How do you make science fun? Just ask 36-year-old vodka entrepreneur Sibusiso Sibisi.
With an unquestionable flair for organizing events and parties – most of them in his backyard growing up – instead of studying event management, he went on to study analytical chemistry for his BSc degree. He then sanguinely mixed the two.
Today, he makes vodka that gets consumed at parties country-wide in South Africa.
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Born and bred in Kagiso, a township not far from Krugersdorp, a mining town in the south of Johannesburg, South Africa, Sibisi launched his own brand, Distinkt Vodka, in 2016.
Keen to hear his story, I head to Kagiso to meet him. It takes me 30 minutes to locate his address, using maps on my phone and eventually realizing the need to update the GPS in my car, an exercise that would have saved me a lot of time and petrol.
Outside his home, a black delivery van is parked next to his swanky MINI Cooper. Sibisi, equally sleek, in a suit, emerges, welcomes me inside, and leading me to a bar in his garage, offers a shot of his Distinkt Vodka.
Sampling it with a dash of lemon and soda, it’s a good taste of the interview that is to follow.
Sibisi grew up in a large household with several family members. He didn’t have a privileged upbringing; the first time he got to sleep in his own bed was when he was 18 years old, after he moved with his mother to a new house in the same area within Kagiso.
After high school, he pursued a national diploma in analytical chemistry at the University of Johannesburg, a path he chose goaded on by college career counsellors who thought he had the right analytical abilities.
“To be honest, I hated analytical chemistry because it did not go with who I was,” says Sibisi.
His heart was elsewhere.
As a student, Sibisi enjoyed organizing and hosting events, in the same house I meet him for this interview. He was popular for his, although-humble, backyard parties and for simply, having fun.
When he told people he was studying chemistry, it always surprised them.
But as he pursued his studies, he realized he actually liked analytical chemistry; studying how things came to be, such as vodka or even a bar of soap.
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But Sibisi still struggled to acquire the diploma, dropping out after four years, as he had lost interest and wasn’t sure if he really did want to study. He called his mother and told her he wanted to work instead. But that too was to be short-lived.
“I started working at a call center for a bank. [But] I realized I needed to graduate because it wasn’t nice saying the same things all day; that’s how I went back and graduated in 2008,” he says.
Soon after graduating, he worked as a laboratory technician, then supervisor and manager, going through all the motions of working in a lab. Sibisi worked hard and it was recognized by his employers.
“A lab is a place where you get to talk to yourself a lot because it is not active and vibrant like many industries. You are on your own and have to focus,” he says.
“All this time, I was thinking I had acquired so much knowledge in university, I’m acquiring knowledge now in the field, I know how most of these things come about. [But] what am I doing about it? That is how I went into the lab and started experimenting.”
This he accomplished, using the Chemin incubator program labs at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
He looked into the alcohol industry, researched the volume of alcohol consumed by people, especially the youth, on weekends, and the sales potential of such an opportunity.
He also realized that this could be a revenue-spinner for South Africa, a major importer of liquor.
Sibisi saw an opportunity in the vodka market and knew he had to target his own country, he says pointing his fingers to the ground.
The first beverage he developed was a beer prototype, then a brandy prototype, followed by a gin prototype. He developed the first vodka prototype in 2012 and decided on vodka, adding that it is one of the few quality products in the market.
“The liquor market is very saturated, even worse with the vodka market because there are many ways to make vodka, but there’s very few ways to make good vodka,” laughs Sibisi.
His knowledge of chemistry more than came in handy.
<div id="attachment_36010" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-36010" class="wp-image-36010 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Vodka-182-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="682" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Vodka-182-1024x682.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Vodka-182-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Vodka-182-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Vodka-182-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Vodka-182.jpg 1241w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Sibusiso Sibisi. Photograph by Motlabana Monnakgotla.</div>
Distinkt is made using grain and potatoes, among other things. Sibisi buys the potatoes from a farmer in the North West province of South Africa, after which he mashes them, and then boils them at high temperatures. The liquid is strained from the potatoes, and fermented.
Soon after the fermentation process, it is distilled and filtered three times for purity. He takes what’s left of it, and tastes the alcohol content. If it is high, he uses purified water to dilute the alcohol, if it is low, it is redistilled to have the exact desired concentration of alcohol. It is then tested again. If there is an anomaly, the process is repeated before the vodka is bottled and packaged.
“This proudly South African vodka has reached most of Gauteng and other big towns in other provinces [in the country] and is selling at a faster rate than it was before,” beams Sibisi.
“We are currently in a few Pick n Pay liquor outlets and Ultra liquors across South Africa and in most township bottle stores, pubs and clubs.”
Distinkt is currently produced in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal and a plant in Germiston in Johannesburg.
I had downed a shot of vodka and had to drive back to the office, with the GPS for company. How I wished the interview had been on a Friday afternoon.

Vodka-188

The Party Animal In The Lab

Bottles of perfume or liquor are standard items in suitcases coming home from a trip to America. But when Juliana Rotich, Co-founder and Executive Director of Ushahidi, heads into customs in Nairobi, immigration officials balk at the circuit boards packed into her bags. Rotich laughs when recalling her explanations to officials about her unusual haul – they  help facilitate prototyping new tech solutions in Africa.
Rotich is part of the vanguard of African techies creating ‘by Africans, for Africans’ solutions that respond to the local context and problems that ambitious coders and ordinary cell phone users alike face on the continent. Rather than innovations and technology made ‘for the developing world’, what they are tending toward, says Rotich, is more collaboration.
“Not so much developing for but developing with, which will result in better products that have more impact,” she says.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-6271" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/NexExpo_Unesco-1-of-1-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
The 36-year-old Kenyan, who studied and worked in the United States (US), says she feels most at home in the MediaLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which she calls ‘nerdvana’) where she is a fellow, and also at the iHub (an innovation hub for the technology community) in Nairobi.
The flow of information and new connections in Africa has been tremendous in the past decade: new flight routes allow us to go from country to country without a time-consuming connection through Europe.
Yet the Internet, the defining medium of our age, remains out of regular reach for many Africans because of infrastructure issues with older technology. In addition are electricity failures and surges that wreak havoc with productivity and damage expensive equipment. Even in cities widely electrified and where offices have some sort of backup plan, efficiency is curtailed when every person has to reboot and reconnect on a regular basis.
“Despite leaps of progress, one of the showstoppers is when the electricity goes out,” says Rotich.
Lack of Internet also drives up related costs by forcing people to resort to costly telephone calls and SMSes, when using Skype or WhatsApp is virtually free with online access. Enter BRCK, a high-performance modem with a battery big enough to last a full workday, which can charge multiple devices, and can take power from a wall socket, car battery, or just about
any source.
It’s not the sort of solution that’s wanted or needed in cities where continuous electricity and public Wi-Fi are taken for granted.
BRCK is rugged enough to protect its circuits from dust, as well as from ‘dirty’ voltage that can fry computers during a power surge. Multiple SIMs can be used to search for the fastest connection, and aid travelers using various Internet providers in different countries. Financed in part by a Kickstarter campaign, and retailing at $199, the first batch of BRCKs shipped in May.
“If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere,” says Rotich.
Besides BRCK, Ushahidi is the other product Rotich is part of. Ushahidi, which means ‘testimony’ in Swahili, is the name of both the open source crowdmapping software as well as the not-for-profit tech company that provides it. Last year, Ushahidi won a prestigious MacArthur award as a Creative Organization.
Ushahidi was born out of the problematic 2008 elections in Kenya. With traditional media houses shutting down, it was a website initially developed to map reports of post-election violence in Kenya based on eyewitness reports submitted via the web and mobile phones.
More than 45,000 crowdsourced Ushahidi maps have since appeared all over the world, in more than 30 languages, on topics as diverse as human rights abuse, environmental devastation, and where to find the best burger in town.
Ushahidi is registered as a non-profit in the US (with nodes all over, including the key one in Kenya), making it a bit of an
odd duck.
“The money is not in the code – it’s in the expertise to use that open source code, to provide that personalized experience,” says Rotich.
So while Ushahidi software is open source, the organization offers consulting services to large organizations, including United Nations agencies and large nongovernmental organizations that require expertise for implementation. This work makes Ushahidi more sustainable.
“We do get grants, but the percentage of external income is starting to shift,” says Rotich.
It’s hard to get Rotich to talk specifically about her own role at Ushahidi, as she refers to all their successes from a collective point of view. That said, she is the group’s most public face and voice, speaking at TED (a global set of conferences), Design Indaba (held in March in Cape Town), the World Economic Forum, and other groups of movers and shakers. When asked if she envisioned herself in this role, she opens her eyes wide and shakes her head to say no, momentarily speechless, but says it’s an honor to share her organization’s story with people who haven’t heard of it.
“It’s an opportunity to reach more people with an idea we hope can interest them. We don’t have a media budget; we don’t have ads on TV,” she says.
Last year, both of Rotich’s grandmothers passed away, and when she speaks of the irreplaceable loss, her pain is palpable. But she draws strength in remembering their lessons that she has integrated into her life and work, lessons such as the importance of fixing things and helping others.
“The act of making is something that is intrinsic to African culture,” she says, adding that it’s important not to look at the act of making as something beneath you.

Tag: Liquor

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