Range Rover is a name synonymous with motoring excellence. It is a car with impeccable luxury and practicality, by which most other top-end brands are benchmarked. Coupled with this is an off-road prowess that is matched only by cars with the same badge. This badge has enjoyed immense success in the past few years, most notably with the launch of the Range Rover Evoque, a car that soared to the top of all previous sales records for the brand.
The sales success started back in 2005 when the first Range Rover Sport was unveiled. The recipe was to create a car that infused the DNA of the Land Rover with the finesse and refinement of the Range Rover… with a bit of sport added into the mix. It was an instant success, enticing new buyers through dealership doors. And now, it is back.
The design brief for the new car was simply to be more agile and sportier. To achieve this, the Range Rover Sport needed to lose a considerable amount of weight. The result: 420 kilograms less than its predecessor, thanks to an all-aluminum body. Further weight savings in engine construction has resulted in a car that is half a ton lighter than the model it replaces.
The significance of this becomes evident the moment you drive the Sport. It accelerates, brakes and corners faster, with much less body roll and understeer than before. This handling ability is achieved by a host of driver aids, most notably the two-channel active anti-roll system that negates body roll from both the front and rear suspension.
The new car is also offered locally with a choice of three engine derivatives, each connected to an amazing eight-speed ZF gearbox. The 250kW 3.0 liter V6 and the 375kW 5.0 liter V8 petrol engines are both fitted with a supercharger and both sound incredible. The SDV6 diesel engine is the most efficient in the range with 215kW on tap and 600Nm of torque.
To properly understand the capability of this car, you have to drive it as hard, as far and as high as you can. I drove it on diverse surfaces ranging from urban highways to rippled gravel roads; from rocky tracks to muddy terrain; from wading in almost meter deep water to climbing 27 degrees up a man-made ramp into the cabin of a massive DC10 airplane. Yes, in a first for me, and apparently the rest of the motoring world, Range Rover Sport’s launch involved using an airplane to demonstrate its impressive 4X4 capability. The departure angle exiting the DC10 was 37 degrees, which you do not truly appreciate until you are literally hanging on the seatbelt, hoping against all odds that the car will reach the bottom without incident. Of course it does—with minimal fuss.
Prices start at $79,440, while you can expect to pay no less than $121,725 for the supercharged V8. As always, the discerning buyer has so many options to suit a particular taste, including seven interior themes, six interior finishing options, three exterior finish options, three headliner colors, 19 exterior colors, 10 wheel designs and more. The color palette is left entirely to the buyer, but underneath the skin, you will struggle to find a more accomplished and more luxurious vehicle.
The Range Rover Sport has never been as capable a motor car as it is now. There is still a market for the incredible big daddy Range Rover and the Evoque continues to be the talk of the town. The Sport, however, has molded its own fan club and I have no doubt that they will remain devoted to their beloved brand as it remains true to its intended purpose. It is more agile, more sporty and more Range Rover.

Agility And Sport In A Business Suit

It all started with R40 ($4) and a neighbor’s oven. A year later, Espinaca Innovations is a bakery on a mission to make money by getting people in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape province to eat bread packed with spinach.
Espinaca, meaning spinach in Spanish, is where Nomjana bakes about 40 loaves and umpteen muffins every day. But the idea didn’t come by easily.
Nomjana started off selling clothes in his community of Khayelitsha, just outside Cape Town, to make a living. But he knew he needed something of his own, something innovative.
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A year before attending the Raymond Ackerman Academy, Nomjana decided to change his lifestyle and became a vegetarian. As he read a newspaper article about diabetic patients standing in long queues at hospitals, it spurred the spinach bread idea. It could be the answer for many people.
“I knew spinach was something that is a solution to my society due to the fact that it grows [all year], it’s versatile and it’s nutritious. I did my research, and found it was the most nutritious vegetable in the world,” adds Nomjana.
While attending the Academy, in partnership with the University of Cape Town, Nomjana was able to improve his entrepreneurial skills. The Academy is a post-matric level institution offering studies in entrepreneurial development.
Espinaca Innovations was a great idea on paper but implementing it proved to be a challenge. The only problem was that nobody was interested at the time.
“Eventually I just sat down and said let me use what I have and during that time I had nothing but the intellectual capital and $4 in my pocket. And I didn’t have an oven. I was living in a shack (a tin roof house) in a backyard with my wife. We were just dating at the time,” Nomjana says.
But he knew that he couldn’t operate this kind of business from a shack. So he asked a neighbor if he could bake bread in her oven when she was not using it.
In February last year, with his neighbor’s oven and R40 ($4), Nomjana sold about 200 loaves in 25 days. He grows the spinach in his backyard in about 20 crates and enriches the bread with it.
All good so far but Nomjana soon realized that he was not making enough money with the borrowed oven so he approached Pick ’n Pay (a grocery store owned by millionaire Raymond Ackerman) for assistance.
“That’s when they assisted with a four burner oven of my own I could use on a daily basis and at night as well. I spent my time baking lots of breads and going to the field and selling to people on the street, which I’m still doing now. Like going to train stations and selling door-to-door,” says Nomjana.
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The grocery store placed Espinaca Innovations into their small business incubation until it was big enough to become a supplier.
He now supplies the Pick ’n Pay head office canteen.
With the grocery store’s assitance Nomjana was able to bake more loaves but distribution became an issue as he was producing more bread than he could sell.
The solution was delivering bread on bicycles. He partnered with a crowd funding platform which helped to raise around R11,200 ($1,000) in two months. It enabled Nomjana to buy five bicycles to deliver bread.
Today, Nomjana has a wider range of spinach products, ranging from spinach muffins, sandwiches using the spinach bread, juices and smoothies.
These spinach products are sold and delivered to orphanages, pre-schools, and homes in Khayelitsha. He also supplies Spar, a grocery store chain, in Khayelitsha.
Nomjana will soon establish his own premises where he would be able to sell all his spinach products. He hopes to be able to turn the idea into a franchise across townships in the Western Cape.
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On The Crust Of Something Big

Kola Karim wants to build bridges in Nigeria and the whole of Africa. This is best appreciated when meeting him in person. African in style and looks, he speaks with a posh British accent and has the sophistication of someone who has been part of the business elites of London and Lagos for a long time.
A die-hard afro-optimist, the Harvard graduate sees himself as a mediator between two very different cultures with two very different ways of doing business. He also wants to put Africa on the map as the world’s most promising investment destination of the next decade.
At 41, Karim is one of the wealthiest and most influential entrepreneurs in Nigeria and on the continent. His conglomerate Shoreline Group, which employs more than 5,000 people in seven countries, has interests in all essential industries, from electricity to oil and gas, construction, engineering, commodities trading, logistics and agro-allied products.
He got there through hard work, focus and persistence. Karim, the son of a policeman and an entrepreneurial mother who ran a small commodity trading firm, spent the first years of his childhood in Nigeria. After his father’s death, he moved with his siblings to England at the age of 14, where he studied management, finance and later obtained an MBA.
From there, Karim slowly worked his way to the top. His first job was as a trainee manager at one of Britain’s largest insurance companies, Guardian Royal Exchange Assurance.
“That’s where I cut my teeth, in financial services. It gave me a critical understanding of how business works,” he says.
Two years later, he joined the prestigious investment firm HK Beaumont &amp; Associates as senior manager responsible for pension and investment funds.
Another couple of years later, his entrepreneurial spirit kicked in. The place where he saw the most opportunities was Africa. He returned to Nigeria in 1993 to start Koda Trading with his mother, specializing in the import and export of bulk feed stock, raw materials, heavy-duty machinery and equipment.
“My focus has always been Africa. My mother taught us to always remember who we are and where we come from. Today, I am building businesses right across the continent. We’ve got businesses in Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Kenya, Uganda… and I want to continue growing,” he says.
When Karim talks about his career today, he makes it sound like an easy ride. But the truth is that his entry into entrepreneurship was rather rocky. He and his mother struggled to access finance to kickstart Koda Trading and were forced to put up their family home as security.
“We were mortgaged up to the neck to the banks. I was under a lot of pressure. If I hadn’t succeeded, my whole family would have gone bust. Because of the pressure, I started to panic. I remember I couldn’t sleep because of the responsibility I carried,” he recalls.
It took him nine months to gain back his confidence at which point he made a deliberate decision to view every negative in the narrative of the African story as an opportunity. His luck started to change, and two years later, Karim turned his first profit.
His ticket to success was Nigeria’s persistent shortfall of electricity. Following his new motto of turning negatives into positives, Karim became an independent, private electricity producer, offering corporates a full range of services, from grid-connected to off-grid power generation, plant management, repair and optimization, power lines, substations and various high and low voltage services.
“Energy security is one of the most important drivers of Africa’s economic growth. It has therefore one of the largest growth potentials for the continent,” he explains.
Power shortages remain a major stumbling block for businesses and households all over sub-Saharan Africa, where only a quarter of residents have access to electricity.
As the Nigerian government struggles to meet rapidly growing energy demands, private companies have a chance to offer complimentary services. That is where Shoreline Power comes in.
Taking on a job that is traditionally the role of government, Karim is keenly aware that a smooth interplay between the private and public sectors is important. While business can take over the slog work, entrepreneurs rely on government to create an enabling regulatory environment.
“Bureaucracy can throw a spanner in the works and hold back growth. We need more transparency, rule of law, open and functional processes to attract investment.”
At the same time, he is keenly aware that the private sector needs to play its part by creating best practices based on international business standards. Eradicating corruption should be on top of this list, says Karim, who was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2008 for his excellent management skills and his transparency in conducting business. That is crucial in a nation like Nigeria, which has long been considered one of the world’s most corrupt states, with billions in oil revenue pocketed and misused during the past decade.
Despite his excitement about the possibilities of public-private partnerships, Karim has over the years become wary of relying too much on government contracts. He learned from his past experiences.
His main lesson came several years ago, when he chased a range of major government contracts, which were eventually awarded to a Chinese competitor. It was a serious setback for Shoreline from which the company took a long time to recover.
“It was a huge letdown, mentally and financially. This is where African governments need to think because they could drive successful entrepreneurs out of the continent. While my revenues stay in the country, a Chinese or Indian company can just pack their bags and go [if things don’t work out]. So who deserves the bigger support? Africa, at this point, has the opportunity to strive. But we need government to support us,” he says.
It was at this point that Karim decided to never again put all of his eggs into one basket. He began to diversify, branching out into food, construction, oil and gas services, exploration, logistics and production.
“I built my business by investing in anything that contributes to the lives of ordinary Africans. All you got to look for in entrepreneurship is the simple stuff,” he suggests.
It doesn’t need rocket science to understand that a continent with a billion people and some of the world’s fastest growing economies offers tremendous opportunity.
“Africa is reaching a position where it can negotiate. And the world is ready to listen,” says Karim.
He is, however, keenly aware that Africa will never come out of its economic doldrums until it creates a generation of entrepreneurs that will create sustainable businesses willing to reinvest in Africa.
Karim is taking the lead from one of his mentors, Africa’s richest man, cement magnate Aliko Dangote, whose net worth FORBES estimates at $20.8 billion.
“I have learnt a lot from Dangote. He has been like a brother to me. He is dogged and determined, and he doesn’t let anyone push him around,” he says.
The business acumen Karim has shown in recent years has not gone unnoticed by Nigeria’s entrepreneurial elite.
“Kola Karim is one of Nigeria’s emerging entrepreneurs who has already made his mark on the national scene with the remarkable growth recorded by his various interests. He is a versatile and astute businessman, a role model,” lauds Dangote.
One of Karim’s secrets is to keep business in the family. He is running Shoreline as a tight-knit family firm, which he believes is part of the group’s success. Apart from his mother, four of his five siblings work for the conglomerate. “As a family business, you always have people in management who have the interests of the business at heart, because you’re in the same boat. Together, we grew the company from a small firm into a global business,” he says.
His focus as founder and group managing director is Shoreline’s overall strategy and vision. But he also has the reputation of being a brilliant salesman, which, combined with his endless optimism about Africa, has over the years helped him strike major deals with powerful financial backers and multi-nationals.
Karim says he learned to sell himself during his time at Harvard Business School when he realized that communication is one of the most important tools for the success of any business.
“As a Nigerian entrepreneur, you have to be your own best salesman. We have to be relentless, determined and persistent because we come from a disadvantaged position. We have lots of things that speak against us: threats of kidnapping, Boko Haram, corruption. We have to fight prejudice and negative perceptions,” he says.
“If you want to convince global corporations to invest, they have to believe that you are trustworthy and reliable. The first thing you have to do is make known that you are not a conman, not a fraudster, not a drug dealer.”
This approach clearly worked for him. Karim single-handedly turned his national company into an international conglomerate through strategic acquisitions and partnerships.
“I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel. My business model is to look at existing, successful international brands that want to enter my region. The best technology belongs to the big corporates, so we partner with them and that way create positives for us,” he explains.
He has struck partnerships with industry giants like electronic equipment manufacturer Siemens, power and automation technology developer ABB, oil and gas technology and project management provider Schlumberger, engineering and construction group Costain, tyre manufacturer Michelin and communications giant Motorola.
His very first acquisition was that of Swiss multinational ABB. According to Karim, it happened by coincidence. He was chatting to the man seated next to him on a plane. When the aircraft touched down, they exchanged business cards. Only then did Karim realize he had been talking to a senior manager at ABB.
When he learnt that ABB was considering pulling out of Nigeria, Karim saw his chance. He suggested they sell their Nigerian operations to Shoreline.
“To my shock and horror, he looked at me and said ‘let me discuss it’. Three weeks later, he invited me to Switzerland to make a proposal. I was stunned,” Karim explains.
The deal with ABB gave him a taste for what was possible. He realized it could be replicated with other multinationals in other business sectors.
Karim purchased controlling shares of the West African operations of British group Costain, followed by the acquisition of a cache of oilfields in the conflict-scarred Niger Delta in a joint venture with Heritage Oil for $850 million, in November 2012.
With the deal, Karim secured himself a portly share of Nigeria’s oil production, which is the largest in Africa. It also brought him a step closer to his goal of becoming a significant upstream oil operator in his home country.
The father of three children, who live with his wife in England, spends much time jetting back and forth between Lagos and London. Although he could easily afford it, he doesn’t own a private jet. He prefers flying commercial airlines, since they are better for networking.
“I do have access to one or two private jets to travel with, but to me it’s boring because you travel on your own. A commercial plane, in contrast, is a good place to meet interesting people,” he says.
With that much on the go, it’s surprising that Karim has a private life at all. Every now and then, he escapes from the humdrum of loud and chaotic Lagos to one of the megacity’s lakes, where he likes to race speedboats.
His other hobby is the exclusive game of polo. With a handicap that nears professionalism, Karim is one of Nigeria’s most ardent and popular players. He is a member of Nigeria’s prestigious Lagos Polo Club on Ikoyi Island, the city’s most upmarket neighborhood.
A true fanatic, Karim, who started playing polo in his early twenties, bought his own team, the Shoreline Polo club.
“I play a lot of polo in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and England. My brother, my son and I play a lot of tournaments. Polo is one of the sports that demand the highest mental aptitude. You ride a horse while at the same time holding a stick and hitting a ball,” he says.
One comes to fully understand Karim’s love for polo when realizing that it is mirrored by his fashion sense. Classic with a modern twist, he is a fan of fashion guru Ralph Lauren’s famous Polo flagship brand—so much so that over the years he has become friends with the celebrated designer.
In May, Karim threw a glamorous charity event at London’s Ralph Lauren store on the expensive New Bond Street in aid of The Pure Soul Learning Foundation that supports people with autism—one of his many philanthropic initiatives.
It was a move with a somewhat ulterior motive however. Karim plans to invest in the fashion industry next.
“I want to boost African brands, from fashion to design and furniture to market Africa’s image. I want to re-brand Africa.”

The Polo Playing Entrepreneur  Who Calls Dangote Brother

From the heart of the Lower Zambezi National Park hundreds of miles from a town or on the streets of Lusaka, the name Mark O’Donnell is as common in Zambia as the Victoria Falls or Mosi Beer. On the streets they call him the Mall Man; the Zambian who made his fortune building places to stay and shop. In business, he is known as a ruthless strategist who wants to make money and cannot make it fast enough.
“Zambia is a small market but it’s a growing one, at six to seven percent a year, for the past 14 years. The economy of the country has grown much bigger. We’ve been fortunate to make investments when the time was appropriate… we just wanted to build a shopping mall,” says O’Donnell.
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O’Donnell is a born and bred Zambian and has walked a meandering path to riches.  At 18, O’Donnell was selling auto parts for someone else. But he dreamed of being an entrepreneur. Times were tough in the 1980s, when private money struggled in a socialist state run under tight regulations. Strangely, at a time when there was little to buy, he thought that malls could be just what Zambia needed.
“It was very difficult to do anything in Zambia. Ninety percent of the country was controlled by the state. You would drive around in Lusaka and all you would see were queues of people lining up to buy whatever commodities were in the stores. There were a lot of hardships,” he says.
This hardship led to riots and ushered out the 27 years of power for Zambia’s president Kenneth Kaunda and its policy of control. Frederick Chiluba led his Movement for Multiparty Democracy in the elections in 1991 on a ticket of free enterprise. Despite the freeing of the economy for private business, things got worse for O’Donnell. Private business was shrinking by the day.
“In the 1990s, business was pretty bleak. We were just plain contractors at that point, and we were just trying to find work. It was almost impossible to get regular types of work, so we had to be innovative. We had to figure out how we were going to make projects. So we went and designed our own projects,” he says.
O’Donnell decided to build a mall to keep his business running. Despite his fears, the Arcades Shopping Centre was built in 2003 and brought in a number of South African franchises, putting Zambia on the map for investment.
“Many people wondered why we were building a shopping mall when the market seemed like it was struggling,” he says.
It brought fame to the farthest reaches of the country, even to the far flung bush of the Lower Zambezi National Park. Hundreds of kilometers away, Joshua Chizuwa, who has been a game ranger for more than 40 years, has heard of him.
“I used to work as a construction worker for him during breaks from the bush a long time ago. O’Donnell was as a hard businessman, ruthless in his deals. I have seen his buildings rise and Lusaka has grown from his ventures. He’s changed the face of Lusaka,” says Chizuwa.
According to Trevor Simumba, a Zambian-born managing director of the Sub-Saharan Consulting Group, within Lusaka O’Donnell is regarded as a progressive businessman who saw the liberalization policies of the MMD in the nineties as an opportunity rather than a challenge.
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“He was very helpful to me when I was starting my career in the consulting field. At one point during a very difficult career transition, Mark said to me ‘Trevor it is always darkest before dawn’. This simple but profound statement helped me through and I always tell myself that whenever I face a challenge. Zambia is privileged to have Mark doing his business in Zambia. We need more role models like this in business in Zambia,” says Simumba.
O’Donnell also went into the hotel industry. It was a failed game lodge that saw O’Donnell go big. He negotiated a deal with Africa’s largest hotel group, Protea Hotels, a chain that has been targeted by Marriott International.
The first hotel O’Donnell built was in Chingola, in northern Zambia’s rich Copperbelt Province. He says it was a disaster.
“We opened it in the same week that Anglo American pulled out of Zambia. It wasn’t the best start to a hotel chain. There was zero occupancy for a couple of years,” he says.
It has taken 13 years of fighting back to expand seven more hotels. He is currently building his eighth in Lusaka, next door to his mall.
As the largest owner of hotels in Zambia it makes sense that O’Donnell wants tourism to boom. Until recently, he has been critical of the government’s efforts to encourage visitors. Tourism currently accounts for a mere 2% of Zambia’s gross domestic product. In August, the government announced a turnaround strategy to increase this to 7% in line with neighboring Zimbabwe. It has won over O’Donnell.
“You are talking about an industry that needs to double in size over the next five to 10 years. Our current arrivals are about 900,000 a year. If we take out non-tourist visits, we are probably looking at 300,000 tourists. I think what we would like to see that number grow to about 600,000 high spending visitors. We need to increase the visit to arrivals in Zambia. That’s our first priority. To raise Zambia’s profile in the key source markets and increase interest to come into Zambia either through leisure tourism or for business travel. Certainly both components have interest,” says O’Donnell.
Tourism in Zambia is difficult. O’Donnell says a ban on Zambian aircraft by the European Union (EU) has discouraged North Americans and Europeans.
“The agents won’t book internal flights due to insurance reasons. It’s purely to do with some technicalities that the EU won’t deal with, with our civil aviation authorities,” he says.
But his greatest challenge lies with Zambia’s marketing. According to O’Donnell, 60% of wealthy foreigners in North America, Asia and Europe have never heard of Zambia.
“Our customers demand a high quality sort of product. Just because this is Africa it doesn’t mean you can’t offer top class products to the market. Zambia is generally unspoilt, an environment untouched by commercialization. In some places in Africa you would find 20 minibuses around a lion, this doesn’t happen in Zambia. You can’t compare what we have with London and New York, but you have something different,” he says.
In a city that was little more than dirt roads, O’Donnell had a dream that many struggled to envision. Where people queued for hours to get their hands on commodities he saw malls with refrigerators. Today, O’Donnell’s buildings run alongside tarred roads and Zambians are eager to see what his next dream will be.

The Mall King And His New Toys

It’s Friday morning, just after 8AM. A blanket of clouds fills the sky over a hot and humid morning in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo. On the pavement of Martires da Machava Avenue, everyone wants to get a newspaper but there are not enough to go around. Near the entrance to the yard, a knot of people tussle over a diminishing pack of newspapers.
A few minutes later, an old man dressed in a grey suit pulls up in a silver Range Rover Sport to jump out and grab his newspaper.
This happens every Friday because in Maputo, everyone wants to know. Verdade, which means the truth in Portuguese, is a free newspaper in more ways than one. It is a newspaper that often criticizes and upsets the authorities.
On this particular Friday, the paper publishes comments written by readers on a wall outside the Verdade offices, saying the people are not happy the president of the Democratic Movement for Mozambique, Daviz Simango, won the municipal elections.
Erik Charas, an electrical and mechanical engineer turned entrepreneur, started Verdade six years ago, which appears to be flourishing in a world where newspapers are dying. Verdade is Mozambique’s best read newspaper.
Charas believes that Verdade can be a tool of change in his country’s fight against poverty.
“I thought I’d do greater good for my country than contributing to the bottom line of a company,” says Charas.
Unlike many developed countries where information flows like water, in Mozambique newspapers are expensive and scarce.
Verdade skirts politics and concentrates on the issues of the people: electricity prices; crime; HIV/AIDs and bread subsidies. It receives about 5,000 SMSes a month for a section that focuses on sex and health. The paper also touches on entertainment, nightlife and lifestyle in Maputo.
What also makes this newspaper popular is that it publishes Facebook comments from its readers.
Charas is an unlikely newspaper baron. After leaving his engineering job, he went on to teach at a university in Mozambique before spending nine years at the Graça Machel Foundation.
He left the foundation to try and fail as an entrepreneur. His stint at the foundation was successful and he was signing million-dollar cheques for the projects it ran. He left without having any plan whatsoever.
He launched his own company with various sub-companies within it, including infrastructure, telecoms, finance and transportation. He founded Verdade in 2008 with around $500,000 that he had raised from previous business ventures and private investments.
Verdade appeared to be an outlandish idea, but exploited a loophole in the market left by official and government newspapers, which are not popular with the people.
When it was launched, Charas says the goal was to reach around 50% of the literate population in six years, but sights had to be lowered. There are roughly 12 million people in Mozambique who can read and write. However, according to Charas, Verdade is read by a mere million people, 10 times more than any other official newspaper in Mozambique.
Back at Martires da Machava Avenue, workers distribute newspapers from a garage at the back of a house where 10 journalists work. Verdade workers hand out around 5,000 copies from the pavement outside. Fifty drivers deliver the paper across the country using bright yellow txopelas (tuk-tuks) in Verdade branding. About 2,000 copies are delivered in Nampula; Quelimane receives about 1,000; Pemba 200 and 100 in Bilene. About 1,300 newspapers are flown to Chimoio and Inhambane.
In some of these cities, the paper is distributed on street corners and bus stops.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for this popular newspaper. In 2013, Verdade saw sales dropping and experienced a loss of 20% in advertising renewals.
“A lot of our renewals say they got calls from officials saying ‘oh you can’t advertise in that paper—it gets critical’,” says Charas.
The print run was cut from 50,000 to 20,000.
“We want to print more papers for the rural areas, rather than for the city dwellers who have internet and can access the newspaper using their phones,” he says.
As for the future? Charas says they would like to associate Verdade with advertisements that people trust and do not give a false message. The 32-paged newspaper has almost no advertisements. Charas says newspaper ads will only get the thumbs up once they have gone through screening for truthfulness in its message.
Charas says he would only like to associate the newspaper with advertising that is truthful because readers trust and believe in the Verdade brand, which he says is linked to advertising.
“We are taking the trust our readers have put in us to a new stage. And you might ask us why… We’ve built a very strong brand that people trust and identify with… People look at it beyond just a newspaper title. It’s part of their voice and people contribute to it.”
“We’re taking responsibility of knowing that if I say that this water is good for you, people will totally trust that and move in mass towards one product or one process. We’ve seen that with the elections. We measured it. We went through the process of doing research about it. We worked with Paul Collier from Oxford University. They did research on the impact of information that gets carried through our newspaper [and the effect it] has on people’s actions and you could tell that [Verdade] really does&#8230;,” says Charas.
Another exciting venture is that the company bought a huge printer in northern Mozambique, which is part of the expansion for Verdade. The people in this part of the country often threaten Verdade employees, demanding the right to know the truth. The paper is currently printed in Nelspruit, South Africa.
Despite the harassment to advertisers and nearly losing revenues through advertising that could force the newspaper to shut down, Charas says Verdade will not go down without a fight.
“If we have to sink while telling the truth, so be it,” he says.

The Truth Hurts

“You must keep going, don’t let go,” replies the teacher.
A moment across a table as an African trailblazer in business uses his lessons in life to help shape a young entrepreneur.
The teacher is 86-year-old Richard Maponya; his pupil is 32-year-old Monalisa Sam. They grew up worlds apart with the same aim.
Maponya, a trained teacher who never taught, joined a company in the 1950s to sell clothing to miners. This job spurred him on to become an entrepreneur.
For more than 50 years, Maponya did everything. He sold clothes door-to-door, meat to butchers, BMWs to the rich and property to the wise. Most came in oppressive apartheid days when Maponya was shunned at every turn.
Maponya Mall is his holy grail. It took Maponya $62.8 million, 28 years and a string of lawsuits to carve out the first shopping mall in the bustling Soweto.
“It was like a war, I don’t know how many times I had been turned down by the apartheid government,” Maponya says.
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Former president Nelson Mandela opened the mall in late 2007. In 1957, Mandela, then a young lawyer, assisted Maponya when the businessman was trying to obtain a license to open a retail clothing store.
By contrast, Sam is the daughter of a former headmaster, who had it easier. Her father, Gideon Sam, is now the South African Sports Confederations and Olympic Committee (SASCOC) president. Sam was part of the first generation of black children to enrol in formerly whites only schools. She has a Bachelor of Commerce in accounting degree from the University of Cape Town and was employed by Old Mutual Properties.
Their paths crossed when Sam was a general manager for Maponya Mall Property Trust in 2007. A friendship was forged in the two years she worked there, before she left to co-found Tungwa Retail Holdings in 2011, a company run by black women.
“When we interviewed Monalisa for the job, there were many others but she was the star. We grabbed her with both hands. And we were not disappointed by our decision. She’s very talented and confident. I know she will go very far,” says Maponya.
To this day, Maponya, albeit frail, hasn’t lost his hunger for business, nor his dress sense that made him a snappy salesman a lifetime ago.
The mentor and protégé meet at Maponya’s house in Hyde Park to catch up and assess how the young entrepreneur is faring.
“The business is coming on well, Papa, but as any entrepreneurial project it takes time with a lot of challenges. But we are grounded on what we want to do. We will keep going,” Sam tells Maponya.
Maponya surprises his protégé with talk of a new business.
“I have been very busy with a little challenge. I have ventured into the chicken industry. It has been monopolized by Afrikaaners and I just felt I had to have a crack at it and see if I can make a difference and see if I can encourage some of the black folks to join in. It is not an easy industry,” he says.
“If you want to succeed in this industry you must own everything. Don’t depend on other people,” Maponya advises his student.
The talk veers towards the government’s black economic empowerment (BEE) policy aimed at wealth redistribution. They both feel it has failed.
Maponya criticizes the BEE policy and tender system which the government uses to give contracts to the public.
“They came up with something they themselves cannot control. The white men saw opportunity in the BEE. It has created so many white millionaires as it made it possible for them to just pick a black person and say this is my BEE partner,” says Maponya.
“As the black partner you never get access to finances, you don’t know what’s going on with money, you are not empowered, you are just a token,” Sam interjects.
They agree BEE has failed to spread wealth. It is benefiting the few with political connections.
“The other thing it does Papa, it encourages a sense of entitlement among black people. There’s this idea you don’t have to work, you don’t have to understand anything. If you are just there as a black person, you are going to get something,” adds Sam.
Sam says the deals are out of most people’s reach.
“It has done a lot of harm, it has killed the youth initiatives,” says Maponya.
“Tendering is the worst thing that has ever been created. It has become a monster that has corrupted people from right at the top of government to the bottom of the ladder,” says Maponya.
“The idea is that you will never get a tender if you have not done something unscrupulous. Some say by the time it comes out in the papers it is too late. Newspaper advertisement is just a formality to say we are transparent,” says Sam.
Maponya says the government must scrap the tendering policy.
“It hurts me seeing the country becoming the most corrupt nation in the continent,” says Maponya.
The National Empowerment Fund (NEF), the government funding agent, argues that it is doing its job with distinction and merit.
“The relevance of the National Empowerment Fund is far beyond question. There’s no other (funding) entity that does what we do, no bank that does it. NEF is run with absolute integrity,” says Moemise Motsepe, the marketing and communications manager of NEF.
On average the NEF receives more than 300 applications a month. Those that are not successful are considered for a business mentorship program that runs over six months, says Motsepe.
“To date the National Empowerment Fund has funded over 500 black businesses which have created over 44,000 jobs. Over 20% of the beneficiaries are women,” he adds.
Despite these problems, Sam is far from discouraged.
“If you listened to Papa’s story when he started, the times were different but the business principles are the same of saying take the opportunity, understand where the gap is and how you service that gap,” she says.
“For many years, Papa nurtured his dream of building and owning a world-class shopping center in Soweto. In my time at Maponya, I learnt so much from him. But the most important thing he has taught me is humility and patience.”
It is evident in the conversation that the duo’s problems are different but the suffering is the same.
Like his clan totem elephant, which is the emblem on his business and tie, Maponya remains a heavyweight in business who is far from ready to give up his title.

It Hurts Seeing My Country Becoming The Most Corrupt Nation

A cold front is sweeping over Addis Ababa from the Eucalyptus-dotted Entoto mountain range. In the gloom of dawn, I shiver and look out from my hotel window at the derelict shell of a half-finished tower block. As usual I am awake as the early traffic noise begins. Despite the gray pallor of the horizon, I set out and take a morning run across the rutted steps of Meskel Square—my feet splashing in rust-colored potholes.
As the shadows lift on the downtown plaza, a more forgiving light gradually reveals hundreds of young athletes limbering up in the drizzle. I know my limits. I am a mere mortal compared to even the least talented of these local runners—most of whom will finish 30 kilometers in a round trip—a day. Rising at 4AM and running between 5AM and 7AM, with their eye on the Olympic dream, this is their solemn and stark ritual seven days a week. It will take the most dedicated years to let it go.
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I may be a stranger in their midst but I know something of their story. I investigated the plight of Ethiopia’s female athletes in 2008. For them, running represented not only a long shot at riches but an opportunity to escape the blight of child marriage which is still common in far-flung rural areas. The stipends paid to the most talented athletes by local associations also ensured the track was a small source of income in a landscape where jobs for young women were, like gold medals, too often beyond reach.
Today, I notice the warring crowds of female athletes, jostling for position along the concrete terraces that line the square, have thinned out.
“More and more are going to college. They all want to work for Western firms setting up shop here,” my driver scornfully tells me.
I have arrived back in Addis to investigate Ethiopia’s thriving leather export industry just as the Swedish retail giant, H&amp;M, reportedly enters the local market with their first small manufacturing hubs in Africa on the outskirts of the city. Other Western firms, notably the British supermarket giant, Tesco, and the ubiquitous Walmart, are also now, according to local newspapers, manufacturing goods here for the first time. This is welcome news in many ways. I know from experience that jobs in the retail sector fill a vital role employing women—although, as recent history in Asia shows us, it is a sector that does not necessarily empower them.
The garment industry and I have had a combative relationship. While a foreign correspondent based in India, I uncovered children in the supply chain of Gap Inc, prompting relentless international headlines and hurtling me into a campaign to expose abundant retail wrongdoing among other Western manufacturers in unimaginable sweatshops from Karachi to Dhaka and Colombo.
It was an issue I couldn’t even stay away from when I first moved to Africa after I exposed suppliers to both Levi’s and Gap, in the tiny kingdom of Lesotho, who were dumping dangerous garment waste and leaking toxic dyes into the heart of an impoverished HIV-ravaged community. An exposé made all the more startling by the fact that the Gap supplier in question was producing clothing for Product Red—an enterprise entirely designed to help the world’s poorest people.
As a consequence, I find myself sitting in an Addis café reading local headlines heralding the creation of garment manufacturing hubs in Africa with both hope and trepidation.
H&amp;M’s decision to look towards Ethiopia as a new low-cost country to produce clothing does not come as a surprise. After all, it is not a newcomer to the textile and garment industry. The first garment factories in the country were built in 1939, during the fascist Italian occupation.
Africa also has a history of production in the sector. Few Western shoppers realize that Madagascan textile factories continue to make clothes for Inditex, the parent company of Zara, and once did so for Gap Inc as well as other major Western retailers. Tunisia and Morocco has been furnishing high street shelves for decades.
But H&amp;M’s decision to move into Ethiopia has captured the attention of many in the garment trade. It comes at a time when many retailers are relying too heavily on nations like Bangladesh for clothing production—a place where many supply chains are at breaking point. Like other foreign firms, H&amp;M, widely seen as an industry leader, inevitably sees Ethiopia as an opportunity to expand its sourcing footprint in Africa, which could come to represent a major consumer market in itself, and not part of a bigger plan to replace its commitment to production in Asia.
But Asia is causing many retailers serious problems. In Bangladesh, sustainability and a series of deadly factory fires has led to international condemnation of the garment industry. The shelf life of China, at least as a source of cheaply manufactured clothing, also appears to be diminishing. According to the research firm, Sanford C. Bernstein, individual garments manufactured in Ethiopia were half the cost of those in China as of 2011.
The Ethiopian government wants to transform its textile and garment industry and has set an ambitious target of $1 billion in textile exports by 2016. In order to achieve this, it is bringing in foreign investors to modernize machines and factories. Other countries like Kenya, Ghana and Uganda are following suit. Led by commitments by firms such as H&amp;M, the garment industry could partly help such nations achieve the goal of moving from primarily agricultural economies to industrial.
Few in the West realize that Ethiopia is the second-most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated population approaching 92 million. According to the United States Census Bureau, in less than 40 years, Ethiopia’s population will more than triple to 278 million. In perspective, in 1967, the population was just 23.5 million.
But it is also a youthful demographic. Half of all Ethiopians today are between the ages of 15 and 24. Yet according to a 2012 US Agency For International Development study, Ethiopia has one of the highest urban youth unemployment rates in the world at 50%. In a nutshell, Ethiopia, like all African nations, needs manufacturing hubs to deliver jobs to young people and in particular, young women.
In my opinion, for major players like H&amp;M and Walmart, the country also offers the opportunity to learn from the mistakes made by the garment industry as a whole in Asia. Shaping sub-Saharan nations like Ethiopia into retail manufacturing hubs offers Western retailers the chance to wipe the slate clean and to work harder to help local suppliers avoid supply chain exploitation and sustainability issues. Above all it could represent a chance for retailers to offer consumers and stakeholders more transparent insight into their supply chains.
But there is already a flaw in this ideal. Today, the sub-Saharan Africa clothing industry is challenged by the fact that it is only partly African-owned. The clothing industries in Lesotho and Swaziland are in fact owned by Taiwanese consortiums. Similarly, in Kenya and Ethiopia, much of the industry is controlled by Indian and even Mauritian investment. Before it even grows to a recognizable sector, sub-contracting already shapes much of the industry in Africa—as does the inevitable out-sourcing of profits from local operations.
Shane Godfrey, a senior researcher in the Labor and Enterprise Project at the University of Cape Town, recently claimed that many of the garment factories in Africa are part of a triangular manufacturing strategy. So, despite often being very large operations, they do little more than assemble garments made in other nations. In the industry, he claims, they are known as caravan factories that can be easily packed up and moved elsewhere.
Godfrey’s argument is simple. He claims that that while foreign investment should be retained and encouraged, there also needs to be more stringent requirements for skills transfer so that locally-owned manufacturing capacity can develop. Controversial perhaps but the argument that Indian factories in the heart of Ethiopia will, inevitably, be less engaged in emancipating the local population and more engaged in taking out profit is hard to ignore.
Major Western retailers should not think about building schools or investing in clinics but framing corporate social responsibility investments around the training of young women to work in the garment sector and ultimately assisting Ethiopians themselves to create businesses that contribute and profit from the promising retail economy. Simplistically speaking, these firms should also keep a tighter hold on sustainability issues in far flung production hubs, such as the disposal of garment waste, the use of water during dry spells and the application of dyes.
In recent years, my own thought processes, as the outsider trying to encourage change in the garment industry, has evolved with reason and deeper understanding.
I strongly believe that Africa needs to become a manufacturing hub in sectors like retail to capitalize on the youth dividend of nations like Ethiopia. But there also needs to be more social responsibility from major manufacturers, who have been part of problematic supply chains in Asia and are now eyeing Africa as the next source of cheap clothing.
H&amp;M, now the second biggest retailer in the world, was the first company to sign a Europe-led safety pact for Bangladesh garment factories after the collapse of the factory in Rana Plaza. This despite the fact the firm had no suppliers in the building. Helena Helmersson, the firm’s global head of sustainability, has also urged Bangladesh and Cambodia to raise the minimum wage and revise it annually. Such commitments at the outset of any involvement in Africa should be expected.
Underlying this entire issue, the dialogue between the stakeholders involved in these supply chains also needs to be more open, honest and robust. The NGOs, the CEOs, the grassroots communities and the regional and national governments all need to be involved from the outset as Africa begins to process and build goods for the West and we all need to discard the distrust we have of each other and learn from the terrible mistakes made in the sweatshops of Dhaka and Delhi.

Investment Or Exploitation?

The Royal Bafokeng Nation in north west South Africa has an estimated worth of more than R40 billion ($3.76 billion), with stakes in platinum mining, telecommunications and shares in the Rand Merchant Bank Holdings. It listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 2011.
But, many on the ground claim this vast wealth is not trickling down to the people; that millions have been wasted on white elephant projects. At the sharp end of this discontent is Luka in Action, a group representing youth in Bafokeng.
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The group is based in Luka, a village lying 10 kilometers north of Rustenburg in the North West province. The youth say the Bafokeng administration has failed to deliver on promises of employment, despite its vast wealth. These days, Luka, once a fertile farmland with livestock, resembles a township dotted with shebeens and youth hanging around on street corners.
Luka in Action claims it has companies; Sediba Sa Kwena, involved in renewable energy and Refetogile Moral Regeneration, which seeks to train ex-offenders, which are yet to get off the ground because there is no money.
The youth claim the money was wasted on sports development programs involving a team of Brazilian football coaches. They say, without their knowledge, the Brazilian team called Samba was brought in to train coaches and young players. After a five year contract, little has happened.
“Those Brazilians have come and gone with millions of rands but there’s nothing to show why they were here except t-shirts and soccer balls they handed out. If they can pay the Brazilians for doing nothing, surely they have funds to sponsor our projects,” says youth representative Otlile Thlapane.
In Luka village there is a state-of-the-art youth center, equipped with computers and games, as well as a radio station paid for by the Royal Bafokeng, but it is not working amid claims of mismanagement.
The youth further complain that the nearby mines, where the money comes from, are damaging their village. Blasting creates cracks in houses and underground vibrations, pollution and water shortages are the order of the day.
“The influx of migrant workers with their families had turned Luka to a slum township. Each year, locals erect dwellings to rent out. Our water supply is overused and the municipal refuse truck cannot manage. These people are causing stress to the limited resources, even clinics are not managing well because the mines are not providing adequate resources to their employees,” claims Thlapane.
“Royal Bafokeng Administration people have their individual agendas, they do not represent us, and worse, they don’t know their jobs.”
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“Kgosi Lerou Tshekedi Molotlegi [the king of Bafokeng] desires the best for the Bafokeng community, making sure that we are getting the right education and we become employable, but the administration entrusted with implementing that is failing him,” says Thlapane.
He says the surrounding mines have encouraged many youth to drop out of school and go underground for low wages.
“We are the richest nation with seventeen mining shafts but we have nothing to show for that,” says Thlapane.
The youth in the 29 villages around Luka say their frustrations with the Royal Bafokeng Administration and mining company Impala Platinum, which have shafts nearby, have led to people taking the law into their own hands.
Twenty-six-year-old Kelebogile Diale, who is a partner with Thlapane in Sediba Sa Kwena, says there are three pending court cases implicating the community in arson and malicious damage to property, public violence and intimidation.
On an overcast summer’s day, FORBES AFRICA went in search of answers at the Royal Marang Hotel, in Rustenburg, a four-star hotel owned by the Royal Bafokeng. Here we met Kgosana Mojalefa Mogono, a headman in Mogono village and businessman, dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt. The 36-year-old speaks for the older generation on behalf of the Royal Bafokeng.
“The youth’s claim about unemployment is valid but we are doing our best to have more youth trained and skilled so that they could be employable in the future,” says Mogono.
“The sense of entitlement is really killing our youth. Lack of communication has led to wrong perceptions that there’s nothing happening.”
“Bafokeng youth know where to get information but they choose to be ignorant and go around spreading lies. There are more non-Bafokeng people who have come to pursue jobs in the mines and they are the ones making the noise,” says Mogono.
“In our programs we align ourselves with youth because we have aging community leaders and in the next 10 years the Royal Bafokeng will be run by them. The nation will be shooting itself in the foot if they ignore youth.”
Mogono and Ditebogo Diale, a Luka resident and Mogono’s cousin, say Luka in Action’s claims that the nation spent R400 million ($37.6 million) on the soccer development project are ridiculous. They say the project budget could not have been far from the similar National Basketball Association project that cost the nation R10 million ($940,000).
Mogono says renting out houses to mine workers had been discouraged by Molotlegi. He says it is draining resources allocated to Bafokeng subjects.
Mogono says the Bafokeng Administration, which is independent from Rustenburg Municipality, conducts its own census and all the Bafokeng have proof of residences so they could get employment priority. But, outsiders manipulate the system.
“Unfortunately Kgosi cannot willy-nilly chase people off the Bafokeng land. It’s unconstitutional, but the government needs to create employment where these people come from,” Diale says.
Mogona says the Bafokeng Education Institute, which oversees a nursing college, a management school, as well as hospitality and artisanship colleges, promotes skills development. In 2009, King Molotlegi launched Lebone II College, a private school that sponsors tuition fees for Bafokeng learners.
“Lebone II College is a world-class school, whose main purpose is to afford talented Bafokeng children an educational opportunity that will hopefully assist them to transcend their circumstances and achieve their true potential. As such, it is equipped with the best infrastructure and educators in South Africa,” says Mogono.
Mogono dismisses Luka in Action’s claims that the Royal Bafokeng Administration is autocratic.
“If people were following the right channels of the Royal Bafokeng Administration they would not be making such noises. These are people who don’t attend makgotla (meetings). Many of them stay in Johannesburg for a long time and they come back demanding. This is not how we do things.”
Mogono also denies claims that the local youth are not given equal opportunities of employment in the nearby Impala Platinum mines.
He says the youth don’t seem interested in the youth center facility. The center is endorsed by the Love Life youth program.
The Impala Platinum management has acknowledged they have not done much to develop the community in the past, hence they have a social labor plan that involves the building of a technical school in the Luka village this year, says Mogono.
The future for the Royal Bafokeng, the wealthiest tribe in Africa, threatens to be as complicated as it is rich.

The Sense Of Entitlement  Is Killing Our Youth

It was a bad time for new beginnings. The year was 1976 and South Africa was burning. The township youth was protesting against Bantu education and it was then that the 18-year-old Tommy Makhatho walked out of school with nothing.
Life was bleak; it took him two years to get a lowly job as a waiter in the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg. It was here where his life changed.
“Life was hard at the time but I was so motivated to try my hand at anything,” says Makhatho.
This is the epiphany of a man who spent his teenage years moving from one relative’s home to another.
It all began the day he met flamboyant hairdresser Brian Gule, dressed in a cowboy hat and boots, in the coffee shop at the Carlton Hotel.
“I was amazed by this man who would come to the hotel every day and tip me more than what a cup of coffee costs. He carried a stack of cash with him. He really liked me and I took the opportunity to ask him what he was doing for a living. I could not believe that he owned a salon in Soweto,” says Makhatho.
Gule agreed to take him to see what he was doing better than other hairdressers in Soweto. On that day, Makhatho got himself a temporary job as a shampooist at Gule’s Blackwave salon. Soon after, in 1983, he was a full-time hairdresser and had resigned from the hotel.
“At the salon there were always long queues of people who wanted their heads done. That’s when I started realizing why this man was making so much money from the business,” recalls Makhatho.
A year later, Makhatho resigned from Blackwave to start his own small salon. He had some knowledge of the business and a certificate in hairdressing.
From the years of blow waves, he saved around $700; the capital he needed for his backyard salon in Soweto. But it did not pay off and he had to crawl back to Gule to ask for his old job.
“To start a hair salon at that time was easy; you needed at least a small shelter, some start-up equipment and some money. But keeping clients was a challenge. I was ambitious and made a mistake of not planning properly,” he says.
A married and mature Makhatho resigned again and left Johannesburg for QwaQwa, in the east of South Africa, to open a salon on April 16, 1984, a date close to his heart. This was make or break.
At the time, Makhatho was selling women’s clothing door-to-door. His wife Thandeka, a teacher, joined the salon business and in four years they had six branches and $29,500 in the bank.
“We opened new salons every few months for four years,” says Makhatho.
The salons generated enough money to open a cosmetics distributor, Jabula Cosmetics, supplying hair products around the Free State.
But the rapid growth made it difficult for the Makhathos to control the operation.
“We could not manage the business from a distance, so we had to close the other branches and go back to the original salon.”
In 1993, Makhatho ventured into the supermarket sector and opened the first Bibi Cash &amp; Carry store. A second store was opened and two other bigger supermarkets followed in 2005.
His eldest daughter, Nwabisa, unwittingly lent the name. Her younger brother, Setjaba, called her Bibi. Makhatho thought if a toddler could say it, surely everyone could remember it.
“When we did our financial year-end projection for 2006/7, we realized the last two stores wouldn’t pull through, so we closed them down. We closed down an asset worth $1.78 million with view of coming back,” he explains.
From the profits of the two supermarkets the Makhathos opened two more stores in 2009 and 2010, respectively. Then, two years down the line, the first Johannesburg supermarket was opened with a second due in April.
“Why should I keep my money in the bank, I am a hardened entrepreneur, money needs be invested back into the business to grow. It is safer in the business than in the bank,” asserts Makhatho.
The family owns six supermarkets employing more than 800 people. There are 32 Bibi Express stores in the Free State.
Makhatho thinks people overlook retail.
“People need to understand if you want to be successful in life, you must be the best in what you do. I had the experience of being ignored by many as soon as they realized I am in the supermarket business. Once people hear you are in the mining business they give you respect no matter what,” Makhatho explains.
Makhatho is a firm believer in the power of aggressive advertising. He says competition in retail is interesting if you play your cards right.
“You should not shy away from competing with the established national supermarkets because there is a big market out there. I will never put my shop alone. I want it next to those supermarkets and bombard customers with advertising flyers and banners. That is guerrilla marketing.”
This success allowed him to buy a massive home in the luxurious Houghton Estate in Johannesburg and win the 2013 Sanlam/Business Partners Entrepreneur of the Year award.
“Awards are recognitions from the people who have been observing what you are doing all along. They get you inspired to do more and more of what you are being recognized for,” says Makhatho.
Makhatho’s son Setjaba joined the family business as a systems manager, after two years in management at the Southern Sun hotel group.
“I see myself in him. He’s a dreamer like me and highly innovative. With him on board, there’s another guaranteed 30 years in the family business.”
Setjaba has a hospitality management qualification from Switzerland. Of the four children, he is the only one involved in the family business. Nwabisa, lender of the Bibi name, is a teacher.
“In the next 10 years Bibi will be the major player in the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) retail sector. I will be 65 then. I also consider listing as an option to raise more money. I still have energy to continue, even Setjaba can’t keep up with me,” he jokes.
All this thanks to a little curiosity over a cup of coffee.

The Waiter Who Served Himself  A Supermarket Empire

He is Africa’s king of telecommunications. He’s a frontrunner in fiber optics. And he operates the continent’s largest satellite communications business. Add fixed and enterprise networks to the mix and you get Econet Wireless Group, one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. This is the life story of a man who rose from a poor village in Zimbabwe to take a seat at the top table of world business.
As the company’s founder and executive chair, Strive Masiyiwa is writing entrepreneurial history. His Econet Group is a celebrated example of how to make it in Africa, through constant re-invention and persistent expansion into new countries and sectors. It has earned him a personal fortune of $600 million, according to FORBES.
With well over 30 million mobile customers, thousands of corporate clients and almost 6,000 employees, Econet generates an estimated $3 billion in annual revenue—and that’s probably a conservative figure.
The group has operations and investments in 17 countries, mainly on the continent, as well as in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
Communications technology is written across Masiyiwa’s heart. He already understood in the early 1990s that the opportunity to use mobile phones to drive change in Africa is enormous: the continent is the world’s fastest growing market for cellular technology.
Twenty years ago, less than 1% of Africans had a telephone. Today, the once dark continent is the talking continent, with three out of four Africans owning a cell phone. It’s one of the most phenomenal business successes in the continent’s history.
“There are more cell phones in Africa today than in Europe. More Africans access the internet via the cell phone than Europeans,” says Masiyiwa.
But Econet’s telecoms interests stretch well beyond mobile phones. Recognizing the growing need for data on top of voice services, Econet has expanded into fiber optics infrastructure.
“It’s important to move with the changes taking place in our sector. It’s no longer sufficient to just provide voice. People have increasing data requirements,” says Masiyiwa.
Econet’s British subsidiary, Liquid Telecom, now runs Africa’s longest network across 14 borders from Cape Town, via Kigali, Kampala and Nairobi all the way up to Mogadishu.
Its fiber optics customers are mainly large corporations, including mining and oil companies, internet service and mobile providers, as well as banks.
“It’s about staying ahead of the curve,” says Masiyiwa, listed by FORBES as one of the 20 most powerful African entrepreneurs in 2011.
Over the years, he has become known for having a nose for investments and to sniff them out early: African internet users—who have a growing need for data—have increased ninefold since 2003.
“There’s a tsunami of data. People talk less on their cell phones than they use data. The traditional cell phone networks can’t carry that. You just have to look post-voice,” Masiyiwa says.
To provide a visual image of this data tsunami, if you stacked up the total global data, he says, it would reach 2.5 quintillion bites. About 90% of that was generated in the last two years alone.
Econet’s fiber optic expansion through its Liquid Telecom arm is fairly aggressive, according to TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod.
“They are plugging in a very big gap that exists in Africa,” he says.
“Masiyiwa is a shrewd operator who is very connected and understands the market as well as the conditions on the ground. He knows how to operate in tough business environments and how to make the best of it.”
Diversion of investments is part of that strategy. And whatever Masiyiwa sets his mind on, he does it well. Econet operates Africa’s largest satellite communications business, provides fixed networks, enterprise networks, payment technologies to banks across the continent and has investments in insurance, Coca-Cola bottling plants, hotels and safari lodges.
Yet another arm, Econet Solar, is growing rapidly, offering products from solar lanterns to home power stations to bring lighting to off-grid communities.
It all looks like a smooth ride in hindsight. But it took Masiyiwa years of hard work, persistence and heaps of faith.
He got his first glimpse on what makes a successful entrepreneur when helping out in his mother’s furniture business in Zambia, after the family fled Zimbabwe—then called Rhodesia—in 1965 to escape Ian Smith’s regime after the declaration of independence from Britain. From the age of seven, Strive, his brother and his sister helped out in the workshop, which helped pay them through boarding school in Edinburgh.
“My mother manufactured and sold her own furniture. She was very good at it. It was a typical African family business. You are part and parcel of what goes on in it. I learnt a lot of the basics from her, including the importance of hard work,” he recalls.
Masiyiwa applies these principles to this day. Although Econet is far from a family business, it follows the ethos of his mother’s small firm: people first.
“The most important aspect of a business is its people; how you motivate them, how you keep them. Those are enduring principles,” he says.
Even though Masiyiwa had left his home country at a young age, he always longed to return to Zimbabwe. After he finished school, he planned to join the guerrillas in the armed struggle against Smith’s ruling white minority. He realized that an education might be a better tool to wage the war against injustice.
He studied engineering in Britain instead and returned in his early twenties to what is now Zimbabwe, run by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, to work for the national telephone company, ZPTC.
“I decided that it really wasn’t for me to work for an enterprise, so I started my own business. Because there were no opportunities in telecommunications, I changed sectors and started a construction firm,” Masiyiwa says.
Retrofit, his construction business, was soon snapping up lucrative government and private sector contracts throughout Zimbabwe.
“Even if you visit Harare today, there is hardly a major building that I wasn’t involved in,” says Masiyiwa.
<div id="attachment_2421" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2421" class="size-medium wp-image-2421" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Strive-Masiyiwa4-hires-300x202.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="202" />Strive Masiyiwa, Chiarman of Econet Wireless. Photographed in London this afternoon.</div>
Trained as a telecommunications engineer, Masiyiwa’s ears pricked up in the early 1990s when people started talking about mobile phones. Despite his success in construction, he decided to bet on wireless communications.
“As soon as I saw that the telecommunications sector was opening up, I began to pursue that,” he recalls.
The hitch: state-owned ZPTC had a monopoly. When he approached his former employer in 1993 with plans for a wireless joint venture, they said no, refusing him a license.
Instead of giving up, Masiyiwa thought of plan B. He came up with the idea of telecommunications as a beacon of freedom.
“Being able to talk to someone on a telephone is part of freedom of expression, I thought. That means that monopolies restrict freedom of expression,” he says of his ruse.
Thus began a five-year constitutional court battle, which brought Masiyiwa international prominence, but made him rather unpopular with his government. It was also the end of his flourishing construction business. As soon as he took on Mugabe, doors slammed in his face.
“The day we filed the case, every single contract we had with any government organization ended,” he says.
The intelligence men and the police made life even more difficult for Masiyiwa, his wife and six children.
To keep financially afloat, he eventually sold Retrofit, back then the biggest company in Zimbabwe.
“I scrambled to sell the business because it was in court against the government. When I eventually found a buyer, he said I needed to resolve the dispute first. But I couldn’t wait years, so I set up a new company, Econet, and transferred the litigation to the new company,” he says.
It was a tough time, but what made him hang in there was his irrevocable Christian faith. The constitutional battle coincided with a spiritual awakening, says Masiyiwa.
“When I was in my mid-thirties, I came across the bible and made a commitment to become a Christian and live life according to certain values,” he says.
“When you have faith, you don’t see obstacles. Knowing God was on my side, I never had a sense of struggle,” Masiyiwa, a born-again Christian, says while explaining why he never faltered despite the financial stresses and intimidation.
Masiyiwa, who grew up in a non-religious family, is now a member of a tight-knit church community.
“In fact, it was the church that carried me through. They rallied behind me in an extraordinary way,” he recalls.
Many Zimbabweans supported Masiyiwa’s case against the government. Ordinary people would walk up to him on the street to offer their solidarity, promising to never own a cell phone until he was allowed to operate in the country.
When the court eventually ruled in his favor, in December 1997, removing the monopoly, Econet shot up to become a market leader only six weeks after being licensed. Masiyiwa soon became Zimbabwe’s first US dollar millionaire.
He never forgot the support he received during this difficult time from his church and his people. Every year, Masiyiwa donates a sizable chunk of his annual income to his church. He also listed Econet’s Zimbabwean subsidiary partially on the Harare Stock Exchange—Econet otherwise remains a private business.
“When I got my license, I felt I had to give those who supported me an opportunity to be owners in my company. I wanted them to be more than just customers. So, I sold 40 percent of the subsidiary and kept the rest. I decided it was the best way to show my appreciation,” he says.
“The response was phenomenal. We have the largest and widest ownership of any company.”
Not only Zimbabweans, but people across the continent can be grateful to Masiyiwa. The case was a milestone in opening up Africa’s telecommunications sector to private capital, making mobile phones affordable.
It was also Masiyiwa’s stepping stone for creating an Africa-centered global corporation.
He launched all over the continent; from Botswana to Lesotho, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and eventually South Africa, where he relocated in 2000. Today, he lives between Johannesburg, where Econet is headquartered, and London, where his family lives.
Botswana was the first step of Masiyiwa’s expansion strategy, even before he moved to South Africa. He set up Mascom, short for Masiyiwa Communications, a consortium to launch Botswana’s first cell phone company, and won a public tender called by Botswana’s government. Shortly thereafter, he bought Lesotho’s public telephone company.
“I became known for putting consortia together, because we didn’t have a lot of our own capital. In each country, I found partners and put a strong offer together,” he says.
“To be successful as a business in telecommunications, I had to leave Zimbabwe. And that had nothing to do with politics. Zimbabwe is a small country. There was only so far I could go. Since I had a great management team in Zimbabwe, there was no need for me to hang around there.”
Masiyiwa never set foot in Zimbabwe again, but he never forgot the people he left behind. Ever the defender of freedom of expression, he made a personal loan in 2000 to the country’s then only independent newspaper, the Daily News, which was shut down by the government three years later.
His reputation as an entrepreneur who takes mobile phones to the people, and doesn’t take no for an answer, has spread.
“One day, I got a phone call from the Maori in New Zealand, who had read about my battles in Zimbabwe. They wanted me to help them to bid for an empowerment license for a mobile operator,” he says.
Since Masiyiwa likes a bit of a challenge, he packed his bags and flew to the Pacific. With the help of his battle-hardened team, he got New Zealand’s indigenous people their license. They treated him like a hero and to his pride and joy, the company, 2degrees, remains successful to this day.
Masiyiwa returned to South Africa to pursue his own ventures. He had set his sights on Kenya where the government had put the national telephone company up for tender.
“We won it, but the people who were in office had strange ideas about how to do business. After a very inappropriate proposal came through, I said ‘Thank you, but no thank you’ and called the deal off,” Masiyiwa says.
It was the beginning of his fervent crusade against corruption. Masiyiwa abandoned more than a handful of lucrative but non-transparent government tenders in Nigeria, Malawi and Cameroon.
“Dealing with corruption is simple. You walk away,” he says, claiming he has never paid a bribe and simply says no.
“It’s not the end of the world if the deal doesn’t happen. I have no regrets.”
He has to admit, however, that he was at times persecuted for his tough stand against corruption and at other times had to wait years to launch operations in a country because corrupt officials were blocking his way.
In the example of Kenya, his resolve and patience eventually paid off. A couple of years after walking away from the tender, elections replaced Kenya’s leadership.
“The new government called me and asked me to bid for another license, promising it was going to be open and transparent. I bid and won that tender and began to build a new business in Kenya, which I subsequently sold to (French mobile provider) Orange,” he says.
Instead of wasting his energy on dodgy deals, Masiyiwa poured it into staying on top of his game in Africa.
Masiyiwa is quite a visionary, who must not be underestimated in any way, says Arthur Goldstuck, director of business technology research firm World Wide Worx.
“He created a real pan-African business in a sector dominated by foreign firms and foreign investment. What makes Masiyiwa unique is his pan-African approach while also branching out elsewhere in the world. He doesn’t see Africa as a limitation. That’s very rare.”
Whoever thought Masiyiwa was just about earning top dollar couldn’t be more wrong. When he turned 50 three years ago, he decided to spend half of his time promoting entrepreneurship and social development in Africa, with projects ranging from health to education and agriculture.
“While I’m still interested in the growth and development of my business, I only spend half of my time on it. It was a very deliberate decision,” he says.
Among many other initiatives, Masiyiwa helped to develop a $50 tablet for disadvantaged students, which will be rolled out this year in universities and colleges in Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Lesotho. He also developed solar-powered cell phone chargers for communities without electricity and launched affordable weather-indexed insurance schemes for smallholder farmers.
But most importantly, Masiyiwa works towards making mobile telephony more affordable for the average African. Without communications technology, people are unable to become part of their country’s economic growth, he says.
Years ago, he invented the free ‘call me’ messaging service for subscribers that have run out of airtime. Econet’s latest initiative is tariff zoning based on capacity utilization so that customers in poor rural areas are charged lower tariffs than those in wealthier urban areas.
“I believe that meeting the needs of ordinary people is not mutually exclusive from being a successful, profitable business. We are in constant search for creating greater value for our customers. We are constantly developing products and services that break the barrier,” he says.
Also, Masiyiwa commits considerable time to numerous charities and trusts, including the Rockefeller Foundation, AGRA, which represents smallholder farmers, the United Nations panel for sustainable energy and Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel.
He was appointed by Bill Clinton to serve the Southern African Enterprise Development Fund and sits on the boards of the Nelson Mandela Advisory Committee and Endeavor SA.
One of the most respected Universities in the United States, Morehouse College, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Junior was educated, recognized Masiyiwa’s humanitarian work and philanthropy with an honorary doctorate.
Perhaps most importantly, he supports 42,000 orphans in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Burundi through the Capernaum Trust, which he established with his wife Tsitsi.
Fellow Zimbabwean entrepreneur Tawanda Nyambirai, the founder and chief executive of TN Holdings, once called Masiyiwa an honest, generous, kind and humble man.
Together with British entrepreneur Richard Branson, Masiyiwa now also runs the Carbon War Room, an international non-profit organization, which helps entrepreneurs develop solutions to fight climate change.
“Strive is passionate about Africa gaining full economic freedom,” Branson wrote in his latest book Screw Business As Usual. He also credited Masiyiwa as one of the people responsible for the communications revolution.
No wonder Masiyiwa is often referred to as the Bill Gates of Africa—a backhanded compliment he takes in his stride.
“I thought Bill was the Strive Masiyiwa of America!” he quips.

“Dealing With Corruption Is Simple, Just Say No”

Gina Din Kariuki was not what you would call a bright student.
Teachers mocked her from Nanyuki, a tiny red-soil township in central Kenya where she went to primary school, to the London School of Journalism.
“I wasn’t very clever. I had negative reports, and I was at times told I was wasting my time in school,” she says.
Gina Din—as she is known in Kenya—hauled this baggage, heavy with low self-esteem, into her first job as a communications manager at Barclays Bank Kenya in 1985. Yet, that job turned out to be Gina Din’s epiphany, catapulting a below-average student to the top of Kenya’s public relations and corporate communications class.
As her role at the bank expanded over a 14-year period, so did her obsession with the job.
Like a meticulous chess player, Gina Din planned her exit years before.
“It wasn’t really challenging as it was the same old thing. I even set up the bank’s CSR agenda through a community relations department, which was replicated in the whole of Africa. I had no interest in it but I found myself enjoying it very much,” she says.
Blue-chip companies in Kenya, such as Kenya Airways, Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) and East African Breweries (EABL), were keen to recreate what Kariuki had done at Barclays.
“I became a generic term because these corporates were looking for a Gina Din. That made me realize I can replicate what I did for Barclays, but I really didn’t want to go to another company because it would be the same thing. I had been building a brand without realizing it. When I stepped out I had a name and brand that stood for something,” she says.
She set up Gina Din Corporate Communications, a promising public relations outfit that would be courted by global companies. Interestingly, her first client as an entrepreneur, on October 1, 1997, was the employer she had just ditched and from which she poached four of her colleagues. A year later, she won over South African Breweries, which was entering the Kenyan market, followed two years later with Safaricom, then a struggling start-up without an office.
Gina Din was on a roll, amassing clients as the PR market grew in Kenya. Four staff grew to 15 in five years.
Over the last decade, Gina Din has been a mean closing machine. At one time, she enjoyed the lion’s share of blue-chip accounts, including national carrier Kenya Airways, leading mobile operator Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest bank in terms of geographical distribution KCB and LG Electronics.
But this unassailable position has waned over the last few years forcing Gina Din, a feisty dealmaker with a penchant for showbiz, to rethink her strategy. She has lost the big-dollar accounts, including Safaricom, which she held for 10 years, KCB, and Kenya Airways.
The losses have been a big blow to Gina Din. Many in the industry were writing her epitaph. But she claims—in a bit of ambitious PR—that the loss of business was strategic, even though the huge Safaricom loss sparked speculation.
“I had to take the backstage to consolidate business without them (Safaricom), because if we continued with them they would have been every part of the decisions we made. In terms of staff we had lots of people on the Safaricom account. It did not make business sense,” she says.
Gina Din argues that she actually walked away from the most profitable company in the region and the highest-paying client, to save her business. Still, it was her worst day as an entrepreneur.
“I wanted to do other things. We didn’t walk out in totality; we still do government work for Safaricom. It was very amicable. Our other clients were complaining because we were so Safaricom. It didn’t seem that there was enough space for anybody else,” she says.
“It was a strategic decision. I didn’t want my brand to be identified with one client. It was tough financially, but it was necessary to take a year off making huge amounts of money to rebuild the business.”
Part of this consolidation strategy, or what others see as a comeback plan, is a partnership with big brands in the industry. Recently, Gina Din, with a personal fortune estimated at more than $5 million, entered into an affiliation partnership with Weber Shandwick, one of the world’s leading public relations firms, to anchor expansion into the African market. Africa is the strongest of emerging markets, with a growing population and middle-class attracting multinationals.
“We had requests from many firms to partner with or even buy us out. We searched and vetted and agonized, and found we had chemistry with Weber.”
The show-stopper in Gina Din’s revival was the October 2013 marriage with a rival Kenyan company after six months of secret courtship. The transaction involved a share swap with IMAGINE, a mid-level marketing and communications firm in Kenya, strong in one aspect that Gina Din lacked: creative marketing.
The firm was rebranded to Gina Din Group to consummate the union and has launched an ambitious five-year strategy that seeks, among others, to have a presence in West Africa. Now Gina Din, which already serves Camac Energy in West Africa, can boast a significant presence in the region, thanks to IMAGINE’s clients, such as Vodacom in Tanzania and Heineken.
“Traditional PR no longer works. Clients want a one-stop shop. I know PR and nothing else and so I had to get someone with a background in marketing and creative. Also, the average CEO in Kenya today is 40 years old. The workers need someone of their age group to take the brand to the next level so I can focus on business development.”
The shift in gear comes with a change in its offering. Gina Din says the group is now focused on providing strategic communication solutions.
“I don’t want to be your average PR company putting up banners at events. I want to provide and shape discussion. We are shaking up the industry. I want to change the business from the event organizer thing. There is space for those who want to do that. I want to be a consultant and I want to offer strategic guidance and counsel in the league of Deloitte or PwC. I’m not really keen on golf competitions. We have taken some shocks because of this decision. I am confident this will lift my brand to the next level.”
Dismas Mokua, who worked for Gina Din for five years as a media director, says the company has the capacity to bounce back given the founder’s extensive connections and lobbying prowess.
“I think she started developing interests outside her core strength of political lobbying and that diverted her attention. She can come back as her political connections are still intact and now she has built systems to run the business. Gina knows how to open doors and she’s charming,” said Mokua, who is vice-president of Sadiki East Africa, a political advisory firm based in Nairobi.
Gina Din emphasizes that she is not ready for a buyout yet, but to grow the brand further.
“I have reached the point in life where it’s not about money. I am transitioning from being successful to significant, and going across Africa is part of the new direction. As we speak, we are helping (the United States International University) USIU-Kenya to build a public relations curriculum,” she says.
Looking back, she relishes her journey in PR which has deepened her understanding of societal issues. She spearheaded the Kenyans for Kenya campaign in July 2011 to feed starving people, which raised KSh700 million ($7.9 million). Now she is the Kenya Red Cross goodwill ambassador.
The last born in a family of four sisters, and a mother of two, Gina Din turns heads with her flamboyant lifestyle and dress.
“I love being a woman and owning that space. I love to dress and I don’t do it for anybody else. If a guy can be manipulated by how you are looking, what kind of guy is that? It’s really sad. I love being feminine.”
For this, Gina Din has been a target for gossip. One of the most hurtful was about her coziness with former Safaricom CEO, Michael Joseph. Talk resurfaced when Safaricom engaged a different PR agency just two years after Joseph’s term expired.
“I am so used to that; I have developed a thick skin. At Barclays, whenever a woman got promoted you’d hear stories. We had a very turbulent relationship with Michael. If anything, we would fight like crazy; we would challenge each other and it was intellectually stimulating. We were never good friends until after six years. It took hard work to get that respect from Michael,” she says.
It is this defiance, in an unforgiving business that has seen her rise, fall and rise again. Gina Din says she has learnt from her mistakes, for instance, holding onto the business for too long at the expense of professional management. She rues that she didn’t hire more staff earlier on.
“You have this founder thing that I have to nurture this baby. But it’s never too late, we are there now. Two or three minds are better than one.”
She also made mistakes in under-pricing her services in a market with high overheads. She was excited to get business, she says, and cared less about payment. At some point Gina Din had 40 clients, but was subsidizing some.
“I have become much more of a businesswoman in the last three years. I was following my passion blindly; it didn’t matter whether I made money. Women lead from the heart and at times we do things because we love to do them. Sometimes you take steps and ask if they make sense. But, a time comes when you can’t do everything you want to do. I ran my business as if it was a foundation.”
Gina Din has had many worst days in her business, but the Kenya Airways Doula crash in May 2007, which killed all 114 on board, hurt her as she presented the airline’s message to the people.
“The communication support I gave KQ changed me as a person. It made me realize how fragile life is. My hubby is a pilot with KQ and it could have been him. I also realized how crisis communication is important. From then, we started insisting our clients prepare for crisis communication. There’s no point building the ark after hearing the thunder.”
You can be sure, in business, Gina Din, will have hammer and nails in hand long before the sky turns dark.

Tag: February 2014

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