With just hours to go, the prevailing mood in Britain was hardly celebratory. On streets washed by rain, the number of tourists in London’s capital seemed below the average for the time of year. The last minute preparations were far from frenzied and all that anyone was certain of was that the opening ceremony involved live sheep.
But then the brutal cynicism that greets every major event in Britain was washed away by an event that left many around the world scratching their heads. The spectacular, which included dancing nurses, engineers, Shakespeare, James Bond and a cameo from the Queen, was a satisfying antidote to the blanket corporate sponsorship that had alienated many Londoners ahead of the games.
<div id="attachment_1187" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1187" class="size-medium wp-image-1187" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149916643_10-300x203.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="203" />WINDSOR, ENGLAND &#8211; AUGUST 02: Sizwe Ndlovu, John Smith, Matthew Brittain and James Thompson of South Africa celebrate winning the gold medal for the Lightweight Men&#8217;s Four final on on Day 6 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Eton Dorney on August 2, 2012 in Windsor, England. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)</div>
The ceremony—which saw a celebration of the National Health Service, the industrial revolution and modern day British multiculturalism—combined wit, elegance and a theatricality. It confounded a widespread belief in the country that the event would be an expensive and embarrassing disaster.
A security fiasco, which saw G4S, the lead contractor, admit with weeks to go, that it had not hired enough staff to man the games, saw the army drafted in to run X-ray scanners and patrol the venues. Last minute problems on some of the major routes into London raised fears of transport chaos, but, though the infrastructure creaked under the weight of the additional hundreds of thousands of users, it held—just.
Even the weather, which had appeared apocalyptic, from March through to July, turned. The ceaseless rain gave way to fierce sunshine as summer smiled—although the hailstorms did return to add spice to the cycling road race.
<div id="attachment_1186" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1186" class="size-medium wp-image-1186" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149948438_10.jpg.-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Track &amp; Field: 2012 Summer Olympics: Kenya Ezekiel Kemboi victorious after winning Men&#8217;s 3000M Steeplechase Final gold at Olympic Stadium. London, United Kingdom 8/5/2012 CREDIT: John W. McDonough (Photo by John W. McDonough /Sports Illustrated/Getty Images) (Set Number: X155268 TK11 R1 F174 )</div>
The early stages were not encouraging for African teams. Nigerian slalom kayak hopeful, Johny Akinyemi, fell at the first hurdle, accumulating too many penalties in his two runs in the K1 event and failing to reach the semi-finals.
The Nigerian basketball team, which qualified at the eleventh hour for their first appearance at an Olympic Games, showed some promise, but came up against a rampant USA ‘Dream Team’, who notched up an Olympic record winning spread of 156-73. One of the country’s two individual medalists from the Beijing Olympics in 2008—Chika Chukwumerije—had to wait until close to the end of the event to try to better his bronze in the +80kg Taekwondo.
Not that it mattered—London’s large Nigerian community has been vocal in its support of its team. A three day conference saw ministers and some of the country’s leading businesspeople gather in the Dorchester Hotel, while around town other delegations turned up to show off their country’s investment opportunities.
Juliano Máquina, Mozambique’s light-flyweight boxing hopeful, was soundly beaten by a clinical Aleksandar Aleksandrov, the Bulgarian took apart the Olympic debutant over the three rounds to win on points 22-7. Thomas Essomba, from Cameroon, the other African fancied in the weight category, put in a solid first round win, but failed to make the quarter finals, beaten by the Northern Irishman Paddy Barnes.
South Africa picked up some early successes in and on the water. The South African men’s lightweight four picked up a gold in the rowing, while Cameron van der Burgh and Chad le Clos were the surprise winners in the 100m breaststroke and the 200m butterfly, respectively. The latter, saw le Clos beat the world’s best—the American, Michael Phelps—by a fingernail, and made a hero of his father, Burt le Clos, whose hoarse and emotional post-swim interview with BBC quickly went viral.
<div id="attachment_1189" style="width: 215px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1189" class="size-medium wp-image-1189" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149585173_10-205x300.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="300" />LONDON, ENGLAND &#8211; JULY 31: Chad le Clos of South Africa celebrates after winning the gold in the Men&#8217;s 200m Butterfly final on Day 4 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Aquatics Centre on July 31, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)</div>
As the first week drew to a close, it was only South Africans who had made it to the podium.
Hopes were boosted when the Kenyans arrived. With three Olympic champions—Pamela Jelimo, Brimin Kipruto and Asbel Kiprop—and four world champions—Vivian Cheruiyot, Ezekiel Kemboi, Edna Kiplagat and captain David Rudisha—named in their squad for the London games, there was no doubt the East Africans had come to win. Rudisha, an 800m runner, was set to follow in the footsteps of his father by participating in the 4x400m relay—the team’s pedigree crossed generations. In Beijing, Kenya was the highest ranking African country in the medal tables, taking six golds and 14 medals overall.
This time, they rejected the offer of a training base in Bristol, to the west of London, preferring to remain in Kenya to train at altitude right up to the last minute.
Cheruiyot was the first in action, taking on a strong field, including the Ethiopian Olympic champion, Tirunesh Dibaba, in the 10,000m final. In the end, it was the Ethiopian’s day, kicking ahead to win gold, with Cheruiyot trailing in third behind her compatriot Sally Kipyego.
It was the Ethiopians again who denied Kenya in the women’s marathon; Tiki Gelana beat Priscah Jeptoo by five seconds to claim gold in the thrashing rain.
The highly fancied men’s team fared even worse in the 10,000m. On home turf, the British runner, Mo Farah, took gold ahead of the American Galen Rupp and Ethiopia’s Tariku Bekele, with the Kenyans trailing outside of the medal positions. It was the first time since 1984 that an African runner had not won the event—although some were quick to claim Mogadishu-born Farah for the continent. In a rather ugly series of attacks in the run-up to the games, the right-wing press had railed against Britain’s foreign-born competitors using the epithet “plastic Brits”. Farah’s response was definitive. Having taken gold, a journalist asked him whether he would have preferred to have won the medal for Somalia.
“Look, mate,” Farah replied, “This is my country.”
The Kenyans had to wait until Sunday afternoon to finally break their duck, Ezekiel Kemboi, a policeman facing an assault charge back in his home country, stormed ahead in the last lap of the 3,000m steeplechase, after his compatriot, Brimin Kipruto, had fallen. At the end of the race, Kemboi announced that he would retire from the discipline to focus on the marathon.
<div id="attachment_1185" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1185" class="size-medium wp-image-1185" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/150115672_10-300x214.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="214" />LONDON, ENGLAND &#8211; AUGUST 10: Meseret Defar of Ethiopia celebrates as she crosses the finish line ahead of Jepkemoi Jepkemoi Cheruiyot of Kenya and Tirunesh Dibaba of Ethiopia celebrates winning gold in the Women&#8217;s 5000m Final on Day 14 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Olympic Stadium on August 10, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)</div>
Amongst the running contingent was Guor Marial, whose story captured the imagination of many in the international media in the run up to the games. Marial was one of four competitors who joined the parade of athletes underneath the Olympic flag. Three—Churandy Martina, Philip Elhage and Rodion Davelaar—are previous competitors from the Netherlands Antilles, which recently became a municipality of the Netherlands.
Marial, in his first Olympics, was born in South Sudan, and turned down an offer from Khartoum to run for the north. Granted refugee status by the US when he was 16, the marathon runner lost many of his relatives in the vicious civil war that saw millions displaced. With South Sudan newly independent and lacking an organizing committee, the decision by officials to allow Marial a spot marks the first time an athlete from Africa’s 54th nation has been able to compete.
While stories like that of Marial have provided great examples of the redemptive power of sport, the event continues to raise questions about the ability of athletes from the continent to be able to make their mark. While the raw talent and commitment of African competitors has seen them dominate a few important sports in recent decades, the London games more than any other may have shown that top-level sport is becoming so clearly bifurcated between the haves and the have-nots. The dominance of the US and China in the medal tables showed that financial clout can be the difference between a victor and an also-ran.
The press fell in love with the stories of hardship and graft of willing amateurs like Hamadou Djibo Issaka, the rower from Niger who took up the sport only months before the games. He worked as a gardener and swimming pool attendant in Niamey and trained in an old fishing boat. The 35-year-old finished a distant last in the single sculls. While narratives like his provide great examples of the vaunted “Olympic Spirit”, they also highlight the vast discrepancies in resources. British rowers, who had one of their best years at home, are the product of a well-established network of training facilities, coaches, equipment and finance.
<div id="attachment_1188" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1188" class="size-medium wp-image-1188" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149771045_10-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />LONDON, ENGLAND &#8211; AUGUST 03: Tirunesh Dibaba of Ethiopia celebrates winning gold in the Women&#8217;s 10,000m Final on Day 7 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Olympic Stadium on August 3, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images)</div>
In the end, African hopes fell in the most part to domestic competitors, as British athletes, fired up by the support in London, won through in events that would normally be dominated by the continent’s finest.
Although much noise was made around the ‘Africa Village’ hospitality area about a potential bid by Durban for 2024, with no African countries on the shortlist for 2020, it will be more than a decade before anyone on the continent will be able to claim that home advantage.
Kenya’s prime minister, Raila Odinga, threw his country’s hat into the ring for a bid, reminding press that the country is not only home to some of the world’s greatest runners, elite athletes already flock to the high altitude training centres in Iten, in the Rift Valley. However, major international investment—and a change in international perceptions of the country, and the continent more broadly—would be needed for that bid to take off. It is unlikely to have been enhanced by the closure of the ‘Africa Village’ early due to unpaid debts, caused by the failure of many African Olympic committees to turn up and take out space.

From African Grit  To Plastic Brits

Stacked plastic boxes of Dutch Wax, the colorful patterned fabric ubiquitous in West African communities, obstruct the cramped staircase of Yinka Shonibare’s studio, a converted warehouse in east London.
Now a signature of his work, the tangled history of the material encapsulates some of the themes central to the artist’s canon. Originally based on Indonesian batik printing techniques, the fabric was commercialized by Dutch and Belgian traders in the 19th century and sold on to West Africa in huge quantities. Since then, Chinese manufacturers have begun to capture large swathes of the market.
Dutch Wax is, like Shonibare himself, a cultural chimera, a combination of global influences. Born in the United Kingdom in 1962 to Nigerian parents, Shonibare moved to Lagos at the age of three and returned at 17 to complete his education. Today, his joyfully subversive work mixes quintessentially British iconography with African accents, taking aim at a broad range of domestic and international issues.
“My point is that identities are often made up of different influences from around the globe&#8230; no culture is actually static,” he says of his chosen material. “A lot of cultures actually take and reuse things. But there is a romantic wish to freeze culture in a sort of time warp. Even within the continent of Africa, no such thing [as stasis] actually existed within traditional cultures. People always incorporated and took on new things as part of a growing, dynamic, living culture.”
<div id="attachment_1151" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1151" class="wp-image-1151 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/143776123_10-681x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="713" />Artwork Homeless Man by Yinka Shonibare</div>
He is comfortable with the Nigerian-British or British-Nigerian labels he is routinely given. The world accepts “hyphenated identities” as does he.
“I have no wish to run away from my identity. I’m informed by history. I’ve been defined by a colonial encounter with Nigeria… So, I enthusiastically explore that historical fact in my work because to stand outside of it would be to delude myself. If I don’t define myself by it, then others will. So I might as well do it first.”
Shonibare resisted definition from an early stage. At art school in London during the last days of the Soviet Union, he began working on art that explored perestroika. His tutors, however, saw an African artist and with that, came preconceptions. He was asked, he says, why he was not producing “authentic” African art.
That was difficult, he says for “somebody who grew up in a cosmopolitan city like Lagos, watching Sesame Street on television. I don’t think people understand that here. They think Africa is still the jungle. It’s coming from that mentality and that’s why I thought I’ll give you ‘Africa’, but I’ll give you Africa with a twist.”
“At the time, I guess I was facing the world and trying to understand how I was perceived by it. I learned through that process that actually, as a black man in Europe, anonymity was rather difficult. Now things are different, but I think then, whatever I did, people would have said ‘that’s a black man who doesn’t make work about being black.’”
Shonibare’s reaction to this early pigeonholing created the signatures he uses to this day—British imagery remade. One set of photographs cast Shonibare himself as a Victorian dandy. Another of his most popular pieces—which had a long residency on the empty fourth plinth beneath Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square—was a scale model of Admiral Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory: its sails made of Dutch Wax. The work is frequently playful, an ironic comment on aspects of European society and globalization through the eyes of someone with a “hyphenated” identity.
“I think for me, it’s just generally amusing. No-one ever questioned Picasso’s obsession with African clichés—why can’t I do the same to European culture? There was a fetishization of African culture by a lot of modernist European artists. So as an African artist now, I can do the same to European culture with a lot of amusement,” says Shonibare.
Post-colonialism and the colonial ties that link global Africans like Shonibare to Europe remain a major theme in his work. Unlike some of his contemporaries, however, he has avoided sliding into bleak assessments of the crushed optimism of early post-colonialism. The reason, once again, is his refusal to fall into line with preconceptions and labels.
“It’s extremely important not to be anybody’s victim. Power does not lie in victimhood, so you are more assertive if you are in control of your own image and your own culture. One group does not have a monopoly on aesthetic pleasure. Anyone has the power to express themselves in the way they want to. I dictate the terms of my own work,” he says.
In the same vein, he refuses to appear to be suffering for his art. Shonibare is wheelchair-bound after contracting Transverse Myelitis in his youth.
“I think what’s normally expected is some sort of sob story of the victim. That’s not the narrative I’m particularly interested in; especially where historically my people have been oppressed and disempowered. Why should I fall for another victim narrative, when I could actually take control of the means of production?”
“That sounds very Marxist,” he laughs. “The artist is meant to be some kind of van Gogh who will die with no money and suffer generally, but I actually think in 2012 that’s just old hat. It’s not interesting. You have to take control.”
Art, he says, has been a spiritually and commercially fulfilling career—although his father would still have preferred him to become a lawyer. It’s one that continues to provide new outlets for his musing on identity and culture. For the next five years, his latest work—a ballerina dressed in bright purple and green Dutch Wax fabric, will rotate in a glass bubble on the corner of the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. In August, he curated a major exhibition of African art and culture at the opera house, overseeing, among other performances, an African ensemble performing Handel’s Messiah in the heart of Britain’s cultural establishment.

Yes, But Is It African Art?

Kirsten Goss, a Durban-born entrepreneur, jewelry designer and mother has quickly become an award-winning African brand with stores in Johannesburg and London. There’s no stopping the strong-willed, go-getting Goss who has high aspirations and wants to continue expanding her exclusive jewelry chain with Cape Town also in her sights.
Goss has agents in San Francisco and New York and was recently the new face of Bombay Sapphire in South Africa. She now plans to expand to Asia.
A qualified jewelry designer and gemologist, her first flagship store was opened in London in 2002 and she recently opened another in Johannesburg. In 2009, Goss opened a state-of-the-art goldsmith studio in Durban where six designers craft her jewelry.
The London-based Kirsten Goss gallery is based in the trendy area of South Kensington on a picturesque cobbled path. Exclusive collections are heavily embellished, simple cuts which grab your attention. The pieces appeal to the independent, sophisticated woman who wants something unique. The exquisite styles are breathtaking, the gems dazzling; silver and gold jewelry with embedded precious stones.
Being passionate about the designs is important. Goss is meticulous about her work. She makes sure that every individual piece is handcrafted and personally designed, to fulfill her pride in the Kirsten Goss brand.
It took several attempts to catch the driven jewelry entrepreneur, who we managed to track down in Hong Kong. She explains her latest plans to break into the Asian market with a “pop-up” style fair.
When starting her business she took the risk and established herself as a small boutique firm which has now gone international. “We are doing an unusual thing, most people use the wholesale route to get ahead,” says Goss.
She said that her grandmother, Erica Goss, influenced her to start her own business.
“My role model is my grandmother who was a real frontier lady. She was a well-educated, typical Irish living in Africa, very frontier-orientated. She was somebody who was well-traveled. She taught me a lot,” says Goss.
“I started my business in London when I had a small child and then moved back to South Africa and visited London every month. My grandmother taught me you could live anywhere in the world. It’s all about passion, it’s all about ambition, it’s all about you and I think she was somebody who I drew a lot of inspiration from in my life,” she adds.
The designer’s Scandinavian and Irish heritage and her South African upbringing have all played a major part in influencing her designs. The use of exuberant colors clearly shows how she is influenced by her African heritage.
Goss supports a number of charities including the Make A Difference (MAD) Foundation; Sunflower Fund (leukemia); Save the Children, Enkuliso and Ekujabuleni nursery schools and the Wildlands South Africa. Her father was active in rhino conservation.
She was recently asked to design 12 pieces for the Spirit of Liberty exhibition in London. She has designed pieces for the Royal Wedding and Prince Willliam’s special birthday party.
“My dream is to have five to six galleries around the world in different locations and everybody knows that when going to a Kirsten Goss gallery they will find a truly unique piece,” says Goss.

An African Diamond  Sparkles In London

If it weren’t true, it would sound too far-fetched to make up. The life of Penny Streeter, chief executive of healthcare staffing conglomerate A24 Group, is the archetypal rags-to-riches story of a woman who was left with nothing, didn’t give up, started small and made it big. She revolutionized the recruitment sector by turning it from a 9-to-5 business into a round-the-clock operation that dispatches temporary health professionals at as little as an hour’s notice.
Born in Zimbabwe to British parents and educated in South Africa, Streeter, who dropped out of school at the age of 16, ended up in recruitment by chance. After moving to London as a young adult, she trained as a beauty therapist but was soon looking for something more fulfilling.
“I decided this wasn’t going anywhere. I walked into an employment agency and told them I was looking for a job. They said, ‘Fantastic, we got one for you here’. That’s how I got into recruitment,” she says.
A go-getter by nature, Streeter was quickly promoted to branch manager. When the firm opened a second outlet, she hired her mother, Marion, to run it.
“We used to compete with each other about bringing in the most sales,” Streeter remembers. But one day, both mother and daughter were fired—they cost the firm too much in commission. They had worked themselves out of a job.
Irked by the limits of being an employee, Streeter decided to go it alone. She got a £30,000 ($46,611) bank loan. Her mother borrowed another £10,000 ($15,537). But their timing was bad. Within months of opening office recruitment company Elite Personnel in 1989, the United Kingdom (UK) went into a major recession. Demand for her services dried up almost overnight.
“It was a complete and utter disaster. The one day it was going well, the next day we had queues of people looking for jobs. We carried on and on, borrowing money, trying to dig ourselves out of this hole and eventually went bust,” she says.
By 1992, Streeter had lost every penny and was spiraling into debt. The furniture and cars belonging to her luxury offices in a posh part of London had been repossessed. But it wasn’t only bad timing that caused the firm’s failure. It was also “total lack of business experience”, Streeter admits. She had gone in, guns blazing and overspent.
To make matters worse, Streeter’s personal life suffered a tremendous setback. She went through a divorce which left her with nothing and—pregnant with her third child—was forced to move into a homeless shelter in a part of London her brother thought too dangerous to park his car. She had hit rock bottom.
Out of worry for the welfare of her children—“I thought, ‘How the hell do I ever bring up my kids in this environment? They are going to be drug dealers!’”—Streeter decided to give the recruitment industry another try in 1995, this time with only one asset: her determination. A value, she says, her parents instilled in her.
“At home, there was no such thing as can’t. I am lucky to be a confident person, so I had a strong belief that I could do it on my own. I knew I had to,” she says.
She started another venture, Ambition 24hours. This time, she took a different approach. Instead of getting a loan to kit out opulent offices, she rented a rickety desk in a corner of the office of a car parts dealership.
“I learnt everything from what happened [with Elite Personnel]. We didn’t buy anything. Every penny we earned we put back into the business,” she explains.
Streeter and her mother took turns working and minding the children. On weekends, they organized children’s discos to make cash.
“That’s how we raised income. We would literally earn some money to pay for a newspaper advert to recruit staff to our books and pay our phone bill. We knew we had to make instant money,” she remembers.
Ambition 24hours first recruited for the financial services industry, but Streeter’s big break came when she spotted a market gap in 24/7 medical staffing services.
“All the established agencies opened at 9 a.m. and closed at 5 p.m., including all weekend. But healthcare requires shifts around the clock, and you don’t know in advance that someone is going to fall sick,” she says.
Even though entering a market saturated by successful recruiters was a risk, her groundbreaking model took off fast, supplying round-the-clock services across England.
It was the business that within a few years would turn her into one of the most influential entrepreneurs of our time. Today, it has expanded into an umbrella group, the A24 Group, which houses a range of independently run staffing agencies, makes a turnover of £70 million ($109 million) and is said to have generated £5.5 million ($8.5 million) in 2011 alone. Streeter, who doesn’t like to discuss her net worth, and her mother Marion, are A24’s only shareholders.
Whoever imagines Streeter as a tough, aloof businesswoman in a tailor-made suit couldn’t be more wrong. The passion and love for life that drove the 45-year-old, back in the 1990s, radiates from her as she sits, dressed in a casual cotton top, a plastic pink watch studded with fake diamonds on her wrist, in her office in Cape Town, South Africa, where her business is now headquartered.
“It doesn’t feel any different, really I never set out to make millions and millions of pounds. I just wanted to provide for my family, run my business and do it successfully,” she says.
Despite making more profit in a year than most firms do in a lifetime, Streeter has stuck to her hard-earned motto of keeping it basic. A24’s offices are simple: functional carpets, plain beige walls, plywood tables and worn-out chairs. As pop music blasts through wall-mounted speakers, customer service staff outside Streeter’s unpretentious cubicle wear headphones in front of computer screens in an unadorned open-plan office, focused on attracting new business.
“I still live in the mindset of that first business. What happened then, could happen again. We’re going through a global downturn again. The same principles of don’t borrow, have crappy furniture, are still true in my business. We still have no borrowings at all,” she says laughing, “and we still have crappy furniture.”
Simplicity has become her philosophy.
“Think big, start small and keep things very, very plain,” is Streeter’s advice to young entrepreneurs. An original idea, a good business plan and hard work are far more important than large amounts of finance to get a business started. After all, she points out: “The majority of very successful entrepreneurs have started with virtually no money. The biggest driver has got to be you. People always look for others to motivate them. But at the end of the day, when you’re in business, you’ve got to be able to motivate yourself. And that’s hard.”
Needless to say, Streeter—who was named Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Entrepreneur of the Year in 2003 and received Britain’s highest decoration, an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for ‘services to enterprise’ three years later—drives the A24 Group with a keen eye for cost control.
“I have to make sure we’re not waking up tomorrow, the market has changed and we’re all out of work. It’s not just me now, it’s everyone I employ,” she says.
She likes to hold the reins tightly, so she’s set up a flat management structure, with herself as chief executive, a finance director and the management of the group’s agencies straight below.
“Flat management makes it easy to get to the heart of the business, without having to go through masses of chains of people. I want to be able to communicate directly with the person who can make the maximum impact and change on that business immediately,” she explains.
One of her most important decisions, she says, was to move the company’s headquarters to South Africa in 2004. With an £11 million ($17.1 million) investment plan, she set up sales and back-office resources on the tip of the African continent to supplement her UK facilities.
“My finance manager thought I had lost my marbles,” she laughs. But the move was much more than a romantic whim after a beautiful holiday to the country Streeter spent her teens in.
Although A24 was extremely successful in the UK—it was Britain’s fastest-growing private enterprise in 2002—the group had been suffering major staffing problems. Numerous employees had started to break away to set up their own agencies or join the competition, taking clients and databases with them.
“We were taking them to court to get injunctions. It was a very negative point for us. It cost hundreds of thousands of pounds,” says Streeter.
At the same time, Streeter struggled to find well-trained consultants, the group’s key asset.
“I realized that by moving operations to South Africa, I could protect the business from theft and regain with South African staff what I needed in terms of service. If we had remained in the UK, it would have been slowly eating away at us,” she believes.
Initially, it didn’t look like the smartest move. The business took a dip and two years to recover. But then, Streeter made her next move and acquired Nursing Services of South Africa, the country’s largest temporary staffing firm, adding another star to her shiny belt of agencies.
“When we came to South Africa, it was like going back in time. We found existing nursing agencies were arrogant, not flexible enough and had no service orientation,” Streeter recalls. Twenty-four-hour staffing also took off in South Africa.
Today, A24 is run from three centralized recruitment hubs in South Africa and the UK, plus smaller branches throughout both countries with 450 permanent employees and about 13,500 temporary personnel on its books.
But even someone as successful as Streeter makes a wrong call from time to time.
“I’m not immune to making wrong decisions. As CEO, you have to be able to make decisions really fast, right or wrong, and then you have to live with them,” she says, admitting that failing remains her biggest fear.
“If I’m wrong, I correct decisions quickly and hold my hands up to them. It’s better to make a wrong decision than no decision at all.”
That’s what happened in 2006, when Streeter decided to expand into recruiting services to the oil, gas, construction and engineering sectors, having set her eye on major emerging markets like the Arab Emirates. For almost two years, A24 invested heavily to prepare the launch of this new business arm. But when the 2008 global economic crisis began to unfold, Streeter knew she had to cut her losses: “We pulled out of the market immediately. Places like Dubai were starting to collapse. We could see we were going to run into huge payment issues. It was about knowing to get out at the right time.”
It was a hard decision to make, she says, but one that was once again based on the lessons she learnt from the failure of her first company in 1989, when she kept pouring money into a venture that had no chance of succeeding.
“You’re giving up business that is still there, which in a lot of ways seems ridiculous, but it’s about weighing the risks,” she says. She also shelved plans to expand operations into the United States.
Instead, Streeter decided to expand again on home ground. In 2010, she bought another competitor, the British Nursing Association, at one point the giant of the UK nursing industry, and its associated nursing agency brands Grosvenor Nursing and Mayfair Nurses, owned by Pinnacle Staffing, for a mere £2.75 million ($4.15 million).
“We’ve got that sick giant now, and hopefully we’ll get it back to where it was,” she says, without illusions about the complexity of rebuilding a struggling business.
“When you grow your own business, it’s your baby, you know it inside out. When you adopt other people’s children, they don’t do things the same way. It’s quite a learning curve and completely draining.”
Streeter clearly thrives on challenges, with acquisitions being her core expansion strategy. That’s not a new business strategy, but Streeter adds a twist: instead of fully merging the new acquisitions into her existing operations, she runs them in competition to each other. Each A24 agency operates independently, has different business strategies, different pricing structures and service models.
“I like starting new businesses and understanding their dynamics. I wanted to make sure we’re a bit like the soap powders in the supermarket: you have all those different brands but you end up buying the same one. I wanted the same effect for our agencies. The choice would always be one of our brands,” she explains. “I’m effectively trying to dominate and drive out competition.”
It’s also a way of keeping herself on her toes. Although she calls herself risk-averse, Streeter has a keen eye for new market trends and isn’t afraid of branching out. When she heard IT experts talk about the advent of another global tech bubble, she decided to invest in information and communication technology (ICT). She set up an IT development department to design tailor-made software for the group, giving it an advantage in speed and accuracy in the registration, management and booking of temporary staff.
Then, she took it a step further. A24 is developing management services software, which will be launched next year as a stand-alone operation within the group.
“In everyone’s business, technology is the driver now. If your technology isn’t right at the cutting edge you’ll be dead and buried,” Streeter believes. “Business is a real thing where what worked yesterday isn’t necessarily working tomorrow. I continually have to keep reinventing.”
Unsurprisingly, she has no intention of resting or retiring. Her business is like her fifth child, says Streeter, who has re-married and now has four children.
“The children see the business as their other sibling. When I told one of my daughters I was thinking about selling Ambition, she laughed at me and said, ‘You would sell me first’.”

No More Penny-Pinching  For Penny

It has been a lonely few months in Mozambique. In the dim dawn, before the sun grips the rugged streets of Maputo, Juliano Maquina, runs in the hope of Olympic glory.
In many ways Maquina feels left behind, the last man standing. He is the only Olympic athlete who has trained in the meagre gyms of Mozambique–while his compatriots tone up in well-heeled countries around the world. If he can fight to become the last man standing in London, it would all have been worth it and could boost boxing in the land of his birth.
Maquina is the first boxer from Mozambique to qualify for the Olympics for nearly 20 years. He weighs 49kgs and will fight in the light-flyweight division.
The fight for Maquina began long ago. Every morning, six days-a-week, he trains in a basketball court in Maputo with no ring, no ropes, not even a punch bag–the lot of a sport starved of cash. Against the odds, the boxer with the baby face stays fit and tries to improve his technique ahead of being thrown to the finest young fighters in the world.
<div id="attachment_939" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-939" class="wp-image-939 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lucas_sinoia_20120516_19-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="315" />Lucas Sinoia</div>
“My dream is to make it to three Olympics and three world championships and take silver in two of them. My family have supported me and I hope that a successful boxing career will provide for them,” says Maquina.
At the very least, the 18-year-old southpaw has time on his side and clearly the stomach for a fight. Maquina had to battle hard at the qualifiers in Morocco to make it to the Olympics. Three boxers fought for Mozambique, Maquina was the only one to qualify in Casablanca; by contrast Angola sent six boxers, none qualified; South Africa sent nine, two qualified. One hundred and fifty four boxers competed from 30 African countries.
Maquina also has a good man in his corner, Lucas Sinoia, who fought twice for Mozambique at the Olympics.
Sinoia, aged 45, was born in the rural Mutarara Province in Tete in the remote north-western corner of Mozambique, and fought at 67kgs in the welterweight division. He was the champion of Mozambique between 1985 and 1996 and worked in a bread factory, to keep boxing, because the pay was so poor.
The answer to penury came from the barracks. Sinoia joined the army, which gave him the money and facilities to train. The army has long been a cradle of the sweet science. Legend has it that Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel, used to punch sandbags for fun, on visits to his troops and was ringside at the big fights.
Sinoia thrived in the army and won a bucket load of medals leading to his qualification for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, as the youngest member of the national team, aged 22. He lost in the second round of the welterweight tournament to Spaniard, Javier Martínez, after getting a bye in the first. Robert Wangila, of Kenya, won the gold–the first Kenyan to win gold for his country in a sport other than athletics. Wangila, who fought 22 professional fights, died, aged just 26, from his injuries after a severe beating in the ring in Las Vegas in 1994.
Sinoia also qualified for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta where he built his reputation as a highly disciplined boxer.
The glory days in Atlanta were few, as Sinoia was beaten 11-6 in the first round by, Vadim Mezga, of Belarus. He retired in 1998.
Nearly 20 years, later Sinoia has put his own money up to start the Academia de Boxe Lucas Sinoia, in Maputo, where he coaches aspiring boxers, as young as eight. He is looking for the next heavyweight sensation, but has spent the last few months training the young Maquina.
“I have great hopes for Juliano, but fear that he will have a hard time. Apart from a small trip to Cuba and to Morocco for the qualifiers, he has no other international experience,” says Sinoia.
Together with trainer Braulio Montiel, from Cuba, Sinoia shares the job of coaching the national boxing team.
The Cuban connection is an old and powerful one. It began when Joao Caldeira, a businessman and President of the Mozambique Boxing Federation, went to teach Portuguese in Cuba in 1978. He stayed for five years and arranged for three Mozambicans, including Sinoia, to be trained in the Caribbean country which produced Olympic gold medallists such as the late Teofilo Stevenson. All three returned to become Mozambican champions.
The Cuban dash in the ring appears to be rubbing off on the young Maquina. He says his role model is the former Olympic gold medallist featherweight, Yuriorkis Gamboa, who is now unbeaten in 21 professional fights.
Sinoia and Monteil want to concentrate the meagre money, given by government to boxing in Mozambique, on training a small group of determined and talented fighters. They are looking to business for money to help the impoverished sport that could bring medals.
A successful international boxer could help coax this money from companies and revive what was once a glory game in Mozambique and a way out of poverty for many of the country’s poor.
In the 1960s and 70s, boxing pulled huge crowds and money in Mozambique. The hotbed of boxing with the seaside town of Beira and thousands took trains from all over Mozambique, as well as South Africa and Zimbabwe, for the big fights.
Money flowed through Mozambican boxing. The bets were big and boxers from across southern Africa travelled to reap the rewards of the ring.
These days of money and thunder may be a far cry from the quiet build up to the Olympics, on a shoestring, for Maquina, but there is hope. Already the victory in Casablanca has been hailed for putting Mozambique back on the boxing map.
Maybe the slender teenager, with the baby face and the sneaky jab, could stun the world in London. After all, the oldest saying in the history of boxing is the bigger they are the harder they fall.

The Lonely Last Man Standing

Fresh from training in London, the approaching Olympics is just starting to feel real for Johny Akinyemi.
<div id="attachment_932" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-932" class="size-large wp-image-932" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/143000275-1-1024x663.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="307" />Aerial view of the Olympic Stadium</div>
“After I qualified it was a bit of a dream, and then you have to quickly realize it’s not that long until the games. You have to get down and focus on the training and put in the hours and the hard work,” he says.
A British-born canoeist of Nigerian blood, Akinyemi, 23, has a realistic shot at a medal in London in the white water slalom, having beaten Beijing bronze medalist, Benjamin Boukpeti, in the qualifiers to book his place. Since then, he has put in the hard graft, training at altitude in South Africa and on courses in Cardiff and London. “Now I’m at quite a high level of training. I don’t want to peak too soon,” he says.
Raised in Warrington, near Manchester in England, Akinyemi represented the British team at a junior level, and was for a time the country’s top youth canoeist before switching allegiance to Nigeria, narrowly missing out on a trip to China in 2008. Since then, he has worked hard to improve the profile and practice of the sport in West Africa. The Nigerian Canoe Federation was founded in 2007, attached to the country’s active rowing association, based on Victoria Island in Lagos, and Akinyemi has been there since the start, getting a crash course in the country’s infamous bureaucracy on the way.
“We got a container full of boats delivered to Nigeria—some sprint canoes and slalom kayaks. It took about 18 months to get them out of the port, but eventually we got them out,” he says.
It is unlikely that the sport is going to challenge Nigeria’s other sporting passions—soccer and wrestling—but it is generating a buzz in certain circles. The country picked up two canoeing medals in the All Africa Games, on top of Akinyemi’s own qualification for London 2012. Once the games are over, he will head to Nigeria’s Calabar region to scout out some white water to train on and to hopefully set up a club there to train the next generation of slalom competitors. Akinyemi believes that the potential is there for Nigeria to achieve.
“In Lagos, there are canoes everywhere. There are villages out on the water—canoes are a way of life for those guys. They’re not carbon kevlar, but I’m sure that if we could, in some way, get these guys in competitive canoeing they would be good at it. They’re used to the water, they’re used to using the paddle, and they’ve got the strength.”
The success and the interest has not, however, transmuted into riches for the sport or for Akinyemi himself, who is currently looking for a sponsor. Up until 2011, most of his funding came from his father, who paid for airfares and gear. The Nigerian Olympic Committee has paid for his canoe for the London games and is contributing to the fees for training on the Olympic course, which come to £60 ($93) per hour. The Olympic Solidarity Commission, which funds athletes from lower income countries, allocates him around $1,000 a month for training and equipment, which, given the cost of canoes and the requirement for international travel, is a drop in the river.
The dreamlike rush of excitement, followed by hard graft and tangles over sponsorship, of Akinyemi’s experience is, in microcosm, the London Olympics. Since winning the bid, the euphoria has dissipated amidst a mixture of traditional British cynicism and genuine economic pain. The 2009 recession was followed by a brief and uninspiring calm, before a combination of deep state spending cuts and the European sovereign debt crisis dragged the British economy back into the mire. The Olympic stadia are among the few buildings of scale still under construction in London, as funding dried up and the rationale vanished for new skyscrapers in a city where jobs were being lost.
Britain notoriously overspends and delivers late on its big projects: the Millennium Dome, £200 million ($362.3 million) over budget; the new Wembley stadium, a year too late; so it was hardly surprising that expectations were fairly low. The experience of the Dome also highlighted the difficulty of turning showcase projects into useful infrastructure.
The Olympics, more than any event, is known for its white elephants. Greece, which hosted the 2004 games, as if it hasn’t suffered enough this year, has the embarrassment of a number of crumbling and unused facilities. After spending more than €10 billion ($12.2 billion) on running the games, Greece now has the cost of the upkeep of these abandoned buildings.
On the flip side, both the Barcelona and Atlanta games, in 1992 and 1996, respectively, are seen as exemplars of how to handle legacy programs. Both benefited from smart investments in infrastructure and marketing. London hopes to follow their example, rather than that of Athens, but the signs are not encouraging. A deal to sell the Olympic stadium to West Ham football club fell through in October 2011 and the Olympic Park Legacy Committee is now on the hunt for tenants.
The rest of the site in East London will be renamed the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, with the sports facilities opened up to the public and the athletes’ village turned into housing. Just how much demand there will be for a high tech velodrome in Stratford, one of the capital’s more deprived areas, remains to be seen.
One part of the organization does seem to be running smoothly: Sponsorship, branding and broadcast rights are expected to generate around £2 billion ($3 billion) for the International Olympic Committee and the London organizers, and commentators have remarked on how visible the corporate presence is in the 2012 event.
The 70,000 volunteer “Games Makers” will have their training materials prepared by McDonald’s, which will be operating the world’s largest fast food outlet in the Olympic village for the duration of the games. The US chain is one of 11 worldwide “Olympic Partners”—a group which also includes Samsung, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble and, controversially, Dow Chemical.
Dow’s contribution, which includes a “wrap” for the Olympic stadium, caused uproar amongst human rights groups, including Amnesty International. Dow acquired Union Carbide, the company responsible for the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India. Fears that the Indian team would boycott the opening ceremony, or even the entire Olympics, proved unfounded, but the issue has left a sour taste.
The commercialization of the games—the organizers insist that private sponsorship is what makes them possible—has also been a story. The aggressive clampdown on the use of trademarks, including the words “London 2012” have made headlines as small businesses in East London are warned that they could find themselves in serious trouble should they try to associate themselves with the event. The policing of this skirted close to farce at times, with reports that monitors from Locog—the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games—have arrived on set at photo shoots to prevent non-sponsors from recreating famous sporting moments or straying too close to the games. An East London florist was threatened with legal action unless she took down a display showing the famous rings made from flowers. Athletes who tweet endorsements for the “wrong” brand have been told they face expulsion. Others have sneered at the spectacle of the supposedly solemn ceremony of the torch relay being led by the Coca-Cola “Move to the Beat” bus blaring out pop music.
In working class East London, there is a sense that the London Olympics is a show more for the brands than for the people. There is also the question of whether the city can accommodate the extra 325,000 people per day using the transport system; the ire caused by the “games lanes” set aside to allow officials to bypass the inevitable gridlock; the near-indecipherable logo; the oddly phallic mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville; the £500 million ($768.5 million)—plus security operation that has seen anti-aircraft missiles stationed on rooftops in Tower Hamlets and warships in the Thames.
Even so, the excitement is building, albeit not as fast as the organizers might have hoped. The torch relay—headed of course by the sponsors’ buses—flickered in the public imagination before a long-awaited spell of hot weather hit the country and the British public moved en masse away from their television sets and into the sunshine. There was first the Queen’s Jubilee weekend to get out of the way, and then the European football championships, which usually puts the country into a disappointed mood. With these out of the way, the criticisms and introspection could either crescendo ahead of the opening ceremony on July 27, or disappear beneath the kind of pressured, euphoric patriotism the East End is famous for. For competitors like Akinyemi, however, it is unlikely to matter—he has canoes and the pride of Nigeria on his mind.

Canoe Win A Medal?

Nyasha Matonhodze was born on July 31, 1994, in Zimbabwe. Her mother was just 18 years old, so she was looked after by her grandmother and grew up bathing outside in the sun and falling asleep in the sand in the rural areas around the capital, Harare.
At the age of eight, she went to join her mother in England, who was working in the small midland town of Northampton. It was here where Nyasha became aware of herself and her dreams.
“I was never a girly girl, but I did really like make up and watching America’s Next Top Model,” she once told Fashion TV.
It was the show that drew her interest in modeling. She decided at 14 that it was something she’d try out. Her parents took her to an open call at Elite, after which she won the Elite Model Look competition in the United Kingdom. Two years later, at the tender age of 16, she walked her first runway. “It really teaches you how to present yourself; what elegant, sexy, fierce is really about,” she says about her job.
It’s extremely hard to pin her down for a chat because of the breakneck speed of her new life.  She went from shooting in London to castings for New York Fashion Week and was later on her way to Milan. You could almost say that the model is elusive and there are very few interviews with her in existence.
Nyasha—whose name means mercy in her mother tongue—is now at the mercy of a tough business while she is still a teenager. Modeling is not for the fainthearted. The rewards may be high, but the risks are great. You have to miss sleep for months on end shuttling from one capital to the next. Your face can fall and your fortunes can fall with it. Often, your name can be on everyone’s lips one minute; the next, you are in obscurity.
Despite Nyasha’s tender years, she appears to have her head screwed on with a healthy grasp of the misfortunes that can haunt her chosen career.
“You never know what’s next. One minute you’re good and the next is a bit of a… I’m just making the most of the time that I’ve got,” she smiles.
For now, she is most definitely a rising star. She has walked in more than 90 shows since her debut, with more than 80 in the last year. She has been on the cover of two magazines and is represented by Elite Model Management in London, Milan and Paris, and the by Marilyn Agency in New York.
Her career highlight must be her earning a spot in the Louis Vuitton advertising campaign. It’s made sure that anyone who hadn’t heard of Nyasha Matonhodze won’t forget her anytime soon.
After the announcement, she told the Daily Telegraph in London that tears had welled up in her eyes.
“I thought ‘Lord you are lucky!’ It didn’t actually hit me until I was in a Rolls Royce sitting eye-to-eye with (renowned fashion photographer, Steven) Meisel.”
She’s also done advertising for Topshop.
She has a pleasing disposition, carries herself with elegance and still maintains that childlike sparkle in her eyes and playfulness.
The cut-throat world of beauty leaves most to think that there’s little room for friends, with plenty of young hopefuls being discovered—and vying for the same jobs. Matonhodze’s warmth has allowed her to find a best friend in Ajak Deng—who is number eight on our list.
“I love what I do,” she says.
The question which remains is how long will this dream run last? In the meantime, you can be sure this potential future-Iman or Naomi Campbell—who has traveled a long journey from the Zimbabwean bush to the heights of sophistication—will enjoy every last minute of it. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-465" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/nyashamatonhodze_327439_original_resp.jpg" alt="" width="768" height="995" />

Elegant, Sexy And Fierce

David Adjaye believes that African skylines are set for an explosion of growth as the continent’s resurgent economies look for new expressions of their increasing potency and self-confidence.
Speaking at his studio in North London, the architect says that the continent needs to define its own vision for urbanization and ensure that its architectural revolution reflects Africa’s cultural, geographical and climatic contexts.
Born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents, Adjaye traveled extensively in his youth, following his father’s diplomatic career through Africa and the Middle East. It was that exposure that was to later inform his work when, after studying fine art, he found architecture and became fascinated by the relationship between buildings and their environment.
<div id="attachment_425" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-425" class="size-large wp-image-425" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/js57_Peace-Centre0144_RT8-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Nobel Peace Center, Oslo. The Canopy is a temporary installation by David Adjaye that serves as a gateway between Oslo City Hall, where the Peace Prize Ceremony takes place, and the Nobel Peace Center.</div>
“I realized that by having been brought up in very different contexts—cultural, religious and social contexts—I had somehow developed an appetite for learning more about how the built environment worked with that, and how it reflected that architecture in its human sense.”
Today, Adjaye is one of the world’s leading architects—in 2007 he received the Order of the British Empire for his services to architecture. His portfolio includes the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, which is scheduled for completion in 2015.
For a 2010 exhibition at the Design Museum in London, Adjaye traveled to cities across Africa, photographing the buildings which, although in varying states of development or decay, show startling commonality.
Today Adjaye runs through his own potted history of African architecture: Colonial builders erased much of the pre-existing urban culture in Africa, replacing it with tropical versions of European architecture. Upon independence, new leaders embraced a vision of the future that was still largely European.
“I think the early leaders on the continent felt that modernity was the way to embrace or celebrate a sort of new world of empowerment for their nations. So you find a lot of modernist experiments, but modernist experiments that could not avoid the specificity of the geography and the climate. So you have what I call a kind of tropical modernism,” he says.
When the money and ambition began to wear thin, this modernism was replaced by economic pragmatism, driven by international donors who made their architectural choices based on their own financial imperative, and using their own approved contractors and designers.
<div id="attachment_426" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-426" class="size-large wp-image-426" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/nma_b110127_f-1024x722.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="334" />National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.</div>
“So you have very odd late ’70s early ’80s buildings that sort of appear, that have nothing to do with the context; they’re just blips,” Adjaye says.
With debt relief and the mineral-driven boom of the late 1990s, which gathered pace in the early years of the new century, African leaders began a new drive for modernity. With this financial independence and growing economic self-confidence has come a stronger sense of cultural identity across the continent, which is manifested in the creative arts.
“I think you see it in literature, fine arts, performing arts and architecture, they’re all in line. They all lead the image of what nations want to project of themselves.
“This image of most of the countries on the continent getting rid of their debt and suddenly discovering vast minerals and negotiating this, means that there is an opportunity to really explore the idea of modernity for these nations. And architecture comes to the forefront of that, because architecture is the image of the city and the future. Architecture is the image of the city as it sees itself. The story of the city is written in books, but it’s also written in buildings.”
The notion of buildings-as-ambassadors has gained currency in the past decade with the successful reinvention of the Emirates of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and the state of Qatar.
“It totally worked,” Adjaye says. “It gave the Emirates a skyline. For my father’s generation, the Emirates was a horrible desert and a place you never went to.”
Where the Emirates initially failed, he says, was specifying what its own version of modernity was. It is a trap he is keen for Africa to avoid. Buildings need to exist in their context, rather than just mimic the current, internationally dictated interpretation of Western modernity.
“I think if there is much more criticality about the way in which buildings are built to their climate, you get a much more unique skyline,” he says. “That doesn’t require more money, it just requires more desire on the part of the patrons to insist on a response that makes things specific, rather than insisting on an approach which is just novel.”
Africa’s modernity, Adjaye says, should be dictated by the same geographic features that defined its early cultures. This means ignoring the artificially imposed national boundaries and shaping regional identities from the unifying climates and cultures across the continent, but also avoiding the “colonial trap” of what he calls “Disney-fication” of culture.
For inspiration, Adjaye looks to New York.
“I love the Rockefeller Center. It’s not a cheap building, but it’s an efficient building. It’s a building that strove to understand the time that it was in, which was the ’30s… It talked about density in the city, it talked about networks, it talked about interconnectivity. It talked about living in the heart of the city. It gave a model which was not iconic in terms of imagery but iconic in terms of place, and it’s still a fundamental part of New York.”
That specificity of place and time has created a building that is more than functional—an artifact that helps to define the city it is in.
“There’s something compelling about coming over that bridge from Brooklyn or Newark, New Jersey, and seeing that skyline. It’s like… it’s so powerful. It’s original. That’s the vision we need in Africa. What is the model of living in Africa that nowhere else in the world you can have? The person who cracks that, cracks the game. Not the person who imports the model that we’ve seen before.
<div id="attachment_424" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-424" class="size-full wp-image-424" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/iStock_000015967621Small.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="800" />New York City, Rockefeller Center, GE Building, viewed from 5th Avenue.</div>
“You’ve got to make a model that makes people say ‘I want to go to that city in Africa because it’s just so great. The life there is something I can’t have in London. It’s contemporary, I can have my life there, but it’s completely unique.’ That’s a hell of a thing.”

The Quest For A True African Skyline

With austerity afflicting many Western markets, it may come as some comfort that so much of the money that flows into Africa from around the world each year comes from Africans. The members of the African diaspora remit around $40 billion back to their home countries every year. With interest rates in the West at historical lows and inflation still high, deposited money is losing value.
Guinean-American Eric Guichard grew up between West Africa and the USA. He worked in the international financial sector and then in the fund management industry. Now based in London, Guichard is working to position his latest venture—Homestrings— in the middle of remittance flows.
Global remittances reached record highs in 2012, totaling $351 billion. “Where it hit me was when I saw the actual global number in transfers and how disorganized that market is—no one is really looking at that mass as a potential source of patient capital,” Guichard says.
A George Washington University study showed that the majority of remitters wanted to use the money to invest at home. In fact, many already do through informal mechanisms—transferring the money to a relative, who then puts it into property or a small business.
Those informal structures work, but are inefficient and rely a great deal on trust. The remitter loses control over the money once it is out of his or her hands. There are a growing number of managed investment funds that target emerging and frontier markets, including in Africa, but few have subscription levels that are accessible to the average retail investor.
Defying the characterization of the members of the African diaspora as poor, the George Washington University report shows that many have above average incomes and significant annual investment portfolios, transferring tens of thousands of dollars each year. They are savvy and the majority use the internet not only for news about their home countries, but also to look for money-making opportunities.
“Being from Africa, and being one of those remitters, I knew that if there was a platform that gave me control and empowered me to choose where I wanted to put my money, I would potentially put all my discretionary capital in that platform,” Guichard says. “If I could choose to invest in this bridge, this healthcare clinic, invest in those sovereign bonds, partake in Actis’ real estate private equity funds at thresholds that are achievable by me, of course.”
Guichard built a platform to do just that. Homestrings is an online portal that connects the diaspora to opportunities back home.
Systems that collect and pool cash from individuals to pump into projects in the developing world already exist—Kiva, for example, has funded a large number of initiatives. However, it is still not permitted to gather cash for investment returns.
Homestrings allows qualified investors to sign up and see investment opportunities—initially projects for co-investment and private equity funds listed on an online portal. There are currently 18 funds listed, targeting Africa, the Caribbean and India. The first “Diaspora bond”, a local currency instrument for international investors, was added this year, with Kenya the first to list.
The result is a traditional mutual fund structure meshed with crowd-funding platforms and online retail systems like Amazon. When social media features are added to it in the next few months, users will be able to review investment opportunities much like Amazon users can rate and discuss their purchases.
“Ultimately, the ideal would be that there are deals that are proposed by the investors, vetted by the members, then organized by Homestrings—a completely self-directed investment platform,” Guichard says.
“Our experience since the launch in August has been quite uniform. We’ve seen registration rates of about 50-100 per month, and that’s with no social network push,” Guichard said. “That’s pretty remarkable for us, the level of interest is that high, and it’s primarily reflective of the three major diaspora groups—Kenyans, Ghanaians and Nigerians, working mainly in professional jobs as doctors, lawyers, financiers.”
Those professionals—of which there are now around 500—have an average of $25,000 to invest per year, according to the company’s own surveys of them.
With the first diaspora bond now listed, and two more—Ghana and Ethiopia—in the pipeline, Guichard is excited about the prospect of financing much-needed infrastructure in Africa, and about offering individuals access to bonds that are normally the preserve of large institutions or local high net worth investors. For their part, governments in Africa have increasingly turned to local capital markets to raise finance for specific projects.
For an international buyer, the process would be long and arduous, requiring regulatory clearance in the destination country and a brokerage account.
“There exists no formal network where people can systematically do due diligence and then invest in their own country’s sovereign bonds targeted at specific projects without going through all kinds of bureaucratic difficulties,” Guichard says.
Homestrings has set up the requisite accounts in Kenya and interested parties just need to register on the platform.
Real estate will be the next step. Guichard hopes to connect developers and investors on Homestrings, systematizing what is already a major use of remittance money. Currently, the process of buying and building at home is long, costly and relies heavily on trust. By allowing professional developers to link up with diaspora capital, and then allowing the diaspora to buy units once they are built, Homestrings takes a great deal of risk out of the system.
“I think the basic proposition is an empowerment proposition,” Guichard says. “You can sit here and look at real estate in Notting Hill, plug in your laptop, use your wi-fi and choose what real estate company you want to select, and look at their catalogue of investments.”
At the heart of the prospect, Guichard claims, is a whole new way of profiling customers in the financial industry.
“We started out with the fact that the way the current financial industry is organized, you are looking at individuals based on age, based on zip codes, based on professions, and based on levels of income, which we see as being a horizontal definition,” he says. “But if you were to look at people in terms of their affinity, in terms of their ethnic allegiances, in terms of their desire to stay connected to where they’re from, then you have a whole new definition of financial services.”
There is also, he says, the potential to change the way that development is financed—crowdsourcing, for profit, long-term capital to drive economic growth in Africa.

Bringing It All Back Home

Angola’s female basketball warriors are pretty pleased with themselves right now in a country mad about the sport. They came back from a thrashing from favourites, Senegal, to take gold at the 2011 Afrobasket Women in Mali; they were feted by President José Eduardo dos Santos and the Minister of Sport, Goncalves Muandumba, on their triumphant return to Luanda and now they have a shot, alongside the men, for a gold medal at the 2012 Olympics in London.
The progress of the Palancas Negras—which translates as ‘black sables’—is being seen as a breakthrough for women’s basketball. Behind this success is the former captain of the Angolan male basketball team, Moreira, who has coached the team for six years.
In the basketball courts of Luanda’s number one sport complex, Citadela, a youthful looking, casually dressed and relaxed Moreira gave FORBES AFRICA the inside track on this heroic chapter in Angolan basketball.
<h3>How do you explain Palancas Negras’ victory at Afrobasket Women in Bamako?</h3>
This year’s result is the fruit of continuous hard work and improvement. The Palancas Negras have already had a foot on the podium since 2007. We gained bronze at Afrobasket Women both in 2007 and in 2009. We lost against Mali twice in the finals. But now we’ve managed to beat them, which made the victory twice as beautiful.
<h3>What does this victory mean for Angola?</h3>
Male basketball was already ‘hot’ in Angola. Now that the men have lost their ticket to the Olympics, the women will definitely be in the spotlight. This victory is of key importance for Angolan female basketball, which has very little support and lacks professional organization. Angola only has four female teams—Primeiro do Agosto, Maculusso, Interclub and Juventud de Viana—of which only two are represented in the national team.
<h3>What role did leading player Nassecela Mauricio, who was elected Most Valuable Player of this year’s Afrobasket tournament, play in the female team’s victory?</h3>
She really gave it her all. She’s a fighter, and she definitely deserves this victory. But I don’t like speaking about any player in particular because the entire team played very well.
<h3>What do you and your team strive for at the Olympics, and what are the greatest challenges?</h3>
We’ll do all we can to reduce the quality gap with the other Olympic teams. Whether we manage to do so will partly depend on the team’s make-up. Height, weight, physical condition and defence are all challenges. Our tallest player is 1.92m. But we’re fast and aggressive, we always seek the best positions, and we will train hard on our three pointers. In order to gain experience, we will try to train abroad as much as we can.
<h3>Isn’t African basketball often deemed a ‘nursery’ for young talented players, who exchange their African teams for European or American teams as soon as they get a chance?</h3>
Generally speaking that’s true, but I think that would be different if they had the same opportunities at home. Africa, except for maybe Tunisia and Egypt, lacks the right conditions for basketball. To professionalize, you need good financial resources. Angola has done that. Our country used to have many players in Portugal, including myself for 11 years. But when Angola started paying well, it managed to create its own great team.
<h3>What needs to be done to improve African basketball conditions?</h3>
Focus on the basics: create more playing fields and schools. Provide the minimum conditions. In the second phase, you can start thinking about remuneration and investments. The Angolan government plans to build a venue for basketball training purposes only, but so far it is only a concept.
<h3>What do you think of the Basketball without Borders camp that was recently held in South Africa?</h3>
It seems to serve a ‘double agenda’. The concept aims at promoting basketball as a common language for global peace, friendship and sportsmanship, but at the same time serves as a recruiting platform.
I think it is an extremely valuable initiative because of the friendships, cultural exchange and experience it creates. I do agree that it’s probably not beneficial for African countries. But what matters to me more is that it benefits the players. It allows them to play in much more competitive championships and to improve their very poor African working conditions.
<h3> How does it feel to be celebrated by the Angolan president?</h3>
We’re happy! This is an acknowledgement of our hard work.

Sizzling Sisters Slam Dunk Their Way To The Olympics

According to the landlords, contemporaries, teachers and neighbors who have lined up in front of the media in recent weeks, Kweku Adoboli was a sociable, intelligent and overwhelmingly ‘nice guy’.
The financial community in London remains awash with speculation about how that nice guy from the industrial coastal town of Tema, in Ghana, came to be in a position to lose the Swiss bank, UBS, more than $2 billion as well as its CEO.
Adoboli’s background speaks of privilege, but is unremarkable amongst his peers in the City. The 31-year-old son of a UN staffer was schooled at the fee-paying, Quaker-run Ackworth School in West Yorkshire, where he was deputy head boy.
<div id="attachment_193" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-193" class="size-large wp-image-193" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/125271682-692x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="701" />UBS Trader in court</div>
He studied computer science and business at the University of Nottingham before joining UBS, where he worked until 3:30 in the morning on September 15, when the City of London police arrested him at the offices of UBS in Finsbury Avenue. Later that morning, UBS announced that it had made a loss of $2 billion due to “unauthorised trading”. It later revised the figure upwards to $2.3 billion.
Adoboli remains in custody in London on two charges of fraud—for the periods October 2008 to December 2010, and from January to September 2011; plus two charges of false accounting—from October 2008 to December 2009, and January 2010 to September 2011.
Facing charges, Adoboli told a court that he was “sorry beyond words” and called his vast trading losses “disastrous miscalculations”.
Those miscalculations have called into question the survival of investment banking at UBS, as the bank decides whether to cut off a division battered by poor performance and scandal. Oswald Gruebel, the bank’s CEO, resigned over the affair on September 25.
As Adoboli’s LinkedIn profile shows, he worked on the investment bank’s European equity desk in London, trading “Delta One” strategies.
“Delta One” refers to the ‘delta’—or marginal difference—between closely correlated asset classes. By buying equities and hedging using derivative products or baskets of other assets, these computer-driven strategies mop up money through the inefficiencies in the market. It is highly complex, but is also supposed to work within tightly controlled risk limits. For every position the trader takes, he or she is expected to take a counter position—or hedge—of almost equal size.
The Swiss and British authorities are now investigating how Adoboli was able to evade the systems that monitor these limits to place directional bets. The results of those probes are likely to be months away, but the investigators will no doubt have seized on Adoboli’s CV and its startling similarity to that of the last headline-grabbing rogue, the French trader, Jerome Kerviel. Kerviel cost Société Générale, the French bank, $6.6 billion in 2008.
Starting in the bank’s “middle office”—the risk management IT department—in 2000, Kerviel made the jump up to trading in 2005, also on a Delta One desk. The bank’s comprehensive “Mission Green” report into the incident charts his activity from that point. He began to take directional bets that same year, probably to cover up the fact that he had been consistently losing using conventional strategies, the report said.
Kerviel used his knowledge of the bank’s risk systems to hide the fact that his positions were not hedged, creating fictitious counter trades by buying securities with deferred start dates or with counterparties that did not require immediate confirmation. Using passwords from other SocGen employees, he was able to go back into the system and remove the trades, fooling the risk monitoring tools. It worked for more than two years and reaped a fortune.
In January 2008, though, Kerviel was found out. He had amassed directional positions in European stock indices totalling almost €50 billion ($6.6 billion). The day that the bank began to unwind these positions was “Black Monday”, January 21, when UK, European and Asian markets fell dramatically.
That he was found out in a period of acute market stress is not a coincidence. The hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management, collapsed after the Russian sovereign debt crisis in 1998. The world’s most famous rogue, Nick Leeson, whose limit-busting trades out of Asia brought down Barings Bank, was shaken out in the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe Earthquake. Both events saw highly volatile markets with large price movements.
Like Kerviel at SocGen, Adoboli began his career at UBS in the bank’s IT department, maintaining and managing those same risk systems that were supposed to keep traders in check. Whether he used that knowledge will likely be a thrust of the investigation against him.
While systems and practices differ between banks, traders often admit that limits really are flexible. There are often subtle ways for traders, with good reputations, to go around the risk management practices that, while they reduce the potential for losses, also constrain a trader’s ability to take educated punts when they have a strong conviction.
This, cynical traders say, is why rogues can get away with deceit for long periods: no-one gets fired for winning. It is only when they lose that they have to “go write the book”—that is, be escorted out of the building by security at best, or the police.
Kerviel was, according to SocGen, at it for years. Leeson began his rogue activity in 1992, initially winning big before his fortunes turned and he began to hide his losses in the now infamous account number 88888. Adoboli’s charges—for which he has not entered a plea—cover almost four years.
Traders are understandably reluctant to go on the record about their peers who ‘go rogue’, but as more than one hinted, if you are considered good enough, hard boundaries get softer. If you break the rules and lose, though, you are on your own.

Tag: London

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

From African Grit To Plastic Brits