He was one of the big names in business in Africa; as gentlemanly. as he was shrewd. He fought the odds and apartheid to stake his place in business and inspire millions of his countrymen to do the same.



Richard Maponya – the doyen of black business in South
Africa – passed away in the early hours of January 6, after a short illness.
Maponya turned 99 on Christmas Eve near the end of a long and fruitful life
that saw him dine with the Queen, laugh with Bill Clinton and chauffer his old
friend Nelson Mandela. Mandela asked Maponya, who owned a car dealership, to
pick him up at the airport in Johannesburg after his release from prison in
1990. 



Ï picked him up at the airport and that was the most
frightening time of my life. We were chased by people on foot, helicopters,
motorbikes and cars. Everyone just wanted to touch Mandela. They could kill him
just trying to touch him,” Maponya recalled to Forbes Africa in a cover story
in March 2017.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 



Mandela was a close friend of Maponya since the 1950s. The
future president, then a young lawyer&nbsp;&nbsp;
helped Maponya set up his first business against the restrictive
apartheid laws that shackled black business. 



Maponya wanted to open a clothing store in Soweto,
Johannesburg; the authorities said no. Mandela lost the fight for the clothing
store, but did manage to secure him a license to trade daily necessities. This
opened the way for Maponya to start out with a milk delivery business that was
to prove the foundation of his fortune.



More than half a century on, Mandela, then a former president
of South Africa, beamed with pride, in 2007, as he opened the first shopping
mall in Soweto. 



Maponya Mall had taken the canny businessman a good deal of
patience to put together. He acquired the land in 1979 – the first black man to
secure a 100-year lease for land in Soweto – and spent many more years building
up the mall.



“Ï fought for 27 years for that mall and was many times denied;
they actually thought I was dreaming. When Nelson Mandela cut the ribbon to
open the mall, that was the highlight of my life,” Maponya said years later. 



It was a mile on a road less travelled by Maponya in a long
journey from the tiny township of Lenyenye in Limpopo in northern South Africa
where he was born. He moved across the province to Polokwane to train as a
teacher and then, like many young men of his generation, moved south to
Johannesburg in search of his fortune.



In those days, the gold mining city was booming, but only the few saw the fruits. Maponya was blocked at every turn as he tried to make his way in business; he won through making a fortune from property, horse racing, retail, cars and liquor. 



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Maponya mentored many black entrepreneurs and inspired many
millions more he had never met. One of them was Herman Mashaba, the former
mayor of Johannesburg, who made his own fortune with hair care products.



“To myself and the people I grew up with he was an
inspiration to all of us to get into business…If he had started out in business
in a normal world there is no doubt he would have been even bigger than he
was,” Mashaba told CNBC Africa.



Maponya will be mourned by the millions who were inspired to
follow him and by a business world that is richer, in more ways than one, for his
nearly a century of hard work in which retirement was never an option.



“People who retire are lazy people. You retire and do what?
Bask in the sun?&nbsp; I am not that type of
man,” he said in 2017 at the age of 96.



He could never be.



&#8211; By Chris Bishop

Richard 128

The Life And Wisdom Of Richard Maponya

When I meet Julian Kyula in his office at the penthouse of the International Life House, smack in the middle of the bustling Nairobi central business district, I cannot make up my mind whether I should address him as pastor or by his surname because rarely do you meet a church minister who doubles up as a shrewd businessman.
Obviously exhausted after a long flight from New York, Kyula tells me he needs to beat the annoying Nairobi traffic jam to be home with his family in around an hour, so we get down to our interview.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2382" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/JamesQuest-JulianKyula-6-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
In the world of mobile commerce Julian Kyula needs no introduction, he is the co-founder and CEO of MoDe, a company he describes as disruptive by nature. MoDe is a nano-finance company that lends credit, as low as 50 cents, profitably through mobile phones.
“When you are in need of cash at 3AM and you cannot access the ATM, or you run out of internet bundles somewhere in Africa, or want a bus coupon or need to buy a day’s worth of electricity in a prepaid facility, that is when MoDE steps in,” he says.
For a company in its third year of existence, having successfully completed its first financial transaction in September of 2010, MoDe has done admirably in the mobile money arena. By June this year, the company was handling 500 million transactions, each ranging from 50 cents to $10 and serving 105 million customers across the 17 African countries it operates in and recording over $750 million in sales revenue since its inception. MoDe is also making inroads in the Asian markets, making it among the top global FinTech companies.
“We have opened new offices in Delhi and Mumbai and we plan to go for the American market by opening offices in the United States in 2014,” says Kyula.
“We believe we are at the forefront of building one of the largest FinTech businesses globally and what is so exciting is that the next big thing is coming from Africa. This will boost our efforts as we seek to deepen partnerships with the United States and Europe as we chase for opportunities in that market,” he says, struggling to hide the smile on his face.
MoDe has partnered with the giant mobile telephony service provider Airtel group, and MTN in the African market, with intentions to hit 13 more markets before the end of the year.
Whenever conversations about the African telecoms sector are held, Kenya always features largely due to the success of M-Pesa, the mobile money transfer system. However, the Kenyan telecoms sector is one that has evolved faster than the legislation designed to regulate it and Kyula knows this too well, observing that when he started there were all kinds of licenses required by the government, most of which were unnecessary.
“Legislation should enable business, it shouldn’t be an impediment,” he says.
Getting over the challenge of cumbersome regulations was the first hurdle in Kyula’s quest at providing nano-finance. Next was to convince a mobile service provider with a significant subscriber base to take a chance on a little-known outfit.
Airtel was an obvious choice for Kyula despite it being the second largest service provider in Kenya after the dominant Vodafone powered Safaricom. Airtel has an impressive subscriber base in West and Central Africa and it has a footprint in India and other emerging markets, exactly what Kyula was looking for.
“If you want to build something that is global you must work with a partner who can take you outside the continent and Airtel was willing to do that for us,” he says.
Looking at the dynamic nature of mobile money innovations in the recent past, one would wonder just how relevant a company like MoDe will be in the next five to ten years.
“We do understand that problems surrounding the access of credit in Kenya, Singapore, Vietnam or America are similar and we are preparing ourselves by spreading our geographical risk by being in as many markets as possible.’’
Kyula’s strategy seems to be working for the company.
“Look, when you stop innovating you begin to die,” he says as he moves towards a trophy the company won at the IBM global entrepreneurs award.
In 2012, Kyula was IBM’s Africa Entrepreneur of The Year, the IBM Latin America Entrepreneur of the Year as well as the recipient of the African Leadership Network Of Top 12 Companies.
Kyula’s share in MoDe stands at around $85 million, however, his total investment portfolio and companies in agriculture, equity investment, and real estate seated on his firm Kyula Holdings, give him a total net worth of $115 million.
So when Kyula, or Coach as he is fondly referred to by his employees, is not jumping into planes to close deals halfway across the world he is busy preaching at his local church called The Purpose Centre. One would wonder how he is able to balance both worlds.
As opposed to a businessman who moonlights as a pastor, Kyula claims to be a pastor who moonlights as a businessman. He insists that church and business are two worlds that can complement each other if the right balance is achieved.
“My best decision and my worst mistake is failure. I was naïve when I was much younger to think that when you are upset with someone you go ahead and compete with him,” explains Kyula.
“There is no better school than failure, you just have to pick up the pieces, take time to recover, reassess, reconfigure, rest and revive. These are my five ‘R’s of life.’’
For an entrepreneur who has experienced significant success and wealth, you may wonder what is left on Kyula’s bucket list.
“The one thing that I want to be able to achieve is to shift the dimension of how we look at those at the bottom of the pyramid. I would like to innovate something that shakes the way businesses look at people that are underprivileged. I want to be able, in my lifetime, to have a million children in Africa going to school because I lived,” he declares.
To this I say amen.

A Pastor  Disruptive By Nature

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

The Entrepreneur Coach, Who Lost $2 Billion

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

Tag: businessman

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The Life And Wisdom Of Richard Maponya

A Pastor Disruptive By Nature

The Entrepreneur Coach, Who Lost $2 Billion

The Pain That Put The Fight Into A Tycoon