed the fight for July and persuaded the boxing federation of the small European nation of Luxembourg to sanction it because no one else would. This will be the first time a fight will be held in Britain, licensed by a foreign federation. The disgusted Luxembourg government withdrew its subsidies from the federation in protest.
It is a big story swirling around a young man from Zimbabwe. Chisora was born and bred in Harare and left for Britain to join his mother in 1999. He fights out of Finchley—Margaret Thatcher’s old constituency—and is a naturalized Briton with an accent more cockney than Shona.
Chisora fought 20 times as an amateur, before turning professional in 2007. Before he was banned, he was ranked 13th in the world heavyweight division, notching up 15 wins in 18 fights, with nine knock-outs. His winning streak of eight fights ended with the boxing authorities suspending Chisora for four months for biting journeyman boxer Paul Butlin in a heavyweight clash at the York Hall in Bethnal Green, London. As a result, he missed a fight for the British Heavyweight title against Danny Williams in 2009. He would defeat Williams a year later to become the British champion.
What irked Chisora was that Haye was given the opportunity to challenge for the world title first. Haye went on to lose to Wladimir in a poor showing after declaring that he would knock out both the Klitschko brothers in one night. Haye later claimed that he went into the fight with a broken toe.
By the way, Chisora went to Churchill Boys High School in
Harare—its mascot is a bulldog. Its spirit follows him still.

Grimy Grudge Match

In a golf-cart-type vehicle, Nico Dekker zooms between stages, cheerfully greeting staff as he drives past. “Hello!” he greets to the left. “Howzit?” he shouts to the right in South African slang for “How are you?”. The cart zigzags over a short patch of sandy gravel road, climbs a small hill and comes abruptly to a halt next to an ancient water well.
Dekker, CEO of Cape Town Film Studios, sportily jumps out of the vehicle and starts walking in long, determined strides through what is southern Africa’s first permanent backlot (an area outside a film studio used for outdoor filming).
<div id="attachment_915" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-915" class="wp-image-915 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/MG_5388final-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Nico Dekker</div>
It’s like time travel. A couple of minutes ago, Dekker, casual in jeans and a dark-blue shirt, stood in the middle of one of the studios’ enormous four stages, pointing out its ultra-modern, high-tech features. Now he strolls through 13th-century Carcassonne, a medieval village of thatched stone houses, arches and narrow lanes in the south of France. The $2 million outdoor set was built for a TV production by English film director Ridley Scott, based on Kate Mosse’s bestselling thriller, Labyrinth. Now it is used as a backdrop for any movie set in ancient times.
“Impressed?” Dekker asks while running his hands through his strawberry-blond hair. It’s the effect he secretly hopes for. “I rather undersell the studios and surprise people, than make a big announcement and struggle to live up to it,” he says, his grey-blue eyes twinkling. Since the Cape Town Film Studios became operational in November 2010, Dekker has sought little media attention, letting the films produced here speak for themselves.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-916" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/MG_5458final-1024x396.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="183" />
Since opening, the studios have attracted Hollywood productions like Blood Diamond with Leonardo DiCaprio, 3D action film Dredd, superhero movie Chronicle, and Safe House, starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds. Presently, South African director Anant Singh, whose company Videovision Entertainment is a major stakeholder in the studios, is turning Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, into a movie here.
The feedback from Hollywood has been positive. Jim Dodson, executive producer of the 20th Century Fox film Chronicle, said Dekker and his team did “an amazing job in laying out and designing the [Cape Town] studios”. Because production costs are much lower in South Africa than in the US, the movie cost $12 million to produce but made more than 10 times that amount at the box office. The Cape Town studios had produced a film that “looks like $100 million for less than half that figure”, said Dredd producer Andrew Macdonald. “Now that’s value for money,” Dekker beams. “We give life to film projects that were seen as unaffordable in the US or Europe.”
South Africa—particularly the region around Cape Town with its beaches, mountains and winelands—has been a prime location for the advertising and film industry since the dismantling of apartheid in 1994, which led to the lifting of sanctions.
“It offers beautiful locations and an incredible variety of landscapes, all within a three-hour radius,” says Dekker. Cape Town’s palm-lined Camps Bay beach often serves as a tropical backdrop. Only two hours outside the city, the barren scenery of the Cederberg or the arid Karoo make for desolate desert settings, while the green hills around Grabouw, an hour’s drive from Cape Town, give an impression of the Swiss Alps.
But until the studios opened, material shot in and around Cape Town was taken overseas for studio work, post-production and visual effects—and that’s where the real value-add is taking place.
This has now changed. Cape Town has become a destination for both location shoots and high-end studio production. Producers go home with a finished product. That’s a tremendous economic opportunity for the country, according to a 2010 Deloitte Touche study, which found that every dollar spent on studio-based film production leads to $2.50 in GDP. At full capacity, the Cape Town Film Studios can add about $180 million to South Africa’s GDP, says Dekker.
With a $750 million annual turnover, the film and television industry contributes a big chunk to South Africa’s economy, creating employment for 30,000 people, and jobs in related industries such as transport, hospitality and catering. Although the Cape Town Film Studios only employ 16 permanent staff, large productions provide an average of 400 jobs over a six-month period, Dekker says. That includes not only highly skilled technical personnel but also work for carpenters, builders and garment workers who build props and make costumes—this means jobs in a country where almost a quarter of the population is unemployed.
The decision to go ahead with the film studios was nonetheless a gutsy and expensive structural investment. It cost $41 million to build the 17,000m2 complex of four stages with support rooms, production offices, green screens, workshops and a cinema on 200 hectares of land a 40-minute drive from central Cape Town and 10 minutes from the airport.
The South African government made it clear that it was not prepared to take on the financial risk. Instead it called for public tender in 2003, which was met with skepticism. “The initial feedback was negative,” admits Dekker. “Most industry experts were extremely skeptical about an African studio handling high-tech shoots.”
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It took five long years to find the money. In 2008, the bulk of the budget was put up by a consortium of Sabido Investments, which owns South Africa’s free-to-air television station e.tv, and Singh’s Videovision Entertainment, which has received international praise for movies like Sarafina! with Whoopi Goldberg and Red Dust with Hilary Swank. “It was not a safe investment. It had its risks. But I felt they were reasonable given the exponential growth of the local film industry in the past decade,” says Singh.
Wesgro, the investment and trade promotion agency in the Western Cape, contributed 10% to the budget, while a group of local business investors hold a 5% share. South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry and the City of Cape Town spent $6 million on road infrastructure to access the studios.
Months of research followed. Dekker visited major studios to learn from their experience. “I asked everyone from Fox to Disney, Universal and Warner to share what they would do differently if they were building today,” he says. The result: The Hollywood Reporter ranked the Cape Town studios among the world’s top 10 last year.
Although Dekker admits that studios are generally the industry’s “loss leaders” because their high overheads cut sharply into profits, he believes it will take a mere five to 10 years to see a return on investment in Cape Town. “Even if not all of the stages are always occupied, there hasn’t been a day the studios have stood without production,” Dekker says. They have already started to write black numbers before tax and interest.
“The studios start looking like a really good investment,” agrees Singh.” More and more international productions are coming in. The successes of films like Safe House and Chronicle prove us right. Now even the skeptics say building the studios was a smart thing to do.”
Dekker has ensured that there will be various additional sources of income: the land, on which the studios stand, has been zoned into residential, retail, commercial and light industrial areas, including rights for a hotel. Twenty film-related companies will move onto the site within the next couple of years.
The South African government has, meanwhile, recognized the studio’s economic potential. To make the country more competitive internationally, it is considering scrapping the cap on tax rebates. Currently, foreign producers who spend more than $1.5 million on a South African production and film half of it locally over at least four weeks qualify for a 15% rebate. This is small compared to other countries like Belgium, Brazil, Spain or Hungary, which offer incentives of 40% or more. In contrast to South Africa, their governments also provide free resources such as access to police, army, navy and government institutions and co-financed marketing.
That means South Africa faces some stiff global competition, especially from other cheap locations like Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Mexico and Chile, which offer low rates, highly skilled technicians and are geographically much closer to the US or Western Europe. It needs to “offer the best overall package”, as Dekker calls it. “Some of the world’s most sought-after locations at affordable rates, together with a film studio on par with Hollywood in an English-speaking environment,” says Dekker. “There is huge potential to unlock.”

Picture This

Igugu is the horse that stole the hearts of many and cost those who failed to believe.  An Australian filly sired by an Epsom Derby winner, Galileo, Igugu has sent waves through the racing industry and was named “Horse of the Year”. Igugu was bred by Kia Ora Stud and bought at a yearling sale for $65,000 by Livestock Traders in 2009. It was then sold to Andre Macdonald—a former electrician and now principal officer at Lido Electrical’s East Rand branch, in South Africa—from the Summerhill draft in 2009 at the Ready-To-Run Sale for $127,530. Macdonald had gone to the sale with the secret intention of buying both of Galileo’s fillies in order to up his chances of owning a champion, only to be outbid for the first horse by South Africa’s top trainer Mike de Kock at $255,060. Luck was on his side when the second horse turned out to be the champion.
Macdonald’s love of horses began when his family moved to the northern suburbs of Johannesburg at a time when horse riding was popular with children. His daughter took an interest and joined a stable. He then bought a horse each so they could ride together on their property. His daughter grew up, got married and Macdonald sold the horses.
“Before I knew it a friend of mine said they had a horse for sale and asked ‘do you want to buy it?’ I said ‘I don’t want to buy it but I’ll think about it.’ Twelve o’clock that night they phoned me and said ‘your horse is standing in the stables.’ But I didn’t say no, I said ‘okay I’ll take it.’ It was the biggest mistake I probably made,” Macdonald recalls. Sitting with a dud, Macdonald then got serious.
Igugu is now co-owned by the Macdonalds and Sheikh Mohamed bin Kalifa Al Maktoum—who also co-owns the 2010 Vodacom Durban July (the July) winner. The royal family clearly has a love for the sport. Years ago, in the United States, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is reported to have bid $10 million for a horse at a yearling sale. Sheikh Mohamed bin Kalifa Al Maktoum‘s share came about when he took interest in Igugu and went into talks with Mick Goss, CEO of Summerhill Stud, about acquiring his 25% stake. Not one to be satisfied with a minority share, the sale was in jeopardy unless the Macdonalds, who owned 75%, sold 25% shares to Sheikh Mohamed bin Kalifa Al Maktoum to ensure an equal partnership.  Macdonald says this is something he would only have done for Goss.
It’s common practice in the industry to have more than one owner of a horse. As much as this can be seen as spreading the winnings, having more than one investor means spreading the risk as well as the costs. These costs include training fees, farrier fees, veterinary care, insurance, race entry fees, jockey fees, ownership registration fees and transport.
For most this is a business after. For Macdonald, it’s a sport.
And as with any business, there is money to be made and Igugu has made more than her fair share for her owners.  She’s a Triple Tiara Princess, winner of the 2011 Vodacom Durban July as well as the 2012 J&amp;B Met (the Met). She is only the second horse to have ever won both the July and the Met. The only other horse to have done so is Pocket Power, who also holds the record for winning the July three times. The prize money for the July and Met alone were $361,600 and $301,330 respectively.
The industry is big and money is no problem for those looking to be a part of the thrill. There are seven sales that take place every year and they work the same as any auction. Potential buyers get a catalogue beforehand and the bidding wars begin. The aggregate price at the Emperors Palace National Yearling Sale held in April was $10,576,311; it was $564,713 at the Milkwood Stud Sale in May and $922,184 at the Cape Mare &amp; Weanling Sale in the same month.
Macdonald laughs as he remembers how he first tried to pick horses at sales. Not knowing what he was doing, he’d shadow the trainers while they checked out the horses.
“If he wants to turn his head left, I turn my head left and if he goes right, I go right.”
You must remember that these buyers take risks on untested horses. De Kock does not shy away from the fact that this is a risky business and is all about luck. He admits that picking up a horse at a sale is not an exact science but reiterates Macdonald’s advice of having a professional around to help.
If it’s so risky, why get into it?
“There is a 1% chance of a horse being a champion from a sale but that’s the intrigue. It’s a sport that becomes a part of your life,” he says with a hint of excitement in his voice.
For de Kock, it all started with two years of military training at an equestrian center and then moved on to work for a number of trainers. In 1988, the trainer de Kock worked for died and since he already had a good working relationship with the owners and staff, he took over the late trainer’s string. He is now the top trainer in the country and is also an owner. Having won the July four times, he’s three wins short of the record for trainers.
Training a race horse takes a hell of a lot of patience says the expert. Purchases would occur when the horse is around 18 months old. If you buy one from a Ready-to-Run Sale it can be ready to race by 24 months, provided it suffers no injury or illness. The monthly cots will average somewhere between R7,000 ($840) and R8,000 ($960), but the rewards for a great runner are tremendous. The industry consists of owners, trainers, breeders, racing operators, insurers, transporters and blood stock agents. Racing operator, Golden Circle, stages both the Vodacom Durban July and the J&amp;B Met. The company has numerous operations and reports an annual turnover of more than $216.8 million. Racing operator Phumelela’s glory comes from staging the Triple Crown and the Triple Tiara. The Triple Tiara’s spoils are $783,151, including the bonus for the horse that wins all three legs. The Triple Tiara—won last year by Igugu—has a combined prize of $270,911, not including the $120,366 bonus.
With this amount of money on the line, it’s no wonder these fine creatures are insured.  The way that the insurance works, is that the horse’s value is established by looking at its track record, breeding and other attributes.  If the horse is a filly, its value will be higher as it can be used for breeding. An unknown horse that’s just been bought at a sale will be insured at the fall of hammer price. As the horse develops a track record and its value increases, so will its insured amount.
The international scene is also a potential money maker for the lucky few. The Dubai Carnival in January has nine events, with $27.25 million to be won.  Unfortunately, the export protocol needs reform. Australia requires 60 days quarantine in the African Sickness Free Zone in Cape Town, South Africa, followed by another 60 days in Europe. Dubai involves 21 days of quarantine in Johannesburg, 90 days in Mauritius, 30 days in Europe and two weeks in Dubai. This means that a horse competing internationally not only has to forgo most of the South African season but it also loses training time and so will run at a disadvantage against other horses on the track.
This is all due to the fear of the African Horse Sickness (AHS). Paranoia, de Kock calls it. He claims that this is the one thing holding the industry back from being a major export industry that creates jobs and adds to government revenue. What we need, he says, is to get more aggressive and let the trading partners know that this is not a major threat. The fact that South African horses competing internationally are doing so well, is a testament to how strong the industry is.
Igugu is geared to start her international career in Dubai. As for her chances for this year’s July?
“Some people don’t win the Met or the July. I was lucky enough to win both. I don’t know when that will ever happen again,” says a realistic Macdonald. He feels that his horse has already done more for him than he could have asked for.
Horse racing has a tradition of being elitist and de Kock says that the image that the sport portrays, along with that of a lack of transparency, is another one of one of the industry’s problems. Syndication, however, is one way to get around this as it makes the sport accessible to more people but de Kock says that it is up to people to educate themselves and the industry to demonstrate the available opportunities. Nonetheless, de Kock is, as he puts it, “bullish” about the future of the South African horse racing industry and expects an explosion if it were to get it right.

Horsing Around

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

Every Cloud Has A Golden Lining

There was one issue at the Hotel Investment Conference Africa (HICA) that had everyone shaking their heads. The big question was: why isn’t there one visa that can get you across Africa? Its lack is choking business and progress.
If you have ever wondered why travelling in Africa is often so expensive and painful—blame it on rigid government policies.
Even though it makes business sense, the idea of a visa that will get you across many borders is as far away as a single currency in Africa, or Europe for that matter.
They call it the UNIVISA—the passport to an entire region—but not even the SADC region (Southern African Development Community) has managed to get one, the conference in Durban heard.
In 14 years there have been many talks, but no fruit. In that time, North Africa has seen three revolutions, East Africa has forged an economic community and Mozambique has built a gas industry.
The first countries which took up the gauntlet were Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. South Africa—the most powerful country on the continent—has joined in, but hesitancy all round is leaving the industry frustrated.
According to Marthinus van Schalkwyk, South Africa’s Minister of Tourism, the issue is close to being settled with merely a few countries—which he could not disclose—still needing to sign the agreement. He said that 80% of the countries were for it. Fernando Sumbana, Mozambique’s Minister of Tourism agreed.
There is more business travel than ever on the continent, so why is it still so difficult to navigate Africa? It is cheaper and simpler to fly to London than it is to Addis Ababa.
Elize Petersen, Namibian Airways’ Manager of Government and  Protocol Relations, says government process is very slow when it comes to expanding regional routes. Allan Moore, CEO of Board of Airline Representatives (BARSA), says getting politics out of aviation is not easy as government policies are rigid.
When it comes to accommodation it is even worse. Hotels are scarce and expensive. Investing in new ones is often prone to fears over political instability and the high cost of infrastructure.
“Expanding out of South Africa is not easy, it is expensive, but it is not impossible. It is a different environment,” says Graham Wood, Managing Director of Tsogo Sun.
South African economist, Chris Hart, says if Africa was an easy place to invest, people would have done so years ago.
“Political risk in Africa is coming down and rising in the western world. Difficult obstacles are not nearly as bad as uncertain ones,” says Hart.
It is a sign of the times that Lonrho Hotels, which has hotels in Botswana, DRC, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, are also stakeholders in a Kenyan airline.
“Hoteliers are more optimistic than airlines, aviation is not moving fast enough [and] we want to boost regional business travel,” says Ewan Cameron, Lonrho Hotels CEO.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks is likely to be the absence of a UNIVISA. Last year there were reports that a SADC UNIVISA would be established by 2013. Most people at this conference hoped there would not be subsequent reports predicting 2020.

More Freedom, Fewer Visas, Please

Christopher Okocha, or Chris, as he was referred to, was one of the passengers on the ill-fated airline that carried 146 passengers and a crew of seven from the Nnamdi Azikiwe airport in Abuja, Nigeria’s  capital, to the Murtala Muhammed Airport in the commercial hub of Lagos. He was one of the many Nigerians who constitute the nucleus of the country, who through their daily motions, are pivotal to the overall development of this giant of Africa. A young and visionary man, he had been married for about two years to the love of his life, during which time he became a father to his daughter. Chris’ life is a sad example of the misfortune that befell several families, as many like his small child lost fathers, while others like his young wife have become widows. The devastating crash wiped out whole families who were on board the airline, while children were left orphaned. The families of the victims have all experienced an irreparable loss; they are left bereaved and despondent, left alone with memories of their kin that do little to soothe the pain.
In the hours after the crash, a pervasive cloud of gloom hung over the country that had been weary from similar incidents that occurred in the past. Nigeria is no stranger to airline crashes. Its unenviable record of 10 air crashes in the last 20 years means that it has had an average of one fatal crash in every other year since 1992. A particularly disastrous spell in the 12 months between October 2005 and October 2006, saw three commercial airlines—each carrying a substantial number of passengers—meet a similar fate. After six years of relative safety, Nigerians bore a palpable sense of relief and cautious optimism at the changing fortune of the country with regard to airplane crashes. Many believe these incidents had become a thing of the past, but the crash of Dana Air flight 0092 represents a calamitous setback, which due to the scale, is a visible scar that has blighted the consciousness of the nation. Among the passengers on the flight was the group general manager of public affairs for the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Levi Ajuonuma, a respected journalist who was chief spokesman of the state owned oil corporation for nine years. Likewise, Ehime Aikhomu, the son of a former vice president who held office under the military in the 90s, also lost his life in the incident.
The airline involved, Dana Air, is a subsidiary of Dana Group of companies, which is owned by the Hathiramani family. The family has lived in Nigeria for over four decades, they control a number of subsidiaries that play in the automobile, consumer goods, pharmaceutical and aviation industries. The airline has been operational since 2008, with a fleet of five planes that fly across various regions of the country. The aircraft involved in the crash was a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 which was commissioned in 1990, when it was bought by its previous owners, American Alaska Airlines. The plane was reported to have had a history of incidents including a wiring incident that caused smoke to fill the cabin in 2002, while it was being used by Alaska Airlines. Dana Airlines is reported to have bought the plane in 2008.
As a result of this airplane crash, Nigeria’s aviation authorities are now faced with the enormous task of restoring the shattered confidence of the public in the aviation sector. This is despite comments by both local and international regulatory agencies in the aftermath of the crash that significant improvements have been made in the country’s aviation sector in terms of adherence to safety procedures and international standards. In 2006, the industry regulators issued a recapitalization order to airline operators. This led to a significant reduction in the number of carriers with only eight able to meet the new requirements. Since then, the carriers had operated remarkably well, with no major incidents recorded. But notwithstanding, some experts had indicated that airline maintenance and overall safety practises in the industry were not what they should be. On the evidence of the recent crash, it appears that they have been proven right. Dana is now liable to pay compensation worth over $15 million to families of the crash victims, in line with global practices and rates for airline passenger insurance. It is reported that about 70% of the insurance risk was retained with foreign-based insurance companies; therefore the local companies will avoid taking a massive hit from the claims. Thus, for both the aviation authorities and the airlines, the long and arduous task of addressing the challenges in the sector has just begun.

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