When the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) recently advised the real estate sector to start looking for alternative sources of funding as a way to prevent too much lending into the sector, it became apparent that the sector was going to face serious challenges. However, thanks to the recent introduction of the Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in the country, the sector now has a new channel to raise capital through the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE).
Kenya has joined more than 30 countries worldwide that have embraced the REITs concept, which now boasts more than $1 trillion in market capitalization as at the end of 2013, up from $300 million in 2003.
The start of the new market which interestingly coincides with an ongoing real estate boom is set to help property developers access long term funds at cheaper rates, while providing retail investors with an opportunity to own landmark properties in the country, albeit a small stake. Supply is also expected to come from banks saddled with non-performing loans (NPLs) involving collateralized real estate. The latest data from the CBK shows that as at June 30, 2013, lending to the real estate sector by banks stood at Ksh194.9 billion ($2.3 billion) out of the Ksh1.45 trillion ($17 billion) in gross loans and advances made, an equivalent of 13%. The Kenyan government is also set to be an early participant as it seeks an alternative in its divestment of publicly-owned assets in order to finance its budget deficit.
As a pointer to its bright future, since the gazettement of the REITs regulations last year, two firms have been approved by the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) to operate as REIT managers. The National Social Security Fund (NSSF), one of the biggest property owners in the country, has also declared interest in the use of REITs to exit some of its real estate projects. Currently, the fund holds property estimated at Ksh33 billion ($388 million), which is 26% of its Ksh126 billion ($1.5 billion) worth of total assets. Overall demand from the wider pension industry is expected due to its preference for low risk and stable income investments. REIT stocks are known to give higher dividend yields and more stable returns than common stocks. Home Afrika, the only listed real estate developer, is also planning to raise up to Ksh2 billion ($23.5 million) through REITs to fund its infrastructure projects.
One of the challenges facing this fledgling market is the uncertainty over the direction of long term interest rates. A rise in rates would make REIT returns comparatively less attractive, and the market may face selling pressure as REITs borrowing costs rise. Existing and prospective managers will need to structure REITs that can offer attractive yields to investors. Nonetheless the stakeholders can take comfort in the fact that in the past 15 to 20 years, global returns in this sector have outperformed the broader markets. Three-year total returns ending 2012 stands at 38.6%. The lack of sophistication by local shareholders to trade securitized real estate is also another hurdle facing the market. However, though admitting that this could take a while to realize, history shows that REITs have eventually proven to be popular with investors who view stocks as too risky and bonds as not having enough yield.
With the annual demand for housing in the country outstripping supply by as much as 150,000 units, REITs are set to bridge this gap by increasing availability of housing, which is a priority area in Kenya’s development program, Vision 2030, in addition to increasing availability of commercial and residential real estate.
Moreover, the new market will help deepen Kenya’s capital markets and provide a gateway to middle Africa for regional and international capital flows. Ernst and Young’s Global Perspectives: 2013 REIT report recognizes that the global REIT industry has been a major participant in transaction markets in the last three years. Real Capital Analytics (RCA) estimates that REITs accounted for 14% of transactions by volume in 2012, and that percentage rose to 20% in the first half of 2013. Needless to say, Kenyan REITS are on a safe path to success. With Kenya’s robust growth expected to be between 4 and 5% in the next few years, Kenya’s real estate sector is surely going to be an attractive option.

GET REAL

Its economy, political arena and society are in crisis mode. Abuja, its capital city, and other sections of the country are increasingly making headlines for the wrong reasons.
Meanwhile, representatives of Nigeria’s youth, political, traditional, religious, civil and business society are currently in a national conference (Confab) in Abuja. Their task over their three-month tenure: discuss salient national issues and recommend the way forward.
The most critical issue has been the dearth of safety and security in the land. On this point, a member of the Confab and former inspector general of the Nigerian Police Force, Muhammadu Gambo Jimeta, laments the failure of previous administrations to provide altruistic leadership.
“The country is sick, otherwise how will people organize themselves and kill innocent students, how could people gather together and rob, how will people gather together to vandalize pipelines? It means the central system is sick and that is national security,” he says.
The country’s defense budget ballooned from $625 million in 2010 to $6.25 billion this year.
Military muscle has however failed to curb the increasingly sophisticated insurgent group. Anecdotal evidence even suggests that some of this cash has fueled the crisis. The class of the impoverished community continues to outnumber the elite factions of society. Poverty afflicts more than 60% of Nigerians &#8211; around 100 million Africans. Twenty four percent of Nigeria’s employable population is effectively unemployed; for those between the ages of 15 and 24, it surges close to 40%.
Africa’s most populous nation is currently engulfed by a lack of social values. Homegrown terror gangs and Islamist insurgents ravage parts of northern Nigeria and violent criminals now roam through southern states, mostly outside Lagos, at will.
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has declared that Nigeria is essentially at war. Many who find this statement alarming struggle to disagree with the famous poet, playwright and ex-political prisoner.
In March, suspected members of the militant group Boko Haram executed a commando style operation to rescue their cohorts held in the Abuja cells of the Department of State Security, which is located within view of Aso Villa, the Nigerian president’s residence.
In April, economic analysts and pundits pontificated on the effects of the country’s rebasing exercise when terror struck again. Within one week, more than 200 girls were abducted by faceless rogues from a school in Chibok, in the north-eastern Borno State. In Nyanya, a densely populated district on the outskirts of Abuja, an early morning rush hour blast in the motor park killed more than 100 people and maimed many more.
Interestingly, the horrific situation has not halted progress on the quest to diversify the domestic economy. Apparently positioning for the long term, companies like Huawei, General Electric and IBM continue to ramp up their commitments and workload with Nigeria’s business, public, academic and scientific communities. Jim O’Neill, former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management has invested some of his cash in Paga, a leading mobile payments service provider which has more than 1.3 million individual and 1,350 business clients.
While the nation’s image abroad continues to take a daily bashing, the paradoxical positives also need highlighting. GDP growth for the period between 2013 and 2015 is expected to hover between 6% and 7%. Ongoing reforms in power and agriculture look set to boost productivity. The fortunes of the capital market should be boosted by long term bond financing. Some sectors – telecoms, e-commerce, hotels, retail, real estate and construction – will continue to boom thanks to Nigeria’s head count. With a population of 167 million; consumer spending well in excess of $100 billion each year, and a fast growing middle class, Nigeria is definitely a promising African destination for business. According to the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment, more than $1.3 billion in fresh investments has come into the formal retail space over the last three years.
No doubt, a state of insecurity will continue to stunt domestic economic growth and attenuate the much needed peace of mind required for deep rooted investments. Poor governance has bred this terror monster. A crazily expensive, parochial and unprogressive political culture will continue to breed a heated and ignoble socio-economic landscape.
Being the 26th largest economy in the world will mean little to the hundreds of families still searching for their daughters in the forests of northern Nigeria.

The Economics Of Painful Politics

A blank projector screen hangs in the middle of a room in William V.S. Tubman High School. A handful of expatriates and Liberians mill around, waiting for the film that was scheduled to start rolling over an hour ago. Young women wait expectantly behind a table filled with snacks and baked goods. But most of the yellow plastic chairs are empty.
After plugging and unplugging a jumble of chords and tapping a few computer keys the film begins to play. Restless children and 20 or so adult members of the audience sit as a film titled No More Selections We Want Elections screens. It traces the 2005 elections that saw President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf come to power. The sound is gritty, light streaming through the sheer curtains washes out the image on the screen and the audience is small.
This is the first time Liberia has held a film festival. The brainchild of Pandora Hodge, a young Liberian student, and a collection of her colleagues from the University of Liberia and SPARK, a Dutch NGO that fosters entrepreneurship in post-conflict countries. The Image of Liberia film festival was held over three days in Monrovia in February and aired Liberian and African films in classrooms and communities throughout the city. Some screenings were packed and went off without a hitch; others ran late and attracted a sparse audience.
Through the festival, Hodge and her team hope to challenge the war-torn image of Liberia and build up interest in the art house cinema called Kriterion that she and her colleagues are trying to establish. Films about Liberia’s brutal recent history – it’s civil unrest that spanned three decades, killed 250,000 people and destroyed the nation’s infrastructure – are notably absent from the program that is filled with a small selection of Liberian and African films.
“We are creating a platform where young people can go to express themselves. A cinema is a really good way to get people involved and get people aware of what is happening in the country and abroad,” says Hodge.
Inspired by the model of a cinema that was created in Amsterdam by university students involved in the anti-Nazi resistance movement in the aftermath of World War II, Hodge hopes that Monrovia’s own Kriterion can provide part-time employment to students and also become a hub for Liberian cinema and intellectual debate. The Kriterion model has also been adopted by students in post-conflict cities like Sarajevo.
But, establishing an art house cinema will be a challenge in a country where most people get their slice of cinema in ramshackle video clubs, sitting on wooden benches watching Nigerian, American and Indian films off eerie television screens that sit small in the darkness. In Monrovia, cinemas are virtually non-existent – two of the three cinemas, remembered fondly by Liberia’s pre-war generation, have been demolished. Only Rivoli, a cinema in downtown Monrovia, is still standing and seems to screen Bollywood movies exclusively. These cinemas aired mainly American movies as films were largely limited to government public relations and propaganda. But Hodge and her team, through surveying and research, found Liberian audiences want to see more locally produced films.
Unlike some of its neighbors in the region, like Nigeria and Ghana, Liberia has never had a vibrant film culture. Liberia’s cinema scene is small and amateurish with only a handful of directors producing quality films.
Derick Snyder, a filmmaker and producer, describes most Liberian films as birthday party quality.
“You got a little camera for your daughter’s birthday and you just film the yard. We’ve still got a lot to learn,” he says.
Snyder is one of a handful of Liberian producers who are able to shoot and edit quality films. Most actors are untrained and perform for free; those with talent and ambition head to Nigeria, Ghana or Gambia. Lack of access to equipment, technical know-how and stale plotlines, have hindered the growth of Liberia’s small film industry, says Snyder.
“Everyone is doing ma, pa, daughter crying in the living room love stories,” he says, adding that Liberians prefer the drama and slick effects of many of the Nigerian films.
Snyder, like many producers, has a day job shooting events for the United Nations Mission in Liberia and produces films on the side. He says most filmmakers struggle to earn a living.
Unlike other African countries, the Liberian government provides limited funding for the arts.
But, over the past year, there have been efforts to develop filmmaking by organizations such as Accountability Lab, an NGO focused on funding small projects that encourage accountability. Nigerian-Liberian director Divine Key Anderson heads a part-time film school that helps train students to make short films focused on accountability issues.
“Since 1847, we have been writing papers and not much has changed in this country and that is because 70 percent of our population are illiterate… but with film even a blind man can see,” says Anderson, who, like Hodge, agrees that film can be instrumental in creating political debate and change.
For James Emmanuel Roberts, who made No More Selections We Want Elections, the arts play a vital role in creating national identity and broader political and social debate. Roberts, 70, headed the national cultural troupe in the 1970s and helped create a satire television series called Kotati, meaning ‘sit down there’ in the Kru language, that aired on Liberian state-run television.
Roberts argues the development of a film scene in Liberia will play an important role in creating a collective historical memory that was largely erased by the 1980 coup and civil war, during which many records and archives were destroyed.  He says that cinema could help Liberians shape the story of their nation, whose recent history has been narrated by outsiders, namely Western journalists. Roberts and his son are currently working on a film on the 2011 elections.
After I finish interviewing Roberts, the public electricity cuts out and Hodge and her team rush to fuel up a generator for the next screening.
Creating an art house cinema, in a country whose cultural scene is only just beginning to re-emerge a decade after the civil war, will be a challenge. Hodge is confident she and her Kriterions are up to the task and that the film festival will continue to attract a culture-hungry audience.

Us On Film

Kozhikode is a tiny coastal town in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where the winds blow from the Arabian Sea and strains of Sufi music fill the evening air. The rickety roadside stalls selling sticky sweetmeat, savories and newspapers for a pedestrian public during the day take on a different character by night.
As dusk wears on, swarthy cooks pour ladlefuls of fermented rice batter on to the large red-hot flat pans in open kitchens that are lit up by kerosene lanterns strung on the palm leaf-thatched roofs of these makeshift shops. The pans rasp as groups of ravenous diners perched on shaky stools await their turn to be served the delicious, crisp, wafer-thin dosa – a type of rice pancake that is southern India’s most famous culinary export.
<div id="attachment_2828" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2828" class="size-medium wp-image-2828" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Dosa-Hut_Chef_6767-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Dosa Hut chef, Vineesh Karvnakaran.</div>
On one such night nearly ten years ago, Judy Joseph, a 24-year-old college dropout and dosa-lover, boarded a flight out of this coastal town, with dreams to make it big – not in the Middle East, as scores of his friends had done before him – but in South Africa.
Today, it’s not the curry coast of Kozhikode, but Fordsburg &#8211; the cosmopolitan suburb of Johannesburg dubbed ‘Little India’ with its profusion of street-side eateries &#8211; that Joseph lords over.
Dosa Hut, his unpretentious restaurant on the cluttered Central Road in Fordsburg, is favored for its dosas by the thriving Indian community working in the city’s CBD. On Fridays, Joseph’s clientele consists of white South Africans and tourists. On weekends, Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani bachelors and families – with their shopping bags and baby-strollers – jostle for tables.
To recreate the same modest ambience as his Kerala hometown, the décor is deliberately downplayed – no fancy linen or cutlery. Joseph’s customers don’t want the frills; they come here for his piping-hot dosas. His cooks &#8211; recruited from Kerala &#8211; disappear behind clouds of steam as they relentlessly rustle up 14 varieties of dosas, priced from R20 ($2) to R55 ($5), in the open kitchen by the entrance. On any given Saturday, they make as many as 600 of these, rolled up and served on steel plates with spicy coconut chutney, tomato pickle and yellow lentils, and washed down with masala tea.
Today, Joseph has two other business partners, Abhilash Raveendran and Areeza Nizar, and with them owns five Indian restaurants across Johannesburg totaling a net worth of R6 million ($567,000). They are well on their way to rolling out the Dosa Hut concept in Durban in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, as well as in Angola and Madagascar, places Joseph attests have a sizeable Indian population.
Joseph hadn’t expected to be this successful when he landed in Johannesburg that fateful day in 2005. He had $500 in his pocket and the Nigerian agent who had promised to pick him up at the airport didn’t show up.
“I waited five hours. I couldn’t speak English, but fortunately, I met a man from Nepal who helped me get a room for $15 a night,” says Joseph.
Until then, the only business experience he had was selling tea powders, sourced from his family’s tea gardens in the Nilgiris in South India, to his college mates. His family also had a small jewelry business in Wayanad in Kerala and they wanted him to complete his MBA – but he was on the plane to Johannesburg before that could happen.
Determined to prove himself, Joseph dabbled in a variety of odd businesses to survive in Johannesburg. He found a family friend who lent him $1,600, and he ran a tuck shop for three months selling cigarettes, samosas (fried Indian savory) and vetkoek (traditional Afrikaaner pastry). That didn’t work, so he tried selling cars, importing them from Japan, driving them to Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and flying them to Kinshasa before selling them for a tidy profit. He also sold copper ore in the DRC. All this while the few good friends in Johannesburg would rave about his flair for South Indian cooking.
“They goaded me to open a restaurant, which I did with one of my friends,” says Joseph.
His first venture in 2008, with a capital of R250,000 ($32,200), was Spiceburg in Greenside. He rented the premises from an American who previously ran an Italian eatery there.
“Back then, there were no South Indian restaurants in Johannesburg. We wanted to spice up Joburg, so we called it Spiceburg.”
Joseph brought 15 cooks from Kerala and introduced the dosa at R65 ($8) a piece, along with an assortment of South Indian curries. Spiceburg became profitable within three months of opening.
“The food was a hit. About 95 percent of our customers were South Africans, and they knew what they were getting was authentic,” says Joseph.
The food was even traditionally served on plantain leaves brought from Polokwane.
By then, 30-year-old Raveendran, Joseph’s college friend, joined him from Kerala to take the business further. In 2010, they set up Dosa Hut, a budget restaurant in Fordsburg, located in a 120-year-old building, which now also includes India Coffee House, yet another restaurant in their portfolio. The restaurants in Fordsburg are halal, don’t sell alcohol and cater to a wider audience.
“My dream was to make our food affordable to everyone,” says Joseph.
Raveendran is the face of the business, says Joseph.
“I am the shy one. He works his charm to bring in the clients. People ask for him at all our restaurants.”
Besides catering for big Indian weddings and corporate functions, the two are busy with plans to start a bakery selling homemade Indian sweets and savories, and a catering college in Randburg in Johannesburg.
“We want to start a centralized kitchen and to start with, train 10 South Africans in Indian cooking. They will study for free and work at our restaurants for six months. They make the curries better and learn faster than our own Indian cooks, so we don’t need to bring them all the way from Kerala,” says Raveendran.
Today, there are many other restaurants in Fordsburg that offer dosas on the menu; even the neighborhood grocers stock readymade dosa mix packets imported from India.
“But no one can make dosas like we do,” says Raveendran.
“Our unique selling point is the price and the fact that our dosas are served quick and hot. We bring South India to South Africa.”

Selling South India  In South Africa

Out of a desire to ease the burden on his beloved wife, who had to juggle a career as a business technology consultant with the demands of managing her home, an entrepreneur decided to start his own online retail business.
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Olumide Olusanya, established Gloo.ng &#8211; initially buycommonthings.com &#8211; to enable his better half, Seyin, to shop from the comfort of home and not have to spend what ought to be quality time with her family in grocery stores.
Olusanya, a medical doctor turned technology solutions developer, was in the middle of his third act as a value investor after a successful career as an e-payment expert where he led the team that deployed West Africa’s first locally issued and processed international payment card &#8211; Ecobank MasterCard. The idea to establish an online supermarket that would offer same-day delivery of groceries and essential homecare products came to him on a routine work day.
“I was doing my investment management from my home office; I would jog in the mornings and spend the rest of my day working from my study. When the idea came to me, I wrote the plans and tested it. I took out all the settees in my house and had a carpenter build the shelves then set up a small team initially, but all of them ran away after one month because they couldn’t stand the heat. So I was left with my co-founder, my wife, and we continued developing the idea. We had built the product and were operational, so with the traction we saw, I decided we had to do this.”
Progress over the next few months meant the business had to be expanded. Tapping into his personal savings, Olusanya moved to a bigger facility and hired two more people to join the team.
“For the first three months, of course it was just me alone. I was doing deliveries and as the demand started growing, we had to increase capacity. So I asked my wife to leave her job and she also started doing deliveries as well. Then we got the facility in Lekki (a middle class suburb in Lagos). Once we moved to Lekki that was the moment we burned the bridge and the only way we were coming out of this was at the other side. We had two people join us later and for 10 months, four of us ran the business.”
Nigeria’s retail sector has seen explosive growth since the middle of the last decade. A recent report by Euromonitor estimated the annual value of the market for supermarket products in 2012 at $33 billion.
Groceries and household essentials are mostly sold in open air markets and convenience stores, but recently, there has been a revival in the development of large shopping malls and superstores. South African retailer Shoprite entered the market in 2005, while Dutch brand, Spar, also entered the market operating in partnership with the Artee Group, a local player. Both brands are leading the market in terms of the number of stores with a combined total of eight. But as they seek to expand &#8211; Shoprite and Spar aim to have 40 outlets nationwide over the next three years &#8211; online retailers such as group buying site DealDey, as well as Jumia and Konga, have experienced rapid growth in the last three years.
Gloo.ng aims to ride this wave to challenge the brick and mortar players and capture the largest share of the market.
“Our vision it to be the biggest supermarket in Nigeria and our mission is to change the way Nigeria shops for living essentials or supermarket goods. There’s something driving everything we do. Our values derive from the Spartan culture, which is a very well knit culture where our sense is there’s nothing we set out to achieve that we will not.”
Eschewing the marketing-led approach to creating awareness for the brand, Gloo.ng chose to grow organically, allowing its customers to spread the word about its service. This has seen the company build an army of loyal customers, something that often eludes e-commerce firms. Olusanya reveals that 75% of the company’s business comes from repeat buyers, where most e-commerce firms have return rates below 10%.
“I was the one doing deliveries, and then Seyin joined me so she started doing deliveries as well. The early customers knew Seyin and me, but they didn’t realize we were the co-founders. Someone found out and that was something they liked about the story. So the business started growing; we hardly spent money on marketing, we grew largely on word of mouth.”
Impressively, the firm is also surmounting challenges that have often held back online retail companies in Nigeria. Payment has been a significant problem in a market where a lack of trust means customers prefer to pay for products with cash rather than using bank cards.
Gloo.ng is bucking this trend.
“What we end up building with our customers is a relationship. Our customers know us and once they do one or two transactions with cash, for the next transaction, they start using the electronic means which is obviously more cost effective for us. The new trend we are seeing is that customers are actually leaving money with us because using your card in Nigeria is a pain, unlike abroad where it’s just a click once your details are stored. So I think the whole idea, because of the nature of the repeat business that our customers do with us, is the trust they have built with us.”
Expectedly, the company’s early success has not gone unnoticed. Olusanya previously received offers from savvy investors but thought it was premature to raise major funds to grow the business. Feeling that the time is now right, Gloo.ng just secured Series A funding from an investment firm in Nigeria.
“We just signed a $1million funding agreement with IRM Limited. We’ve had investors calling us from all over, locally and internationally, but we have a type of entity that we’ve chosen to work with because we have to have people who are aligned with our vision. IRM understand what we are trying to achieve.”
Selling groceries online is notoriously tough and several worldwide start-ups have failed, most notably that of United States-based Webvan in 2001. Scaling Gloo.ng in Nigeria, a country renowned for the hostile nature of its business environment, promises to be a sizeable task but Olusanya is confident that they will succeed.
“The experience of the team we have and the research we have done are some of the things that put us in good stead to deal with the risk. Anything involving groceries online has been the Bermuda Triangle of e-commerce worldwide, but some companies like FreshDirect, Tesco.com, Ocado and Peapod have shown that it can be done. But we are not chasing any of those models; there is no single model that has been proven to work in that regard, and that’s why Gloo.ng has a multi-faceted model. We have various models, each with its own strategic objective that we are executing at the same time and we’ve been growing well quarter on quarter, so we are confident that we will get it right.”
Their loyal customers seem to agree.

Millions To Be Made In  Shopping’s Bermuda Triangle

Set in Kenya’s Hell’s Gate National Park, Disney’s animated film, The Lion King celebrates 20 years on June 15. The Lion King’s stage adaptation of the original 1994 film has grossed more than $5 billion across the globe. The original film is the highest grossing hand-drawn film in history.
It tells the story of Simba, a young lion who is to succeed his father, Mufasa, as king. But after Simba’s uncle Scar murders Mufasa, Simba is fooled into thinking he was responsible and flees into exile in shame and despair.
While growing up with two wastrels, Simba is given some valuable perspective from his friend Nala and his shaman, Rafiki, before returning to challenge Scar to end his tyranny.
The story is set in the kingdom of lions in east Africa, with influences from biblical stories of Joseph and Moses, as well as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Though it has had great success, the production of The Lion King has also had its problems. A dispute arose between Disney and the family of South African Solomon Linda, who composed the song, ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, originally titled ‘Mbube’ in 1939. In July 2004, the family filed a lawsuit for $1.6 million in royalties from Disney. Two years later, Linda’s heirs reached a legal settlement with Abilene Music who held the worldwide rights and licensed the song to Disney.
In 1997, three years after the release of The Lion King, Walt Disney produced the musical stage adaptation of the same name, with the first show in Minneapolis in the United States. The musical went on to become one of the most successful in Broadway history and is still running across the globe to this day.
Britain’s stage production of The Lion King casts a huge number of South Africans. In the current run, 25-year-old Nicholas Nkuna is wowing audiences as the third South African to be cast as Simba, following Brian Temba and Andile Gumbi. Before heading to Britain to play Simba, Nkuna was the second youngest black Phantom in the musical The Phantom of the Opera.
“I auditioned for the show for two years and got a call back for the final in the third year. I went to Florida in America to do my final call back. Towards the end of Phantom, they rang me to let me know I got the job,” says Nkuna.
In July 2012, Nkuna moved to Bristol to start rehearsals for the spectacle.
Playing the lead is a huge responsibility and expectations are high. But as time went on, Nkuna says he eased into the role.
“It was incredible; it was eye-opening. The standard of performance is different, the preparation is different. With The Lion King, there’s acting, there’s singing and dancing and you also have the animal elements to it. So you’re half a lion, half a human,” he says.
“You need to learn how to move like a lion. It was interesting to do those workshops. We did Javanese movements. There’s certain cultural depth that they do that’s sort of similar to how humans would move animal-like.”
After two years of traveling with The Lion King, Nkuna has decided to end his journey as Simba to focus on his music and other business adventures.
But the show must go on. In March 2013, The Lion King was launched in Brazil and for the first time in Portuguese. It has been performed in six other languages. It has also been seen on every continent besides Antarctica.
The creators of The Lion King are probably sitting somewhere saying to themselves, ‘Hakuna Matata’, as the Lion King could enthral audiences for decades to come.
<h4>The Soul Of Simba</h4>
The opening scene of The Lion King is unforgettable. As the yellow African sun rises over the horizon, a Zulu voice cries ‘Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba’. It means ‘Here comes a lion, Father’.
That voice belongs to South African award winning musician Lebohang Morake, but to the world of arts and entertainment he’s known as Lebo M.
Morake grew up in Soweto, Johannesburg. From a young age, he started singing in a local pop band. In his first interaction with the music business he saw corruption. At the age of 12, he released his first single Celebration which received a lot of local success. However, Morake only received $20.
After finding success in Lesotho, Morake received a scholarship to study music in the United States (US). It was there that he met world-renowned composer Hans Zimmer. The two worked together on the score for the film The Power of One.
Years later, Hans Zimmer was hired to score the most successful animated movie in history, The Lion King. Zimmer wanted to make the music authentically African and there was only one person he had in mind for the job.
Zimmer traveled to South Africa to find Morake. The two returned to the US where they created a soundtrack to the film that won them numerous awards as well as a Grammy for best instrumental arrangement with accompanying vocal for The Circle Of Life.
Riding on the success of the film, Morake was then commissioned to write the music for The Lion King musical which instantly became a Broadway hit. Morake composed new songs for the production which went well with the music from the original movie.
It has become one of Broadway’s longest-running shows with productions in several countries around the world.
Morake’s original compositions and voice can be heard in a number of films including Chicken Little, Mighty Joe Young, Congo and Tears of the Sun. When you listen to Morake sing, you may not understand the lyrics but you will understand why everyone calls him the voice of The Lion King.

A Roaring Success

Seven years ago, 22-year-old Patrick Ngowi sat in a small office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He held several positions in his newly-formed renewable energy company, Helvetic Solar. He was the founder, CEO, assistant, cleaner and had one investor, his mother.
He was young, energetic and ready to change the way his country creates energy. But it was tough to convince the rest of Tanzania.
“I had cases where you extend a hand to someone and they don’t want to shake your hand. Some people were rude unnecessarily,” he says.
Many companies saw the potential of solar energy, but questioned the capabilities of the young man. Ngowi had come a long way as an entrepreneur and wasn’t going to give up that easily.
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His first business venture was selling scratch cards at the age of 15 where he would make at least $5 a day. After high school, his parents could not afford to send both him and his sister to university so his mother gave him $1,800 and a plane ticket and he flew to China and set up his own business in the cellular phone industry.
“It was an industry that yielded high profit margins but because capital was low, many people started coming up with similar business models.”
Ngowi adjusted his sights and focused on selling mobile phones to the rural communities. He thought that the market had been neglected and it brought him greater profits.
While working in China he learned that discipline and hard work were essential for success. One thing that made him sit up was seeing the respect people had for one another.
“From the common man on the street to the boss at the top, first and foremost people are very down to earth. They are not egotistic so you don’t get people over the top and for me that was important. As a young man, I saw men who were multi-millionaires who were literally loading the consignment onto the containers. For me it’s one of those things that wakes you up.”
With the money Ngowi made from his cellular business he was able to study renewable energy at Dezhou University, in Dezhou which is close to Beijing. Every day, he was troubled by the way the thick smog would blot out the sun. He decided that he didn’t want to see the same thing happen to the African sun in Tanzania.
“If you can lower your carbon footprint, it’s life changing. The idea is to preserve the world and make it a better place and to leave it better than the way you found it… I am so happy because right now, with the prices of solar panels going down, you’re seeing more and more people are able to afford it.”
While sitting near the beach, Ngowi slouched back in his chair and spoke of the positive impact China has had on the continent. In the last few years, China has made massive investments in several African countries. And while some question their motives, others, like Ngowi, see the benefits in improving the infrastructure.
“If you want to see the impact of how the Chinese are transforming Africa, ask a person in the rural parts of Africa, ask a person who did not have a road, did not have water, did not have a hospital or school. Suddenly those things are being done… They [the Chinese] are bringing about change that we have not seen before and you cannot turn a blind eye to it.”
Over the years, Ngowi has had massive success in turning the Helvetic Group into an $8-million company. Last year he made the FORBES 30 Under 30: Africa’s Best Young Entrepreneurs list. Ngowi hopes to turn Helvetic into a power brand that is able to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor in Africa.
With the strong global interest in Africa, Ngowi still fears that foreign investors overlook African entrepreneurs.
“It will really be so pathetic if today we wait for European, Chinese or American solar contractors to come and light up our rural home while there is a younger person with a proven track record, already doing it, not being able to scale up.”
While the effects of climate change and global warming continue to destroy the world, Ngowi is focused on educating the youth and making changes that will benefit generations to come. For him renewable energy is not a business, it’s a way of life that captures the light.

The Green Eye For Energy

The test-tube sized bottles go into the piping machine. After being heated, they’re blown into shape and then filled with the carbonated soda. Out on the other side pops the brown flavored drink, Mo Cola. It hopes to compete with industry heavyweight Coca-Cola. Good luck.
Coca-Cola, ranked third on FORBES’ list of the most powerful brands in the world, is a force to be reckoned with. The company owns 40% of the market share in Tanzania and will attack any company that tries to take the smallest percentage away.
Here in Dar es Salaam, the rivalry for the best carbonated drink is fought out between Coca Cola and Pepsi. But, Mohammed Dewji, the CEO of the MeTL Group, is expanding his billion-dollar empire worth $1.2 billion on the FORBES rich list.
MeTL has invested more than $48 million into the drink called MO. It is available in a variety of flavors including orange, mango, lemon, malt and cola.
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Although Coca-Cola has managed to shut down many of its competitors, is Mo-Cola something they should be worried about?
“Whether they are nervous or not, I don’t know. But I tell you something, I don’t have much to lose, if anything they have market share to lose; I have zero market share. The only thing that can happen is I’ll go up; right?” says Dewji.
But he is not the first to go up against the industry giant. The list is long: Afri-Cola, Qibla Cola, Zam Zam Cola, Kola Real and, Coca-Cola’s biggest rival, Pepsi.
In 1994, Richard Branson launched Virgin Cola. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal he said he thought Virgin Cola was going to become the number one brand in the world. They had the right resources and the right people, so what went wrong?
“We decided to take on the might of Coca-Cola. We had a great brand we had a great product [and] it tasted better than Coke. We launched in the United Kingdom, we were outselling Coke, we were outselling Pepsi and for one wonderful year we had dreams of Virgin Cola being the number one brand on everyone’s lips when they wanted to buy a soft drink,” says Branson.
Unfortunately, Branson would never see that dream come true. Someone in Atlanta warned the then president of Coca-Cola, Roberto Crispulo Goizueta, of the Brit who was becoming a problem.
“Soon every retailer we were in, we found Virgin Cola disappearing from the shelves,” says Branson.
And just like that Virgin Cola was history.
This history doesn’t worry Dewji. He took 35% of the detergent market share from Proctor and Gamble. Fast growth in the edible oils sector saw them dominate 60% of the market share, beating Unilever.
“I’m not saying that brand consciousness doesn’t exist, but I believe that price consciousness is very important. I think that if I give a good product at the right price I can repeat the stories like I’ve done with my edible oil and soap and detergent powder,” he says.
So let’s say Dewji gains market share, ruffling a few white and red feathers. Then, Coke offers Mo-Cola a deal he cannot refuse. Will Dewji sell?
“I’m yet to sell a business. At the end of the day, I’m not emotionally attached to companies, I’m attached to values so anything at a right price, at my price, why not? I would sell any business,” he says.
But Dewji’s mind is far from failure. He’s banking on the MeTL Group’s vast distribution network of more than 100 depots in Tanzania and 2000 transportation vehicles that deliver, door to door, deliveries for many of their products, which include everything from detergents to tooth picks, bubblegum and pens.
“My strategy is to be able to make it affordable to the normal person on the street. I’m not saying I’m going to play the price strategy but this is going to be a surprise for everyone; whether I will sell the same milliliters as they will we don’t know, whether I will sell more for the same price we don’t know or whether I will sell 50ml at a much less price, I don’t know.”
MeTL is in 10 African countries: Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Eastern Congo, South Sudan, Malawi, Mozambique and Ethiopia. The group also trades internationally.
Within the year, Dewji hopes to snatch 10% of the market share from Tanzania’s Coca-Cola plant. Only time will tell if Mo-Cola will rival Coca-Cola or be slaughtered like Virgin Cola.

Oh Mo! Here Comes A New Cola

When the music pumped, Andrew Mlangeni jived onto the dance floor – carrying with him the spirit of the men with whom he faced death half a century ago. Fiery and defiant, dancing with the female vocalist of the band. Everyone stood and cheered.
“Mlangeni, wherever your fellow Rivonia peers are, they are proud of you,” says Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse, one of the men who played music.
For a moment, you could almost imagine a fortune teller putting his hand on Mlangeni’s shoulder, as he faced the death penalty for sabotage on that cold winter’s morning in April 1964, in Pretoria.
“Don’t worry young man, you will live, see your country free, and 50 years later you will dance in celebration with a woman a third of your age.”
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You couldn’t make up a story like that; a story of Mlangeni, Nelson Mandela and the Rivonia Trial. Indeed, Mlangeni was unlucky to be arrested at all, on that gloomy winter night in July 1963, and even luckier to survive. Mlangeni was asleep at his home in Dube, Soweto, where he lives to this day, when police came to arrest him. They had already picked up his late friend Elias Motsoaledi, who was in the back of the police car. Because the detectives had been brought in from outside Johannesburg, to clamp down on dissent, they didn’t know Soweto and drove past Mlangeni’s home several times.
“Motsoaledi told me that he was saying to himself ‘can’t this man wake up and run?’” says Mlangeni nearly half a century later.
Police eventually found Mlangeni’s back door, for which they had a key, and woke him in bed to tell him he was under 90-day arrest. It was 26 years before he set foot in his home again.
In Johannesburg Fort, that night, special branch officers put a cloth bag over Mlangeni’s head and poured water through it. The water seeped into his lungs and soon he was drowning. Close to the moment of death a special branch officer punched Mlangeni in the stomach. The force of it blew the water from his lungs and saved Mlangeni’s life.
This was the spirit Mlangeni brought to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Rivonia Trial at Liliesleaf Farm on April 20. Mlangeni is one of the three survivors of the Rivonia trial &#8211; so called because that is where the arrests were made. Ahmed Kathrada and Denis Goldberg are other survivors of the 10 accused. Kathrada and Goldberg were traveling overseas, so Mlangeni held the fort on the dance floor.
The festivities were to commemorate the famous three-hour speech Mandela read from the dock before sentencing. On behalf of his co-accused, Mandela declared he was prepared to die for freedom.
“Comrade Mandela’s job was to make a political statement, about our struggle, about the suffering of our people, about the regime killing our people, banning our people, sending our leaders to exile. He spoke on our behalf when he said those words ‘If it need be, I am prepared to die’. It was a speech that affected the feelings of everybody in the country and abroad,” says Mlangeni.
“When the Rivonia trialists were arrested, I must have been 12 years old. My father walked into the house angry, I knew something was wrong. And this something that remained in our minds for many years… We celebrated it and, at some stage, I felt that that particular speech should resonate with what we do. We should be guided as musicians by those activities,” says Mabuse.
Mlangeni had the crowd in stitches as he recalled how he and his late friend Motsoaledi, father of the health minister Aaron Motsoaledi, could have been easily hanged. The two were responsible for a number of Umkhonto we Sizwe operations, the armed wing of the African National Congress. They took advice not to give evidence.
“All of the other accused took to the witness box, but in the case of comrade Motsoaledi and I, we were not to go to the witness stand. It was felt that if we went to the witness stand, the prosecutor would slaughter us, he would really cut us to pieces.”
Mlangeni is living proof that you cannot suppress a good man forever.

The Spirited Survivor Jive

A deep horn blast was used in a slice of history at Africa’s biggest stock exchange. It was from the lungs of Rakesh Wahi, founder and vice chairman of Africa Business News (ABN), signaling the opening of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), as CNBC Africa crossed a new frontier in business broadcasting on the continent.
CNBC Africa – the sister of FORBES AFRICA in the ABN stable – became the first African broadcaster to beam shows from the JSE. It came on the eve of the company’s seventh anniversary.
“It’s an exciting time; I haven’t stopped smiling since yesterday. It is to the credit of the people around you who have all done a fantastic job,” says Wahi.
CNBC Africa is emulating the example of CNBC in the United States (US), which has broadcast from the New York Stock Exchange since 1995. This move is all part of a bigger plan.
“Our vision is to be in all 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We have to be in all the major exchanges and report from the smaller ones. We need to be able to integrate all these exchanges through information flows. We need to be able to go out and educate people about what markets are,” says Wahi.
The new studio is state of the art. It includes an eight cube video wall, six interview positions and robotic cameras &#8211; which will be fully controlled out of the gallery and will minimize additional camera crew. The main anchor desk, resembling a star, is a copy of the one used both in Europe and the US.
It will host Open Exchange, Power Lunch and Closing Bell, with regular crossings to Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Mauritius, Uganda, Zambia, Namibia, Rwanda, Mozambique, Botswana, Gabon and Ghana.
Jean Landsberg, the head of technical and operations for the ABN Group, traveled to New York and Singapore to check out the latest technology.
“When I traveled to the SGX in Singapore and New York, I got an idea how they put their infrastructure in place… whereas Singapore still link in to their [stock exchange], from the main studio, we will be actually running everything and all the operations from the JSE studios. So it’s a little more advanced than what Singapore is doing,” says Landsberg.
LED technology will be used to reduce the power consumption by the studio lights and the video wall. Landsberg says, as time goes by, small technological frills will be added.
The new technology is in the interest of keeping business people better informed about what’s happening inside Africa’s biggest bourse.

On The Pulse Of The Markets

A few years ago I sat staring out onto the Mediterranean from the wrought iron balcony of an old café clinging onto the crumbling walls of the harbor at Syracuse, Sicily.
I can still taste the sublime ricotta-filled sfogliatella brought to my table with a tiny espresso by the lace-clad owner: the bronze, tightly wrinkled, skin on her wrists glimmering with confectioner’s sugar.
In this way, Sicily was predictable: buzzing mopeds, trembling verandas, and narrow laundry-strewn alleyways. Everywhere I walked I breathed in the smell of clams simmering in olive oil or heavy frying dough emanating from the cloistered alleys reaching up from the seafront.
Yet my journey to the island had taken a far less predictable course. I had reached Syracuse from the deep Pacific waters off Suva, the Fijian capital, an obscure route even for me. I had arrived off the coast of North Africa where I was following the tuna for an investigation into overfishing. Along this storied coastline I had stumbled across quite possibly the last thing I had expected: The sea bounty of one of the world’s most notorious dictators.
Encircling the outer reaches of the island were rows upon rows of aluminum-framed spheres bobbing in the ocean. Complex webs of floating tuna farms, which I discovered were part-owned by none other than the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. This was the summer of 2009. Two and a half years before the colonel would be found cowering in a ditch in Sirte and murdered after his own fashion, in cold blood.
The revelation that Gaddafi was bringing deep red sashimi to my table was a surprise to say the least. I later discovered the fish farms represented a tuna empire stretching far and wide across southern Europe from Malta to Gibraltar, which had turned the Libyan leader and his cohorts into some of the biggest seafood players in the Mediterranean, allowing them to establish partnerships with major Spanish fishing firms and Japanese importers.
My ears pricked up. I wanted to learn more about Gaddafi’s money trail. A few months on from my visit to Syracuse, I found myself in a nightclub in the Kabalagala district of Kampala, where Gaddafi had built the city’s national mosque, listening intently in a dark corner as details were poured out to me of the Libyan revolutionary’s heavy investment in five-star hotels and shopping center construction across Uganda. By this time, details were also, independently, starting to emerge of his multi-billion investments in South Africa. Where did Gaddafi’s financial reach end I wondered? Five years, a revolution and a murder later, it would seem we are all still none the wiser.
Since the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, a small but dedicated task force of lawyers and forensic accountants from Britain, the United States (US) and France have been scouring the globe for the Libyan dictators missing fortune. Tight-knit teams taking on underground bankers and mute government officials on four continents.
Theirs is a thankless task chasing shadows, rumors and, when they get really lucky, spreadsheets. But Gaddafi isn’t the only quarry this small army of investigators have in their sights. As I write this, there are people hard at work tracking down the fortunes of fallen regimes from the deposed Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak to the recently prosecuted former Liberian leader Charles Taylor and the disgraced Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
To lighten the load of a heavy train of thought we could pause to consider the bizarre excesses of our most recent fallen despots. Gaddafi, who we know was partial to sushi and the occasional gold AK47, also had a penchant for baby grand pianos, infinity pools and Pierre Cardin carpets and upholstery. Not to be outdone, Mubarak, more of a tapas man, boasted no less than nine luxury Spanish villas. Ben Ali, rather predictably kept tigers in one of his many palaces and was running out of garage space for his 47 limousines, including an armored Maybach worth $1 million.
In 2014, financial crime among the globe’s fallen dictators broadly relates less to their garish taste in sports car but a complex  range of activities such as tax avoidance or evasion, corruption, bribery, money-laundering, price fixing and drug trafficking. All out embezzlement has many different labels.
But, finding a definition for Hague charge sheets and fighting through the legal minefield to get a prosecution isn’t the biggest challenge. Finding the money after regime change is what takes real time and effort.
Last month, the US froze assets worth $458 million alleged to have been stolen from the country by the former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. A close relative of his admitted to keeping $100 million buried in his home, which we assume, given the bulk of cash, was a large property in itself.
Such an asset freeze could be seen as a major success. Yet Abacha’s iron-fisted military rule reached its zenith in 1996, almost 20 years ago. Nigeria has, in the last few weeks, petitioned the US for the return of the uncovered funds. But the sum is only a large drop in the ocean. After two decades, the whereabouts of the bulk of the estimated $5-billion fortune remains unclear. Nigeria isn’t even certain it has a claim on the US money.
It is a familiar pattern. In the wake of the Arab Spring, the ill-gotten gains hidden away by overthrown regimes remains one of Africa’s greatest modern mysteries. The king of Africa’s nation robbers is undoubtedly the disgraced and deposed Egyptian president, Mubarak, who amassed a fortune for his family, estimated between $40 billion and $70 billion, most of it is still missing. Gaddafi is thought to have taken some $30 billion out of the country.
In 2011, Tunisia’s Ben Ali was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for inciting violence and murder and also convicted of wide scale theft. Efforts to uncover the bulk of his assets painstakingly roll on. What is beyond dispute here is the missing cash and valuables would provide a desperately needed boost for post-Arab Spring states like Tunisia who are hoping for economic recovery.
At an international level there is some intent to reach into the shadows and find the money. The European Union (EU) recently reiterated its claims that the recovery of assets stolen by the former dictators and regimes of Libya, Tunisia and Egypt was a moral and legal imperative. A team is currently working with officials from the Arab Spring countries to find ways of speeding up the process.
The Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR), a UN-World Bank project, also provides training and technical assistance to enable countries stripped of wealth. But its most important role is to foster ties between the countries seeking looted money and those sitting on it. That may simply be fixing meetings between their police, prosecutors and financial-intelligence experts. But there are concerns that the international response has led to only limited success in recovering misappropriated assets.
One country at the center of the money trail is Switzerland.  Ben Ali, like many dictators, liked to visit Switzerland or at least take his money for a holiday there. The Swiss, known for their impenetrable banking system, are in the face of growing pressure, probably doing more than they are given credit for.
In the last few years, Swiss officials have worked with the Tunisian government to recover two executive jets, worth an estimated $30 million, linked to the family of the ousted Ben Ali. Switzerland also quickly froze more than $60 million in funds held in Swiss bank accounts linked to the Tunisian family. In addition, the Swiss government reprimanded and fined three major Swiss banks for improperly handling accounts belonging to family and close friends of Ben Ali. But questions remain around Mubarak’s fortune. The former military leader’s protracted exit may have allowed him precious time to move money around and hide significant parts of his fortune in Switzerland and elsewhere.
According to Swiss officials working on asset recovery matters, the European country has helped return nearly $1.7 billion to countries affected by corruption. Switzerland proposed last month a new law to make it easier to freeze assets stolen and salted away by foreign leaders and return them to their countries of origin.
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Yet as important as it is to follow the money, or the tuna in Gaddafi’s case, and return the misappropriated funds to the people, we cannot endlessly look to the past. The recovery of hard currency will ultimately not be the key factor in determining whether Egypt, Tunisia, Liberia or Libya become more prosperous, democratic nations.
The best thing we can do is gain a deeper understanding of how the money was so effectively stolen in the first place and how it can be prevented in the future. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak was an army man and not a businessman. But, running a country with what was effectively a suspended constitution for 30 years allowed him to feed off every business deal in the country, benefiting from monopolies, bribery fees, red-tape and nepotism.
This applies as much to Tunisia as it does to often forgotten Liberia which claims to still be recovering from Charles Taylor’s grand theft. A few years ago, I interviewed Thomas R. Creal, an accountant from Chicago who has led the search into Charles Taylor’s missing millions for the United Nations.
Retained by Liberia, he and three law firms developed new strategies to follow the money involving filing civil damage claims against companies, governments and international banks that they contend aided Taylor in illegal transactions. The goal, after investigators have succeeded in freezing only around $8 million held by Taylor’s relatives and associates, is to win judgments for Liberia even if Taylor’s accounts cannot be found.
The estimates of Taylor’s hidden wealth from timber and diamond trades run from $280 million to $3 billion. Taylor himself claims to be a pauper. Stephen Rapp, the US ambassador at large for war crime issues and a former chief prosecutor on the case, said the hunt could continue for years.
“You will never find an account listed under Charles Taylor,” he says. “In all of these asset recovery cases of former leaders who have been accused of corruption or worse, it has taken a long time to achieve recovery. So this is not going to end.”
So what of preventative measures? All the plundering we have spoken of here has been linked to one key thing: a political elite’s monopolistic control of regulatory bodies with no accountability to the people they represent.
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As a consequence, state officials have used their resources to suppress institutions, thereby producing dictatorships and a country whose socio-political and economic policies prioritize the interests of the political and economic elite.
With respect to the domination and control of government structures, existing laws needs to be strengthened in order to compel state officials to declare and disclose their assets and bank accounts. The potential for abuse is further exacerbated by the immunity from legal action enjoyed by the political elite across Africa. Changing laws which exempt presidents, governors and their deputies from prosecution while in office would be a significant step in many African nations.
As we know in South Africa, tenderpreneurship is a defining issue. All government contracts should go through public tenders and the lists of bidders and awardees be made publicly available. At the societal level, there also needs to be greater public awareness of what is happening.
Today, this can increasingly be achieved through freedom of information which would allow civil society organizations such as NGOs, the media, and labor unions, as well as individuals and whistleblowers, to challenge state institutions, and the anti-social practices of the government, its representatives and agencies.
In the absence of African leaders volunteering to host a summit dedicated to combatting corruption and establishing civil frameworks to overcome it, the best we can do is look to the African countries who are doing things right.
When he finally leaves this world, focus will inevitably fall on the personal riches of Robert Mugabe and his family. Enriched in recent years by huge diamond finds in the east of Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s treasury has reaped in billions and offered little transparency as to where the money has actually gone. When measured against neighboring Botswana the comparison is stark.
On a scale of zero to 100, where zero counts as highly corrupt and 100 as very clean, Transparency International’s 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index gave Botswana a score of 65. The figure placed the country in 30th position out of 176 countries measured, the highest of any African country. Zimbabwe was given a score of 20, which placed it in 163rd place &#8211; on a par with Equatorial Guinea, and only slightly above Somalia and Sudan.
To understand what has been Botswana’s secret, Gareth Penny, the former CEO of De Beers and the Vice President of the Botswana Economic Advisory Council claims that business can play a role in ensuring transparency.
In his opinion, a stance on corruption doesn’t just have to be written into a constitution but adopted as a source of pride and a means to attract investment and create jobs.
“Botswana has been a democracy since its independence with working opposition groups and real freedom of speech and press and it has been led by strong, democratically elected presidents, who have taken an uncompromising stance on corruption,” he says.
“With the discovery of diamonds by De Beers, government brought in external and respected advisors to negotiate benefits for the country and not for specific individuals. This led to the creation of Debswana, a 50/50 joint venture between De Beers and government, which has been the driving force in Botswana’s economic development over the past 50 years. It is an outstanding example of a public-private partnership, which has acted in the interests of the country.”
But the lead can also be taken by technology. With more than 650 million owning mobile phones in Africa, people are becoming increasingly well connected, in turn providing a powerful opportunity for citizens to access critical information about their parliaments and to report on human rights violations, corruption and poor service delivery.
Crowdsourcing techniques like Kenya’s Ushahidi can be used to report incidents of bribes or corruption. Similar initiatives are springing up all over Africa; with stopthebribes.net in Nigeria, and No bakshish in Cameroon. These platforms allow people to make their voice heard.
In South Africa, where corruption is a growing concern and undermining the popularity of the ruling party, the African National Congress, the Open Democracy Advice Centre has created a platform where citizens can submit freedom of information requests. A data repository has been created online, enabling journalists, analysts and campaigners to utilize this information to hold government to account and campaign for improved service delivery.
ICT has the power to bring the voices of citizens closer to government and is a significant contributor to ensuring that governments serve the interests of their citizens.
To some, this might sound a little idealistic in the face of dictatorships but ICT improves transparency in more fundamental ways. For the new wave of despots and rogues, hiding cash in palace trap doors is becoming increasingly difficult.
Looking at the longer game, the very presence of ICT in government may not immediately decrease corruption and secret activities but it could leave the very thing that investigators burning the midnight oil are looking for: fingerprints and audit trails to ensure quicker prosecutions after a regime change.
Above all though, most African ruling parties and leaders still lack the political will needed to genuinely tackle corruption. Legislative gaps in dealing with corruption must be strengthened across African countries and the enforcement of internal anti-corruption controls within states must be improved.
One thing I would like to see, as someone who has spent years as an investigative journalist, is more quantifiable and hard-hitting studies on the impact of corruption on the poorest people on the continent.
We often only see the eye-watering figures and forget that corruption undermines the delivery of healthcare, public housing, access to water, sanitation and electricity. In an age where finding employment for Africa’s burgeoning youth is paramount, corruption also diverts financial and other resources that could have been used for development with respect to job creation; a fact that the Arab Spring showed can create the ultimate resistance to the corrupt who le

Gaddafi’s Empire Of Tuna Fish  And Hotels In Uganda

Entering the site of the 4,800MW coal-fired Kusile power station in the northeast South African province of Mpumalanga, one has to clear the security checkpoint and forget about taking any unauthorized pictures. The site is large, covering 1,355 hectares, and buzzing with activity.
Abram Masango, the general manager of Kusile with a mechanical engineering background, started out at steel company Columbus Stainless before moving to state-owned power utility Eskom, working on the company’s Hendrina power station, one of the country’s oldest and the only one with 10 units, to establish the $2.4 billion Mpumalanga project. This included refurbishing power stations and constructing the Majuba Rail – running between Ermelo and the Majuba power station.
In 2004, a five-year, $13.1-billion investment plan in the country’s electricity infrastructure was approved by cabinet. This was changed to $22.2 billion for the five years to 2011/2012. Generation projects absorbed around 70% of the funds.
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More recently, state-owned enterprises were allocated $39.1 billion of the public capital expenditure for the next three fiscal years. The public sector’s energy infrastructure will get $18.2 billion of this.
Eskom’s major energy source is coal, but it hopes to bring down its share in the primary energy mix to 70%, from its original 88%, while increasing its nuclear energy portion to between 17 and 25%, all by 2025.
Masango was brought in to run the Kusile project in late 2007. A decision was made to build it in eight years, instead of the standard 10. The team went with a multiple contract approach, divided into 62 packages.
Eskom didn’t feel it had a choice in the fast-tracking of Kusile because of the power shortage the country is experiencing. As for elements falling through the cracks, the team is adamant that managing the project as a world-class one, as well as placing the necessary skills in place, has prevented quality being compromised.
The Unit 2 TG block had to be destroyed and redone because of a quality problem.
“As much as we are fast-tracking, we are not taking a shortcut. We do sometimes have some quality challenges, and we pick them up and then solve them,” says Masango.
“If we compromise on quality, we will kill people.”
Another Eskom project currently underway is the 4,400MW, $10-billion Medupi power station. It is the fourth largest coal plant in the southern hemisphere and the biggest dry-cooled power plant in the world. It was originally slated to start generating electricity in 2011 but there have been numerous delays, ranging from faulty welding to strikes. French company Alstom was contracted to develop the Boiler Protection System (BPS) and Balance of Plant (BOP) control systems which repeatedly failed testing. Siemens was then brought in to work on the BPS for Unit 5 and 6 with Alstom. Alstom’s BOP has since passed the factory acceptance test.
Masango says that Kusile also experienced strikes but managed them better than Medupi.
Both Kusile and Medupi are important due to the power shortage problem in South Africa. It was in 2007 that the country first faced countrywide load shedding. More power emergencies came this year, with load shedding and blackouts.
In 2010, Eskom encountered a funding problem and Kusile could only continue on a skeleton base, while long term commitments continued. Funds were also redirected from Medupi, while Eskom tried to find a solution. In April 2010, the Development Bank of Southern Africa announced a $2 billion loan to Eskom. The World Bank approved another for $3.75 billion.
“The loan is provided to South Africa’s power utility, Eskom, and was brought about by unique circumstances including South Africa’s energy crisis of 2007 and early 2008, and the global financial crisis that exposed the country’s vulnerability to an energy shock and severe economic consequences,” the World Bank said in a statement.
Three billion dollars of the loan was earmarked for Medupi.
The funding plan took two years. It was in 2012 that construction on Kusile resumed at full steam, but not all the components were ready due to contracts having been put on hold. This came with some engineering integration challenges.
Eskom had to take on some of the design elements of the project, while waiting to give out contracts, in order to get part of the project &#8211; mainly the foundation &#8211; to continue. Some contractors had been given limited notice to proceed &#8211; for example placing a contract on the design of a component so that the specs could be given to another company that is responsible for that part of the project.
Kusile faced what Masango calls political, stability and unemployment challenges. It established a contractor academy providing eight months of intensive training for emerging companies in order to equip them with the skills needed to participate in the project.
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) was a big component to consider. Kusile had an agreement with contractors to only bring their core people and then employ 60% from the surrounding communities. With time the team realized a new strategy with procurement conditions, forming joint ventures between large and emerging companies. To date, 409 companies have, in some way, participated in the project at a cost of close to $6.2 billion.
The two weeks of heavy rainfall during March set the project back a month. At the end of April it was almost 60% complete and the working goal is to get the entire plant operational by 2018. Unit 1 will be commissioned the second half of 2015. As of the end of March, construction on Medupi sat at 61%, with $7.4 million of the budget spent. Unit 6 is expected to be synchronized in the second half of 2014.
Due to growth, infrastructure is needed for capacity regardless of whether it’s coal, nuclear or otherwise. Last year a reported $130-million loan from France was granted to Eskom, to help finance its solar power projects. The trick, according to Masango, is trying to have a balanced mix – while bearing in mind that South Africa is still reliant on coal-fired plants.
According to Masango, Kusile has tried to ensure it is environmentally friendly &#8211; incorporating flue gas desulphurization, fabric filter plant, and supercritical design boilers which all decrease the air pollution that the plant emits. Medupi, and possibly some of the other plants, will in the future get these technologies as well.
A lot of the criticism of Eskom is about how the company has been managed.
“I think it’s also time that we [Eskom] go out and tell the public that they have to trust us because we’re doing our utmost best to deliver and make sure we keep the lights on,” says Masango.
Eskom has a lot to prove and only time will tell whether they can truly deliver this time.

The Long Crawl  To Electricity

Solwezi was once a tiny village in northern Zambia, 16 kilometers from the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo, 581 kilometers from Lusaka, and a million miles from the rest of the world. A few hundred people lived off maize for more than 2,000 years. A walk to the nearest village was days away through thick bush. Now, thanks to copper, Solwezi has become one of Africa’s fastest growing towns in a few short years.
“What started as little more than a village, now has a population of half a million,” says Andrew Hickman, the Local Development Officer for the Kansanshi mine, the largest copper mine in Solwezi.
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The two mines near Solwezi, Kansanshi and the Equinox Minerals-owned Lumwana mine, now produce almost 40% of Zambia’s copper; between them they are giving a free market makeover to what was once a tiny village.
Solwezi and copper date back further than the New Testament. Archaeological digs around Solwezi found people traded copper crosses 2,000 years ago. Arabs used the crosses as currency.
Solwezi got back into the business of copper mining in 2005. After years of trial and error Kansanshi, originally a nationalized underground mine, was abandoned when a fissure flooded the shafts. Run by Canada’s First Quantum Minerals, it has expanded since its reopening. It began producing 110,000 tons of copper in 2011 and in 2013 produced 270,724 tons. A new expansion project aims to increase copper capacity to around 400,000 tons by 2015.
Solwezi is not the only mining town to bloom in Zambia. According to the World Bank, Zambia has the largest known reserves of copper in Africa, 6% of the world resource. The country has been exporting copper since the 1920s, but it’s been a rollercoaster ride made more difficult with nationalization, cheap Russian copper and poor economic development.
“Copper production in the country peaked in the 1970s at 700,000 tons and gradually declined to 255,000 tons by 1998, as a result of depressed prices and under-investment in the then state-owned industry. However, as copper production soars on the back of the completion of major projects and also because of the development of the new Trident mine, operated by Canada-based mining company First Quantum Minerals (FQM), Zambia is set to be at the peak of copper production once again,” says Jason Kazilimani Jr, a senior partner at KPMG in Zambia.
Demand for copper is high and expected to grow. The power stations of China alone buy 45% of the world’s copper, says Kazilimani.
It means people and businesses have flocked to Solwezi as if it were the days of the 1849 California Gold Rush. Trucks, buses and taxis veer around potholes in gridlocked traffic. Along the town’s only tar road rises smoke from hundreds of wood fires. The shouts from informal traders, selling anything from cooking pots to roasted nuts, ring the dusty streets. The city is growing; one shack is thrown up after another.
“There is this expectation that we can create full employment for all of them, but it’s impossible. We can only employ 13,000 and these jobs are for semi-skilled and skilled laborers. Our biggest problem is convincing the growing community that we can’t provide jobs for them,” says Hickman.
“On the one hand you have local resentment towards the mine and the idea that foreigners are making millions. On the other you have this huge impact on the community with the social evils like crime, alcohol abuse and gender based violence,” says Bruce Lewis, the head of Kansanshi Corporate Social Responsibility.
Of the 90% of the mining company’s expenditure, 5% is spent in Solwezi. But the town has not been left to fend for itself, claims Mathias Mutupa, the president of the North Western Province Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who is also an entrepreneur.  Kansanshi runs a number of programs with the local chamber of commerce, some include lessons in how to apply for tenders, says Mutupa. He believes the speed at which Solwezi is growing is vital and local business needs to take advantage of it.
“When we started we were giving tenders to locals to kill weeds in our pipeline at KWA 50,000 ($8,000) &#8211; small jobs. Now those companies are winning larger tenders to build houses.”
Solwezi should have cheap costs compared to importing them from the copper belt or internationally. In the last four years, the local tenders awarded have quadrupled. In 2011, we were able to give $22 million worth in tenders to local businesses. We are now seeing $105 million going back towards the local community,” says Hickman.
Production of copper may be strong, but the infrastructure isn’t. It’s the story of good and bad news. The good is that by the end of the year Kansanshi will have completed a smelter which will refine 300,000 tons of treated copper concentrate per year &#8211; a very lucrative and welcome development at a time when African leaders want more self-manufacturing capabilities. The bad news; the highway needed to transport the copper has not been built due to land rights disputes with local authorities. It means, for now, hundreds of trucks will clog the streets of Solwezi on their way to the smelter.
This lack of infrastructure does not hamper Solwezi alone, explains Kazilimani.
“The problem is so serious that, according to an Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic 2011 report on Zambia, investment of at least $16 billion over the next decade is required just to catch up with the rest of the developing world,” says Kazilimani.
Despite this, Zambia has won back its claim to be the copper powerhouse of Africa. There is even talk in Solwezi that another copper belt could be hidden under the soil of Zambia. There is no doubt that the mining companies will find it, eventually.

The Copper Rush

Re-benchmarked, readjusted, refurbished; whichever term you choose to use, Nigeria’s GDP has been given a statistical facelift and the results reveal that the size of its economy has leapfrogged South Africa to become the biggest on the continent.
Twenty four years after its last rebasing exercise, Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has released the country’s new estimate of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Now estimated at $510 billion for 2013, the rebasing effect values Nigeria’s GDP at almost double the previous year’s World Bank estimate.
To many economists, Nigeria’s rise to become the top economy in Africa came as little surprise. Given the delayed rebasing &#8211; usually practiced by countries every few years &#8211; it is widely acknowledged that Nigeria, economically, was probably ahead of South Africa three or four years ago. Whereas previous estimates relied on 1990 as the base year for calculations, the revised estimate uses the year 2010, now taking into account key sectors that were otherwise overlooked, such as telecoms, professional services, and entertainment.
What the NBS has achieved isn’t quite as crude as putting lipstick on a pig, as some have suggested, but perhaps more like reclassifying beauty so the pig is more appealing to look at. Lipstick or no lipstick – it’s still the same pig, just around 93% bigger than previously thought.
Without the context of GDP per capita or developmental statistics, such as life expectancy and adult literacy, it’s been tempting for Nigerians to draw false positives from their nation’s recalculated size. Indeed, with the country’s rising poverty levels, as reported by the same statistics bureau a year earlier, many outside the country have greeted the rebased figure with cynicism. It’s probably the equivalent of that noisy neighbor who boasts of living in the biggest mansion of a small town, bereft of the minor necessities of constant electricity, running water and a paved road to drive to it.
So, does the size of Nigeria’s GDP really matter? The simple answer is, yes, and by a great deal too. A larger GDP places Nigeria at the forefront of conversation regarding Africa’s development, even more so than it has previously.
When global investors look to deploy resources in Africa, Nigeria’s GDP, coupled with its already massive population, means it can&#8217;t be ignored. As the scale of investment nations attract will principally be driven by their economic size, this could make a world of difference. Potentially, Nigeria could receive a larger consideration for investment compared to competing economies, even those viewed as more stable. As outlined in the NBS’s report, Nigeria has achieved a lower debt to GDP ratio, falling from 19% to 11%, thereby, at least in theory, increasing Nigeria’s capacity to borrow and attract higher levels of Foreign Direct Investment.
However, don’t expect Nigeria to displace South Africa as the top investment destination anytime soon. Critical infrastructure such as highways, rail and ports required to attract investment remain insufficient. The country might as well be shouting: “Invest in Nigeria. We may have poor road, port and rail infrastructure, but our GDP is huge.” It won’t convince many as an investment slogan.
For Nigeria to realize the rapid development as achieved by its MINT counterparts, Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey, investment needs to be channelled towards infrastructure development for the benefit of sectors outside oil exportation. Areas such as agriculture and manufacturing need more focus. Increased borrowing power offers the ideal opportunity to attract the required funding for such investments. Only when Nigeria begins to bridge the infrastructure divide will the real impact of its GDP size be felt by the masses. It’s not about the size of the economy but what is done with that size that ultimately counts.
In defence of the NBS, it has never claimed that the new GDP estimates translate into a changed or improved Nigerian economy. The new figures are simply about having better measurements. It’s about providing a better understanding of Nigeria’s economic structure, under which investment decisions can be made, such as increasing Nigeria’s weak non-oil tax revenue base.
For Nigeria to make that much needed leap forward, the stark realities of its income inequality, low GDP per capita and living standards need to be confronted head on. As well as infrastructure, the game changer will be education and up-skilling to put Nigeria’s massively unemployed and underemployed populace to work.
So, while a larger GDP may not immediately equate to the rapid improvement Nigerians have longed for, the rebased figure should kick-start the conversation for which the accelerated development needs. Much credit should be given to the NBS for achieving this feat.
Beyond bragging rights, Nigeria’s rebased GDP offers opportunities for Africa’s giant to really awaken. With Nigeria scheduled for a reweighting of its inflation index by the end of 2014 and another rebasing in 2016, we may well see this pig begin to fly someday.

Will This Pig Fly?

Every few minutes, they touched down at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport. The roads buzzed and hotel lobbies filled as the world arrived for the most important meeting in African business.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) on Africa, hosted in Abuja, was one of the largest in many years. The biggest names in world business, among 1,000 leaders, were there. They included Aliko Dangote, Pravin Gordhan, Paul Kagame, Uhuru Kenyatta, Li Keqiang and Bineta Diop.
This was a meet to check progress from the last meeting in Cape Town and work out what needs to be done ahead of the next.
Nigeria hosting the gathering reflected its success and trials. In one way it was a celebration after the country was elevated to Africa’s largest economy after the rebasing of its GDP. On Nigeria’s rebased GDP, a wide cross section of investors and prospective entrants confirm that investing in Nigeria has become a priority.
“There is undoubtedly huge potential in this country and the rest of Africa respectively. The real power will, however, only materialize when we get plans into motion and make things work,” says Julian Roberts, the Group Chief Executive of Old Mutual.
On the other side of the coin, the country is still plagued by poor infrastructure and unrest. In Abuja there have been deadly bomb attacks and further north, the Islamist militant group Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls.
It meant public offices and schools closed from May 7 to May 9. Security was beefed up as police squads threw up checkpoints. But, the world made its way to Abuja to tap into Nigeria’s burgeoning market. Investors contributed $21.3 billion in foreign direct investment last year and $2.5 billion in January and February this year alone.
Expectations were high in spite of the difficulties. The forum was set to discuss innovative structural reforms and sustainable investments for creating jobs and prosperity.
“The need to create jobs is a global problem. All countries around the world are concerned about job creation. In Africa, the unemployment problem is compounded by the youthful population and pending demographic transition. Africa’s population is very young…  making African leaders face special challenges,” says Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan.
So, what has changed since the previous forum in Cape Town?
In spite of impressive growth, many African economies have yet to see broad-based prosperity. There are also issues of security, infrastructure, skills, education and health.
Africa’s alarming youth unemployment story is often told in parallel with growth. The youth account for 60% of all of Africa’s unemployed, according to the World Bank. Sub-Saharan Africa’s unemployment rate is at 6% in comparison with the world average of 5%, according to the African Development Bank. The problem is that youth unemployment in most African countries occurs at more than twice the adult rate.
A defective educational system, lack of vocational guidance and training could be to blame.
Nigeria, West Africa’s leading economy is even plagued by intermittent strikes in the classroom.
So, what will WEF achieve?
“It is not just about growth, it’s about the right kind of growth and participants’ focus will not be limited to growing Africa’s economy, but will also highlight means of doing so in an inclusive manner,” says WEF’s head of Africa, Elsie Kanza.
“This meeting is creating tremendous opportunity in sub-Saharan Africa and the continent at large. These opportunities will help to break down barriers and open up new frontiers for business. The theme of this year’s forum is very apt as this is what we are working tirelessly on presently. The power of these forums should not be underestimated,” says Jim Ovia, the $900-million banking veteran and FORBES AFRICA cover in June last year.
Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to remain the world’s second fastest growing region &#8211; a result of more efficiency in resource utilization, better governance and rising domestic demand. Challenges and opportunities shaping Africa’s growth outlook are often under-estimated. These issues went under the microscope at the forum.
Nigeria’s finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, says infrastructural and logistical challenges will continue to hamper the growth of the continent. West African leaders drew up plans to build highways to boost intra-Africa trade, as has been seen in East Africa.
Kenya has signed a $3.6 billion Mombasa-Nairobi railway deal with China. The railway will connect Kenya with the rest of the region and open up trade within East Africa.
Security in Nigeria was also on the agenda with the schoolgirl abduction in the headlines. Jonathan thanked the international community for their support on the issue but questions still hang over what the government will do.
It was announced by Okonjo-Iweala that a sum of $10 million has been approved by the state for a safe school project. A further $10 million will be provided by Nigerian business. This is seen as a move to improve security in Nigerian schools.
Lack of power in Africa poses a major threat to economic growth. Nigeria’s parlous power sector and power privatization process, the biggest on the continent yet, has spurred global interest.
“We are getting somewhere and it will not be an overnight transformation. We are excited about the transformation this sector will experience and urge Nigerians to have some belief and patience in the process,” says Okonjo-Iweala.
Trade between Africa and China is also expected to continue to grow.
“This is definitely the world’s largest inclusive growth. Africa needs to develop its infrastructure and industries while China boasts a stronger and spare capability of investment and construction in this area. Thus, the economies of China and Africa are highly complementary and both sides’ development is each other’s opportunity. China and Africa shall complement each other in mutually beneficial co-operation to give a stronger impetus to each other’s development,” says Li Keqiang, the premier of China.
Technology can also drive the continent’s economy.
“A vast number of people have been digitally empowered and are more open to economic participation. Getting this critical mass to act accordingly should be a stronger focus. Therein lies an opportunity,” says Hendrik du Toit, the CEO of Investec Asset Management.
WEF also announced so-called Global Growth Companies (GGCs) in Africa. These are 16 high growth companies on the continent with innovative revenue growth and sound corporate governance. The selected companies are: Seplat Petroleum Development Company (Nigeria), Computer Warehouse Group (Nigeria), Interswitch Limited (Nigeria), Nagode Group (Nigeria), UAC of Nigeria (Nigeria), Notore Chemical Industries (Nigeria), Nation Media Group (Kenya), Bidco Oil Refineries (Kenya), GML (Mauritius), Growthpoint Properties (South Africa), KZN Oils (South Africa), Net1 UEPS Technologies (South Africa), Tekkie Town (South Africa), Capitec Bank (South Africa) Webber Wentzel (South Africa) and Simba Group (Uganda).
WEF and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development set a joint task force to redesign financing for Africa and developing economies. According to Development Initiatives, an independent organization working on poverty alleviation, approximately $1.7 trillion flows from the developed to the developing world. The task force will redeploy the finance to key sectors of the economies that will benefit the most.
For now, Africa waits in anticipation to see whether the proof is in the pudding.

Tag: June 2014

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