Supra Mahumapelo, the Premier of South Africa’s North West province and staunch ally of President Jacob Zuma, is the man leading the way. He wants to build a statue on the remote spot where police arrested Zuma on his way to Botswana with uMkhonto weSizwe recruits, the armed wing of the ANC, in 1963. It would stand in the dusty rural town of Zeerust, in the north of the country. Zuma spent 10 years on Robben Island, after the run-in with police on this spot, but protesters don’t seem to care.
“We are disappointed the Premier wants to erect a statue, he’s spending more time in planning what he is going to do with the statue, rather than spending time dealing with corruption. We will call upon Barutsi people in Zeerust not to allow a statue on their soil. The statue of Jacob Zuma will go nowhere to solve their critical need for services, as water supply fails daily, waste water treatment plants lie unusable and broken, and the inhumane bucket system still plagues our people. We need service [delivery] rather than statues. We are saying the Premier must reconsider this and listen to the plight of the people. Mahumapelo’s priorities are clearly disturbingly skewed to praise Jacob Zuma, rather than to deliver to the people,” says Joe McGluwa, the provincial leader of the opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA).
McGluwa says the Premier is acting as a law unto himself by planning to honor Zuma – who has been in power since 2009 and has 783 pending criminal charges.
“He spoke about celebrating the lives of all those who were in the struggle. President Zuma is still alive and there’s no need to erect a statue for him. Even worse, he has been linked to a number of corrupt activities. The president of this country, better known as JZ 783, doesn’t deserve a statue, he’s a broken president, he broke the law, he broke the constitution, he acted in contrast of his own oath. The honorable thing is to retreat from what they are doing.”
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), another opposition party in the province, acknowledged Zuma’s role in the liberation struggle, but they are also against the statue.
“Zuma is not exemplary and has multiple cases of fraud. Why must we honor him, why must we celebrate him? He’s broken his oath of office, he must leave that office for an honorable man to occupy,” says Betty Kedisaletse Diale, the EFF provincial leader.
“We will make sure that the statue is swiftly removed. It will not be erected while we are members of the legislature. We will fight it until the end,” she says.
The DA claims it has done its own cost analysis and demands the North West province reveals how much this statue will cost. The DA says there’s a tender out for R6 million ($457,000), but Mahumapelo denies this.
“Where the opposition gets their exaggerated figures, I don’t know. We said six meters, not six million rand. We can’t spend that money. It will be wasteful expenditure. The decision was taken in 2009, it was before my time. I have the responsibility to implement. We are going to honor the families who helped liberation fighters. We want to talk to those who are still alive to have audio and visual records of this historic event,” Mahumapelo told journalists minutes after his state of the province address in Taung.
Mahumapelo says it concerns him when people say they don’t want the statue because they want services.
“There must be a win-win situation. People must have water, but we cannot run away from the fact that in South Africa there were freedom fighters. We cannot erase the history of people who experienced torture. Other countries are honoring their leaders. Why shouldn’t we?” he asks.
Mahumapelo, who calls himself Supranomics, said the statue will create more jobs in tourism.
In Ventersdorp, 150 kilometers from Zeerust, stands another controversy.  A six-meter statue of struggle hero JB Marks cost R4 million ($305,000) and left his family irate. They say the North West government did not consult them.
JB Marks left South Africa in 1963 for Russia to lobby the international community to support the struggle against apartheid. He died in exile in 1972, and his body was repatriated and reburied in his hometown of Ventersdorp, on March 22, 2015. The statue was to be unveiled on the same date this year.
So statues appear destined to divide. In the North West province alone there are two statues, two issues, and two groups of angry people.

Give Us Water  Not Statues

It was a painful ordeal for a parent.
In most African cultures, rain is a sign of blessings. The irony is, in this case, the poorest of the poor, who need the water the most, are the ones who hurt the most when it rains.
Three-year-old Everlate Chauke, her father Shadrack, and mother Cynthia were in their makeshift home in Alexandra, next to the Jukskei River, six kilometers from Africa’s richest square mile, Sandton, when it started to pour. When water filled their shack, they climbed a tree for safety; Cynthia on one branch, Everlate and Shadrack on the other. The branch broke and Everlate fell into the raging waters. Shadrack jumped in after her, but couldn’t find her. What started as a celebration, amid South Africa’s longest drought ever, ended in death and despair. Little Everlate was found 10 kilometers downstream, almost three weeks later.
The Chauke family is among 150 other people who lost their homes and property in the downpour at the Setswetla settlement in Alexandra. Several other people around Johannesburg died during the floods and many others lost their property. Yet, Africa may one day go to war over the lack of water. Too much water can take lives – yet so can the lack of water that one day Africa may go to war over. It has already happened elsewhere in the world.
The Khedevite of Egypt invaded Ethiopia, in the mid-1870s, to gain control of the Nile River. The dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is largely about control of the Indus River. For now, for most of Africa, it’s a king-sized headache.
On March 10, major dams in Africa were down. In Lesotho, Katse Dam, the highest dam in Africa built in the Maluti Mountains, was 53.6% full; Swaziland’s dams stood at 75.8% and in Zimbabwe, Kariba Dam, one of the biggest in Africa at 128-meter tall and 579-meter long, stood at 32.8%. Water levels in Malawi, Mozambique, Kenya and most of the rest of Africa remain low. The UN warns of a looming crisis.
“Let us commit to invest in water security as a means to ensure long-term international peace and security,” says  former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Ratings agency, Moody’s, early last year, went as far as to say a lack of water was causing rising inflation, risking a weak South African economy going into recession. It is so concerning that, Cape Town’s Executive Mayor, Patricia de Lille, declared the city of the rich a disaster zone. At the time of going to print, the city had just over 100 days of useable water left.
The problem is the average household uses about 20,000 liters of water a month but Cape Town’s top water wasters, located on Haywood Road‚ Crawford‚ used a shocking 702,000 liters in one month. The city is naming and shaming all water wasters in an attempt to ensure they comply. On February 1, the city introduced harsher water restrictions; meaning everyone should use 30% less water or face a R5,000 ($380) fine and a higher bill. It is helping.
On March 6, in the Western Cape province, dam levels had dropped to 31.5%, which was 1.6% down from the week before. If the situation does not change, the province could run out of fresh water in dams by 2019.
“With the last 10% of a dam’s water mostly not being useable, dam levels are effectively at approximately 21.5%. Consumption has broken through the 800 million liter barrier for the first time to 783 million liters of collective use per day, but we have still not achieved the new collective usage target of 700 million liters per day,” says the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services, Councillor Xanthea Limberg.
Water Scarcity: Cooperation or Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa?, an article in Foreign Policy Journal written by Lisdey Espinoza Pedraza, International Relations lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, and International Relations researcher, Markus Heinrich, suggests while Africa struggles to quench its thirst, some regions of the world have ample supply of this scarce resource.
“While 70% of the planet is covered in water, only 2.5% of it is fresh water. Of this, only 1% is easily accessible, as much of the world’s freshwater is trapped in glaciers and ice caps. Compounding this is that this scarce resource is very unevenly distributed,” say Pedraza and Heinrich.
One problem is Africa is not pouring money where the rivers flow.
Water projects account for a meagre 1.3% of total infrastructure investment in Africa, according to the Africa Construction Trends 2016 report by Deloitte Africa. The report notes that there are only 15 water projects across the continent, valued at $4.8 billion, in comparison to 271 non-water infrastructure projects valued at $319.2 billion. The water sector is thirsty for investment. But it’s not that simple.
“If you are asking the private sector to finance water, what’s the return, who is going to pay them and how are they going to collect their money? Water is a basic human right. This also colors how people treat water from a drinking point of view. Should you be paying for something that falls from the sky? In many instances, the charges that cities levy on water are often far too low from a cost recovery basis,” says John-Pierre Labuschagne, Infrastructure &amp; Capital Projects Leader at Deloitte.
According to Labuschagne, water does have an opportunity for investors.
“The economics behind it though is what makes it difficult… The trick is how do we get the water from the dams to the cities? The water network is crucial. It needs to be rehabilitated and also expanded,” he says.
Ethiopia is leading the way to a solution with its $5-billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project.
Located about 500 kilometers north west of the capital, Addis Ababa, in the region of Benishangul-Gumuz along the Blue Nile, it is expected to be completed in July this year. It will be the largest dam in Africa at 1,800 meters long, 155 meters high and with a total volume of 74 billion cubic meters. The dam will generate some 6,000 megawatts of electricity which will be sold to neighboring countries and is expected to aid Ethiopia’s growing economy.
This world’s ninth biggest hydroelectric project dam, however, has been under fire because it will flood 1,680 square kilometers of forest, displace 20,000 people and possibly affect the flow of the Nile River, which is shared by Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Sudan and Egypt.
In Namibia, 4,860 kilometers south of the Nile, the answer is desalination.
Dewald Duvenhage, General Manager: Engineering Services at the Swakopmund municipality in Namibia, says desalination may be the only solution for the water problems Africa faces. The only problem is it uses a lot of energy.
“If the energy is renewable – solar panel farms, wind generation, concentrated solar power – all with suitable storage to allow 24-hours-a-day operation – then yes, it is sustainable. Interesting also is that all the large luxury shipping passenger liners are producing their water with desalination,” he says.
Sustainable, yes. Cheap, not so much.
The Namibian government is considering desalination with a special Cabinet committee, but media reports indicate that about N$57 billion ($4.36 billion) may need to be spent on it.
“Desalination water is presently exclusively used for mining water supply, yet since the same pipes transport and the same reservoirs store the water, we are all drinking desalination water mixed with borehole water as far as Henties Bay, Swakopmund and Arandis is concerned,” says Duvenhage.
He says we should use water responsibly but should also consider other avenues.
“We may consider recycling – but given the complications when industrial waste pollutes water, it is cheaper and physically simpler to desalinate seawater than to recycle sewage back to potable water. Yet we should first ask whether there is anything we can do to solve the energy supply crisis. No energy, no desalination, no water,” he says.
Professor Neil Armitage, the Head of the University of Cape Town’s Urban Water Management research unit, agrees that desalination is expensive and power-hungry.
“Most of our power is generated by thermal power stations that contribute to greenhouse gases contributing to global warming and contributing to climate change which is what caused the problem in the first place,” says Armitage.
That’s not all. For many years, Australia had a drought and opted for desalination plants, which according to Armitage, would cost between AUD2 billion ($1.5 billion) and AUD4 billion ($3 billion). As Australia was in the process of commissioning them, it rained.
“There were major floods, people were washed away in cars, reservoirs filled up and the residents said they don’t want to pay for the water when they can have water at a quarter of the price from the tap,” he says.
To do a similar project in Johannesburg or Cape Town, according to Armitage, may cost anything between R30 billion ($2.3 billion) and R50 billion ($3.8 billion).
“Someone proposed to me that we should build an undersea pipeline from the Congo River to Cape Town… another said can’t we get water from the Orange River to Cape Town… these are very expensive for something that can be managed if we change the way we manage our water.”
Armitage says two to three times more rain falls on Cape Town than is distributed to the people. The rest of it is wasted.
“There are two ways of dealing with that. One is rain water harvesting where you have a rain barrel taking water straight off your roof. This is very common in farming rural areas… the biggest problem though is that Cape Town’s climate has long dry summers and relatively short winters. You need more water in summer time than winter… If you are going to make rain water harvesting to work, you will need rainfall all year round.”
Another option is storm water harvesting.
“If we can find a way of harvesting that, storing it and treating it, then there is potential to supply all the cities with storm water. The reality is, it is very difficult. Storage and quality is a problem. Storm water can be very polluted,” he says.
It has worked in Singapore. For years, the country heavily relied on imported water from Malaysia and catchment water. Now it also has NEWater, produced from treated purified used water and desalination.
“In Cape Town, we have a natural sand aquifer on the Cape Flats. We are doing research to see if we can’t store water underground for periods of time; could be a month, six months or a year. It has been done in Cape Town for many years up on the coast where, for about 40 years, water to [the Western Cape town] Atlantis came from harvested storm water, treated sewage affluent put into the ground and then taken out again after a period of time… we are proposing to do something similar but on a bigger scale.”
It’s time Africa pours more money in its water, before a long dry season could lead to war.
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Water , The new oil?

African turned on African. Mobs looted shops, threatened lives and smashed anything they could get their hands on. There were languages from across Africa shouted through the streets of the capital of Pretoria on this confusing afternoon – one language was heard above the rest; the language of the boot.
By 11AM, in Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria, angry youths stood by the side of Townlands Road – rocks in hand. Earlier they had thrown rocks, witnesses said, at any vehicle entering where the so-called foreigners live. A police van stood by, just out of rock range.
For the mob, getting rid of fellow Africans, they call foreigners, was their aim; bigotry their game.
“All those who are selling drugs, nyaope (South African street drug), doing prostitution and human trafficking should voetsek (go away in Afrikaans). Would Robert Mugabe allow me to sell drugs in Zimbabwe? No, never! So why is our government failing us. This is war that’s not going to end. As you can see, it started slowly but let me tell you it’s going to get huge,” says Thembi Skhosana, a South African protester in Marabastad.
In many ways Skhosana epitomized the ugly threat on the streets.
“If our government doesn’t tell these people to go, people are going to die. [The government] is used to killing people, like they did in Marikana, so even now blood will be spilt,” she says.
Skhosana criticized the authorities for failing to clamp down on foreigners without permits.
“It’s best that we take the matter into our own hands. Police have failed. When they take bribes that means they’re also taking things into their own hands; we might as well deal with this our own way.”
On the other side, people also prepared to deal with things in their own way.
In Marabastad, Somali immigrants took up machetes, sticks‚ rocks and knives.
A Somalian shop owner, who sells groceries, Ali Abdul Hasen, came to South Africa as a refugee in 2006 to escape terrorist attacks.
“I came to South Africa for peace, stability and to provide for my family. When I came here I believed I would forget the sound of bullets, and killing each other. In Somalia there are terrorist attacks; you can get injured and die, but not from knives and axes to cut you into pieces,” says Hasen.
“They’re attacking us so we have no choice but to fight back. We have closed all our shops in the townships and came to this area, and now they’re attacking us here, again. We have to counter attack; it’s just tit for tat,” he says.
A woman wearing a peach-colored dress emerged waving a machete and shouting in her mother tongue. I couldn’t make out what she was saying but she wasn’t stopping for anyone.
Then we heard screams and shouting of enraged Somalians, everyone running to the left, chasing a young man in his twenties. When they caught him, the Somalis beat him up. We thought they were going to kill him. Police fired stun grenades to disperse the attackers. A journalist in the crowd was hit in the back by a rubber bullet.
Protesters looted the clothing and home appliance shop of Pakistani Muhammed Yaqoob. The floor was strewn with broken glass and debris. A dismayed Yaqoob walked gingerly over the broken glass, counting the cost of his empty shelves.
“I was at home when I received a call that my shop has been broken into. They took mattresses, shoes and blankets which amount to R50,000 (around $3,800),” he says.
“Life is better when there is peace. We are here to work for our families. And I believe that we are providing jobs, in this shop alone we have three ladies we hired. I’m also involved in feeding schemes providing food to local churches and giving blankets to street kids. But these are the same people who were among the group that stole our stuff,” says Zahid Afzal, chairperson of the area’s business forum.
In 2003, Afzal traveled 7,617 kilometers from Pakistan to Pretoria for business. He makes about R5,000 ($380) a week and sends half of it to his wife and two children. He’s contemplating going home, even if it’s not that safe there.
“Most of us are here because we are under threat of terrorism in Pakistan. There’s lots of bomb blasts happening in every part of the country. If this continues we have no choice but to go back home,” says Afzal.
About 40 shops have closed in Mamelodi and Atteridgeville, in Pretoria, and 12 houses were burned in Rosettenville, south of Johannesburg. According to Brigadier Sally De Beer of the South African Police Service, about 136 people were arrested for looting and being in possessing firearms and drugs.
“I’m actually not willing to stay in South Africa as I can see the situation is like this now, I’d rather go back to Somalia. I’m sure if I’d be killed in my country I would be killed by a terrorist, not by civilians,” says Hasen.
While we were in Atteridgeville, police arrested South African protesters, confiscating a firearm as well as needles and drugs wrapped in a black shopping bag. By this time it was chaos.
“I was born to die. If I die today, it’s fine. But your mother will be killed first. F**k you,” shouted a man, believed to be a Nigerian, raising a middle finger to the mob.
“The dislike of foreigners in the use of foreign labor from Africa, India, and Europe to undermine black economic and political power during the apartheid period… this has conditioned people to see foreigners – particularly Africans, but also those from other regions – as a threat. This sense of threat has been exacerbated by public statements and actions from officials in all parties, police, and people in society at large,” says Loren Landau, from the African Centre for Migration &amp; Society at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Inequality and unemployment make it worse.
“Unless the conditions leading to these attacks change, violence will continue,” he says.
“Public education is a start, but this will not counter the incentives and benefits of violence for those who lead it. We will need the police to hold organizers responsible; to reconsider how we plan and manage our cities and to hold politicians to task when they demonize any group in our society, including refugees and other immigrants.”
According to the Nigerian Union South Africa spokesperson, Eneka Ezinteje, about 800,000 Nigerians are currently in South Africa.   According to reports, about 116 Nigerians were attacked in South Africa in the last two years. In 2016, 20 were killed.
How many Africans have to die before something is done?

There Will Be Blood, Brother

Cosmas Maduka is a man who knows a thing or two about overcoming adversity.
By the age of six, Maduka had survived bombs and bullets. It was in the dark depths of that civil war over the failed secession of Biafra – a civil war that saw 30,000 dead and more than a million refugees. His home state of Anambra was right in the thick of it; it was the base for relief flights to the beleaguered Biafran population. This drew airstrikes by Nigerian warplanes.
“We had a bunker outside our house which we ran into during times where the military opened fire and dropped bombs with their fighter jets. We did not know whether we were going to survive to see the following day,” says Maduka.
One day, as the young Maduka walked to the market, soldiers opened fire, killing scores of civilians. Again, Maduka was lucky to escape with his life. Soon afterwards his mother sent him away to safety to live with his grandparents.
In these tough early years, Maduka had no idea who his father was until the day he was led to his funeral.
“The best I knew of my father was the day I saw a man lying lifelessly in a suit… It was like a festival, people were exceptionally kind to me that day and whatever I asked for, I got,” he says.
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The sad celebrations faded into struggle and grinding poverty. Maduka became a street hawker to provide for his family. Every morning, at 5AM, Maduka would wake up to sell bean cakes on the streets with his older brother, Pius, to feed his family.
In a small step up from street life, Maduka began life as a lowly apprentice in his uncle’s motorcycle business. It was a sour first taste of the motor industry that was to make his millions decades later.
The motorcycle workshop job was poorly paid and after seven years of service his uncle fired him – the severance package was less than $400. In these difficult times, Maduka hugged to his heart two guiding principles.
“Firstly, no matter how careful you are things are always going to happen that you never anticipated. The second lesson is don’t ever take a risk you cannot discount.”
Both principles were the rich harvest of a bitter and expensive worst day that will forever haunt Maduka.
“Sometime in 2011, I was sitting in the office and my phone rang, it was a kid brother from my state who was in the oil business who said he wanted me to assist him. He had some difficulties in raising money for a project. I tried to talk to him and counsel him and at the end of the day he convinced me to come and see what he was doing,” says Maduka.
“I went with my wife and I was fascinated looking at how far he had built his business. He was looking for a line of credit. I was sitting in two publicly quoted banks owning about 70 percent equity in one of them. I tried to get the bank to support him but they refused, so I said I would guarantee the transaction. I told the bank to put the credit under my name and I parted with over $300 million.”
The approach came from Ifeanyi Ubah, the CEO of Capital Oil and gas, for a loan to import petroleum premium spirit. Maduka took a calculated risk.
“We did things systematically. The first consignment came and within 45 days we cleared the shipment. We did it for the second one too and that went well but I didn’t know he was goading me. Before December 2011, he came with six documents saying if I did this for him he would be eternally grateful. We had done several transactions and they were all successful, timely and he paid at the correct time so I had no issues.”
Maduka opened a line of credit to guarantee the loan for Ubah to secure his goods for the six consignments but, to his horror, the goods never arrived in Nigeria.
“The guy went abroad and connived with the shipping company and sold the vessel offshore. Every month interest of N300 million ($972,000) was dropping into my account,” says Maduka.
He was left liable and had to sell his entire stake in one of the financial institutions, where he was a director and had a controlling share, to pay off that debt.
“My franchise was threatened because this was not something we planned for. That is why when we talk about success, you can never be complacent and say that you have arrived because there are always obstacles you meet along the way. An entrepreneur must continue to reinvest into his business and keep reserve capital because there are shocks that you are going to meet that you never anticipated,” he says.
Today, Maduka is the President and Chairman of Coscharis Group, franchise holders of over eight luxury automobile brands and one of the largest distributors of spare car parts in Nigeria. The company also has interests in real estate, banking, technology, medical equipment, petrochemicals, elevators and agriculture. He stresses the importance of trust and loyalty to his 300 staff. Clearly, he doesn’t want them to suffer as he did in the motorcycle repair shop a lifetime ago.
The lessons from his worst day also led to a wiser, more cautious Maduka whose mantra today is never take anyone at face value.

A Mistake  That Cost  A Million  A Month

It was not narcissism that saw Papa Kwesi Nduom name his company after himself. It was that desire to put his reputation on the line when it came to business; that strong belief, born of a brass neck and a steel backbone, to be accountable for his work.
Today, Groupe Nduom sits atop of a business made up of tourism, investment advisory and management, financial services, technology, media, management consulting, cross border trade and sports.
It is a modus operandi born in Nduom 47 years ago, when the first opportunity knocked.
“There are certain stages in life that you get to know things. I had the privilege of getting a scholarship and spending one year in the United States in 1970. Prior to that, I wanted to be a medical doctor. I went to the United States and was introduced to other things. Through that I got to know that you could also be in business. In just that one year I took so many different classes outside medicine which broadened my view in life and all sorts of opportunities became possible,” he says.
His uncanny ability to spot opportunities led to the formation of a business empire, based in Ghana, with 60 companies in its portfolio. When we meet at the Coconut Grove Hotel, on a warm Saturday afternoon in Accra, Nduom has a spring in his step, a broad smile and an energetic “good afternoon” for everyone as he ushers us into his inner office in the sprawling resort.
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<h5 id="eow-description">The final episode of the first season of My Worst Day with Peace Hyde features Ghanaian serial entrepreneur Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom &#8211; who shares his memories of the day he lost $2 million worth of business that threatened to end his consultancy business.</h5>
At 64, Nduom’s attention to detail is slightly intimidating; his demeanor is composed and authoritative. His gaze is attentive as he reminds us politely he is flying out later that evening to the United States to complete the acquisition of a new bank. Nduom’s intuitive timing has served him well over the years. That skill was born of the transition from medicine to business. 
“I ended up at the University of Wisconsin and that is where I did the Bachelor of Economics and PhD in service delivery systems. It is there that I actually went off course. I wanted to be a medical doctor and I took all the admission tests and everything and got to a point where I needed a lot of money to continue if I wanted to get into a high-quality medical school. But I found out that I could take some different courses and take a degree in economics and get to work quickly, so I took that path so I could finish and get to work and make some money.”
“I had to fend for myself. Some of the things I do to make a living today, like finding opportunities, comes from the fact that I had to do those things myself and scrape along to survive. I had to pay my own fees, pay for my rent and go to school at the same time,” says Nduom.
In those lean days, he packed canned beans in a factory; toiled for two weeks on a construction site, in the cold winter; and spent long hours as a parking lot attendant.
“I would do the third shift at work which was at midnight and when you come back there would just be enough time to take a shower and go to school. If they said a semester was 15 credits, I wanted to take 20 because I calculated how many credits I needed to take to get out of school early because it was money I had to pay.”
The search for new opportunities to make money taught Nduom two key business principles: the first was how to negotiate.
“One job I really liked was working second shift at a meat factory. It paid well per hour and you learned how to cut meat, and you were also able to take some of the off cuts home. So you had food. So the people I shared my apartment with at that time were two Somalis who loved meat, so I used the meat to trade for other necessities which I couldn’t afford myself.”
Second lesson: the power of perseverance.
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“Right after university, my first job was with Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance in Milwaukee. I went there and applied with my Ghanaian name and the lady looked at the name Papa Kwesi Nduom and started asking all sorts of other questions. I got to a point where I couldn’t answer all the questions so I failed the interview.”
“I went back to the university and I carried a different identification because my passport had two names in it. So I went and changed my clothes and came back as Joseph Hubster Yorke Junior, which was my other name. The lady didn’t notice that it was the same person. So now, with my new name, she asked me completely different questions, which I answered and she gave me the job and I became a life insurance underwriter,” says Nduom.
Then, Nduom worked at the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Wisconsin, a health insurance company, and then the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District, a county government institution. Here a rare life-changing experience, in an unlikely place, unfolded through a chance meeting.
“You never know where and when opportunity will make itself available so you should always be ready. I was on the fourth floor of my work building but on the seventh floor was a nice men’s room, which was big and had marble floors, which was really nice. So I would go and use the men’s room on that floor instead of going to the one on the fourth floor,” says Nduom.
“One day I was washing my hands and a guy comes also washing his hands and we strike a conversation. He asked if I would be interested in a job opportunity. He happened to be a recruiter who worked in the building and was looking for people that Touche Ross might be interested in. So we spoke and he set up the interview for me with the partner at Touche Ross and that is how I got the job. It was just an accidental meeting in the men’s room.”
Touche Ross later became Deloitte Touche, one of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms with revenues of $36.8 billion, according to research company, Gartner. Nduom worked his way up to become a partner in the firm where he would learn his most important business skill, the art of selling.
“Every year they had a book that had all the partners in the US and in that book every partner’s production was there. In it were also the points that you earn as a bonus, so you see the entire top performing partners. So you knew where you were and what your business was supposed to do. So it is important for you to deliver. So you learn how to sell, you learn how to provide service and you learn how to satisfy the need of your customer.”
Nduom became a partner at Deloitte in 1986; with that the pressure to deliver increased. Ronald Reagan was president, Wall Street was booming and business was opening up around the world. Deloitte was in the thick of it.
“When you become a partner in the firm, you are a shareholder in the firm and basically you work for your own account. What you earn is strictly based on the business you bring in. The minimum amount you had to bring in terms of consulting fees was $1 million a year.”
Nduom moved to Washington when the firm merged the Milwaukee and Chicago offices. That put him in contact with the international division at Deloitte; another opportunity Nduom quickly took advantage of.
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“One day, over Thanksgiving dinner I told my wife that I wanted to go to Ghana to see what it was like to work there because I had never worked in Ghana before. So I bought a ticket, came to Ghana and I wanted to spend about a month or so to look around,” he says.
It was this conviction to understand the Ghanaian market that lent Nduom his next big entrepreneurial break. Initially, he sought to offer his services for free to get a feel for the consulting market in Ghana. At the time, Deloitte had representation, with Haskins &amp; Sells, in Accra as well as an association with Akintola Williams in Nigeria. Nduom looked for another opportunity and his instinct paid off, yet again.
“One of the partners said Ashanti Goldfields was their client and it was time to go do an audit, so maybe I should go with them to do an information systems audit. I traveled with them to Obuasi and spent a week, did the analysis of their systems, wrote a report and spoke to the man in charge of the whole area. He said he liked what I was suggesting which was something they might like to do but I should go talk to the managing director of Ashanti Goldfields, which was Sam Jonah, but then he was based at Diamond House in Accra.”
This principle of perseverance, which Nduom had learned a lifetime ago, when he secured his first job as a life insurance underwriter, was to serve him well – just as well, as a frustrating time was ahead.
“So I tried to talk to Sam Jonah several times in Accra and it didn’t work. I went back to Obuasi and somehow somebody there accused me of messing up with their computer systems so they ordered me off the mine. So I left the mine but sat by the supervisor’s door all day and convinced them to let me in because I wanted to talk to him about what can be done to improve their systems. He let me in and I left with an agreement to come back and organize their information systems,” says Nduom.
The contract was for a complete systems overhaul of the gold mine, involving the change of computers, accounting systems as well as payroll. Nduom enlisted the help of Deloitte to deliver the projects. After this, Nduom delivered more projects, including overseeing the merger of Touche Ross and Deloitte Haskins &amp; Sells, forming Deloitte &amp; Touche.
“When they merged they didn’t have a management consulting section and that is what gave me the opportunity to set up Deloitte and Touche Consulting West Africa and brought some other people from the US and hired them to join the team,” says Nduom.
The team had nearly 100 people in Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Zimbabwe. Ever the opportunist, Nduom spotted yet another gap in the market.
“While we were here, we realized that nobody was doing consulting work. So I took my own money because the firm said you are a partner in the US and not a partner in Ghana or Africa. They had no interest in setting up a branch of Deloitte USA in Ghana. Deloitte is set up as member firms. So they said we will give you two years after which you will get Africa out of your system and come back to the US.”
The two years taught him resilience. The new West African consulting business was inundated with work. Nduom secured major contracts with Texaco and Elf Oil in Nigeria, the African Development Bank and Malawi Oil. He was also responsible for setting up the computer software for Zimbabwe’s social security system.
“Eventually I became the coordinator for consulting for the African region for Deloitte and the time came for me to go back and I said there was enough work to do here so we set it up as a member firm of Deloitte. So when senior partners will get together every year to have their annual meeting, I would go as the senior partner for the West African consulting practise,” says Nduom.
Nduom became the chairman for the African region for Deloitte and held that position until the end of 2000. His says his success is down to focusing on long-term objectives, while staying flexible enough to solve day-to-day problems.
“We would look for a place to relax or do some work, we couldn’t find anything and so we set up Coconut Grove. We were looking for people to do some software work for us and we couldn’t find anyone, so we took a bus to Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and recruited some students, gave them computers, gave them software to tear apart and build again and then we started a software company. Out of that we set up a software company called TSS, then a hardware company called IBS, and out of that came corporate finance which became Gold Coast,” says Nduom.
The slogan of Groupe Nduom grew beyond expectation and owns a string of companies, from hospitality to entertainment. It has hotels, a football club and an artist management business. In media, it has newspapers, television, radio and advertising; it also owns primary and secondary schools and a university.
Nduom’s intuitive timing helped elbow out competition across his empire; a shrewd strategy that led to his worst day in business.
“I try to forget the date. It was 1995. It is the day I traveled from Ghana to Wharton to speak to graduate business school students about investments in Africa. I was one of the keynote speakers so I traveled from Ghana to Washington and my brother met me with faxes from Ghana, which said number one, I was on the Ghana Airways board at the time and I have been sacked from the board. I had consulting business with Ghana Telecom and it had been canceled. I was doing some consulting business with State Enterprise Commission and it said I was under investigation and in one day I lost over $2 million worth of consulting business,” says Nduom.
He believes this was an attempt by the government of the day to block his businesses for reasons he never found out. The event prompted a passion to be a part of the political system to prevent this injustice from happening to anyone else.
“I didn’t want anybody in Ghana to go through that experience where a government will just get up and, for whatever reason, decide that somebody should not be in business and that they should cancel their contract and just try to move him off the earth. There was a plan to do away with my businesses and everything I was doing in Ghana. They said they would smoke me out and get me to go back to where I came from. This was elevated to an extent that it became a row between the government of Ghana and the US,” says Nduom.
Nduom turned lemons into lemonade and expanded across Africa, leaving trading in Ghana until the impasse was resolved. It was, and 40 years on the business is riding high on its acquisition of Illinois Service Federal (ISF) Bank in Chicago, US. Nduom is older, wiser, with a clear eye for new horizons.
“Working here is like working in our own republic. We are governed by our own rules. You have to send a daily report, monthly report, quarterly report, a mid-year report and a yearly report. The idea is if something was to happen to you, anybody is supposed to look at your business and pick up where you left,” says Richmond Keelson, General Manager of Groupe Nduom Corporate Affairs.
What a journey – from packing canned beans in the United States to owning a bank there – a first for Ghana. The next couple of years will be spent trying to help the bank – the newest entrant into the group – find its feet in the business of its faraway owners.
Nduom is driven by the passion to have a business set up, thrive and succeed beyond Ghana.
That is the legacy Nduom is building; one opportunity at a time.

From Canned Beans To The African Dream Of Owning A Slice Of The States

Nigeria is a nation that knows all too well what damage dictatorships can do. Between 1966 and 1999, the country saw several military coups, culminating in Sani Abacha seizing power. From 1993 to 1998, Abacha’s rule marked a period of oppression, inflation and poverty. As a business owner, the main objective was to stay afloat.
For those brave enough to speak out against the regime, the punishment was either death by hanging or prison. Atrocities were commonplace in an atmosphere of desolation. In 1998, when Abacha died, Tonye Cole, the Co-Founder of Sahara Group, remembers it like yesterday.
“I remember exactly where I was when Abacha died. I remember people jubilating and singing and it was as if an air of relief had happened. I remember my partner had just got married and we were closing a major transaction so he delayed his honeymoon and stayed in Lagos. It is one of those moments in life where you remember key places you were. And the first expression was that of relief from everybody and then the next day reality set in,” says Cole.
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Tonye ColeFor the first time in years, hope dispelled despair. Cole was invested and happy.
“My partners and I had been working for three years and pushing ourselves really hard. We just got to the point where we were establishing ourselves as a business. Everything seemed to be going right. We had been working on an oil transaction and collected our allocation to load the products. At that point, all the brokers who we collected our oil allocation from had been paid by us. This is what you call betting on the horse. We had taken everything we owned and put it on this single deal,” says Cole.
Cole believed there was nothing more to be done but wait for the return on investment. Then the new government cancelled every contract that was issued by the Abacha administration.
The three young men had pumped everything they had earned for the past two years into the deal. Overnight, Cole and his partners went bankrupt. The trio had invested $400,000 of their savings in the supply and distribution of oil contracts from their new venture. For Cole, this was not the first time he lost everything. The first time was the catalyst for him to take control of his own fate. Ironically, he was hitting rock bottom again.
“If you are an entrepreneur, you are going to get bad days and if you are a successful one you are going to get even more bad days. As young people, this was all we had. People had collected their commission and nobody wanted to help us. We knew we had nothing to lose. Everything was gone. The good thing was that we had records and payment to brokers and their assignments they had given us. So we put the files together and walked into the office of a man we had never met before. We waited until we had an opportunity to speak to him and we locked the door,” says Cole.
It was 2PM on a Monday. The drive to the office of Mallam Lawan Buba, Group Executive Director, Commercial and Investment, Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC), was a quiet one with all three men contemplating the gravity of what had just happened. Cole remembered advice his father, Patrick, had given him years ago. He told his son to spend five years working and learning from different companies before embarking on his own business venture. Cole had already served the five years but, in hindsight, he wondered if an additional five years could have saved him from this catastrophe.
Cole and his partners spent weeks trying to secure an appointment with the man seated in front of them that day. As Cole stood in Buba’s office, a fleeting fear gripped him. They had leveraged their one good relationship with the company’s secretary to get this appointment and if things did not go according to plan, not only would they still be bankrupt but the secretary could lose her job as well. Cole tried to read the expression on the face of Buba and drew a blank. He then regained his composure and approached the man who had the power to change their destiny.
The trio made their impassioned plea to Buba, the man responsible for the allocation of oil contracts. They showed him their legitimate contracts, payments made and financial records for the past three years. Cole took a cue from his father’s days running for president of Nigeria and gave a fervent speech on why they believed they could make a difference by creating employment and establishing an indigenous oil business, one of the first of its kind.
Buba listened to their plea and told them to wait. That was the end of the journey; there was nothing more the young entrepreneurs could do. As they left, it occurred to Cole that this could be the end of a lifetime of hard work.
“Failure teaches you a lot. As an entrepreneur I am not afraid of failure but I must learn from it,” says Cole.
During the two-hour trip back home, Cole’s life flashed before him.
Cole had three major influences growing up. His creative side was nourished by his mother, who was a journalist for one of the leading publications in Nigeria. From his father, Cole learned the skills of diplomacy and how to be a mediator on account of his role as an ambassador to Brazil. From his stepmother, Cole was given the foundations of the Christian faith upon which he built his life principles. Born in January 1967 in Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State, Cole and his family relocated to Anambra State during the civil war. Cole had a nomadic existence, shuffling between guardians. He learned to be self-sufficient and stumbled into his career by what he calls divine intervention.
“I ended up studying architecture because the subjects I had taken for O-levels in secondary school aligned more with the profession. I went to the University of Lagos to study architecture and then found that it was something that was perfectly suited for me. It rewards extreme hard work and punishes laziness to a fault. You had to imagine things and create it in your mind long before it comes on paper,” says Cole.
After university, Cole joined Brazilian architectural firm Grupo Quattro SA where he oversaw the construction of the new Palmas city developments in Tocantins, Brazil. This was a slight deviation from his plan to work for himself.
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“When I was in university, we had already set up a business where I created architectural drawings and designs for different companies and teachers, as well as perfecting their existing designs,” he says.
Cole’s father influenced his decision to go to Brazil and leave.
“I have this belief and patriotic zeal in Nigeria and I believe we all have a role to play. My father had decided to run for the presidency in Nigeria and I decided to relocate to help him with his campaign,” he says.
Back in Nigeria, Cole Joined EMSA S.A. – one of Brazil’s largest engineering firms. He was the head of operations and business development in the country.
“They needed someone in Nigeria who could speak Portuguese and someone they could trust to implement a World Bank project. I now had this job, which was an engineering job, and it involved traveling around the country meeting government officials and business development. I had a wonderful salary at an expatriate rate, a company car and all the corporate perks. I had no interest at this point to do anything entrepreneurial. I was very comfortable,” says Cole.
Nigeria had just fallen under Abacha’s military regime. The initial hope and excitement turned to gloom. Almost overnight, the military started throwing people in jail. Riots ensued all over the country, leading to the exit of foreign businesses, like EMSA, from the Nigerian economy. The company signed off all the contracts and instructed Cole to liquidate everything.
“I said to myself ‘I am never leaving my fate in another person’s hands again,’” says Cole.
Prior to this, Tope Shonubi and Ade Odunsi had teamed up to start a new business venture in the burgeoning oil industry. Cole had turned down the offer to join the team in favour of his hefty salary and company perks. The offer was made once again, and now finding himself unemployed, Cole accepted. It was the birth of the Sahara Group, a leading private power, energy, gas and infrastructure conglomerate established two years before the end of Abacha’s rule in 1998.
All of this led to Cole walking out of the office of Buba, the man with their oil contracts. A week later, they got a call promising to reinstate their cancelled contracts over one year. Cole learned a valuable lesson.
“Don’t rely on one product and one country. In 1998, we got some of our contracts back and by 1999 we were in Ghana and then subsequently in Côte d’Ivoire, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Singapore and the UAE.”
Today, the Group has around 20 operations across the energy sector with 660 employees. Sahara began as a facilitator in the oil sector, acting as a middleman between producers, marketers and traders. This year marks their 20-year anniversary and there is a lot to celebrate. The company has diversified into utilities, real estate, farming and infrastructure. Among its many developments is the $400-million Lekki power project in Lagos.
“When we came in there were not a lot of people in the business of trading and exploration of oil. When you talk about someone in the oil business back then, the most they would be were petrol station owners. We were the first pioneers to come into this aspect of the business,” says Cole.
Being trailblazers served the company well. The first major break happened about a year and a half after the company started. A major tool in the oil trade is the ability to have a letter of credit, popularly known as an LC. This is a guarantee taken on by a bank to make payments on behalf of the client, provided certain terms are met.
As brokers, Cole and his team will get allocations and trade them off to those who had an LC and then get their commission from the deal and plough it back into the business. For the initial period, Sahara could not open an LC, which was a major stumbling block for its growth.
“We couldn’t even open a dollar account in the beginning because the banks did not trust Nigerian businesses and this is a dollar denominated business. So we had to use a lot of innovation to get LCs. We asked our international clients to open an account for us so we could receive the payments, which they did with ease and secondly, we made sure that any LCs our clients opened, was done in our name,” says Cole.
Another major breakthrough happened when financial giant BNP Paribas approached the firm after two years of trading and helped them to finally open an LC in the company’s name.
As Cole turns 49 this year, he is slightly nostalgic when asked about his success in the oil business. He takes a deep breath and, for the first time during his interview, the charismatic and energetic entrepreneur assumes an almost vulnerable disposition as he talks of his multimillion-dollar empire.
“I am not sure I will be anywhere I am without my wife. She has allowed me to work and to be able to do what I do. I travel a lot and the ability to come in and go out without anybody being as clingy and commanding has been very helpful. Family wise, she makes me look good with everybody in my family because she is the one who keeps in touch with everyone. She is my perfect complement,” he says.
Cole met the love of his life 22 years ago at university. She was 16 going on 17 and he was in his third year of studies at the age of 18. Cole spent two years trying to convince his wife that he was the perfect match for her and years later, with three children, he calls her the glue that holds everything together.
Success can be fleeting. It has been a number of years since the company almost went bankrupt. In those days, the focus was on staying afloat as a business. Today, the Sahara Group has set up a foundation with a mandate of helping 12 million people in the next four years. The company contributes 5% of its profit to the foundation, which has worked with international not-for-profit organizations to eradicate Guinea worm disease, cataracts and cleft palates.
Faced with a global drop in oil prices, a resurgence of Boko Haram in the north of Nigeria and conflict in the Niger Delta, the West African nation’s economy is facing economic and social challenges. For Cole, his fate is firmly back in his hands. He has a much better understanding of the industry he operates in.
“We are in a boom and bust business, so these challenges are all part of life. We know when it is high and when it is low. Once oil prices are low you adjust immediately as an organization. You look at waste and how to cut it. We try as much as possible not to cut staff, we talk to them and let them understand that they need to be a lot more efficient in the things they do. It is all about planning ahead,” he says.
As Cole looks to the future, he sums up the strategy that has served him well so far.
“Let people think you have 10, act like you have only one but make sure you have 100.”

The MILLIONAIRE Of Oil And Toil

Four years of drought and South Africa is counting the costs on the farms. It is tougher than most for hundreds of struggling sugarcane farmers in KwaZulu-Natal who lost everything last year and fear the same this year.
Fifty-year-old Thembelihle Mzila grew up near Wartburg, 40 kilometers from Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal. All she wanted, like her parents, was to own a sugarcane field. For more than 20 years, she has lived that dream. All these years, Mzila has worked long hours to feed her children and has build her house.
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“I have learned to use my own hands at a young age. I know how to use my hands, it is something I was born into, I never begged,” says Mzila, pointing to her sugarcane field stretching downhill near her homestead. When FORBES AFRICA met Mzila, the sky over the rural town of Wartburg was grey and the clouds were heavy. It rained when we left but not enough to make up for the four years of drought.
Mzila’s childhood dream is slowly running dry. Since drought struck a few years ago, there is little to harvest, forcing Mzila to look for other income while she prays for rain. Last year, KwaZulu-Natal was the first of five provinces declared drought disaster areas by the government. Early this year, the government announced a R15-billion ($955 million) bailout through loans, but Mzila and her 95 associates won’t qualify for it. They don’t have collateral. While she waits for rain, she is selling soft drinks and snacks to keep her children at school.
Mzila is the chairperson of the Inzwakele Co-operative Group, formed in 2011, that meets once a month. There are 95 members, who plough a field the size of a football field. Most are pensioners, unemployed and single parents. Besides solely depending on rain for ploughing, there are many other problems. They use their annual financial support from government to hire agricultural instruments and repair fences broken down by cattle.
It takes up to two years for a sugarcane harvest. Many are despondent as well as dry.
“Because of climate change, and its unpredictable weather, we find it difficult now to know exactly which months are good for ploughing the fields. Habitually we start in August and through to the end of January, but there was no rain last year, as a result the fields dried up and went hungry with no money,” says Mzila.
“Unemployment is very high here. Many people turn to farming for income. Though we have so many members, we still have a challenge to assist each and every one getting started with their own fields. We have many in the waiting list because we hire tractors and tools. We have a roster that we keep,” says Bongani Shangase, a 75-year-old former bus driver who now farms sugarcane.
<div id="attachment_4748" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4748" class="size-medium wp-image-4748" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/P26B8333-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Young children collect water from a spring in Kimaswa Western Kenya Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2015. 375 schools in Cheptai and throughout Western Kenya are currently being given Lifestraw Water Filters to ensure that every child at school has clean water to drink. Jaguar Landrover are supporting the project being run in partnership with Vestergaard and Climate Care and employees form Jaguar Landrover are currently visiting the schools to assist with distribution. ( Photo/KATE HOLT)</div>
“As the small cooperation farmers, we get advice or recommendation from the ‘mill’ as to what kind of sugarcane seed we should be planting at the given time. Based on the soil test done by Illovo representatives on our land, we were given sugarcane N12 and N48 seed to plant. Those of us who ploughed in 2012 have started selling sugarcane to Illovo.”
Mfanufikile Mbatha, 52, is another member who has yet to see his first crop. He’s a shopkeeper as well.
“We worked separately on our own gardens, ploughing vegetables for ourselves and selling when the product was good. But when the local officials approached us to organize ourselves, we came up with the cooperation in 2012. The thing that boosted our confidence was the government grant, although at times we received money a little late into the ploughing season, we are grateful for it,” he says.
They’d be even more grateful for a few weeks of torrential rain.

Dry And Desperate

The people here call it Mpumalanga – the place where the sun rises. Every morning when the light grips Louisville, 40 kilometers from Barberton, December Mazibuko and Jabulile Nyarende, wake up to another day in hell.
For weeks, they prayed for Yvonne Mnisi, Pretty Nkambule and Solomon Nyarende – three of their family trapped in a steel container, 80 meters underground after a crown pillar collapsed at the open pit gold mine, Lily Mine, on February 5.
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Nkambule’s family lives in a house made of mud in Louisville, 20 minutes away from Lily Mine. Her husband, Mazibuko, sits on a small bench, cradling their seven-month-old daughter and five-year-old son. There is the agony of hope and despair in their eyes.
“This haunts me every day, I can’t even begin to explain the pain I’m feeling right now. If they come out alive I would be grateful, but at this point we are ready to accept any news. Even if they are dead we want their bodies, because we want closure,” says Mazibuko, who also works at Lily Mine.
The three missing workers are all breadwinners. Mazibuko will have to raise four children alone.
“I am so heartbroken, if I could go down and rescue them myself, I would. Whenever I look at my sister’s husband and children my heart tears into pieces. Everything has been done, but still nothing,” says Nkambule’s older sister, Phindile Nkambule.
As the drills bore away at the mine, families of the trapped believed more could be done.
“The situation is painful, because they are taking a long time to get those people out. I believe that the management is not doing enough to rescue them. They should look at other means of getting the three out,” says Mazibuko.
“A ritual is done at all mines, but it has never been done here. There were signs that something like this would happen. People have been hurt countless times in that mine and we’ve been telling the managers to do a ritual, but they keep refusing… all they care about is making money.”
On the day of the tragedy, 115 people clocked in for work and nearly all were rescued.
The three missing were working in a steel container, used as a lamp room, which crashed down a sink hole.
Jabulile Nyarende, Solomon’s aunt, remains hopeful that her nephew will come out alive.
“What is frustrating me the most is that Solomon used to take care of his mother who is mentally ill. Who is going to take care of her now? But, I serve a living God and I believe that in this situation, he would never forsake us,” she says.
Three collapses delayed the rescue. One saw a large part of a hill fall into the hole where the container was. The rescue team suffered another setback when a drill broke.
“A rescue mission has begun, and the plan is to drill a hole 800 meters away from the sinkhole,” says Mike Begg, Operations Director at Lily Mine, at the gates of the mine on February 23.
The drilling will take three weeks to be completed.
This disaster came days after the South African Chamber of Mines celebrated the lowest fatalities in the history of mining.
In 2015, it was reported that 77 mineworkers died underground, the lowest number on record.
“South African mines are failing dismally to comply with the safety rules and regulations of mines… It’s a really sad situation,” says Jeff Mphahlele, Secretary General of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu).
“We are concerned about the safety of mines in this country because this is the third incident to happen in three months,” says Sahlulele Luzipho, Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Mineral Resources.
“We need to find a way to tighten up the rules where safety compliance is concerned.”
So do the families of the three missing mineworkers of Lily Mine.

The anguish Of Those left behind

For entrepreneur, Oresti Patricios, it was a long and tiring climb to the top from the very bottom. He knew struggle. His father went bust when he was 16.
“My dad had a laundry business and when he went insolvent, I remember him trying to give his clients their clothes when the shop was being locked up by the authorities. Seeing the love he had for his customers and the pain he was going through because he couldn’t service them made me swear I would never be in that situation,” recalls Patricios.
It was so bad his mother had to go to work as a seamstress to put food on the table. Patricios even applied for a study loan just to make ends meet.
“My father taught me how to work hard and I learned a lot about business sitting around the dinner table with my Jewish friends and speaking about business,” he says.
It was 1978. While still at university, Patricios waited tables in his hometown of Johannesburg, and juggled odd jobs for extra money. His great-grandparents had moved to South Africa from Greece. Life didn’t promise to be the immigrants’ dream, until one day, a piece of good luck came along.
“My friend’s cousin had a camera he had bought for leisure. The three of us started using it for a wedding video business. As jobs and money came in, we started investing some money back into the business. Eventually we bought a top of the range camera and we tried to keep up with our competitors.”
They named the business Ornico – a mix of their names – and it grew to make corporate videos, where the big money was.
“Your network is your net worth. We used our network and began to have more and more clients,” says Patricios.
The other two partners left Ornico for new ventures. Patricios roped in his brother.
“At this time, the camera we were using broke. My dad cashed in his life insurance policy to pay for fixing the camera and to buy a new one. A friend got us a gig to freelance edit videos for another company. When we got there, I asked the managing director if we could also edit our videos there. He agreed and that month we made more money than we had ever made because we didn’t have to rent edit suites anymore.”
It meant the years between 1984 and 1988 were boom time. Patricios says they took their competitor’s clients rapidly. They also saw the hunger for information. Ornico grew into a media monitoring business and expanded into five divisions.
“The company was doing well. We had property, advertising, production, TV commercials and web development divisions in the Ornico Group.”
Money was pouring in. But, it didn’t last. A few years later, Patricios and Ornico hit rock bottom. He was thrown in that dark hole he swore he would never see. The same hole his father suffered in. He didn’t know it yet, but his past had returned to haunt him. It meant the worst day of his life. It sprang from his company’s books.
“I had hired my friend from university as an accountant. After a while of him managing my books, I had a gut feeling as the numbers were not feeling right. I found out he wasn’t giving me the right reports. He was giving me creative accounting. From a group perspective, it looked like we were doing well when in actual fact he was shifting expenses across the businesses. Some businesses were not doing as well as others but the books didn’t show that,” says Patricios.
The fear of running his business into the ground made him panic.
“I felt very frustrated with myself as I should have picked it up sooner but also felt I should have been a lot closer to the numbers. I panicked, as we were not sure how we would handle it. How do we provide funds to stabilize the business? Which business do we close? Which ones will be able to trade out of the mess?”
He politely asked the accountant to leave, who took a third of the staff with him.
“We had to close some of the businesses and retrench people. It was the hardest decision I have ever had to make. The most painful thing is that it wasn’t their error but mine,” he says.
It bruised his ego. In 1997, he sold Ornico and worked for the company that bought him out. It was four painful years.
“That was definitely the worst time of my life. Even my family life suffered as I was really very unhappy. My wife’s positivity could not pull me through some of those dark days. I did not believe that the company was moving in the right direction strategically, the reporting lines were blurred and as an entrepreneur I did not have the autonomy I needed. I felt I was powerless to make a difference, I felt hamstrung, frustrated and demotivated,” says Patricios.
Being an employee frustrated him. He had to get his company back.
“I needed autonomy and freedom. It was not the money that drove me. The best day was when we bought [the company] back at a lower price than I sold it into the listed organization. It showed that they had no clue about the business but now I could start again in a business I was very passionate about,” he says.
Today, from his sunny office in Sandton, the richest square mile of Africa, Patricios runs Ornico, the business he bought back. The media, advertising and brand intelligence company has departments in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. He employs 200 people. Capitec Bank, Hollard Insurance, Old Mutual, Revlon, South African Breweries and Wimpy are among his customers.
After two decades, he hasn’t forgotten his worst day. He might have fallen into a hole but he climbed out fitter, stronger and wiser.

Tag: April 2017

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