How do you come back from this? You’ve lost the life savings of scores of poor people who trusted you; the company that was the key to your fortune has abandoned you; your dream of building a mining empire is in tatters and you are broke. What do you do? Go back to the office and go to sleep? Surely not. Tim Tebeila was used to hardship. He was born, the third of seven children, to a laborer in the remote village of Sekhukhune, in Limpopo, in the north of South Africa. From an early age, he walked barefoot through the mountains to school—15 kilometers each way.
“It was very tough. In winter you had to wake up at four o’clock andevery day you were still late. I was lashed for being late every day for two years,” says Tebeila. As he grew up, Tebeila hustled a living selling apples on the streets. “I think entrepreneurs are born, they are not made. It is a talent, like being a soccer player, but you have to nurture that talent.” To make his life even more complicated, Tebeila was drawn into politics and became one of the leaders in the South African Youth Congress. At nights, often he would sleep in the mountains near his home to avoid arrest.
At the dawn of democracy in South Africa, in 1994, Tebeila decided to quit his job to chase his dream of becoming a mining magnate and set up a company, Sekoko Resources. In those days there were very few black entrepreneurs in mining. “My dream was always to own a mine. My dream was to build a conglomerate similar to that of Anglo American. My belief was very simple; when the Oppenheimer family startedAnglo American they started the same way I did. Not by buying other companies, but getting their ownrights and developing them.”
Getting these mining rights proved a nightmare a million miles from the dream. Tebeila was turned down 10 times, and every time he rolled onto the couch in his Polokwane o­ffice and wept. In 2002, he used his last R100,000 ($13,500) to pay consultants in pursuit of yet another mining right. He found out too late that the money was non-refundable and ended up losing both the rights and the cash.
In 2004, he identified the asset he felt could make his fortune and prayed for better luck. Soutpansberg was an estimated 200 million tons of metallurgical coal, under 11 farms, covering 8,000 hectares, near Mussina on his home soil of Limpopo. On April 19, 2005, the government granted Tebeila a license for the site and he was set to chance his arm with consultants yet again. The bigger problem was that Tebeila did not have any money left to explore and the banks were refusing to lend. He needed R1.5 million ($195,000) for exploration and struck on the idea—as was fashionable in latter years of black economic empowerment—of gathering the money from the people who lived in the villages near where he grew up.
So on a crisp winter’s morning near Bela Bela, in the heart of the country’s northern Waterberg coalfields, hundreds of curious villagers gathered to hear what their brother planned to do in return for their life savings. “I remember it was a very cold day and I had a stomach problem… There were many people there that day, old people, disabled people and even chiefs from the community. I told them I needed their money and could make them all rich,” says Tebeila.
The next day, a blind woman shuffled into Tebeila’s offi­ce and handed over R15,000 ($1,950) in cash—her life savings. “This touched me a lot and it showed belief in the project. The chiefs followed and they represented the community. My feeling was at least we have got people who are backing my dreams and people who believe in my dreams. After all the long stress of turned down applications, this was going to be it.” Full of hope, Tebeila paid R600,000 ($78,000) to a firm of geological consultants and R900,000 ($117,250) to drillers to explore for coal at Soutpansberg. Little did Tebeila know that his worst day—like the coal itself—was lurking just beneath the surface.
The alarm bells started ringing when Tebeila spent weeks chasing up the paperwork from the consultants. To his horror, he found out that the consulting firm—which had been riven by strife—had dissolved almost overnight. To make matters worse, the geologist had fled to Australia with the exploration report under his arm. It meant Tebeila was mired in a project without information, money or hope; where he was landed with being the geologist, lawyer, environmentalist and engineer of a “I couldn’t phone a blind person, who had given her last money, to tell her that I had lost everything.”
“I felt I was down and I would notwake up. I felt really bad. This was my second loss. I got that money out of struggle and it had gone. I was very down, but I never thought of quitting. Every time I had hardship, I always went and slept in my office. I went back and slept on my couch. I slept for four hours. I do this because it is both meditation and praying for an answer. I woke up with the solution.”
The answer lay in a laboratory in nearby Witbank. Because Tebeila was hands-on during the exploration he knew the laboratory used by the consultants and the people who worked there. He sped to Witbank, more in hope than expectation.
In Witbank, lady luck at last cracked a smile on the Soutpansberg coal project. The laboratory was able to salvage two pages of exploration data for Tebeila. Luckily, the two pages contained the all-important drilling data. A lifeline for the coal mine; for Tebeila these flimsy pages were manna from heaven.
The struggle was far from over. Tebeila spent five months trying to sell the idea of a coal mine with his two pages in hand. There was a glimmer of hope when the Brazilian resources giant, Vale—the driving force behind Mozambique’s mighty Moatize coal project—showed interest, but there was a language barrier. Vale needed to send the proposals to Brazil for translation into Portuguese, but this was going to take months and Tebeila neither had the time nor the money.
<h3>What did he learn?</h3>
“I think I have learned the art of perseverance and how it works. I learned to persevere no matter what. I learned to stick to my dreams. I want to build a new Anglo American and I am doing that.”
At last, the sun broke through the clouds for Soutpansberg. Tebeila got a phone call, while he was driving, from Coal of Africa— an established player in the South African industry.
“Coal of Africa made me an off­er to purchase 74% of the assets for R70 million ($9.1 million). They also pledged to spending R100 million ($13 million) to take the project to a bankable feasibility study. “It’s the biggest deal I have ever closed on a cellphone while I was driving. The following day, they signed. Two years later, they o­ffered me R20 million ($2.6 million) for the remaining 26% and gave me the capital to finance my present project, Waterburg Colliery, which will mine up to 15 million tons of coal-a-year by 2019.” Sekoko Resources survived it all, diversified into iron ore, and is set to reach turnover of R10 billion a year ($1.3 billion) by 2019. And what of the people who handed over their last bundles of cash way back in 2005? “They got their dividends. They got all their money back and they made 300% back on what they gave. Some built houses out of that money. I felt very proud,” says Tebeila. So, coal’s well that ends well.

Two Flimsy Pages – The Difference Between Disaster And Fortune

Three years ago, as the construction industry cratered, Bill Haney and Maura McCarthy made the curious—maybe crazy— decision to launch a prefabricated home business. Their vision: architect designed, factory-built, single-family dwellings with green accents (including energy-efficient appliances and airtight construction) that appeal to higher-income, eco-conscious buyers. “Yes, the housing market has been decimated,” says Haney, 49. “But if you have the moxie to get going during a recession, you can build something sustainable and significant.” So-called modern prefab had become a staple of home-design magazines during the housing boom. But the economics of mass-producing green homes like Priuses didn’t work.
<div id="attachment_73" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-73" class="size-large wp-image-73" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_008-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Blu Homes Construction &#8211; Founders Bill Haney &amp; Maura McCarthy at their East Longmeadow, MA manufactory.</div>
For one thing, building houses narrow enough to fit on a truck while still wide enough to live in is no mean engineering feat. Then there was all that custom work. “The options package just grew and grew, and economies of scale were never reached,” says Allison Arieff, former editor-in-chief of Dwell, who wrote the book on prefab in 2002 (Prefab, Gibbs Smith). “The homes ended up being all one-offs.” When overall housing demand tanked, some prefab firms shut their doors. With Blu Homes, headquartered in Waltham, Mass., Haney and Mc- Carthy are building a different model. Their solution: steel and software. Using recycled-steel frames with large hinges, Blu homes fold up to fit on a standard tractor-trailer that handle cargo up to 8.5 feet wide. Fancy software automates design, manufacturing and purchasing. The extra efficiency allows Blu to offer more options and still make a living; doing it all in-house also eliminates confusion among a slew of subcontractors. “You have to control the manufacturing, design, shipping and the finishing,” says McCarthy, 31. “The guys who pack up the thing in the factory have to be the same guys who set it up on-site.” That recipe sounded plausible enough to attract $25 million in funding from investors like Abby Disney, Walt’s grandniece. (Haney keeps a 40% stake.) Blu used some of the proceeds to buy mkDesigns, a high-profile prefab firm founded by San Francisco architect Michelle Kaufmann, giving the company green cachet and some award-winning designs.
Since 2008 Blu has built 28 homes, which sell for between $125,000 and $500,000 (land not included), and has orders for 42 more. McCarthy estimates that Blu’s East Coast operation will be in the black at an annual production of 50 homes, a goal she expects to hit in 2013. Blu is set to open a factory just north of San Francisco this year. And if the housing market nose-dives again? “The general notion that we want to be greener, we want to conserve, we want to be healthier— that’s a cultural trend that has not been thwarted by the economic downturn,” says Haney. Clad often in jeans, sports jacket and a baseball hat, Haney dabbles in documentary films when he’s not cranking out houses. (His latest flick, The Last Mountain, chronicles mountaintop coal mining and stars Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
<div id="attachment_74" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-74" class="size-large wp-image-74" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_009-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Blu Homes Construction &#8211; Founders Bill Haney &amp; Maura McCarthy at their East Longmeadow, MA manufactory. Tom Skala, Carpenter, installs kitchen cabinet units on a house nearing completion.</div>
Haney met McCarthy, a venture capitalist who invested in prefab builders, in 2005 at World Connect, a non-profit organization focused on solving health care issues in developing countries. At Blu’s 120,000-square-foot factory outside Springfield, Mass. A 1,650-square-foot model called the Glidehouse (ordered by a retired Boeing engineering executive in Seattle) is under construction. Build time is about six weeks. When finished, the floors and walls will fold up like a corrugated box, and the entire house—from the low-flow toilets to the kitchen sink— will fit on an 8.5-foot-wide trailer. (Unfolded, each of the structure’s two wings measures 18 feet wide by 48 feet long.) Joining the sections and bolting them to a foundation takes a day; spot-painting and other finishing work about a week. (For a diagram of the setup process, see page 52.) Blu architects draw the folding domiciles on a system called CATIA made by Dassault Systèmes. Boeing uses the same program to design and stress-test airliners. When changes are made the algorithms make engineering adjustments, calculate the cost and send a bill of materials to the factory floor.
Blu is rolling out a new interface that allows customers to view models in three dimensions and to preview thousands of options, from the location of the kitchen to the flanges in the Anderson windows. Replacing wood framing with recycled steel allows Blu to build foldable houses that can withstand high winds and heavy snow. Steel also adds flexibility: The absence of load-bearing walls means windows and doors can be placed just about anywhere. Says McCarthy: “It feels much more like building a car than building a stick-built house.”
Indeed the Blu factory resembles a gargantuan assembly line rather than a construction site. The structural steel rolls in from a loading bay, and machines fabricate it into parts that are welded together to form the frame. After the exterior walls are hung the house slides on rollers to another station where workers add interior walls, insulation and the roof. Next comes the drywall, cabinets and bathrooms. The entire house is constructed in the factory; the only work done at the owner’s address is minor painting and woodwork near the folding joints. For two-story models a crane drops the upper floor in place.
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Blu’s customers are clustered on the coasts. To expand, Haney and McCarthy will need to reach more people like Sandra Beer, a fundraiser for a PBS station in Albany, N.Y. and a single mother. Beer bought a 1,008-square-foot Blu Element model last year. A big draw for Beer: never having to deal with an army of contractors. “They gave me a price, and that is something I can control,” she says. Haney and McCarthy have the luxury of patient investors. “The timing is horrible right now,” says Abby Disney, who has put in $3 million. “If you buy Bill’s thesis you might have to wait a while, but things will turn around.
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Bold Construction

From a distance, Kariuki Gathitu looks like just another kid you would pass on the street without blinking. He wears jeans, sneakers and a backpack; he sips milkshake and hangs with his friends. But in Gathitu’s backpack are big dreams and a business plan aimed at making him one of Kenya’s first tech billionaires within five years.
Gathitu, a 28-year-old systems architect, is one of East Africa’s new breed of technopreneurs—the hip ones with big ideas who make their fathers’ generation sit up and take notice. They are the whiz kids who command respect. Never before has it been this cool to be a geek. After the international success of Safaricom’s M-PESA, more and more technologists under 35 are mushrooming in Kenya’s large cities. Backed by government-sponsored training, these computer geeks are emerging by the score to build a sunrise industry in what is being called the Silicon Savannah.
<div id="attachment_68" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-68" class="size-large wp-image-68" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Kariuki-Gathitu-683x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="711" />Kariuki Gathitu</div>
“The world has changed and so has technology. These youngsters see the world from a different perspective and they are constantly seeking ways to make life easier,” says Soud Hyder, an independent technologist based in Nairobi. The recent Pivot 25 conference saw the cream of the IT crop from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania come together for two days in Nairobi. Few delegates were over 30. Gathitu’s company, Zege Technologies (Zege Tech), was among them with its M-PAYER application. On the company’s first anniversary in July, it was raking in tens of thousands of Kenyan shillings and aims to increase its annual turnover to $2 million in the next five years. The company has prospered through a gap in the mobile money system. Often you have to wait up to 72 hours for money to reflect—a major cause of frustration when paying bills. M-PAYER, however, pays in real time. It took Zege Tech three months to come up with the application and another eight months to tailor it for the business market.
In a highly competitive market, Safaricom and Airtel, Kenya’s largest mobile networks, were quick to buy in. Zege Tech won Best Product in the Young Innovators category at the AITEC banking and technology conference in Nairobi in March and visits to the company’s website increased 400%. Gathitu is one of the few young geeks around the world to turn down a job at Google. “In June, I received a call from their office in Switzerland and was flattered as it has been my dream job for a long time. They said I could choose at which office in the world I would want to work. Unfortunately, I had to turn down the offer as there are still a few projects I am working on that will enable many young people to have an easier chance at doing business,” he says. Gathitu is as humble as he is influential. He has just returned from a trip to Malabo in Equatorial Guinea, where he addressed the heads of state at an African Union summit on youth leadership. “It was a great moment when I could speak to Africa’s big leaders. I wanted to give the older generation goose bumps through what the youth is doing. I hope I succeeded with that.
Afterwards I received many invitations to speak at conferences in Angola and Zambia and Mozambique… I’m starting to wonder when I will find time to work,” he laughs. Gathitu hoped to study aeronautical engineering in Britain, but ended up with a degree in Computer Science from the Kenyatta University in Nairobi. He has been fiddling with computers since he was seven. “It became my default career, but now it feels like a fit.” The mobile money transfer system, M-PESA, has put Kenya on the technology map. It allows the user to over come the headaches of sending money internationally, as well as pay bills and purchase goods and airtime through a mobile phone. It is made for Kenya, a country where fewer than 10 million people out of a population of 39 million have a bank account. According to Q2 2011 data released by the Communications Commission of Kenya, there are more than twice as many mobile subscribers—nearly 25 million— as there are bank account holders.
With the support of the government’s ICT Board andinnovation hubs in Nairobi like iHub, young innovators have a chance. It is part of Vision 2030, the Kenyan government’s plan to transform into a middle income country. Paul Kakubo, CEO of the Kenya ICT Board, calls the young techno warriors the Tandaa Generation (‘Tandaa’ is a Swahili word for ‘spread’). In one of his blogs Kakubo writes: “…the Tandaa Generation is what will deliver a lot of the goodies we are looking for as a country. They can create, they are intellectually curious, they are driven, very exposed thanks to technologically delivered media, they are non-tribal, they are good thinkers; they like to be independent. Technology provides them with the tools. What they now need is capital.” Gathitu is riding the wave. He is sharp and ambitious. His company is eyeing South Africa, Nigeria and French speaking West Africa. It hasn’t always been easy.
“One mistake I have made is to over-value a product based on its technological superiority as opposed to market traction. I now believe that a business needs customers more than cash flow,” he says. The time is ripe and the demand is high. Gathitu believes he is well on his way to becoming a tech billionaire before the age of 35. Like many, he trained hard in the years since the first M-PESA transaction in March 2007, and like the rest of the Tandaa Generation, he is ready to rumble.

Silicon Savannah Swagger

Once upon a time in Africa, dreadlocks were frowned upon; if you sported them, you were obviously a rough, subversive smoker of something strange. Now dreadlocks are high fashion and big business. Just ask Jabu Stone—a man who amassed a fortune from the fact that many in African society no longer dread dreads.
<div id="attachment_55" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-55" class="size-large wp-image-55" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/stone183_1-680x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="714" />&#8216;Dreadlock Entrepreneur&#8217; Jabu Stone, Johannesburg CBD; 4 August 2011 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
On a sunny winter’s afternoon, Stone glides through the din of chatter and radios at his hair salon in downtown Johannesburg, like a man on a mission. He has every right to: in the years since democracy in South Africa, in 1994, Stone has seen his dreadlock business expand to Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, the United States and Britain, with a turnover of R25 million ($3,489,378.3) from hair products and a dozen salons employing 70 workers.
The black haircare market is large and growing. Its biggest customers: black women. The myth for many black girls growing up was that straight hair made you look pretty and professional. This is why chemical products that straighten—so-called relaxers—account for about 75% of sales in the industry. Now there is a move towards keeping it more natural and Stone is at the forefront.
“Your hair is a unique act of creation; you don’t need to change the structure of your hair,” says Stone.
“Jabu Stone is one of the pioneers of the natural look. He started a trend in South Africa and showed that dreads weren’t for Rastafarians only,” says Pontsho Mokoena, the president of the Afro Hairdressing and Beauty Employers Association of South Africa (AHBEASA).
Stone, a trained electrical engineer, learned the hair trade almost as soon as he could walk.  He grew up watching the nimble fingers of his mother, a school teacher, braiding hair at home.
In later life, he saw a gap in the market. Stone found someone to help him develop a product that worked with the natural structure of black hair at a time when everyone else was looking for ways to straighten it. It was a very modest start, selling merely six units of product a month and renting a chair at a salon.
Stone hit on the idea of getting celebrities, like Nelson Mandela’s daughter, Zenani, to wear his dreadlocks and of allowing word-of-mouth to do the rest, making the unfashionable fashionable.
Research into the black haircare market is scarce, but all agree it is huge. The US black haircare market was claimed to be worth $9 billion in 2009, according to a recent documentary by stand-up comedian Chris Rock. The South African market, according to research company Diagonal Reports, was worth $1.35 billion in 2009. The hot African markets for black hair care are Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.
In South Africa, Stone is on the move. He has a mobile salon that tours the country and sells people the idea of flaunting their own natural, flowing dreadlocks—at a price. It’s still all about the image, he says, and there are even a dozen taxis driving around Johannesburg with a beaming picture of dreadlocked Afro-soul singer Judith Sephuma advertising his wares.  On top of this, there is diversification; you can open a bank account, get a debit card or medical treatment through Stone’s company and there are plans to expand from eight to 24 countries.
“You can only go as far as your eye can see; when you get there you can see even further,” says Stone.
The market is large and wide open with millions of heads waiting for dreads. For a quick, streetwise entrepreneur like Stone, there is a fortune to be made—one head at a time.
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No Business Like Hair Business

The African Bank’s problems could have tied the best manager in the world in knots. 
For three years the bank had been struggling to recover from the biggest ever foreign exchange scandal in South African history; most of the management were still in prison; it was short of money; the board was divided; on top of that the bank had gone through a massive recapitalization. 
On a leather chair, in the middle of it all, sat the CEO, Gaby Magomola, who was about to go through the worst day of his life in business and suffer the prolonged pain of its aftermath. 
Magomola was the man leading the turnaround, who had a past as complex as the problems of the bank. He was a high school drop-out, who spent six years as a convict on Robben Island, who had somehow transformed himself into a family man and Wall Street banker.
<div id="attachment_17" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-17" class="wp-image-17 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Gaby-Magomola-1024x683.jpg" alt="Gaby Magomola ponders on his worst day" width="474" height="316" />Gaby Magomola ponders on his worst day</div>
In the depths of a cold winter, Magomola was feeling increasingly uneasy in his oak-paneled office and double-breasted suits. 
The problem was the board and management of the African Bank were divided and the cracks were showing in the polished veneer of South Africa’s first and biggest wholly black-owned financial institution. 
At this time, Magomola’s determination and desperation to hang onto the top job at the African Bank ran deeper than any desire for the social trappings. His vulnerability and pain stemmed from his passionate belief that the bank was more than just a money lender. To Magomola, the African Bank was a potent symbol of the economic emancipation of the oppressed: the people he had grown up with. 
In many ways, Magomola embodied the dream. The Magomolas became the first black family to move into the affluent and lily white Wendywood suburb in Johannesburg in 1986, in firm defiance of the apartheid laws. 
In fact, most events in Magomola’s 44-year existence had been the calculated moves of a man who believes he deserves more than circumstances offer. 
He was born in a township near Johannesburg—an average African kid with an above average mind. His home was Bekkersdal, his mother was a casual worker in a nearby town and his dad a store clerk. Despite early academic promise, Magomola dropped out of high school one year before matric and submerged himself in the anti-apartheid struggle. This landed him on Robben Island in 1963 aged 19, where he spent years in the company of political leaders like former South African president Nelson Mandela. 
Magomola completed matric in prison and later, a Bachelor of Commerce degree through long-distance learning university, UNISA. The dream was to qualify as a Chartered Accountant. The setback was merely the lack of segregated toilets in South Africa’s big accounting firms. 
In 1976, Magomola, his wife, Nana, and children left for the United States. Magomola had won a Fulbright scholarship to study towards a Master’s degree in Business Administration at Ball State University in the American Midwest. 
Magomola graduated and found work in Citibank in New York, where he says he “learnt the art of business and the beauty of living with people of different races”. The call of Africa became too loud to ignore in 1982 and Magomola transferred to Citibank’s Johannesburg branch. It closed shortly after President PW Botha’s now infamous Rubicon Speech—which quashed any hopes of political reform in the country. 
In 1986, Magomola’s world was at his feet. A stint at First National Bank (FNB) was followed by an offer from the bank of his dreams. The African Bank was a lender under Reserve Bank watch, with almost no capital, big losses and no leadership on account of the majority of management residing in prison following the fraudulent forex dealing. Mildly put, it was a Herculean job. 
Magomola pursued a private recapitalisation of the bank’s balance sheet and the target was African communities. The dream was economic grass-roots activism. “Political struggle was not enough. People had to own their own institutions,” he says. 
It all boiled down to a conflict over strategy. The Magomola camp wanted the African Bank’s expansion to be a gradual process, a five-year plan around funding informal, small and medium enterprises in the burgeoning township economies. 
The other, much more powerful camp held a vision of fast growth based on a model successful among the big boys like FNB. 
“There was no realization of the complexity that the amount of business a bank can do depends on the capital it has,” says Magomola. 
The job of a CEO, with a board divided, was not an easy one and the moment of truth for Magomola came just before lunch on a cold winter’s day by the hand of an old friend. 
There had been a tense board meeting. Magomola was back in his office wondering what to do. All of a sudden, there was a knock on the door. On the threshold stood founder and chairman Dr Sam Motsuenyane—the very man who had enticed him to the African Bank from his cushy position at FNB just three years earlier. Magomola calls it a classic “et tu, Brute?”. Without saying a word, Motsuenyane handed over a letter demanding his resignation. 
“I thought we had a warm relationship; he was not the kind of chairman that interfered in the day to day running of the business,” says Magomola. 
Worse was to come. Letters from management said Magomola’s crimes ranged from favoritism to an attempt to bring American standards into an African business—taboo in the late 1980s, when African nationalism was on the crest of a wave. 
In the depths of his worst day, Magomola staggered from disbelief to quiet desperation. He tried to rally his troops only to find they had all deserted him. 
Magomola’s head was on the chopping block and he could do nothing about it—he was gone. 
Grief followed denial and Magomola descended into a deep depression and alcohol. The banks repossessed the house in leafy Wendywood and the luxury car. 
More than 20 years later, Magomola says that the real pain from his dismissal was rooted in the deep-seated belief that he was helping build a new economy. 
“I received a lot of offers but none were attractive in the way I had aspired to make a difference when I was on Robben Island,” he says. 
Redemption came a year later when the Foundation for African Business and Consumers Services approached Magomola to create another African lender and he became the pioneer of black economic empowerment. Now he helps his son, Thabo, run an investment holding company.
<h3>Looking back, what would you have done differently?</h3>
I may, in the circumstances, have breached the basics of the changed environment I was operating under. The concept of a corporate strategy and its implementation would have been better grasped at the level of my colleagues at the larger banks where I was trained and worked. However, operating under a board of directors who had not had a similar re-orientation such as the one I received through my exposure abroad, was in itself an obstacle. Walking too far ahead of those whom you lead can be counterproductive.

Tag: Entrepreneur

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Two Flimsy Pages – The Difference Between Disaster And Fortune

Bold Construction

Silicon Savannah Swagger

No Business Like Hair Business

Et tu, Brute?