<h2>Q&amp;A With… Busi Mabuza</h2>
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<h4>IDC Chair Busi Mabuza on diversity and development.</h4>
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<h4>There are many female executives at the top at the IDC; how is the organization driving gender to resolve challenges in the African economy?</h4>
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<li>The pleasing part is that the more we improve, the more we see opportunity to get better. Just over half of our staff complement at the IDC is female. We have focused on nurturing talent in a fair and equitable manner. The CEO [Geoffrey Qhena] pays specific attention to promoting equity in the management and executive levels of the organization. My interest is to also ensure that our professional level, which is our natural leadership pipeline, continues to be representative.</li>
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<h4></h4>
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<h4>How does the IDC develop female entrepreneurs and ensure they contribute to the economy and nation-building?</h4>
</li>
<li>The funding of women-owned business is one of our specific corporate key performance targets which we monitor and report on. This has focused everybody’s mind and is an integral part of our conversations at board meetings. We recently hosted a conversation session with women entrepreneurs specifically focusing on manufacturing. Management is now synthesizing the very constructive inputs received. We aim to be an accessible funder and to be one of the first ports of call for entrepreneurs requiring funding in our areas of focus.</li>
</ol>
<h2>Zama Luthuli</h2>
Past the tight security at the Industrial Development Corporation’s (IDC) stately headquarters in Sandton, Johannesburg, and up a couple of floors, we meet Zama Luthuli as she steps out of one of the glass-enclosed offices. She is slender, in a striped skirt and killer heels; one could have easily passed her off as a model.
Luthuli laughs when you suggest this. She has considered becoming a model and owning her own makeup and clothing line, she admits, so we are not far from the truth.
At 40, this self-confessed fashionista is the IDC’s youngest executive. As Divisional Executive: Corporate Affairs, she holds a critical role. This is evident when she points to the files she has in front of her, of entrepreneurs the IDC has developed. She speaks animatedly about them. This job, clearly, is more than a job for her.
“I see it as a contribution to the continent,” she says, which makes the long hours and lengthy Exco meetings worthwhile.
“It’s something bigger than us, it’s about other people. We work long hours, we get so tired but we look at people’s businesses and see the impact in their lives, and then the long meetings no longer matter.”
The IDC is a 75-year-old national development finance institution in South Africa set up to promote economic growth and industrial development.
Luthuli was only 37 when she assumed an executive role for the first time, in her previous job, at PetroSA. She joined the IDC in July last year, working with four heads in marketing, CRM, CSI and facilities management. Her work is in perfect alignment with her goals.
“A woman’s role is in the kitchen? A woman’s role is in bigger kitchens nowadays, [kitchens] that make stuff, create stuff and create employment,” says Luthuli, referring to the umpteen factories and industries that women lead today.
It’s a far cry from when her mother struggled to send her to university. Born in KwaZulu-Natal, Luthuli worked very hard in order not to disappoint her mother, and graduated in communications.
Thereafter, she says she was always fortunate finding employment.
That’s also because she was willing to take risks. “I always knew I wanted to be in a corporate environment.”
But she has a piece of advice for young people. “If you want a job, make one,” she says.
“With challenges, you learn, you grow, you adjust. There will be a woman who has been there before, so rely on her skills. It’s important to have a mentor. You need to understand the lay of the land, understand the organization.
“And always look for a business opportunity in what you do while you are employed. There are so many creative ideas we encounter on a daily basis. Whilst you are working, work on your dream, work on an idea, have a back-up plan.”
What are some of the most offbeat entrepreneurial ideas Luthuli has seen come her way?
“We find quite a few blueberry farms in South Africa!” she offers.
A single mother, with two girls aged 13 and nine, Luthuli says it’s important to rely on support systems. She took up an MBA degree after the birth of her children. But in the end, it’s about finding what works.
“Balance is something you create that’s relevant to your own situation and environment. Balance is also taking into account your own personal journey at a given time.”
The articulate executive says she has gone through enough pain and loss in her life that she knows it’s teaching her something every day.
“Our challenges may be different but let’s not dim our lights, let’s help each other,” says Luthuli, and you know that’s exactly what she’s doing at the IDC, lending her creative energies and late hours for Africa and its people.
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<h2>Lizeka Matshekga</h2>
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Ten minutes into the interview and it’s easy to tell Lizeka Matshekga is a soft-spoken powerhouse. While that may sound an oxymoron, this is a person with enough years in the financial services industry and multiple accolades in her trophy cabinet.
“I don’t want to call it success,” says Matshekga, with a quiet confidence.
“I am hungry. When you have hunger, you keep growing. I am hungry for information and knowledge. It has nothing to do with success. It’s really about wanting to know more every day.”
Matshekga has been with the IDC for 10 years, and is the Divisional Executive of Agro, Infrastructure &amp; New Industries.
With a master’s degree in Development Finance from the University of Stellenbosch, an honors degree in Financial Analysis and Portfolio Management from the University of Cape Town, and a BCom degree from the University of Western Cape, she has had 22 years in the financial services sector, in areas such as investment banking, treasury, turnaround and restructuring management, BEE financing and post investment management.
Last year in November, at the IDC, Matshekga scooped four awards, the most anyone won that year.
From Gugulethu, a township in the Western Cape, she stumbled into finance studies quite by accident.
“I wanted to be a scientist or doctor. I applied for BCom by mistake. My mother asked me to try it for a week, and I loved it! It was in my destiny.”
Matshekga’s mother, now 68, was a domestic worker who raised the children on her own.
“I had no access to bursaries. It was my twin sister’s biology teacher who helped me get the R1,000 ($73) registration fee for my BCom. It’s people like that I am grateful for today because he saw something in me. That’s the seed I needed.
“I always have this notion that your circumstances do not define your future. Almost every black child has faced poverty in childhood. In Gugulethu, most kids didn’t have hope. I was hungry to make a difference.”
She came to Johannesburg, which further fueled the hunger in her. Matshekga worked with Standard Bank Corporate Merchant Bank, and was with the National Empowerment Fund for three years. She joined the IDC and “has not looked back since”.
“I have been through the entire investment cycle at the IDC,” she says.
In 2011, she was asked to head up forestry within the IDC. She had never been exposed to the sector or been “a deal-maker”, so she thought: ‘how do I start?’
The unit was at its lowest in terms of performance when she took over, going up to “Top 5 in operations in the front office” by the end of the year, remaining that way for a while. Soon, Matshekga was also asked to take over the green industries sector, now called industrial infrastructure. Her mantra?
“I create an environment for my people to feel they are adding value and can be creative. It’s not my way or the highway&#8230; I also don’t limit myself to my focus area, I always look for things beyond my zone.
“I always tell youngsters at the IDC that your mentor needn’t be a senior, your mentor could be a peer. When you have friendships, let it add value. Don’t be shy to ask a team member. There are no stupid questions. You always come out of that engagement empowered.
“I always use the tested approach,” she says. “The IDC has invested so many development tools in ensuring where I am today.”
She is passionate about the new emerging industries of the future, and believes it will be her legacy.
A mother of three children, aged 16, 11 and three, Matshekga puts in enough late nights, knowing the larger purpose of her work. Thankfully, she says she has a supportive husband, which helps as her diary is more hectic than his.

IDC-039

Going Above And Beyond

It’s always a humbling experience meeting artistes. Their discipline has come from years of slog, and they take their assiduous approach and loyalty to the craft to almost everything they do.
Loyalty is a key word.
Katinka Schumann is Divisional Executive: High Impact &amp; Regions at the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) in Johannesburg. And she has been with the organization 21 years, joining them the year South Africa became a democracy.
It’s the only career she says she has known.
Schumann could have also made a career in music – she spent years playing the viola, but says she was too ambitious, leaving it to her more gifted sisters, two of who are now well-known pianists in Austria and Cape Town.
Growing up in the beautiful winelands of Stellenbosch, in South Africa’s Western Cape, where “art, music, culture and intellectual conversations” were in abundance, hers was “a musical family”. All her four sisters too studied music, goaded on by a diligent mother, who set aside money just so her daughters could take music lessons.
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“We all played, and would have family concerts [at home]. We played in orchestras from a young age. Somehow there was never a feeling I couldn’t do whatever I wanted to do.”
Which is why, Schumann spent two years as an exchange student in Germany after her matric “to discover what she really wanted to do”. She worked odd jobs, and even studied German.
“There wasn’t a big cheque around me, I really had to look after myself. I had R1,000 in my pocket for the year, I found a job, I sold ice-cream, I sold strawberries, delivered newspapers on Sundays in the snow. But I got a lot of money I was grateful for. It was just one of those things. As children, we were told to take responsibility. Our parents said they were not going to spoil us with comforts.”
Schumann was still finishing her MBA when she received a call “out of the blue” from the IDC, asking if she would like to join.
“I hadn’t even heard of the IDC then. Within days, I convinced my husband about it… I remember I arrived at the IDC starry-eyed, knowing very little about business. But I learned so much. I would walk around with a little black book, and if somebody said ‘dividends’, I would write that down; if somebody said ‘financial structure’, I would say ‘how do you calculate it’. I loved the traveling, every second week, to a different place, looking at different industries, from mushrooms to wine to dirty foundries, and working with communities under a tree, trying to negotiate with a chief versus the CEO of a listed company. The IDC is still like that today – it’s a very broad spectrum you get exposed to at a young age,” she says.
When Schumann joined the IDC, she says it was “a white male-dominated environment with a few black people”.
She says that’s when she knew growing up with sisters and always being competitive was a good thing.
“I didn’t grow up in an environment where you had to fight with men, I just assumed it was like that. So maybe I was oblivious to it, maybe in a way it helped. I didn’t look for conflict. In hindsight, I think they were testing the waters with me. Today, more than half the staff at the IDC is women. They are in many senior positions.”
Busi Mabuza is the current chairperson of the IDC, which is celebrating its 75th year.
“Busi has this calm, mature nature, she’s gentle but also tough. She has a maturity, even-handedness; it’s a calm environment, she never allows it to get completely out of control. So I think as an organization, we have moved mountains, a lot faster than many of our peers or others in the financial services industry,” says Schumann, who has other role models too – in life and art.
Both her grandmothers, she says, were formidable women.
“My mother’s mother came from Holland in 1948, very poor, and through suffering raised her children. She was a tough woman and a go-getter. She was a world traveler on a shoe-string budget her whole life. My dad’s mother was an amazing woman too. Her husband was a lecturer, and started the Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University. He was well-known, but she on the sidelines probably achieved more than he ever did. She spent a lot of time working on women’s issues. There probably wasn’t many women with formal university education then, which she had. She did a lot despite people possibly thinking she was a housewife. I think that’s how our parents’ generation worked it; they made the men look like they were heroes; on the sidelines, they actually achieved a lot on their own. For our generation, we shouldn’t complain. Life for women is a lot easier than it was then.”
In art, Schumann counts her namesake, South African filmmaker and actress Katinka Heyns, a role model.
“She’s probably the best South African filmmaker and producer we still have. She is an artist with words, and very special.”
Schumann had the opportunity to meet Heyns through the IDC recently and calls it one of her “awe moments”.
“I said to her I have always been asked when introduced to people, ‘are you Katinka Heyns’? All my life, I have lived in her shadow because of this name, as it’s not common. Now, when I phone her and say, ‘hi Katinka, this is Katinka’, she says ‘it’s like we are talking to a tunnel’.”
Part of what also makes Schumann’s job at the IDC interesting is the opportunity to assess how companies grow and constantly meet entrepreneurs.
“I have the greatest respect for entrepreneurs; they have so many challenges, and they focus on solutions and try and overcome them. Every now and then they stumble but they have that goal in mind that they have to make it. We see failures as well. You get entrepreneurs who disappoint you, so it is the full spectrum.”
Schumann never planned on staying at the IDC this long – there is still so much to do, she says.
“Our job is never done. Our economy is not growing fast enough, there is unemployment, so there is always scope to do more.”
Schumann also has enough opportunity to work with the younger generation.
“The young women are eager and anxious to move quicker. The one thing I am seeing a lot more is they are starting to use their relationships. Twenty years ago, we didn’t see the power of relationships, of networking.”
Would the 46-year-old mother of three ever turn entrepreneur herself some day?
“I have always had an entrepreneurial flair… I don’t know what I want to do but would like to try it.”
Whatever she does, Schumann will be sure to take her discipline and loyalty to another level.

DSC_0145

Business Is Music  To Her Ears

When Daphne Mashile Nkosi woke up one day, she was told by her lawyers that she had been removed as a director and wasn’t even a lowly shareholder of the multi-billion dollar company she had built from scratch, she thought someone was playing a joke on her. A sick joke at that, for not only did Kalahari Resources have billions in the bank, after securing loans to develop a manganese mine, executive chairperson Mashile Nkosi was still in mourning after burying her husband—who was also her business partner—just a few days earlier.
In one of the most bizarre stories in South African business history, Mashile Nkosi’s name, and those of her fellow directors, had been removed from the database of the Department of Trade and Industry’s Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office. Things were made even more surreal by the fact that the group laying claim to the assets was led by the late Sandile Majali, a dubious character and controversial businessman who was well connected in the upper echelons of the ruling African National Congress. Majali had never been in any way connected to Kalahari, so his move was not preceded by any hostile takeover bid or shareholder revolt, or anything like that.
Mashile Nkosi brought an urgent interdict before the Johannesburg High Court.
Outside court, radio, television and newspapers were all keen to hear her side of the story. But the more she told of her hitherto unknown rise and rise in the mining industry, she says, the more doubts there were about whether she was indeed the real power behind her growing empire.
“I listened to some of the comments. The more I told my story, the more certain people doubted whether these assets belonged to me.”
Rumors and conspiracy theories started flying thick and fast.
“Some were saying nasty things like ‘you send a thief to catch a thief,’” Mashile Nkosi says. “Others thought, ‘she’s either corrupt or slept her way up to the top.’ I said to myself: ‘what did you expect? You got into a man’s world and changed the course of history. You have to go through this pain to make your gains. Stay focused.’”
About a month after the filing of the interdict, the court ruled in favor of Mashile Nkosi. Majali was arrested for fraud, and was also asked to pay Mashile Nkosi’s legal costs.
Mashile Nkosi’s foray into the male-dominated and often dangerous world of mining started long before the 2010 corporate hijacking incident.
In 1999, as a community development activist leading a women’s rights NGO at the time, she was invited by current Exxaro CEO Sipho Nkosi (no relation to her or her late husband) to form part of the Eyesizwe consortium that was to bid for four South African collieries belonging to multinationals Anglo American and BHP Billiton.
“Sipho said he wanted a very strong structure,” Mashile Nkosi remembers. “We put the structure together, went for presentations to Anglo and BHP, and got the business.”
As soon as she was in on the Eyesizwe deal—she is still a shareholder and serves on its board and those of its subsidiaries—she started being courted by other consortia. She soon discovered that many of these syndicates just wanted women “tag alongs” so that they could show that they had women in their midst.
“The men would have their own discussions and reserve 3-4% for women. I sat back and thought, ‘it’s not going to help if all I do is just scream and shout. What is it that I need to do?’
I decided to look for an opportunity that I would start from scratch, control and own, and be the one who would bring in the men.”
In 2001, the relatively unknown Mashile Nkosi applied to the government for manganese prospecting rights. She got them four years later.
Together with her husband, Dan Nkosi, they raised R12.5 million for a pre-feasibility study that confirmed the existence of manganese in the Kuruman area of the Northern Cape province of South Africa.
The following year state financier, the Independent Development Corporation (IDC), granted the company R60 million to do a feasibility study.
Once the feasibility study was successfully completed, the IDC took 20% of Kalahari, and the two entities began to search for a strategic equity partner. After receiving expressions of interest from 19 companies from all over the world, they chose Arcelor Mittal. The world’s leading steel producer now owns 50% of Kalagadi Manganese, Mashile Nkosi’s Kalahari Resources has 40%, and the rest (10%) is owned by the IDC.
Kalagadi is sitting on just under a billion tons of manganese, a commodity tipped for rapid growth in South Africa. The manganese in South Africa is of high quality, with low carbon, making it sought after by steel makers. The country holds a quarter of the world market and its manganese mines are found in the Kalahari Basin in the Northern Cape. Analysts are saying it is likely to be a boom year for manganese this year.
The Kalagadi project includes a R4.2 billion smelter that will be based at the Coega industrial development zone in the South African coastal city of Port Elizabeth. The smelter is part of an R11 billion project that includes a mine and sinter plant.
By June, Mashile Nkosi says, the company should start producing three million tons of manganese ore, 1.7 million tons of beneficiated sinter, all to be shipped to the Coega smelter for beneficiation.
While the journey has not been easy—water and electricity supply problems meant Kalagadi had to buy generators and truck in water while it negotiated with state utilities—the project is already helping to revive the local economy.
The mine employs 1,600 people, while a further 1,600 are employed by sub-contractors who are engaged in a variety of services ranging from laundry and food to engineering and other specialized services. The water pipeline currently being installed, as well as the tarred roads being erected, will assist farmers and the community.
“The difference between me and other people is not that I’m intelligent. I put in extra hours. I push. I work very hard. And as long as I am making a difference, I’m happy. When you see Africa on CNN or the BBC, it’s hungry kids with flies on their mouths. We should be using our minerals to build our countries, to build our continent. Not what some people do—get a license and then sell it to Australians or Europeans.”
Mashile Nkosi’s life has been lived through breaking rules, banishing stereotypes and confounding expectations. The youngest of four children, two boys and two girls, she says she was always different.
Growing up in the former gold rush town of Pilgrim’s Rest, in Mpumalanga, where she was born, she was inspired by her grandmother, who brought up 13 grandchildren single-handedly from proceeds of traditional brew, cakes and everything else she could lay her hands on.
When she was four or five and taken to Johannesburg to join her biological parents, she learnt just how tough and unfair life could be when she saw how her “never satisfied” father treated her “beautiful” mother—“like a second class citizen, even though she did so much for him.” Mashile Nkosi was incensed. “I told myself I will never be abused in a relationship. So in my choice of people I would later go out with, I was clear that I would never be abused.”
Any man who thought he would abuse her would have had to think twice anyway, for when she was younger she was always her “weak” older brother’s keeper, fighting for him against other boys and beating the male species in their own game.
You could argue, in mining, she is doing the same.

Tag: IDC

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Going Above And Beyond

Business Is Music To Her Ears

How The Feisty Queen Of Manganese Lost Her Crown