As chair of the global steering committee of the Radisson Hotel Group, which includes over a thousand hotels worldwide, Federico J. González must have his hands full – especially at this time when the hospitality industry is in the doldrums globally. The marketer and author, who’s the President and CEO of Radisson Hospitality AB, tells us more about how hotels will change permanently.



What is your forecast for the hotel economy and your group as a whole?



I believe that hotel operations will change permanently. We have all had to adapt and act together as a global community for the health and safety of our neighbors, families and friends. Operations have and will continue to change as we continue to apply the Radisson Hotels Safety Protocol and recommendations of the World Health Organization and local health authorities. These will change hotel operations such as check-in, F&amp;B outlets, gyms, spas and more with regard to social distancing, maximum capacity for common spaces and&nbsp; increased disinfection and cleaning. There will be a heightened awareness around safety&#8230; That will be the most important deciding factor for travelers which needs to be at front of mind operationally. The Radisson Hotel Group is one of the largest hotel groups in the world, so for us, it’s imperative to ensure a common high standard of hygiene, safety and sanitation that is standardized and implemented around the world and validated by a third-party like SGS (global inspection, verification, testing and certification company).&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



What about the tourism industry in general and the new thinking that will revive it?



There are so many countries, companies and airlines that rely on travel, tourism and the hospitality industry. Many airlines and hotels are encouraging guests to start traveling again to reignite the travel industry and its future recovery. There is a strong appetite for travel and it’s great to see hotels reopen and people traveling again.



Looking ahead, health and safety will continue to be the most important deciding factor when booking a holiday. We are seeing people take smaller trips where they can get in their car, a train or a plane for a short journey. They want to ensure they will feel safe before getting on a long-haul flight. Given the economic climate post Covid-19, many people may not be able to travel as much, which means they will either look to take smaller mini-breaks, invest in one holiday or spend the time discovering their own country.



The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology within businesses, small or large, and we all had to learn how to work from home full-time from one day to the other, so I believe the way people meet will also change. There will always be a need for physical meetings and interactions, but business meetings might move to a more hybrid set-up, maybe with smaller teams getting together in one location and connecting with the others via videoconference.



What are the opportunities/trends coming out of this crisis?



Our whole world has been greatly impacted and the expansive global scale of Covid-19 is unprecedented. We have seen positive news coming from Asia and Europe with the reopening of some of our hotels and we will see further hotels start to open&nbsp; up as restrictions are lifted.



I feel there is a real opportunity for brands to stand by and clearly communicate their brand values and positioning to consumers. Consumers need to believe in your brand, in your health and safety commitment and that you will deliver on your promises.



What is your strategy for &#8216;doomsday&#8217; should the worst happen?



Prior to Covid-19, we had a strong crisis management process and flexible cost model in place. Of course, no one could have predicted the global scale of this pandemic and the daily changes to our business, the world and life. With our global scale of over 1,100 hotels in operation and another 300 in the pipeline across the world, we had a global macro viewpoint of the pandemic and the different responses. We also have the full support of our shareholders for any financial needs until the expected end of the crisis.



What lessons do you think are there in it for all of us?



Covid-19 has brought out the best in many people around the world. It has been uplifting to see communities come together in support of key workers and medical professionals, rallying around each other. We have seen this especially in the hospitality industry which has been one of the most affected.



My hope is that we don’t forget this remarkable resilience, commitment, integrity and, most importantly, kindness and generosity towards the local communities where we operate and live in.



– Interviewed by Busi Lethole

Federico J. González

What The Hoteliers Are Thinking: ‘Business Meetings Might Move To A More Hybrid Set-Up’

The toughest day in her entrepreneurial journey – inspired by the large number of travelers passing through the numerous police roadblocks she manned in and around Kariba, Zimbabwe – is the day Patricia Mazvidza’s guest lodge opened its doors.
A veteran of Zimbabwe’s liberation war, Mazvidza shrugged off the comfort of government employment as a police officer. She had risen to the commissioned rank of inspector and later on to superintendent.
“The idea to start a guest lodge initially came in 2002 while I was working at the roadblocks as a police officer here in Kariba,” says Mazvidza at her business, Dzimbabwe Lodge, in Kariba. “Most of the cars you would stop at the police roadblocks were carrying tourists and other travelers to Kariba.”
She always wondered where these people would sleep and if they were comfortable during their visit.
Roadblocks are a topical issue in Zimbabwe, but the police deny that it sets targets for each team manning the numerous blockades in Harare. On the day of the interview with Mazvidza, there were nine police roadblocks between Harare and Kariba.
At each roadblock, police officers flag you down, ask for your driver’s licence and check for front and back reflectors, vehicle licence and ask you to open your trunk to check the spare wheel, breakdown triangles and serviceable fire extinguisher.
If you don’t have any of the required equipment, they book you and ask you to pay on-the-spot fines, which range between $10 and $20. If you don’t pay the fine, your vehicle is impounded.
In addition to burning a hole in tourists’ pockets, the roadblocks are hurting Mazvidza’s business. She thinks they deter tourists from traveling to Zimbabwe. She tells FORBES AFRICA that the roadblocks are being handled differently to when she was a police officer.
“When we did our training for law and policing, we were always told and we always observed the importance of warning – you don’t just rush to book and fine just for the sake of collecting a fine,” she says.
Apart from the guest lodge, which has 16 rooms and which is in the process of expanding to 35 rooms, Mazvidza also runs a thriving petrol and diesel filling station under a franchise agreement with Zuva Petroleum.
At the filling station, which opened in 2014, and where profit margins are 6 cents per liter, Mazvidza has opened the Zuva Restaurant and is working on adding a vehicle servicing station.
“I saw that if I put all my eggs in one basket, you will be left with nothing if the basket breaks up. We did not have the experience to run a fueling station and at first I hesitated but it is doing fairly well, but you have to supplement it with other businesses such as the restaurant and servicing garage that we are setting up,” she says.
Mazvidza’s husband is a civil engineer working for the Zambezi River Authority which oversees the Lake Kariba. He encouraged her to soldier on with the business and he also did the design for the guest lodge.
“My best day in the office is actually the day we started the guest lodge business. I was hesitant and thinking ‘what if people do not come and it becomes idle’. Yet, when we opened doors in 2002, there was so much demand and now we are not afraid of even the big lodges and hotels here in Kariba because I believe in the services we offer and the smartness and relaxed nature of our services,” she said
She has no worst day in her entrepreneurial journey but she wishes she had started the hospitality business earlier. The guest lodge – which has presidential, executive, family and single rooms – is complemented by two boathouses on Lake Kariba.
Her business is a world away from where the 53-year-old Mazvidza started. She was born in Mutoko, in eastern Zimbabwe, and crossed over into Mozambique for liberation war training while she was still in primary school. She returned to Zimbabwe in 1980 and later enrolled for the police force.
“I joined the police force in 1983 after undergoing police training at Tomlinson Depot in Harare and was stationed at Mbizo in Kwekwe. I was then posted to Kariba in 1989 which saw me promoted from constable to sergeant and then to inspector in 2000,” says Mazvidza.
“I was then further promoted, in 2002, to the rank of superintendent. We had bought a piece of land here in Kariba and we thought of using it as a guest lodge after carefully thinking about the potential opportunities in the hospitality industry here.”
If starting her business was tough; deciding to retire from the police force was more difficult.
“I retired on October 21, 2002 after making one of the toughest decisions of my life. But I had to decide after considering that if you run your own business full time, it is always better. Frankly speaking, I never thought I would be able to run a business as I always thought it was good just to be employed but today I now know that it can be done because I have done it.”
It was one of many tough decisions along a hard road but Mazvidza is not looking back.

Patricia-2-

No Roadblock Can Stop This Business

Anselm Tabansi left a cushy job as an associate lawyer at a prestigious Nigerian firm to follow another path. He was heeding a call and is now a staple in Nigeria’s design and hospitality industry.
“I am a lawyer by profession, so this is not a familiar academic terrain for me. I worked for a law firm specializing in industrial and intellectual property and did that for about four years. I woke up one morning and decided it was not the path for me,” says Tabansi.
An Anselm Tabansi designed space leave a lasting impression on design aficionados. His is a story of passion and intent.
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His creativity reaches back to his academic years in England where an interest for architecture blossomed. While it wasn’t pursued, Tabansi subsequently found himself trading in interior accessories, supplying interior designers and shops at the start of his design career. Wrought iron was the aesthetic trend in England at the time. Tabansi, believing this trend would thrive in Nigeria, made a decision to test the market at home. Following some research, he took the plunge, opening a small-scale production workshop in Lagos. He started with one welder and soon added a painter.
It was a bumpy start, with the new company, Svengali Designs, struggling to gain any prominence. He needed to create some buzz and began producing samples for friends and furniture shops to gauge their interest. Tabansi’s new venture soon proved to be a great decision. Within a year, there was a surge in demand for wrought iron furniture in Nigeria, catapulting Tabansi’s business.
“I started producing wrought iron furniture, wrought iron for balconies, railings, stairs, and gates. It was in high demand at that time but a couple of years later, the trend began to shift away from wrought iron. It had become a fad. I knew we would start to lose a significant amount of clients. The trend was shifting to wood-based furniture. Aluminum and stainless steel for railings, followed closely. We made the necessary shift and we have never looked back,” says Tabansi.
This shift would transform Tabansi’s company from one that produced a single product to a multi-faceted one.
Nigeria’s creative industry has enjoyed rapid growth as homegrown designers were given a more enabling environment. A few challenges still exist however, power and policy being at the forefront.
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“The need to generate our own power is mandatory. This makes production very expensive as we were constantly burning diesel. The raw materials we use for our production are also heavily taxed on duty. This poses a huge challenge and we hope the incoming government addresses this.”
From conference tables to living room furniture, Svengali Designs has carved out a large slice in the market with production for hospitality projects taking off in 1996 and a growing customer base that cuts across key sectors.
Interior design is a key service the company offers. With a mix of locally produced and imported merchandise, clients come from far and wide. The factory has 160 employees.
A joint venture with Turkish company, Poliform, led to Svengali-Poliform, a production arm for stainless steel and aluminum railings. This has a 43-man workforce.
Looking to grow even further, Tabansi ventured into the hospitality business. Nigeria’s hospitality industry is saturated with international brands. Identifying a gap in the homegrown hospitality management industry saw the birth of Fahrenheit Hospitality.
“I am focusing on the boutique segment of the hospitality industry. Through my various past operations, I have assumed full control of over every aspect of delivering on this kind of project. Design, construction, outfitting, supplies and management is all handled within the group. We have not just reduced our costs but also ensured the quality of our design is adhered to.”
“Every final piece is a reflection of my style and taste.”
As he also plays the role of Creative Director, Tabansi supervises all steps of the production process. He says that the quality assurance at Svengali Designs gives his company an edge.
“Over the years, people have come to associate us with quality. It is my joy to hear that pieces that were purchased from us over 15 years ago are still in top form.”
Under the Fahrenheit Hospitality brand, there are plans to roll out a series of boutique hotels.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3712" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_2377-300x194.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="194" />
As opposed to starting the furniture business years ago, where organic growth was needed, the hospitality brand is a capital intensive project.
“We are currently trying to attract investment with vested interest in our projects,” says Tabansi.
Despite the infrastructural bottlenecks, Tabansi‘s decision to remain a Nigeria-based producer is a conscious one.
Likening his personal style to a simple sophistication, Tabansi urges budding designers to follow their passion.
“I discovered my passion in design. Defining a space, deconstructing it and redefining it. From this, I get so much joy and constantly strive to outdo myself.”
Tabansi tries to cater for a wide spectrum of clients. He, however, says that quality comes with cost.
“Our pieces are affordable and we keep our products within the reach of many.”
Tabansi has exciting plans for the future of Africa’s design and hospitality scene. He aims to be on the frontlines, pushing the envelope.

The Iron Will That Propelled An Entrepreneur To The Top Table

Sola Owoloja has been working in the business for five years; he understands how to please. He had to transport a comb from New York to Johannesburg. It must have been a very special comb. He naturally said: “Yes”. You have to.
The patron staying at a Johannesburg hotel had left the comb, given to her by her dying mother, in a hair salon in New York. West Chauffeurs got in touch with the New York hotel and within 48 hours the comb was hand delivered to the patron.
Running around, chauffeuring, catering to and cajoling the rich is what makes concierge services pay. On another occasion, a patron asked to deliver an elephant across the Atlantic to the United States as a gift to his daughter. Luckily, the request was not followed through, again Owoloja would have said: “Yes”.
“Integrity is very important. If you make a promise to your guest, you have to keep that promise. We made a promise to our guests. We will bend, we’re flexible. We’ll do anything to keep them satisfied,” says Owoloja.
In 2008, Owoloja and Kagiso Dumasi saw a gap in the market for a concierge company in South Africa that would cater for the needs of wealthy travelers. Owoloja oversees the operational, financial and recruitment side of the business, while Dumasi looks after the marketing.
West Chauffeurs can make dinner reservations; find scarce theater tickets and presents in a hurry, as well as deliver combs.
Nigerian-born Owoloja learnt early on at home, in Lagos, that you have to do business however you can.
In Lagos, while in his twenties, he dabbled in the supermarket business with a friend. He moved to South Africa with the hope of running an oil services company, but failed. He moved back home but later returned to South Africa to start a business with the little entrepreneurial experience under his belt.
“When the chips are down, in the face of adversity and massive challenges, you need to still inspire people to get them to see beyond the challenges of the day,” says Owoloja.
Their Johannesburg business prospered through a link to Quintessentially, a global luxury lifestyle company, known for its high net-worth clients.
With a little help from the National Empowerment Fund, West Chauffeurs increased its fleet from two cars to eight, after making more than R1 million ($108,800) in its second year.
They relocated from the central business district of Sandton to another affluent suburb, Melrose Arch. This opened up the business meetings market. The company had to swear its drivers to secrecy as many deals were struck on the road.
Towards the end of that year, an opportunity came to run the travel desk for two new five-star hotels in Cape Town but it all went downhill from there. The two found that they had expanded too quickly.
They had entered into unfamiliar territory, in an international tourist city that has well-established hotels. West Chauffeurs found itself exposed, a small business that relied too much on the hotels for guests for business. The two new hotels were unable to fill up enough rooms to secure business for West Chauffeurs. The Johannesburg office had to keep Cape Town afloat.
“For a small company, expansion should be managed very carefully. We were profitable in our first year, but we did not think through that move carefully. We expanded very quickly without the structures to manage the expansion in terms of cash flow, record keeping,” says Owoloja.
At the end of each month the business was short of around 65% of their costs, which they had to source from the profit made during the previous year.
“It dried up very quickly. We tried to get overdrafts, personal funds to pay salaries but it was quite difficult. We picked up heavy losses in Cape Town but yes those are lessons learnt. They were painful,” he adds with a chuckle.
Owoloja says a big mistake was for the company to go without a management account and financial statements for nearly a year.
But that’s all in the past now. In early 2011, West Chauffeurs packed up office in Cape Town and focused on business at its headquarters in Johannesburg, where the company was doing well.
They signed a contract to run the travel desk for the five-star African Pride’s Melrose Arch Hotel located in the trendy precinct. Again, they struggled with being too small and having to run a high occupancy hotel with demanding clients. The hotels patrons were skeptical about making use of their services because they were much smaller than established car rental companies.
Through it all, things started to look up. The company now turns over nearly $800,000 annually.
“We went from nothing to quite a bit. There’s this very nice feeling that comes with making things work,” says Owoloja.
West Chauffeurs currently has twelve cars and employs 17 drivers and consultants. They drive clients from First Bank of Nigeria, Liberty Life and Barclays, to mention but a few.
One of their biggest achievements was beating more established companies to drive members traveling with the British Lions during their rugby tour to South Africa in 2009.
The softly spoken Owoloja says they are wary of leaping without looking, the scars of the Cape Town run deep. For now, their plans are to grow other services within the West Chauffeur brand in Johannesburg and capture the leisure market.
Surely, when the time is right, the answer will be: “Yes”.

The perils of the “yes” business

Rwanda’s post-genocide recovery has gone through many hands, but there is one big hand to reckon with—that of entrepreneur Said Sekoko Hatari.
Hatari may not be the richest man in Rwanda, but he is among Kigali’s cash kings. Born to a poor family, he grew up in Uganda as a refugee. One of the bitter legacies of Rwanda’s troubled past is that many of its people grew up sheltering outside the country.
Exile was where Hatari started in business, at the tender age of 20, as a truck driver working for Somalis. He was transporting construction materials from Kisumu in Kenya to missionaries living nearby. He quit the job to trade spare parts and coffee. He made mistakes along the way, including losing $1 million in the coffee business.
More than 30 years on, Hatari, who also served in the Rwandan army, is the king of hospitality and construction in Kigali with a number of business partnerships at his elbow.
“In partnerships, people come with their own money and borrowing connections. When you are alone, you get exhausted,” he says.
Hatari is the executive director of Doyelcy Ltd, founded in 2006, one of the largest firms in Rwanda and under valuation by Ernst &amp; Young. The company may list on the Rwanda Stock Exchange or issue a corporate bond to raise capital for investment in its core businesses of hospitality, property, insurance, renewable energy and agriculture.
Doyelcy is co-investing in hospitality and construction projects in Rwanda along with Dubai World, Chinese investors and Sudhir Ruparelia, one of the richest men in Uganda.
The prime project is the Kigali City Tower, which will be the tallest building in Rwanda and a potent symbol of reconstruction less than two decades after dead bodies littered the streets.
The 1994 genocide took more than 800,000 lives in 100 days. It shattered the country’s infrastructure, as well as its soul. From roads to government offices, private businesses and homes, to water pipes and electric poles—the country needed huge investment to build afresh; money that the government did not have.
Seventeen years later, Rwanda is one of the world’s success stories, with an annual average growth rate of about 8%. It was ranked the top global business reformer in the World Bank’s Doing Business Report in 2010. This was the first time a country from sub-Saharan Africa—the region with the highest poverty levels in the world—won such an accolade.
The tower of Kigali is a bold manifestation of this surge of confidence. It will bring scarce high-end office and retail space to Rwanda as the country plans to position itself as the business-friendly Switzerland of East Africa. Tenants are signing up for 20 floors; they include Rwanda’s plush coffee shop, Bourbon Street; Apple; Kenya’s Nakumatt; and South Africa’s Mr Price.
Ernst &amp; Young valued the tower at $33 million, which also makes it the most expensive landmark in Rwanda.
In another project, costing at least $200 million, Doyelcy is also co-investing with Ruparelia in a modern tax park and commercial buildings in Kigali. Then there is a $60 million five-star hotel with Chinese investors. The 254-room Kigali Marriot will be the largest hotel in Rwanda.
This year, the Central Bank says the economy may grow by more than 7.5%,  with strong recovery in the agriculture and service sectors, in a land where it takes one day to register a business. Inflation is easing and the financial sector grows stronger as more regional banks set up shop in Kigali.
This year, Rwanda expects investments to grow to $550 million, from more than $300 million last year.
Construction and hospitality are the fastest growing sectors in the country. In the first six months of 2011, construction rose by 54.6% compared to 28.7% for the same period last year.
“I believe that the future of this economy is mainly its expansion, going beyond borders as it reduces trade obstacles and introduces new markets,” says Hatari.
Although the construction sector is growing, Hatari says it faces setbacks from a lack of skilled labour and construction materials like cement. There is also a question over long-term finance from the banks.
“Finance is still a challenge and I think it will remain a challenge,” he says.
The good news is that Rwanda relishes a challenge.

From A Truck Driver To  A King Of Kigali

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

Tag: Hospitality

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

What The Hoteliers Are Thinking: ‘Business Meetings Might Move To A More Hybrid Set-Up’

No Roadblock Can Stop This Business

The Iron Will That Propelled An Entrepreneur To The Top Table

The perils of the “yes” business

From A Truck Driver To A King Of Kigali

Et tu, Brute?