Our cover for April 2012, Herman Mashaba, has swapped his entrepreneurial hat for politics and has taken over one of Africa’s most important cities – Johannesburg.
In November last year, Mashaba told FORBES AFRICA he wasn’t interested in politics, within weeks , he changed his mind and started running for mayor, when South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma sacked Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene and sent the country’s market into a nosedive.
“It was the final nail in the coffin for me. I could no longer live with myself to watch my country being captured and destroyed,” he says.
Mashaba, Founder of Black Like Me, was elected as mayor after defeating former mayor Parks Tau, in the local municipal elections, with 144 votes – a case of close but no cigar for Tau who received 125 votes. This was as a shocking and humiliating blow to the ruling African National Congress.
Mashaba, who handed over the responsibility of running his business to his wife, has shifted his focus to his duty as a full-time public servant.
Top of his to-do-list is creating jobs, fighting corruption and bringing basic services to people.
For Mashaba, being an armchair critic was no longer an option.
“I have always believed in personal shaping of my life. I will never allow people with unknown agendas to distract me from exercising my rights and doing things I have to do. Our country deserves a better leadership,” he says.
In 2012, our headline for him was Capitalist Crusader; he loved it so much that he made it the title of his latest book.
A month before, in March 2012, Sipho Nkosi was featured on the cover of FORBES AFRICA. It seems life has just begun, at the age of 62, for Nkosi, who retired from Exxaro Resources, a coal mining company he helped build.
“After eight years in the company, it made sense for me to grow and allow other people with great ideas to take over,” says Nkosi.
Before he retired, and when the unstable currency and commodity markets presented risks, Exxaro had to retrench almost half of their workers. It was a tough time, says Nkosi.
“The business shrunk and I learned that when you’re doing well in business people love you, but when you are in crises they see you as a useless manager. I had to allow another person to rebuild the organization.”
Even though he retired and sold his shares at Exxaro, Nkosi is still a director at Sanlam and council member at the University of the Witwatersrand. He says only death will stop him from working.
He started his own organization, Talent10.
“We look at the challenges the mining industry has. We also want to build resources, such that we are able to get into for example,  enterprise development, to get into things like social interventions that we want to get into, and  to tap into technology because other countries beat us when it comes to technology.”
Mashaba and Nkosi are still proving they have what it takes to grace the cover of FORBES AFRICA.

Where Are They Now?

For Herman Mashaba it was a long and tiring climb to the top. An apartheid police crackdown on student politics forced a young Mashaba out of the University of the North, in his second year. He was forced to work as a clerk.
“One day we were ordered by police to leave the university immediately. I never understood why they had to involve law enforcement in solving matters with the students. I simply packed my bags and went home,” recalls Mashaba.
In two years, he saved enough to buy a car. Mashaba had a short stint as sales representative for a hair products company – SuperKurl. It was here where he met a white Afrikaner business associate, Johan Kriel, who was also a pharmacist. The law didn’t allow the two to go into business together. But they found a way around this to start a company called Black Like Me.
In 1984, Mashaba quit the job, after two years, and started selling his own hair products from the boot of his car. From the seed capital of R30,000 (around $2,000) he borrowed from friends, Mashaba had built a R10-million ($725,000) factory in 1993, running in the heart of Mabopane township, north of Pretoria.
Apartheid laws prevented Mashaba from buying or renting land in an industrial area, so he was forced to build his own 6,000-square-meter factory.
Soon, Black Like Me products went all over Southern Africa but clearly somebody didn’t like it and threw a match.
“November 17, 1993, is a day I will never forget. It’s a day I have difficulty explaining but out of it came a lot of lessons. The incident itself was horrific; how I survived was a miracle. Only God knows,” says Mashaba.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4237" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_1830-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
This was to become Mashaba’s worst day, the destruction of seven years of producing Black Like Me products from a dusty township factory.
“I stood there watching the fire department people fighting the fire in my factory. I immediately realized it was not an accidental fire, it was spread across the factory. When the fire department combed the place, this arsonist came through. Unfortunately, when the workers started to arrive for the six o’clock shift, the factory was gone to ashes. You can imagine over R10 million in 1993, it’s close to R100 million today. More than 150 people were crying for their jobs,” says Mashaba.
He says there was no time to cry. His suppliers’ trucks came to deliver stock to the burned down factory that he had to find an alternative storeroom for. By 9AM, he assembled his management team and discussed an alternative. In two weeks, Mashaba found a smaller place to work in in Midrand, north of Johannesburg. But it took two years to get back to full production.
“The lesson for me was that while I went through this people moved on, that’s where I lost market share. The products were not on shelves. The same day when the factory burned down, I had a call from our office in Johannesburg, to tell me about a delivery from Lesotho. The delivery turned out to be bags of marijuana. I asked them to get police involved. The tragedy of it is there was never an investigation,” says Mashaba.
Despite him asking people for information and offering a R50,000 ($3,600) reward, no one was prosecuted for burning down his factory.
Mashaba credits his culture of saving for getting him back on his feet. When the insurance was taking too long to refund, Mashaba used his savings to get the new factory in Midrand.
“I didn’t even get half of what I was insured for, and they took time to pay me. You can imagine the banks at the time, as blacks, they were not interested in us. The only relationship I had with banks was to deposit my money,” he says.
“Fortunately, I never allowed circumstances to determine my fate. I have always believed I was in control of my destiny. I don’t want politicians’, or anyone’s, favors.”
The fire is one of many stories in Mashaba’s first book: Black Like You. Mashaba’s second one, launched this year, is called Capitalist Crusader, a title borrowed from a headline for a FORBES AFRICA cover story on him. In the book, Mashaba speaks about issues that see him vilified by his people who accuse him of being an insensitive capitalist.
“I want to be known as a capitalist. I wrote the book openly, so that people know my agenda upfront. At the same time, I don’t want to be misrepresented. Unfortunately, collective thinking to a large extent misleads people. Most people’s agendas are not what they preach. Let’s judge each other on the basis of what we are doing not what we are preaching,” he says.
Mashaba says the government is to blame for high unemployment.
“This higher unemployment of South African people is a man-made phenomenon created by the government. It looks like it is in our government’s interest for people not to work, so that they depend on government grants. If they really wanted people to work, they would create an environment for entrepreneurs and capitalists to create work for people. We need a free market. They must ask their colleagues in China and Russia what communism did to people,” says Mashaba.
“To protect democracy you need active citizenship, you don’t need to be politicians. If South Africa wants to be a model and a prosperous nation, we need a free market system. You cannot prosper by the government being the driver of the economy. Just create the environment that will allow the 50-odd-million South Africans to be the players. And the sooner we abolish all race-based legislations, the better for the future of this country. It is very dangerous to run the country on the basis of race and tribalism.”
In early 2014, Mashaba stepped down as a chairman of the Free Market Foundation, a post he held for two years, to join main opposition party the Democratic Alliance (DA). He was vilified by many in the black community and called a traitor for joining what they say is a party of white privilege. Mashaba maintains he has no political ambitions, despite being approached by many to throw his hat in the ring for the mayor of Johannesburg.
“There’s no way you are going to see me toy-toying. I never toy-toyed in my 56 years of living, so I don’t think I will start now. I think I will be a stupid politician. If there was no DA, there would be no one I would vote for. Yes, they are not perfect but they represent my value system,” says Mashaba.
Today, from his sunny office in Sandton, the richest square mile in Africa, Mashaba leads Lephatsi Investments, a company with interests in mining, construction and logistics.
He invests in young companies with ideas. After two decades, Mashaba hasn’t forgotten his worst day of fire, fury and despair – he lives to help young go-ahead companies survive theirs.

‘How I Survived Was A Miracle’

In this age of trust funds, favored sons, fat corporate bonuses and bling, how refreshing it is to read of an entrepreneur who has fought his way up from the very bottom of the barrel with courage and humility.
This is the story of Herman Mashaba—who was the April FORBES AFRICA cover story—told in a colorful but straightforward way. A man who struggled to raise 25 cents every year for his school fees, who went on to make millions. It charts his fairytale rise from a person growing up in the middle of nowhere, who made his fortune with a hair-care product, Black Like Me, on his way to the black business ball. You could argue that Cinderella had it far easier.
The overall impression you are left with is that life was grim at the bottom of the heap in apartheid South Africa. Mashaba grew up in Hammanskraal near Pretoria, without electric lights or running water. These were dark days of little food, bullying teachers and draconian laws enforced by ruthless policemen. When Mashaba talks of his fear of walking past a police roadblock, you almost feel as though you are walking with him.
In telling his tale, Mashaba appears to resist the temptation to airbrush his past, as is the wont of a lot of people who have made it. He admits he took and sold drugs and says he was no angel when it came to women.
This is a story of survival and Mashaba leaves us in no doubt that he did what he had to in order to keep going: whether it be running illegal dice games, where there were stabbings every now and again, or selling stolen welding equipment to the township gangster.
As a professional storyteller, I can commend Mashaba for his straight telling of the tale. There are no frills here, or flights into fancy; it is told with an almost business-like, dead narrative that lends power to the richness of the story. He talks of his roots with warmth, but without sickly sentiment; Mashaba speaks of the injustices he faced growing up under apartheid with a quiet anger. In particular, he writes bleakly about his determined mother, Mapula, who was a poorly paid domestic worker—she virtually had to escape from the house of her employers so she could make the long journey to spend time with her children. There are also aching words over the loss of his elder brother, Pobane, who died in a car accident, and the loss of his first child after just 16 hours of life.
Mashaba also pays generous tribute to his wife of nearly 30 years, Connie, who has stuck by him on the often fraught journey from township to luxury townhouse.
In short, Mashaba took his chan-ces, refused to give in and enjoyed a lot of what he says all entrepreneurs need to make it—good luck.
This modest little book could almost be a textbook for the young and hopeful in this, the entrepreneur-themed issue of FORBES AFRICA.

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A Grim Fairytale

As if it were not enough to call himself “proudly capitalist” in such a politically correct country like South Africa, one of the country’s most respected pioneer black entrepreneurs, Herman Mashaba, is now getting ready to blaze another trail, albeit a much more dangerous and potentially costly one this time around.
Mashaba has just been elected chairman of the board of the Free Market Foundation, an organization that in its heyday was a rallying point for all free booting, free marketeers, die-hard capitalists and liberals. It used to dish out honors, accolades and advice to anyone and everyone of a similar mind.
<div id="attachment_512" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-512" class="wp-image-512 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/322-197-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />South African entrepreneur Herman Mashaba, Sandton; 22 February 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
Mashaba, a recipient of the foundation’s annual Free Market Award in 1994 and one of their few chosen blacks at the time, has agreed to lead the organization, “revitalize” it and come up with some “bold new initiatives”.
He is taking no prisoners.
In what he accepts could end up in a very ugly public spat with the country’s mighty and powerful, Mashaba is prepared to tell all and sundry that a mixture of “flawed policies”, widespread corruption and pandering to union interests will soon make South Africa worse than it was under apartheid or colonialism, for that matter.  “I blame it all on the country’s stringent hiring and firing laws, the myriad of bureaucratic processes and the swelling costs of this ineffective bureaucracy.”
It’s a stance, and language, previously thought to be the preserve of the political opposition, certainly not what South Africans are accustomed to from business. “Business has been too quiet for far too long now, we need to let the people of South Africa hear an alternative economic policy,” says Mashaba.
Top of his to-do-list is mounting an unprecedented challenge on the country’s Labor Relations Act—a piece of legislation that the unions see as sacred.
The act regulates, among other things, employer-employee relations, trade union activity, collective bargaining, as well as strikes and lockouts. It is seen as an antidote to the exploitation of workers under apartheid and makes it difficult to fire people.
Mashaba wants it repealed.
“We have a crisis on our hands and we have to address it now. When we fought apartheid it was not to replace it with something worse,” he says, with a great deal of irritation.
His main gripe?
Some of its provisions, such as allowing for a stipulation of minimum wages, are making it difficult for employers to retrench surplus workers.
“This act is really destroying jobs in our country,” he says, without a hint of contradiction in his voice: “No-one goes into business to employ people. You go into business to make money.”
“Capitalism has become something of a dirty word, while the unions and the youth wing of the ruling party are free to talk socialism.”
Mashaba is gathering money, including his own, to take the government he helped vote into power to the highest court in the land. In the Constitutional Court he will argue that not only is the act a hindrance to foreign investment, but that it is thwarting entrepreneurs’ attempts at creating new wealth and jobs.
In the past, to even suggest that the labor laws should be repealed, drew threats of “blood on the floor” from the two million strong Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
Sdumo Dlamini, the president of Cosatu, disagrees: “If anything, Cosatu wants the Labor Relations Act tightened. We want to remind Mashaba that even the current arrangement was negotiated.”
The closest business has come to challenging the legislation has been to say it is restrictive and should perhaps be reviewed. No-one has dared to oppose it as vehemently as Mashaba intends to.
<div id="attachment_514" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-514" class="wp-image-514 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ED_South4127-1-1024x670.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="310" />South Africa, Transvaal, 1994: The CEO of &#8216;Black Like Me&#8221; company, Herman Mashaba in his factory. Black empowerment business enterprise innovation entrepreneur organization Photograph: Graeme Williams/South</div>
Backed by two prominent firms of attorneys, who are offering free legal advice, Mashaba says he has set the ball rolling by commissioning a study to put before the courts.
Ironically, the organization Mashaba intends using as his vehicle is an entity that went missing, presumed dead, at the dawn of democracy in South Africa in 1994.
Established in 1975, it was created, to quote its handbook: “to promote the principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual liberty.”
The Free Market Foundation, once had as its members leading multinationals: Coca-Cola; BP; British American Tobacco; Microsoft; Boehringer Ingelheim; GlaxoSmithKline and Independent Newspapers. Among South Africa’s own were SA Breweries; the Bidvest Group; Pick ‘n Pay; Edgars; Sasol and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
With the exception of people like National Federation of Commerce and Industry stalwart Sam Motsuenyane, the foundation’s members were at some point the who’s who of South Africa’s distinguished, white, captains of industry—people Mashaba had very little in common with except his belief in and love for capitalism.
Mashaba says his love for money and self-reliance was formed early in life. He was two years old when his father died in Johannesburg, leaving his domestic worker mother to look after him and his four sisters.
At a very young age he would watch other boys go in search of weekend jobs in the white suburbs of Pretoria North. The stories of indignity the boys came back with, only to be rewarded with R1 or R1.50, was too much for young Mashaba to bear.
He decided to become, what in the townships they used to call a “knocksman”—that is running a back street dice game.
With a pair of dice, he would organize a venue and persuade his mates to gamble their hard won earnings with him.
The luck of the dice paid his way through high school, where he matriculated and went to Turfloop University, in Limpopo, where he was forced to enroll for a Bachelor of Administration degree majoring in political science and public administration. He wanted to study law, but couldn’t secure a place because he had failed Afrikaans, which at the time was a prerequisite for legal studies.
In his second year, following campus unrest, the authorities closed down the university and sent the students home. To this day Mashaba has never returned to university.
After months of trying, unsuccessfully, to leave the country to join exiled liberation movements, he decided to look for a job.
His first job was at a supermarket, as a dispatch clerk, where he worked for seven months before joining a furniture store where he would spend the next 18 months of his life.
More than two years later he saw a classified advertisement in a local newspaper looking for sales representatives. You could write your own pay check, the ad said. All you needed was a car and selling experience.
Mashaba had never driven a car, let alone owned one. Two months later, he had organized someone to teach him to drive, bought a car on hire purchase, and got married, so he could not be distracted. He and Connie Mashaba have been together ever since and have two children.
<div id="attachment_513" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-513" class="size-large wp-image-513" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/322-258-682x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="712" />South African entrepreneur Herman Mashaba, Sandton; 22 February 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
Every day, for years, he would defy the strict apartheid pass laws that stopped black people from “loitering” in white suburbia.  He would go and knock on doors to the snapping snarls of vicious guard dogs, selling everything from dinner sets, to linen, crockery, fire detection instruments and hair care products.
The promise of writing his own pay check was realized. Soon he was making two to three times more than black doctors, who were among the best-paid black professionals at the time.
His big break came through permed hair, the fashion statement of the day in the townships. Hair salons were mushrooming across the country and Mashaba dived into the market. By selling hair products he was earning around R4,000 a month, which he says was serious money back then.
In 1984, while still a salesman, Mashaba approached two of his colleagues. Joseph Molantoa, a fellow salesman and friend from the township, and Johan Kriel, an Afrikaner guy who was production manager at the same company.
Mashaba didn’t know Kriel that well, but had picked up that he used to own a hair products firm that went under.
“I took a chance and shared with him my dream,” he recalls.
This was the moment that led to the creation of South Africa’s first black-owned hair products manufacturing company. The trio approached a township entrepreneur, Walter Dube, for finance. Dube, whose wife was a client of Mashaba’s and owned a hair salon, agreed to lend the business R30,000—a fortune back then—he charged them prime plus 10% and insisted on owning 25% of the business.
On February 14, 1985, the Black Like Me range of hair products hit the market. South Africans immediately fell in love with the products.
Mashaba, Molantoa and Kriel were in the money. Dube’s loan was repaid within seven months.
Four years later, Mashaba bought his friend Molantoa out. Three years later he bought out Kriel.
Dube would cash in only in 1997, when Mashaba decided to sell a 75% majority stake to beauty and personal care company Colgate-Palmolive hoping the multinational would take the brand further. Alas, it was not to be.
“Slowness, bureaucracy, stood in the way. I quickly made an offer to buy back,” says Mashaba,
Two years later, Black like Me was back in Mashaba’s hands. And he had bought it for much less than he had sold it for.
“Yes, I had made another profit,” he says, with a naughty smile, then a chuckle.
Another two years later the company would see a rapid 47% growth. This after Mashaba had rebranded it, launched it in countries like the United Kingdom and added fragrances and cosmetics to his range.
With the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994 came numerous other opportunities for seasoned black entrepreneurs like Mashaba.
<div id="attachment_511" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-511" class="size-large wp-image-511" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/322-108-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />South African entrepreneur Herman Mashaba, Sandton; 22 February 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
The newly elected ANC government had adopted black economic empowerment (BEE) as official policy. In an effort to empower blacks, it initially nudged, later forced through legislation. It meant white-owned companies had to bring on board blacks by giving them equity.
“When BEE started I was never attracted. It made no sense to me, even though I had invitations,” says Mashaba.
“But as soon as it dawned on me that, with or without me, this thing is happening, I decided to take advantage.”
And take advantage he did, starting in 2002 by becoming part of a consortium that initially bought 10% of a ferrochrome smelter that previously belonged to Samancor, a few years later increasing their stake to 19.9%.
Ten years down the line Mashaba’s Lephatsi Investments has assets under management of R600 million ($80 million), stakes in 12 different listed and non-listed companies that operate across economic sectors encompassing mining, property management and development, energy and information communication technology.
Always the one keen to demonstrate that he always makes money—he quickly points out that he spent R40 million on the Samancor deal and sold for R2 billion a few years later, while they bought Stocks Building Africa for R80 million and sold it for R1.1 billion a couple of years ago.
So, considering the fact that a great majority of South Africans don’t even dream of talking about, let alone owning, those amounts of money, doesn’t Mashaba think it’s a bit unfair to have mustered the wealth he has and still expect workers to agree to less generous Labor Relations Act provisions?
“No,” he replies, “never take away from people the opportunity to make money. Let’s come with policies that ensure that we are fair. Let’s make sure we manage the greed. But let’s allow South Africans to be natural. My understanding of the capitalist system is that it’s only natural. It’s a natural system for human beings.”

Tag: Herman Mashaba

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Where Are They Now?

‘How I Survived Was A Miracle’

A Grim Fairytale

Sticking His Neck Out For The Right To Make Money