For a goalkeeper to be the number one choice for more than 12 years at one of Africa’s biggest football teams is something special. Williams Okpara achieved this remarkable milestone at Orlando Pirates and his consistent performances helped the ‘Buccaneers’ win a number of major trophies, including the coveted African Champions League title in 1995.
Okpara’s dedication and defensive organization stood out when he wore the famous black and white jersey.
“When I came to join Orlando Pirates in South Africa from Nigeria I was very determined to succeed in my football career. During the years I spent with Pirates as a goalkeeper, I played under many good coaches and I was also privileged to team up with quality players,” says Okpara.
<div id="attachment_2592" style="width: 221px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2592" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-2592" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/TL_569714-211x300.jpg" alt="" width="211" height="300" />18 January 2003, PSL season 2002/03, SuperSport United v Pirates, Royal Bafokeng Stadium, Rustenburg, Johannesburg, South Africa. Williams Okpara in action. Photo Credit: © Duif du Toit/Gallo Images</div>
“Our team had a very good defense. Papi Khomane, Edward Motale, Mark Fish and Willem Jackson were brilliant. I had a very good understanding with my fellow defenders; I used to tell them who to pick up during the game and they responded well. They used to position themselves in good areas, for instance, when I was away from the goal line one of the defenders would come and clear the ball from danger. We played very well together and that is why some teams found it very tough whenever they played against us.”
Okpara won numerous man-of-the-match awards while playing in the South African league—the Premier Soccer League (PSL)—after frustrating strikers with his wonderful saves. He was outstanding between the poles and many of his fellow goalkeepers looked up to him as a role model because of his composure in highly competitive games. Whether Pirates were playing against a small team or their biggest rivals, such as Kaizer Chiefs or Mamelodi Sundowns, he always gave his best. He regards his self-motivation as the main reason he was able to stand out.
“My fitness level was very important. Every game that I played for Pirates, I gave my best, no matter who we were playing against and where we were playing. Even when I knew that we were going to play against a top team, I was always confident because I prepared myself well for every match. As a goalkeeper and the last man of the defense, I was aware of what was going on around the field of play,” he says.
“It felt good making those saves and it is was very encouraging for me when my game was improving. There were goalkeepers that I used to admire from other teams like Andre Arendse and Mark Anderson. There are certain things I benefited from by watching other good goalkeepers.”
Okpara is a true ambassador of African football when considering his achievements. He was a Nigerian international and the big role he played when Pirates won the biggest cup competition on the continent.
Pirates faced Ivorian club ASEC Mimosas in the final and an inspired Okpara was in the thick of the action. The goalkeeper managed to keep a clean sheet despite his opponents’ 27 attempts at goal.
Okpara is still involved with Orlando Pirates. He is the team manager at the club and his burning passion ensures that Pirates continue to be competitive in South Africa and on the continent.
“At the moment, I am the team manager at Orlando Pirates. You will still find me on the pitch when the team is training. Also when we are playing our games, I am always around, very close to the team,” he says.
“I am very committed to my duties as a team manager. I have a good working relationship with the entire technical team as well as the management of the club. I also communicate well with the players and we talk about important things in football.”
The current squad made South Africa proud when they reached to the finals of the Caf Champions League late last year. They lost to Al Ahly of Egypt 3-1 on aggregate. Already this season, the Buccaneers have impressed in cup competitions but were unfortunate to lose to Platinum Stars in the final of both the MTN8 and the Telkom Knockout tournaments.
However, so far this season, Pirates have been inconsistent in the PSL and have dropped unnecessary points against the so-called league minnows. Their 1-0 loss against AmaZulu at FNB stadium early in the season and their 2-1 defeat to SuperSport United at home in Orlando Stadium took many fans by surprise. However, Okpara feels that there is no need to panic as they are working hard to improve their position on the log. He also feels it is important for Pirates to do well in the only remaining cup competition, the Nedbank Cup.
Okpara is confident that the current players have a bright future and through his contribution as a team manager there is a lot that they can achieve in the coming seasons.
“I was very happy with the good run that our current Orlando Pirates team had in the Champions League, reaching the final of the competition. It was good for our players to go as far as they did because they gained experience of playing in tough conditions in Africa which is important.”
“We have quality players at Pirates at the moment and I feel we have what it takes to do well in our remaining games in the league,” he says.
Okpara is impressed with the standard of football in the PSL and feels that the league is getting stronger because of the number of top-quality players that the other teams are signing.
He still keeps up to date on the latest happenings in international football and is proud of the success the Nigerian national team achieved when they won the African Cup of Nations in South Africa. The Super Eagles squad then went all the way to represent Africa in the Fifa Confederation Cup as the current soccer champions in the continent.
The current number one goalkeeper at Pirates, Senzo Meyiwa, has praised Okpara for helping him improve as a player. Meyiwa, who is also in the South African national team, acknowledges that Okpara’s mentorship has contributed to his achievements so far in his career.
Okpara has been a fan of Manchester United since he was young and avidly keeps an eye on the progress of African players in the leagues around the world. He is most impressed with the displays of Yaya Touré, the Ivory Coast and Manchester City midfielder, and feels there are more African players that can make a big impact in global football.
“There is a lot of talent in Africa. We have many gifted and skillful players who are capable of achieving a lot in football,” he says.
“Just look at Yaya Touré from Ivory Coast, who is playing in the English Premier League. He is a very intelligent player. He is a creative midfielder that can produce good passes and is also capable of scoring goals.”
You need a big heart and strong character to face all the challenges and emerge victorious at a big club like Pirates. Okpara has showed these traits throughout his career and is justifiably regarded as one of the greats.

Williams Okpara

The annual Mining Idaba in Cape Town attracted more than 7,000 delegates to South Africa’s mother city. Many were positive about the prospect for growth and investment in mining across the African continent, but concerns remain when it comes to investing in South Africa’s troubled sector.
Perceptions were not helped in early February, with a number of strikes across South Africa’s major platinum companies. The labor unrest and above-inflation wage increases seem to be a major turn off for both investors in company stocks and companies, and investors looking to put their money into exploration and mine development.
Mining’s contribution to South Africa’s economy has been falling. The South African Chamber of Mines said that the industry has shrunk by about 1% each year, in the period from 2001 to 2008. This decline came at a time when there was a global commodities boom. In the same period, the top 20 mining economies recorded average growth of 5% a year. Still, mining continues to play an important role in South Africa’s economy.
In addition to labor concerns, worries about the availability of adequate power and an uncertain policy environment persist.
Susan Shabangu, the minister of the department of minerals and energy (DMR), has said that amendments to the 2002 Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) should be finalized in the first half of the year.
Concerns among business remain, in particular, with regard to a plan to identify some minerals mined in the country as strategic. Other proposals that caused much angst last year is one which would have companies seek permission from the minister to change ownership of controlling stakes in companies.
It is also proposed that the downstream processing of some of the minerals mined in South Africa would become obligatory. Government too, if the proposal remains unchanged, would be entitled to appoint two directors to the board of any company engaging in the development of a new energy project in South Africa.
“Uncertainty must be removed in order for us to set a starting foundation for new investment. The free market basis of our founding constitution is of paramount importance. While we understand the need for legislation to evolve and improve over time, certain proposed amendments to the MPRDA create significant challenges for long-term investment in the mining sector,” says the former president of The Chamber of Mines and CEO of Anglo American, Mark Cutifani in the Chamber’s annual report.
He went on to say that companies and government have to work together to find solutions—solutions which support further investment, rather than deter it.
The South African government, like many across a number of resource-rich African countries, wants a greater say in the mining sector. Already the MPRDA obliges mining companies to have transferred 26% of their equity, or output, to black investors by this year.
Asked if he believes mining companies will have been successful in this regard, the deputy director general responsible for mineral policy and promotion, Mosa Mabuza said: “The Department has no reason to believe that any mining company is not working towards this objective. We have commissioned an evaluation of transformation progress broadly and the outcome will indicate the extent of this progress.”
The results of an audit of companies’ BBE status and their fulfilment of the Mining Charter is expected by the end of this year.
Some companies still fall short on the equity and output aspects of the Charter, but many have been successful in sourcing goods and services from empowered companies.
There have been a number of empowerment deals among engineering and project management companies, often involving black-managed private equity funds. This is perhaps a better way of funding deals. In the past, some stakes had been bought through share transfers and in instances where stock prices fell and dividends disappeared, empowerment partners were left with debt rather than equity.
Investors may be wary of putting their money into costly mine developments but there are multinational engineering and project management companies coming into the mining space. They want a foothold in supply services and engineering. In addition to business in South Africa, they have their eyes on the developing mining, and oil and gas sectors in Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Namibia.

The Problem With Sharing is Glaring

The room went quiet and all that could be heard was the sobbing of an emotional young man. His crying was soon drowned out as the small crowd of fans and media rose to their feet and began applauding. He had just reached the pinnacle of disabled tennis with a win in the US Open quadriplegic wheelchair tennis division a few days prior, beating the world number one in the final. Lucas Sithole was not ready for the media circus which followed. He simply had never dreamt of this moment.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2578" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/sithole11-211x300.jpg" alt="" width="211" height="300" />
Back in 1998, 12-year-old Sithole, without much direction in life, found new meaning following a tragic accident in Dunhouser, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Helping load goods onto a train with a friend, Lucas was caught underneath the wheels of the train when it started moving and his body was shredded to pieces. What remained was his left arm, but most of his right arm and both his legs were gone. For Lucas, it was if the world he knew was destroyed in an instant. Depression washed over him and for a while there was no end to his nightmare. The glimmer of hope appeared later when he turned to disabled sport.
At first, Sithole did not know which sport to take up and he started with athletics. When he moved to Pretoria in 2005 to complete his schooling, he switched to wheelchair tennis. He excelled in the discipline.
By 2011, he had risen to the top-ranked player in South Africa. Even then, Sithole was abundantly clear about what tennis had done for his life.
“Tennis gives me a reason to live,” said Sithole in April 2011, when he was already ranked 14th in the world.
“Tennis is an individual sport, and I don&#8217;t like playing team sports. Tennis is life, and it gives me life. It all started when I accepted myself after my accident. I didn&#8217;t stay indoors, I went to look for help and my primary school was a big help.”
The approach he takes, the humble man admits, is a mental one. It is about never looking back, staying in the moment and planning for the future.
Watching Sithole move around the court with ease in his wheelchair is a sight to behold. Throwing the ball up while holding the racket, both with his left hand, he boasts a powerful serve. But, it is the way he moves around using the stump of his right arm to turn the wheel of his chair and then his left hand which helps produce his speed.
His conduct on the court has also drawn much praise and he is idolized in the disabled community. On his return to South Africa, he was greeted by large crowds of disabled school pupils all hurrying to get an autograph from the first African to win a title at the US Open.
When asked where his inspiration comes from, Sithole says his coach.
“In wheelchair tennis my role model is my coach Holger Losch.”
Losch was a regular tennis coach and had to make the adjustment to quad tennis, but the partnership has grown in strength since they joined forces.
He too, was not short of praise for his star player.
“We are really proud of him for his win and the way he behaved,&#8221; says Losch.
Now, Sithole—having risen to number two in the world in the quad division after his win in the final over the number-one-ranked David Wagner—is readjusting his goals. Having competed in his first Paralympics in London in 2012, his major goal will be to win a medal at the 2016 edition in Rio de Janeiro.
In the meantime, Losch says he hopes the success of Sithole will inspire many more disabled athletes in South Africa and in particular the already growing sport of wheelchair tennis.
“Nine years ago, there were about three players playing wheelchair tennis in South Africa. Now there are about 500 children playing wheelchair tennis every week. We host six tournaments in [the country] on an annual basis and that&#8217;s just great for the game.”
Meanwhile, Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu, the deputy minister of disabled people, says Sithole&#8217;s success in the sport will give hope to the entire disabled population of the Rainbow Nation.
“From Newcastle [KwaZulu-Natal] to New York that’s quite a journey for Lucas. When people with special needs are recognized they can achieve anything.”
Bogopane-Zulu says the possibilities are endless now that Sithole has announced himself on the world stage with his major win.
“March on and give disabled people a chance. We need to recognize the rights of the disabled to give them the belief to achieve. We need people to invest in wheelchair tennis so we can produce more Lucas Sitholes.”
Even the sport’s national governing body, Tennis South Africa (TSA), were quick to congratulate Sithole, with the president Bongani Zondi heaping praise on the 27 year old.
“We are proud as TSA to have a champion at long last and also a black South African. We are proud of Holger and all the work Wheelchair Tennis South Africa are doing.”
Sithole was a student at Philadelphia Secondary School. Thirteen-year-old Neliswe attends the same school says she wants to be just like the tennis star. For the young girl, who was born without legs, the chance to rub shoulders with one of her idols is an experience she says she will never forget.
Following on from his title at the US Open, Sithole reached the final of the Australian Open in January. Despite winning the first set, the South African could not hold Wagner off in the final two.
Whether or not Sithole goes on to win more big events, it is quite clear to see that he has already accomplished his mission.

The Ball Bashing Role Model  On A Roll

In the Porsche hierarchy, the Cayman S was penned to fit snugly below the mighty and ever so iconic Porsche 911, that gem of a sportscar that continues to be the success story of the brand. The Cayman was asked to play second fiddle to its elder and more accomplished sibling but I don’t think everyone at Porsche was in agreement. Second should not be this good.
The Porsche Cayman S was designed from scratch, adopting a mid-engined, rear wheel-driven layout that is the perfect recipe for motoring perfection. Located just 30 centimeters behind the driver, the 3,4-liter flat-six engine provides the shove and the soundtrack as you exploit the dynamics and sheer breadth of talent that comes from this car. The car’s 239 kilowatts (kW) and 370Nm of torque may not sound substantial on paper, but from helm, it’s blisteringly quick. The performance figures start to sound more convincing. It claims a 0-100km/h time of 4.7 seconds and reaches a top speed of 280km/h.
The partnership of Porsche’s booming, normally aspirated engine with the PDK double clutch system is true automotive genius that allows the driver to capitalize on the full potential of this car in all driving modes. The more willing the driver, the more rewarding the driving experience, particularly in Sport or Sport Plus mode when performance is at its peak in steering, throttle, gearbox, engine management and suspension responses.
The metal-forged paddle shifters behind the steering give you the option to take control yourself, but if its absolute speed and immediate, unfaltering gear changes you are after, let the box do it for you. Sport Plus also allows you to go beyond the edges of traction as it allows a small degree of slip to make even the most unskilled drivers look like pros. The steering feels perfect and the response is flawless; all adding to a visceral experience of high performance motoring.
In complete contrast, driving the Cayman S in Normal mode is as comfortable and easy to drive as a B-segment hatch. This is, in part, due to the optional dynamic gearbox mounts that adapt their stiffness and damping characteristics in accordance with the driving conditions and changing road surfaces.  A softer drive yields a more comfortable and more compliant ride, the opposite being true for when you floor the pedal. The car is also more practical than other sportscars with enough room in the storage compartment, located at the front of the car, for at least a medium-sized suitcase and some more. For the smaller things, such as quick-stop shopping bags and laptop cases, there is some space behind the seats. In true Porsche spirit, the interior can be customized to suit any tastes, all at the risk of inflating the price and the ego.
At R838,000 ($75,800), it’s difficult to quantify the price in comparison to the Cayman S’ competitors. The Audi TT RS; Nissan 370Z Coupe; BMW Z4; Mercedes Benz SLK 55 AMG and Lotus Evora could be deemed its direct rivals and on this level, the Porsche could be seen as expensive, especially if you are besotted with ticking options. In truth, however, the Cayman S operates in an entirely different league which renders these cars as mere heel-snappers and makes the price argument more interesting. Firstly, consider that a Mercedes Benz SLK 55 AMG costs R999,000 ($90,500). The Lotus Evora costs R900,000 ($81,500). Such is the competence of the Cayman S that it allows us to start making comparisons to other inspirational sports cars such as the Jaguar F-Type (more expensive); and dare I say it, the entry-level 911 Carrera (a lot more expensive). You do the maths.
The Cayman S has many positive features, a lot of which are on the options list. I would strongly recommend to any potential buyers to purchase the Cayman S PDK with the optional Sport Chrono package as well as the Porsche Active Suspension Management. This will ensure you own a car at the height of its accomplishment. The Sport Chrono Package will include interior detailing such as analogue and digital clocks, a stopwatch/timer for recording your lap times and a g-Meter for displaying how brave you are in the corners. But, more important than the interior changes is the fact that the optional Sport Chrono Package enhances the engine, gearbox and chassis to deliver the sharpest and most rewarding driving experience. In Sport and Sport Plus modes the damping is hardened, the steering is more direct and the throttle blips on the shifts down the gears.
The Porsche Cayman S has oodles of competence and this makes it a very difficult car to fault. Using the contrast of its weaknesses would have made an easier conclusion for me but I’ve failed to find a kink in its character, its engineering and its value. The South African Guild of Motoring Journalists have also noticed this, as the Porsche Cayman S sits pretty in the line-up of finalists for the 2014 Car of the Year. I would award it the title without a doubt.
The Cayman S is good… possibly too good. And while Porsche may be attempting to attract buyers of competing products, I fear that the Cayman S may not be too content playing second fiddle any more. Murmurings of a more powerful Porsche Cayman GTS breaking cover add to my argument.

Could It Be Too Good?

It’s hard to find an article on Stedman Graham that doesn’t mention his media-mogul fiancé, of 22 years. The hype and media frenzy that surrounds the queen of talk, Oprah Winfrey, could mean he often lives in her shadow.
“The beautiful thing about it is that even though people in the outside world define me by that, that’s not how I define myself… The bottom line is you’ve got to be a pretty strong person to even be with a person who is able to self-actualize herself and who is a woman, you can’t be weak, you have to step up,” says Graham.
<img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-2569" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/175658371-209x300.jpg" alt="" width="209" height="300" />
Growing up in Whitesboro, New Jersey, Graham had yet to find the self-awareness that he is now blessed with. He grew up with two disabled brothers and a family with a low self-esteem which rubbed off on him.
“I was defined by my race, I was defined by my background and I was defined by my family, all of those things,” he says.
One of his first jobs was as a prison guard, for five years. He then worked in the recreation department and later the education department. But it was a trip to South Africa that changed his life.
In the mid-eighties, Graham took a job in South Africa where he delivered food and clothes to people in the townships on behalf of an aid organization.
“I was working with a gentleman [Bob Brown] and he educated Nelson Mandela’s children. He was a nominee for the ambassador of South Africa and I worked for him and traveled all around the world with him. He was also a special assistant to president [Richard] Nixon, so we had very close ties to the White House. We had a network of folks that we would do work for as a business consultant and South Africa was one of those places that we came to.”
Graham saw the suffering of the South African people and although he is black, he never bore the wrath of racists.
“…as a South African you experienced the racism, but if you were an American you were treated differently.”
Almost 20 years since his first visit to South Africa, Graham retuned in 2013, to speak at a Mega Partnering Event on maximizing one’s potential to achieve success, and was surprised at what he saw.
“I love the way that you’re transitioning and transforming the country. I love the diversity of South Africa and I think that’s the key word… The message [for the people of South Africa] should be: If you want to invest in South Africa, invest in yourself.”
As for Graham’s secret to success, it is all about making the most of the 24 hours you have each day.
“I know that success is when preparation meets opportunity. Now, South Africa has the opportunity, it’s about how you prepare the people for the opportunity. When you prepare the people for the opportunity you’re going to get a booming economy. Your country is only as good as the skills of its people, it’s only as good as the education of its people,” says Graham.
Although South Africa has made many strides, Graham says one of the country’s biggest challenges is the belief that it can succeed on its own. He says businesses need to make use of the resources and opportunities that international investors want to offer.
“It’s like Nelson Mandela said, ‘this is not about black empowerment, it’s not about white empowerment, it’s about people empowerment. When we get along, we realize that we’re all in this together and it’s about a world-wide economy and what we want to do is empower as many people as possible worldwide and educate them worldwide.’”
Beside every strong man is an even stronger woman; but beside every strong woman is a man who is secure in his identity.

‘You Can’t Be Weak You Have To Step Up’

His daughter’s relationship with her boyfriend spurred Charl du Toit to build a forest in South Africa’s capital city of Pretoria. But, the road to this dream was a long one.
After finishing high school, Du Toit didn’t know what to study, so his father told him to find a job. At the time he was living in Zimbabwe, which was still Rhodesia then.
“The very first interview I ever went for… I still remember the newspaper ad saying they were looking for a very young, energetic, honest, reliable, young man. And I responded, writing the exact words to them,” says Du Toit.
<div id="attachment_2565" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2565" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-2565" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_2122-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Charl du Toit Trees</div>
He went for the interview without even knowing what post he had applied for or what the company was about. It turned out to be a pest control business.
“It’s the only interview I’ve ever been to in my entire life. And then six months later I found out that the only reason I got the job was because I was the only applicant. So that sort of brought me down to earth a little. I accepted I wasn’t as bright as I thought,” he says.
He spent around 10 years at this company, working his way up. He started as a pest control operator, moved to sales, then to management until he finally became the CEO.
“When I started out as a pest controller, my friends used to laugh at me. They used to call me ‘bug man’ and all of that. A couple of them even tried to work for the company, but they didn’t last. I was very fortunate, in hindsight, because this particular company had a history of about 40 years before I joined,” he says.
In January, 1980, Rhodesia was in the grips of war. It was then that Du Toit slipped through the border into South Africa and started his own pest control company, which grew quickly. Within 10 years, Pest Control Specialists had 13 branches and this was when he decided to franchise the business.
He realized that he would need a head office for the franchise business, as he was no longer a pest control specialist but a franchisee. So he bought a piece of land in Highveld Techno Park, outside of Pretoria.
“I got an architect to design a building and went out to tender and when I looked at the prices I told myself, ‘I can do this, I’m not stupid’. I had built the odd house before. So I decided to build it myself. The building was 700 square meters. It took me a year to build and when I finished it, I moved my offices in and I thought to myself, this could be a nice hobby.”
With 20 years in the pest control business and 36 franchisees, Du Toit decided to sell the business to focus on his new hobby—constructing and building offices. He bought the building next door to the one he had built, and built another structure, but this time, slightly bigger at 900 square meters.
A year later, he started to duplicate these two buildings and creating office parks, constructing around 16 more structures in two years.
Today, this office park has around 32 buildings over roughly 5.5 hectares. When construction is done, the portfolio should cover 75,000 square meters.
“It was more or less at that time I realized I needed to make a change because the hobby had now become bigger than my business,” he says.
In between all this, Du Toit saw another business opportunity. His daughter began dating a young man named Barry, who was living with his parents and had studied agriculture. He had some chickens, was trying to farm and was also growing trees.
“When I saw that he and my daughter were becoming serious, I sat him down and said, ‘listen my boy, you are going to have to do something else because this girl, for you to keep her, it’s expensive.’ So I said to him, ‘look, why don’t we do a joint venture? And I’ll help you support my daughter.’”
They decided they would grow indigenous trees in 100-liter containers which would take around five years, without any profit, just expenses, to grow them. Seven years later, there are about 500,000 trees on the farm.
“Our challenge was twofold; the first was to learn how to grow trees. The second challenge was to learn how to sell trees. Those were two different skills,” he says.
The 100-liter tree was quite difficult to handle because it was heavy and there was a bigger market for smaller sizes. Today, Willow Feather supplies trees to municipalities, mines, new developments and the public.
Seeing that the business of selling trees was becoming a success, Du Toit started a new initiative called ‘Save our planet, plant a tree’. This campaign was an undertaking that would sponsor, or give as a gift, 150,000 trees to Pretoria residents over five years.
“I’ll never forget, when I made that statement it sounded quite cool. Those are two nice numbers. I took out my calculator and I realized it worked out to 2,500 trees a month,” he says.
“I’m telling you now that it’s going to take me more than five years. We are standing at about 24,000 trees.”
Even though the dream will take him longer than he had planned, Du Toit is not giving up that easily.
The serial entrepreneur is well on his way to building a forest in the city. To help realize his dream, he works with schools around Pretoria to assist in making his vision a reality. And this is his latest way of making his millions, through building a forest with the help of Barry.
And as for his daughter being expensive?
“She married Barry and I have three grandchildren. So, it was a good investment.”

The Bug Man Who Is Father  To Half A Million Trees

The dining room table is set, with three pieces of cutlery on each side of the dinner plates. The wine is flowing and hors d&#8217;oeuvres are being served. The CEO of Guanomad, Eric Rajaonary, sits at the head of the table with his CFO, Anja Randrianalison, to his left and his sales team to his right. Tonight, they are celebrating their nomination by the Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship (AAE).
<img loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2557" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/guano16-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" />
Less than a month later, this growing company based in Antananarivo, Madagascar, beat 11 other companies from the rest of the continent to be named the most outstanding small and growing business for 2013 by the AAE. The product that earned them this accolade—bat droppings.
&#8220;It all began in 2005, where, after a few discussions about the possibility to find bat guano in Madagascar, and inspired by the Peruvian seabirds guano, I decided to make a 180-degree career change in setting up my own company,&#8221; says Rajaonary.
The former accountant saw potential in the fertilizer business and ventured into the southern caves of the island in the Indian Ocean to look for bat guano. In the first year of production, the company sold only 400 tons of compost. Today, the company produces 1,500 tons of guano a year with exports to Europe, Canada and the Caribbean. This year, the target is Africa.
Dinner is served, but before anyone can take a bite of their meal, Rajaonary makes a toast to his team and, of course, the bats of Madagascar. In a country known as one of the poorest in the world according to the World Bank, Guanomad is an example of how one simple idea can provide work for hundreds of people.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2560" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/guano12-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" />
Although Rajaonary was born in Madagascar, he spent a large part of his life in France as a student and then an accountant. In 1998, he left Europe and moved back to Madagascar looking for opportunities in the private sector.   Leaving Europe was a big risk, but one he urges other African entrepreneurs working abroad to take.
&#8220;Agriculture, new technology, health and education. Africa has the brainpower. The continent needs these people to come back. However, these people need better incentives,&#8221; he says.
What really makes the company stand out is Rajaonary&#8217;s dedication to helping his community and building a self-sustainable economy. Madagascar has one of the worst malnutrition rates in the world with nearly half of its population of 20 million not getting the required food to live healthy lives, according to the National Nutrition Office (ONN), a government body aimed at eradicating this problem.
Rajaonary believes that Guanomad is a solution because it helps grow crop throughout the country and if used correctly, could help feed millions. The company goes so far as to train local farmers on how to use the product and often gives tons of Guanomad away for new farmers to try.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2561" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/guano1-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" />
Unlike chemical fertilizers, Guanomad doesn&#8217;t damage the soil or contaminate any of the waterways through nitrification, says Mirana Rakotovelo, the director of marketing and communication. The product is 100% environmentally friendly and can even help repair damaged soil in some cases.
These values of giving back to the community are also felt in the Guanomad offices.
&#8220;We really feel at ease working in a friendly atmosphere,&#8221; says Guanomad employee, Christian Rahelison, who recently joined the team.
&#8220;Secondly, working in an environment like this affects us positively, not just as work but our quality of life as well. There is just less stress,&#8221; he adds.
As the celebrations for their nominations continue, Rajaonary turns to the DJ and instructs him play some Zamba tracks—an Argentinian style of music. The staff gathers on the dance floor and start dancing to the moves on the screen. Most of the female employees take the lead as the male employees shy away from moving their hips. Rajaonary, however, isn&#8217;t afraid and makes his way into the front of the row ready to jive with the best of them.
The entrepreneur says he doesn&#8217;t intentionally try to make the company feel like a family, but the relationship between the top management and all the employees is based on trust which makes everybody feel at ease.
He thinks the future is bright for Guanomad and attributes much of his success to innovation and good management. He also believes that being a socially responsible company, tends to work in his favor as it builds a relationship with the local farmers and people of the country.
As the night winds down, Rajaonary keeps dancing and spurs his staff to do the same. Most of the team moves outside for a break. Everyone is smiling and when the boss comes out to join them, the level of enthusiasm remains the same.
The team moves to the entrance of the house where five vehicles are waiting to take everyone home. It&#8217;s an all-round good feeling, except that work starts at 9AM the next day. The team dread the morning wake-up call, but they know Rajaonary will be the first at work and they don’t want to let their boss down.

The Profits That Drop From The Bat

A neatly laid out kitchen made from African Wenge side panels, with high gloss wrapped doors, completed with a black silico nero top imported from Germany, is the work of two young entrepreneurs, Aubrey Dolweni and Simpiwe Malotana. They are slowly transforming the interior design industry in townships in the Western Cape province of South Africa.
Obsido Interiors started in Dolweni’s backyard and is now growing into a successful interior design company.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2544" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/MG_8280-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
It was Dolweni’s father, Amos, a well-known cupboard maker in the Nyanga township, who taught Aubrey how to build and make cupboards. When Amos died, Dolweni decided to continue in his father’s footsteps and start his own business.
In 2005, Dolweni was working for another interior design firm as well as doing odd carpentry jobs on the side. While installing new cupboards at Malotana’s home, who was his neighbor, the idea for Obsido Interiors was conceptualized.
Malotana, an IT analyst, knew that Dolweni was not entirely happy with the job he had and urged him to start Obsido Interiors.
“At the time I wasn’t comfortable at work. I felt like I was underpaid, but I had a fear of leaving because I didn’t have any business or management skills,” says Dolweni.
Eventually, around 2008, Malotana was able to finally convince Dolweni to look at starting a business with him. It was finally registered two years later.
“It took him a while to decide as he was also employed at the time and a sole bread winner in his family. After several consultations with his mother, he finally decided we could start the business,” says Malotana.
Dolweni concentrated on design and manufacturing, while Malotana, a father of two, would focus on the marketing, financial and admin side of the business.
For six months, Dolweni worked on the business in the evenings and on weekends, doing odd jobs in manufacturing custom-made wooden coffee tables and interior design work for friends and family.
Soon, the company grew and he quit his full time job to focus on Obsido Interiors.
“This business grew very fast and we couldn’t manage the pressure in terms of delivering projects on time and so on… And he [Dolweni] had to work full time on the business.” says Malotana.
Obisido Interiors grew from just making wooden ornaments to a business focusing on redesigning and assembling home interiors in townships.
“We saw that a lot of the people were going to the city to get new kitchens and stuff and so we decided to bring this service to the people in the townships,” Malotana says.
Although, it wasn’t easy at first because Dolweni would meet with clients, do the measurements and sketch the designs on paper. Some clients would chop and change what they wanted, forcing Dolweni to redraw the designs from the beginning.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2543" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/MG_8253-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
“We had to look for software to make things easy for us. In 2011, we bought a program which allowed us to do designs in 3D and things start to work and look better. So we could show the customer a 3D view of the design and if they wanted changes, we could do them instantly,” says Malotana.
A few months into the business, Obsido Interiors received its first big client. They were asked to design and manufacture office furniture for another business in another township.
But like any business, they experienced challenges along the way, especially in townships which an emerging black middle class no longer wanted to reside in. They were instead choosing to move into the city and surrounding suburbs.
Many of their would-be-clients are often unemployed.  Some are blacklisted by the credit bureau but still want to spend money redesigning their living areas. Many of them, according to Dolweni, would rather get service from the guys who sell cupboards on the side of the road using off-cut material. He says it is one of their biggest challenges; competing with these sidewalk businessmen and not compromising on the quality of their product, which is sometimes seen as expensive.
“This market is slow. The type of products we offer, we feel like we’re not going to change. We’re not going to offer lower end products. People will just grow into it,” says Malotana.
Running a business and being young in what is labeled as South Africa’s murder capital has proved to be thorn they are trying to pull out.
“The other problem is trust. Because we’re black and young and we’re from Nyanga, people still feel that we’re going to run away with their money, even though we have all the systems in place,” laments Malotana.
But that attitude is slowly changing. They now have showroom in a mall in their township and people know where to find them.
“We recently formed a partnership with one of our major suppliers, Lansdowne Boards. They helped us set up our showroom,” says the outspoken Malotana.
Business might be booming for Obsido Interiors, but the pair have not forgotten about their upbringing in Nyanga. The township is plagued by one of the highest crime rates in the country and rising unemployment. The saying, ‘charity begins at home’ has become part of their life. The pair decided to start a football team, Nyanga Football Stars, in the hope that it will help alleviate the crime in their neighborhood.
“The team is made up of former gangsters, former drug addicts, ex-prisoners and general students. The vision was to help reform them and get them to be accepted back into society.”
They have even taken their philanthropy a step further by hiring or finding employment for promising team members.
Obsido Interiors might have started from humble beginnings in Dolweni’s backyard, but it is an interior design business that is transforming the township.

‘People Feel That We’re Going To Run Away With Their Money’

Edward Moshole was destined for a life as a cleaner in a factory; until inspiration came on a breath of fresh cherry-scented air in a storage room surrounded by detergents. Now the former cleaner sells 70,000 bottles of detergent a month to the largest retail shopping chains in South Africa, worth R12 million ($1 million) a year.
“A broomstick is what started my business. It was the only thing that I owned… Getting a job as a cleaner at Enterprise changed my life; them giving me the boots and overalls and saying ‘here, clean’. I could feel in my heart I wanted to be something more,” he says.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2542" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_7339-300x111.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="111" />
With humble beginnings in the small township of Gapane, a place few have heard of in the Limpopo province of South Africa, Moshole’s story is uncommon. He grew up without parents from the age of 16 and failed the eighth grade five years in a row. Moshole says when he was young he never dreamed he could become a millionaire.
His life changed when he moved to Cape Town to live with his brother. He says the move woke him up. Moshole finished his schooling and became a cleaner in a factory run by food chain Enterprise. In this factory, in a two-square-meter storage room that smelled of cherries; among piles of detergent, bleach, cleaners and soaps, Moshole had an idea.
“Getting into that store room, I could see that the quality doesn’t measure the performance of the cleaners. I could improve things. I could see myself becoming a detergent manufacturing champion,” he says.
It began with $6 and a broom stick says Moshole. The then cleaner went directly to a manufacturer and bought a 5-liter bleach bottle. His first sales pitch was short and simple.
“I went to an ordinary person and said ‘look I’ve got detergent, I’ve got cleaner and they go for R15 ($1.30) a liter’,” he says.
Moshole’s part-time business took off. He targeted his co-workers who finished work too late to make it to the shops. A few months later, Moshole began selling door-to-door. He moved to spaza shops and sold to neighbors.
Moshole soon grew tired of the life of a middleman salesman and decided to create his own brand. With the money he earned, he bought a pile of 25-liter spice drums from Enterprise for around $1 each. He spent the following weekends churning detergent with a homemade metal mixer in his backyard.
“At the end of the day my hands were blistered,” he recalls.
For three years, Moshole toiled over his blue spice drums. His brand, Chem-Fresh, garnered the interests of supermarket giant Pick n Pay, owned by Raymond Ackerman, who is ranked 38th on FORBES’ list of richest Africans. It was the big break that Moshole needed.
The deal took seven years to sign. Along the way, Moshole learnt some hard lessons about mass-market production. One of them was to change from an informal backyard business to a formal one. He named his company ‘ebinter’ and started selling his Chem-Fresh products through it. Moshole also learnt he needed to become an accountant as well as a salesman. But it was the competition in the detergent business that was hardest to handle.
“Retail must retain a formal market. It’s tough. You negotiate with a buyer who takes 300 calls a day from others who supply the same product as you. Then there you are competing with the multinationals and then you are competing with the companies who own no-name brands. Your product needs to be cheap and needs to be of a consistent high quality,” says Moshole.
These days, Moshole’s factory in Wynberg, an industrial sector a few kilometers outside of Sandton, is a far cry from his backyard. Thousands of plastic bottles are piled to the ceiling. A $90,000 mixer churns bath soaps and hand wash. Another mixer prepares bleach for the day. Moshole says it takes half an hour to produce 500 liters of Chem-Fresh bleach.
His clientele has now spread across supermarket chains Spar, Pick n Pay, Massmart and Dischem. The last two were recently acquired in December.
Despite landing these promising contracts the detergent maker remains humble. He keeps the broom that he started with as a reminder of where his dreams began, minus the brush which fell off a few years ago.
With $6 and a broomstick, Moshole began selling detergent to his colleagues, bottle by bottle. Now, he sells them in the thousands. What’s more, Moshole proudly claims he has never missed a delivery.

The Unlikely Millionaire Cleans Up

It all started from the boot of a car. Luvuyo Rani sold secondhand computers to teachers, whom he realized did not know how to use the technology and this would make his business. It took a few years for this teacher turned entrepreneur’s company, Silulo Ulutho Technologies, to make money and it is now turning over around $1.8 million a year.
In 2004, the South African government was introducing the new outcome based curriculum while Rani was a teacher at Kwamfundo Secondary School in the township of Khayelitsha in the Western Cape province. This curriculum was aimed at teaching learners computer skills that many of the teachers did not have. He quit his teaching job and began selling computers from the back of a little Corsa Lite to schools in the township.
&nbsp;
“Nobody took me seriously when I asked to do presentations and others were saying, ‘You’re not okay, you’re mad, you can’t be selling secondhand computers.’”
But that did not deter him. He soon realized the power of stokvels, an informal savings pool or syndicate, in which money is contributed in lump sums on a rotational basis for family needs. Rani clustered the teachers in groups of six where they contributed $35 every month. Within six months of starting the scheme, each teacher had their own computer.
His brother, Lonwabo, had helped him take out a $900 loan to start the business which was flourishing. The following year, the brothers were selling around 35 computers a month. But soon their customers were returning the computers for repairs and maintenance, which the brothers took to their supplier because they didn’t know how to fix them. Luvuyo had a background in teaching while his brother was trained as an engineer.
“We realized that we needed to have someone and we didn’t have money to pay someone to work for us. So, we decided to get someone to become a partner, in terms of a shareholder, because he had the expertise,” Rani says.
This is when they hired Sigqibo Pangabantu.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2537" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_8484-300x206.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="206" />
With Pangabantu now fixing the computers, Rani realized that the teachers couldn’t use them. The next step was to establish a computer center where they would train the teachers on how to use the computers, which created another revenue stream. His sister-in-law, Nandipha Mtshoba, joined the team to help in marketing this new venture, while the brothers began looking for space to host this computer centre they wanted. They saw an opportunity where a mall was being built. This was the perfect site, near a main road in the township. But their dream soon came crushing down on them. They were blacklisted and they did not have enough cash to open an internet café.
“They didn’t give us the space. We were disappointed. We met one of the tenants in the mall who was selling electricity and Vodacom phones and he had about 30 square meters of space and we asked this guy if we could use it to open the internet café. He said we must come back in two weeks,” says Rani.
When they returned, the man wanted to charge them $375 to rent the space. It was a steep amount for a business that used the boot of a car as an office. They were deep in debt and even the bank was on the verge of repossessing the car and Luvuyo’s house.
Eventually, their computer supplier saved them and the brothers were able to set up their first business center in February, 2006. Things seemed to be getting on the right track.
“So, the turnover we made that month was R350 ($30) and the expenses were R12,000 ($1,100),” he remembers.
For six months it felt like time stood still. They were receiving threats of eviction and they were behind with payments for suppliers.
They were no longer selling computers to schools because people in the townships didn’t know how to use computers. Rani set up short computer courses on the basics of Microsoft office, the internet and email but they sat in the business center, waiting for customers who were just not coming.
A year later, they won $8,900 in a provisional round of a competition and they opened two business centers. In 2008, they won the national round of the competition and Rani was able to open another three stores. Business started to look up, now selling around 100 computers a month.
Through their enterprise development program, the internet service provider, MWEB, sponsored around $45,000 a year which was used to open seven new business centers.
Today, Silulo Ulutho Technologies boasts 18 centers in the Western Cape and eight in the Eastern Cape province, where Rani was born. He says they are looking to raise funds so their staff can buy franchises.
Another company recently approved a $450,000 loan for Silulo to begin the franchising model and 10 stores will be handed to current employees in the next three years. The staff will own 50% of the business centers until they are able to stand on their own feet, at which point they will be able to buy-out the rest of the franchise from the founders.
“Most of these guys were students of ours and started working as consultants, brand managers and others regional managers. Now they will become owners of these businesses. It’s not only just the four of us becoming the next billionaires, we’re creating other entrepreneurs,” he says.
“We really want to make an impact in the township, in the sense that, people in the rural areas need to have key role models they can learn from [and realize] that it’s possible to start from nothing and build something.”
Silulo wants to be in every township in South Africa and even venturing into the rest of the continent in the next 10 years. Rani says they also want to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange by 2024.
He is a man on a mission; taking on challenges in his stride and learning in the industry as he goes along.
“I didn’t get training in IT. I just surrounded myself with my brother who is an engineer and Sigqibo who is in IT. This taught me that you don’t have to be in IT to run a business in IT,” he says.
Rani grew up working in his mother’s shebeen, a drinking hall in townships, where he learned the trade of dealing with customers, selling and managing a business that has helped him run his own business.
He says you need to understand your business’ unique challenges to become a successful entrepreneur.
“We’re trading in Khayelitsha, where the employment rate is 60% and there’s no money. You need to be very smart in terms of how we get money and get people to pay. Some of the people coming for our services are dependent on social grants from government. They save that money for themselves to get a computer and better employment,” he says.
After 10 years of running Silulo, Rani says it’s time to shift his focus to starting a family which he and his wife had put on hold.
“I want to be a daddy now, because this year I’m 40, so it would be a great birthday present,” he says while laughing.
A new venture with new challenges, but Rani has proven that he can be successful in anything he puts his mind to.

You’re Mad.  You Can’t Be Selling Secondhand Computers

It’s mid-September, and Volkswagen of America has a problem: It won’t have any new models coming out until the spring. Keeping VW front and ­center in consumers’ minds has drawn a group of marketing folks from the automaker and two of its ad agencies to Google’s BrandLab at its YouTube headquarters south of San Francisco. Dedicated to “evangelizing the art and science of brand-building,” the richly appointed meeting space is basically a man cave for ad creatives, complete with overstuffed couches, booze and the mother of all big screens, an assemblage of 32 flat-panel displays massed into 300 square feet of video overload.
In one corner of the BrandLab, Google’s Jeff Rozic goes to work running VW’s folks through a rapid-fire succession of video ad campaigns the BrandLab feels have worked. His earnest delivery is well-honed, courtesy of 100-plus similar “private workshops” held for potential advertisers from Coca-Cola to Toyota over the past year. VW has some catching up to do, a point Rozic makes intentionally or not by highlighting 13 travel vignettes produced by a rival, Nissan Mexico. His larger point: Don’t clutter a story with too blatant a call to action. “We shouldn’t apologize for trying to sell cars,” one VW exec protests. “Sure,” Rozic shoots back, “but you have to be careful to distinguish when you’re telling a story and when you’re selling.”
Fair point. Rozic is clearly selling—and it’s a product intended to change Google’s path. The king of the click is now lecturing one of the world’s most accomplished advertisers to forget those clicks and amp up the image ads. CEO Larry Page can go on as much as he wants about self-driving cars, wearable computers or any of the company’s other “moon shots.” But Google fundamentally remains the most disruptive advertising company of the past half-century. As its total advertising-revenue growth rate has halved in the past two years, from 29% to 15% (thanks in part to Facebook and Twitter), it’s now charging full-bore toward the biggest pot of advertising gold it doesn’t own: brand advertising, the image ads you see in glossy magazines and on television.
Most online ads—the banners that litter nearly every commercial website and, most notably, Google’s search ads—have failed to help marketers move the needle on classic advertising measures like brand awareness and intent to purchase. ­Instead, they mainly drive people to a product page to click the buy button. ­Direct marketing is lucrative: Search is still upwards of 60% of Google’s ad revenue, helping it earn an estimated 15.8% net margin in 2013—but image ads will come to dominate digital advertising in this decade.
Look at the numbers: Digital brand advertising is an $18 billion market this year, according to eMarketer. Its forecast implies that number will double by 2018, at which point it will have passed search and direct marketing, with plenty of room to grow.
Television advertising, comprising almost entirely image ads, is currently a $200 billion global market. And it’s a vulnerable one, as the medium’s iron grip on the bulk of ad spending looks a little less firm as younger people scatter to YouTube and Netflix when they aren’t Snapchatting or Instagramming on iPhones or skipping ads entirely on their DVRs. Some 75% of respondents to an Interactive Advertising Bureau poll of 5,000 ad execs expect to see some spending move from TV to digital video in the next year.
This explains the man cave. YouTube remains one of the greatest acquisitions of the Internet era. Larry and Sergey paid $1.65 billion in 2006 for a business that today would conservatively be worth $20 billion as a stand-alone. So what’s another $400 million or so to build out a brand ad business?
The return has been fairly quick: In October Publicis’ MediaVest, the ad agency for Coca-Cola, Honda and other big advertisers, inked a deal to spend tens of millions of dollars over the next year on Google video, display and mobile ads. It was Google’s first agreement with such an online partner to buy ads in advance, as agencies and marketers do on television. In November Publicis agencies DigitasLBi and Razorfish went bigger, committing to spend $100 million on YouTube and Google’s banner and mobile ad networks this year. “Google is one of the few players with a platform big and wide enough to attract these dollars,” says Razorfish CEO Pete Stein.
And Google sources insist that more of these “upfront” deals will be announced shortly, which has investors—who have driven the stock to a recent alltime high of over $1,150—feeling bullish. Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer at the asset management firm Solaris Group, a Google investor, figures the company could capture about 6% of TV ad spending by 2020, or $20 billion a year. Given that Google’s total revenue this year will come in at around $60 billion, this is the growth the company needs to continue its dominance.
&nbsp;
Susan Wojcicki was Google’s 16th hire. Marissa Mayer came a few hires later, yet it was Mayer, now Yahoo’s CEO, who became the flashy female face of Google. No matter. Wojcicki (pronounced wo-JIT-ski), the senior vice president in charge of all Google ad products, plays the anti-Marissa. She favors jeans and hoodies around the office, displaying a self-deprecating plainness that one former employee says is reminiscent of Chance the gardener from the movie Being There. “She never felt she needed to be the smartest person in the room,” says another ex-colleague.
Instead, she’s become the most powerful person—male or female—in advertising. She manages effectively without drama and thus has been Page’s go-to exec for wins such as the introduction of AdSense, which pays other sites to run Google ads (now a $13 billion business), and the acquisitions of DoubleClick, an ad-serving pioneer, and YouTube. “She only works on big problems, not small ones,” says ShareThis CEO Kurt Abrahamson, who worked for her a decade ago.
Her vision of the future of advertising (and hence Google)? Since content is flowing across so many digital devices—a trend Google is trying to accelerate with such initiatives as its Chromecast device for streaming online video to TVs and its flurry of Android smartphones and tablets—she sees nearly all advertising eventually going digital, too, putting it squarely in Google’s wheelhouse.
“Advertisers will have to go where the users go,” says Wojcicki, sitting outside her office at the Googleplex, sipping a “detox” lemonade with maple syrup and a dash of cayenne. “A big chunk of dollars will follow.”
Wojcicki envisions an operating system for advertising that can connect search, display, YouTube and branded content, and bundle it all up into campaigns that span computers, smartphones, tablets, connected TVs and—who knows?—maybe Google Glass. Some marketers are moving quickly in that direction. For the recent launch of its D Rose 4 sneakers, Adidas ran ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network, a partnership of some 2 million sites, backed up by mobile ads for a second-screen experience and search ads to catch those who want to buy them right away.
For some time Wojcicki has talked about the “perfect ad,” the one that people see at precisely the time they want to know about a product or are ready to buy it. Search ads now approach that ideal for direct sales, but Wojcicki pictures image ads, supplemented by data on personal preferences and behavior, that can plant the seed for brand or product preference just as well. It’s an advertising axiom that people are more receptive to messages when they’re leaning back on the couch watching TV than when engaged in online activities. Wojcicki contends the potential is for just the opposite. “If users are engaging with something, they’re choosing to see it,” she says, and Google can use that overt choice to serve even more relevant ads.
So how would a Web display ad—largely, the vilified banner—engage?
Upstairs at Google’s display-ad headquarters off the main campus in Mountain View, Calif. scrawled equations blanket a wall-size whiteboard. The equations are a scrap of the impossibly complex mathematical formulas that power its $12.5 billion display network business. “They turn into beautiful rich-media ads,” Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display advertising, explains dreamily as we walk by.
When Larry Page took over as CEO in 2011, he told Mohan to “revolutionize” display ads so they’re just as useful as Google’s obscenely profitable search ads. Mohan, a veteran of pre-Google DoubleClick, is a true believer. (With a reported $100 million in stock grants to keep the likes of Facebook and Twitter at bay, he isn’t driven by the need for more money.) He has bought or built what even rivals concede is the broadest set of software needed by advertisers and publishers to sell and place ads, including a state-of-the-art ad exchange that sells space as fluidly as the Nasdaq sells stock.
Mohan, who likes to decry the 40% of “spray and pray” TV advertising he says is wasted on indifferent audiences, offers a vision of the future in which Google can marry its data about individual consumers with the reach of TV and measure the results, too.
Google can generate that reach with its display network, which ­ranges from tiny outfits to the New York Times and USA Today. It serves ads on those websites for a cut of revenue. (Tellingly, even NBC partakes, though Google has put a big, fat target on its back.) The network ­reaches 90% of the Web’s population and serves impressions to a billion people worldwide a month. It was tough sledding early on, as ads began showing up on dodgy niche sites, but an ongoing cleanup campaign has big brand advertisers increasingly interested. The number of advertisers booking space months ahead—an option chiefly used by big marketers looking to influence brand consideration—has quadrupled from a year ago, but Google isn’t offering specifics.
Still, the banner ads have been losing out to “native” ads, which use content rather than a boring banner to attract people’s attention. “Facebook is a bigger bet for us right now than YouTube,” says Laurent Fa­racci, the U.S. chief marketing officer for Reckitt Benckiser, owner of brands such as Lysol and Clearasil. Instead, Mohan has bet on rich “engagement ads” for the display network. For instance, one might expand to play videos, games or apps when hovered over for two seconds. Samsung recently ran millions of them to play a live video stream of a new smartphone and smartwatch. In June Burberry ran display and mobile ads through Google that prompted people to snap a photo of their own puckered-up lips and send the digital imprint of the kiss to a loved one.
They’re starting to work. Now used in about 1,000 campaigns daily, engagement ads command around double the price of standard banners, which vary wildly but average around $3 per thousand viewers reached. That’s partly because advertisers can choose not to pay unless someone actually views those ads—like those who pay for clicks rather than views in the banner world—so they’re more valuable. Still, branding remains a challenge for a company whose success so far derives from cold mathematics. Back at the BrandLab, there’s an elegant arrangement of two dozen digital photo frames mounted on a pedestal, all playing videos of flames. “Great stories are told around the campfire,” a Google project manager explains. Cute. Except this campfire gives off no heat. For that, Google needs some of the sizzle of Hollywood.
&nbsp;
The warren of studios and soundstages southwest of Hollywood is strewn with cameras, lights, toolboxes and half-empty coffee cups. One stage features stock horror-movie sets, like the hotel hall from The Shining. In another studio, three women, one of them with scissors in hand, are preparing to film a video on how to cut your own bangs. Once a hangar where Hughes Aircraft built the Spruce Goose in the 1940s, this 41,000-square-foot building is now YouTube Space LA, possibly the world’s largest production facility dedicated to online video.
It’s YouTube’s latest bid to shed its dog-on-a-skateboard-video image and make the site a cleaner, more well-lit place for big TV marketers. That bid began a couple of years ago with YouTube’s $300 million drive to create some 200 TV-like channels from the likes of Shaquille O’Neal and Amy Poehler. While they don’t have TV networks quaking just yet, YouTube has been able to command higher ad prices closer to those of TV than Web display ads. YouTube gross ad revenue jumped 51% in 2013 to $5.6 billion, netting $2 billion after payments to content and ad partners, according to eMarketer.
Here’s the funny thing, though: It turns out that some of the most popular channels are not network wannabes. They’re from producers such as PewDiePie and Jenna Marbles, invisible to those over 30. Likewise, some of the most popular ads on YouTube don’t even look like the TV ads that Google has hoped to capture. It’s dawning on big marketers from American Express to General Electric that to take advantage of the social and interactive nature of online they need to forge a new sensibility, not simply rerun TV commercials.
In a new take on its long-running Campaign for Real Beauty, for instance, Dove launched a video on YouTube in April that featured an FBI-trained forensic artist sketching two portraits of women. One was based on their own descriptions and another on a stranger’s, which produced more attractive images. By May the Unilever brand’s touching three-minute video had drawn more than 114 million views worldwide, becoming the most-viewed online video ad ever. “It’s not just 30-second ads,” says Jamie Byrne, YouTube’s director of content strategy. “It’s creating something that people want to engage with and share with friends.”
So now it’s up to Byrne, whose previous job was head of YouTube’s original programming push, to make it easy for big brands to reach YouTube’s 1 billion monthly viewers.
Similar to Rozic’s ad-campaign boot camps in the BrandLab, Byrne brings companies such as PepsiCo and Johnson &amp; Johnson to YouTube LA for a four-day workshop on creating compelling stories, videos and YouTube channels. He’s aiming to get more than 100 advertisers into the program this year, both at YouTube LA and in a new combo studio and BrandLab being built in New York.
If Byrne has his way, the new world of brand marketing online will look a lot like a shoot at an unassuming neo-eclectic house in Anaheim Hills, 45 minutes southeast of Los Angeles. In the living room a crew of six is filming the sixth episode of Grace’s Faces, on Bobbi Brown Cosmetics’ I love makeup channel on YouTube. It features Grace Helbig, a 28-year-old YouTube star whose own self-produced channel, Daily Grace, draws more than 2 million subscribers to her wacky takes on life. For this new show, Helbig shows up at the doors of fellow YouTube stars to do a makeover.
Her subject this day is Rebecca Black, the 16-year-old who became an instant star in early 2011 for her self-produced monotonous pop hit, “Friday,” that year’s most-watched video on YouTube. Marc Reagan, manager of artistry at Bobbi Brown, is showing Black how to apply various kinds of makeup. Dull barks from a dog banished to the garage only add to the authenticity, apparently. Helbig jumps into the frame, bubbling with a whiff of irony, “You look like an angel!” For a companion show, Touching Your Stuff, Helbig prowls the house rifling through personal effects. “In this medium you can get your Idol moment without paying $20 million,” says Reza Izad, whose Collective Digital Studio produces I love makeup and more than 200 other channels, such as the Annoying Orange—a piece of talking citrus that heckles other fruit until they get sliced with a knife.
It’s all pretty nutty, but there’s nothing amateur about Grace’s Faces. Or even overtly commercial. Bobbi Brown isn’t mentioned anywhere in Grace’s Faces despite the use of its cosmetics. Still, the company says it’s happy with the 300,000 views the channel got the first week and the 70,000 channel subscriptions it drew in the next two weeks. “We felt like comedic programming would be in line with our brand personality and would resonate with a younger audience,” says Bobbi Brown President Maureen Case. Marketers don’t pay YouTube to run the shows, but they do pay to run lots of ads to drive people to watch them.
Google will ultimately win this race for a simple reason: Video ads perform better than TV spots, says David Cohen, Universal McCann’s chief investment officer, based on multiple studies his agency has done. “But TV advertising is a frictionless system,” he adds, “a well-oiled machine.” Google can play around with Larry Page’s moon shots, one of which might eventually land, but what will pay for those flights of fancy? Making digital display just as free of friction, something Google knows how to do. It’s just a matter of time.

Google Wants It All

“Prepare to get cold. Very cold. Take your worst experience in the cold and multiply that by 10!” This is how my colleagues at CNBC Africa briefed me on what would be my first visit to the small ski town of Davos in Switzerland to attend the 44th World Economic Forum (WEF).
After that advice, it’s only natural that I prepared for the worst. It resulted in two suitcases being packed with winter thermal goodies. In hindsight, I should have skipped the extra suitcase as it added logistical stress, but my biceps got a lot firmer.
While preparing for the trip, many questions filled my mind—who to speak to, how to address the global agenda, would I ask the right questions if I were to speak to Christine Lagarde, or better yet, Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of WEF. In response to the anxiety, the journalist in me searched the internet for archived pieces on previous forums, in preparation for future interviews.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2530" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/20140122_122522-169x300.jpg" alt="" width="169" height="300" />
And then came the moment of bidding farewell to family, friends and the South African summer as I, together with my colleagues, prepared to brave the sub-zero temperatures in Davos for a week.
After a little more than 10 hours in the air, we touched down at Zurich Airport, where we would catch three trains in two-and-a-half hours to reach Davos.
So, after hauling my suitcases on and off the trains, I was hot, flustered, hungry and most of all mesmerized. Mesmerized by the beauty of the Swiss Alps. The mountain tops were reminiscent of soft cocoa peaks that had been drizzled in a thick layer of pure white icing sugar. Trust me to compare such a wonderful sight to food. After more than 12 hours in transit, hunger pangs were tormenting my stomach.
This tiny ski town was about to host around 2,500 delegates comprising business leaders, politicians, academia and media from across the globe.
The theme for this year’s forum was ‘Reshaping the world: consequences for business, politics and society’. It’s a broad theme that leaves you questioning where to begin and where to end?
Africa began by reshaping its image and its level of participation. Most WEF delegates are familiar with the multi-colored scarf, representing the South African flag, being adorned by both South African and international representatives, however, this year, green and white scarfs were the order of the day. The Nigerian delegation made a bold and clear statement by pronouncing their presence at WEF through this accessory that kept the cold at bay. Whatever their objective was, it worked as the world and its African peers sat up and paid attention to the West African state that will play host to the World Economic Forum On Africa in May this year. Following nations like Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Africa, Nigeria’s capital city of Abuja will welcome the 24th annual forum that will seek to find African solutions to African challenges. Coupled with the strong attendance of Nigerian delegates was that of fellow African leaders as a whole. Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete, Ghanaian president John Mahama and Guinean president Alpha Condé were just a few that made their voices heard.
With Africa making up roughly 4% of the world’s economic activity, 15% of the global population and 20% of the world’s land mass, it was evident that it is no longer a continent looking for aid, but rather trade.
“Africa is very much on the agenda, (it’s) on the minds of policy makers and corporate leaders,” said Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
After a recent visit to Kenya and Malawi, Lagarde noted that strong economic growth is projected for the continent going forward, especially sub-Saharan Africa.
Key concerns on the African agenda include boosting investment on the continent for the mutual gain of all other African markets; fighting security threats such as the Nigerian terrorist group, Boko Haram; and most of all, stimulating inter-African trade.
Bisi Onasanya, the CEO of First Bank of Nigeria, echoed these sentiments.
“I believe businesses need to pay attention to Nigeria and Africa, if they want to move away from saturated developed markets, the yields in this part of the world are a lot more superior to what you get in other parts of the world and sometimes I think the risks are overhyped to the extent that we scare away some of those investors.”
Onasanya also alluded to the unity that was displayed by both African government and business leaders in Davos, which is not always a common sight.
“Aliko (Dangote) is here, President (Goodluck) Jonathan is here… we are telling the world that we are here and ready to do business.”
Trade with no limits is thought to be the new solution to working towards economic inclusion for all African states and dispelling the stereotypes that we have regarding our peers on the continent. Trade between African nations currently stands at 11% of total trade, compared to Europe&#8217;s level of around 70%.
Peter Staude, the CEO of Tongaat Hulett, however, cautioned that we need to highlight what products can be used for trade.
“Inter-African trade is needed, however we need to ensure that there is no duplication of goods,” said Staude.
Condé is also an African optimist. He too called for more co-operation and assistance to take place between African leaders to bolster economic growth. My interview with him was a slightly tense moment as he had an entourage of at least 20 people, all asking French questions. Who were we? Where were we from? What is the interview about and when would they see it? After recognizing that our team was based in South Africa, Conde smiled and said: ‘Ah Mandela… good friend of mine. And Miriam. Miriam Makeba, good friend of Guinea.”
This light moment brought about some relief from the cold, the Guinean crowd and the French conversation.
Slowly but surely, Africa is making progress. Some states are even learning from each other. Ghana has made oil companies provide transparency around their dealings with government, with the likes of Nigeria, Angola and Uganda potentially following suit.
With Africa’s population geared to reach two billion by 2050, government and business is eager to drive for economic inclusion by creating the right business platforms and addressing infrastructural and educational backlogs, which in the long term will address the issue of youth unemployment.
As a first timer at the event, I was amazed at the united front that was exhibited by African business and government leaders. My only question is: How united are we when the conversations die down and the real work begins and we are faced with the realities of our unique every day African struggles?
Despite the challenges, I am forever a believer in the rise of Africa. The African economic outlook is also optimistic with a projected growth of 5.3%.
While on the icy slopes of Davos, I learnt something: the power of association. It’s the reason why WEF attracts so many delegates each year. It’s also the reason why Africa was so prominent on the agenda this year. Only by having relations can we engage. Only by engaging can we work together to finding solutions to the challenges Africa faces.

Africa In The Alps

If there ever could be heaven on earth, this was it. The sun peeped over Table Mountain and lit the winding streets below with a brilliant light as I walked through Cape Town to the first morning of the Mining Indaba—the 20th annual gathering of investors and mining experts. Its rays exuded optimism and felt like a warm, comforting hand caressing your face.
Without wishing to stretch the metaphor, South Africa’s mining minister, Susan Shabangu, tried to emulate the sun’s rays in her keynote speech.
“This is Africa’s time; indeed Africa has arrived and we shall seize the opportunity with both hands,” says Shabangu.
True, it is Shabangu’s job to hold the line when her country’s mining industry is under attack, especially with an election coming up on May 7. Even so, this was a speech too far; dismissed by most at the Mining Indaba. She was at pains to present a rosy picture, saying the number of mines and mining revenue had increased; further that South Africa had topped a list of 158 countries, compiled by the World Economic Forum, for corporate auditing and reporting. She also mentioned billions that will be spent on infrastructure and pledged to protect investors.
When it came to the strike on everyone’s lips in Cape Town—70,000 workers at the platinum mines, which earn 9% of South Africa’s export earnings—there was disbelief when Shabangu said there was no need to be complacent and there were many areas that needed improvement. The understatement of the year, in light of a strike that cost the South African economy 10,000 ounces of platinum and more than $40 million-a-day.
Roger Baxter, the chief economist for the Chamber of Mines, warned that 45% of the platinum shafts were either loss making or marginal. A long strike, followed by a high wage settlement, may push many more over the edge, he says. South Africa has 80% of the world’s reserves of platinum and 40% of supply; by the next Mining Indaba, the latter figure is likely to have fallen. This is one reason why many foreign investors, looking for a competitive return, say off-the-record, they are fighting shy of South Africa for now.
“The world mining funds are flush with cash right now, but they don’t want to put it here because they are very risk averse at the moment,” says one investor in Cape Town.
“They may look at an easy project, but let’s face it most of the easy projects in Africa have gone.”
Another concern for investors is the threat of South Africa’s government amending its mining bill to give the mining minister the discretionary powers to make certain minerals strategic. That would mean the producers of minerals, like iron ore and coal, could have to ask the government for permission to export and accept prices fixed by the state. For South African power generator, Eskom, this would be a boon because it could have all the coal it needs for its power stations in the country at a price it can afford. Critics, like mining lawyer, Peter Leon, has called the move creeping nationalization and warns it could frighten investors.
“It means we are closed for business,” says a former coal mine boss in Cape Town.
The Chamber of Mines paints a less worrying picture. It says that the government is unlikely to touch prices and a clause in the bill ensures consultation with the mining industry over exports. The bill was due for review on February 18.
“We are still engaging with the government,” says Baxter.
What is likely is that the government is going to push ahead with the transformation towards the 26% black ownership promised by the Mining Charter 10 years ago. In 2014, the Mining Charter—a voluntary document signed by the mining companies—will be reviewed. It is widely accepted that the ownership figure is far short of the target. Foreign investors often don’t understand South Africa’s often clumsy attempt to rebalance the scales after apartheid; the mining companies complain the process of transferring equity, to those who didn’t have the vote before 1994, is expensive and futile.
“Many mining companies put transformation systems in place thinking that 2014 will be the end of it. Nothing is further from the truth,” says Shabangu.
There is more hope across the rest of the continent for mining held in the rugged hands of the Australians. It seems the Australians don’t know what a difficult project is and are pouring billions of dollars into mining, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Ghana, in some of the most inaccessible corners of Africa.
The Mining Indaba heard there are 246 mining companies operating in Africa. They include Sundance Resources, which is spending $5 billion on building two iron ore mines, 40 kilometers apart, in Cameroon, near the border with Congo-Brazzaville. It is hoped that by 2018 they will be producing 35 million mt of iron ore every year.
The project is an 11-hour drive from the capital and the Australians will also build a 500 kilometer heavy gauge railway to the coast to export the iron ore.
“Risk? Mining is risk and we Australians have a way of tackling it,” chuckled Giulio Casello, the managing director of Sundance Resources.
“What really impressed us on this project is that Cameroon put together a committee of experts to help us set up this project. Cameroon doesn’t have a mining industry and clearly wants one.”
Another Australian carving his way through the African outback is Harry Anagnostaras-Adams, who spent 30 years working in the banks of Sydney and now spends his days trying to figure out how to get gold out of Ethiopia. Through his resources company, KEFI Minerals, he spent $6 million buying Tula Kapi Mine, 500 kilometers west of Addis Ababa. The mine, which has two million ounces of gold in resources and another million in reserves, went for a knockdown price—ten cents in the dollar—because the previous owner had failed to deliver.
Anagnostaras-Adams will invest $150 million in the mine with the hope of producing 60,000 ounces by 2016.
“It is not for the fainthearted,” he says.
“The response to us trying to fix the problems of the mine was like greased lightning. The government always wanted us to get the show on the road; I was impressed by their pragmatism.”
There were other encouraging signs at the Mining Indaba. Brazilian resources giant Vale told how it was going to invest billions into increasing output from the Moatize coal project, in the north west corner of Mozambique, from 4.7 million mt to 20 million mt. More than $2 billion will be ploughed back into the mine; $3.4 billion will go into building a railway line from the Moatize, through Malawi, to the export port of Nacala. Another billion dollars will build up Nacala so it can ship more coal.
There were also encouraging words from the Toronto Stock Exchange, the great mining fund raising bourse in Canada. Graham Dallas, the head of business development for the holding company TMX, said around $800 million had been raised in 2013 for mining projects in Africa.
“I think if you have the right asset and the right management you can still raise foreign investment. It is not all doom and gloom, things have been better, but there is no reason to despair.”
If this optimism was not enough, Nick Holland, the CEO of Gold Fields, was brave enough to make this prediction.
“I think China is going to come back. I’ll stick my neck out and say there could be a mining boom by the end of next year,” says Holland.
This is the kind of bullish approach that has sustained mining in Africa and built the Mining Indaba into one of the biggest industry gatherings on the planet. Twenty years ago, the Mining Indaba held its humble beginning in one room in the Cape Sun; in 2014 it has expanded to fill the vast International Convention Centre. African mining has to play a clever game over the next 20 years or risk ending up back in one room at the Cape Sun.

No More Easy Money In Mining

The first visit to Africa by the world’s highest paid sportsman brought disappointment, controversy and champagne.
Floyd Mayweather Jr, the undefeated pugilist from the United States, was treated like a king in South Africa, amid questions over who paid for him and his 16-strong entourage to be here.
The Mayweather controversy began as soon as he touched down at OR Tambo Airport, in Johannesburg on January 15. Journalists asked him why he was in the country. He replied that he was unsure, but he was here.
In a statement, the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) described Mayweather’s visit as a tour of goodwill.
&#8220;No financial liabilities were incurred by our office for bringing Mayweather here,&#8221; the minister of sport and recreation, Fikile Mbalula, told the crowd in Soweto.
“We did not cough up a cent for the visit of Mayweather. The state can’t afford to pay his demands. The trip was sponsored by someone [whose name] I can’t disclose in the media,” says Mbalula’s spokesman, Paena Galane.
All we know for certain is that Mayweather was in the country to endorse a project called ‘Reawakening the Giant’, which aims to resuscitate boxing, a sport that once filled South Africans with pride. He was supposed to inspire young boxers and take part in coaching clinics for a week.
The 36 year old and five-division world champion instead spent a mere two days doing boxing work—shaking hands and sharing positive thoughts with people. On his second day in the country, with Mbalula in tow, Mayweather renamed the renowned Dube Boxing Gym in Soweto after Baby Jake Matlala, the late South African boxer and former world champion. There was a large crowd in attendance, but Mayweather made a hasty exit after the ceremony, much to the chagrin of his passionate fans.
Even worse, thousands of fans traveled long distances to other major cities to meet up with Mayweather but the American had other priorities. He instead went on shopping spree, enjoyed a nature reserve in the North West province and then visited Robben Island, where the late president, Nelson Mandela, was incarcerated for 18 years.
Mayweather refused to visit Mandela’s former cell 46664—saying he had spent two months in a cell and didn’t want to see another one. In 2012, he served a jail sentence for battering his ex-girlfriend.
Deprived of his luxurious lifestyle, Mayweather told people at a gala dinner in Johannesburg, he immediately drove his Bentley to his house and had his nails and hair treated by personal aides once he was released.
“As the ministry, we would have loved to have had him for the five days but we had to accept his terms because we didn’t pay a cent for him being here. We were glad that Soweto people benefited from his memorabilia that was auctioned for R800,000 ($71,000). This will help establish their academy and revamp the gym,” says Galane.
Mayweather also had a reunion with the only African to have fought him, Phillip Ndou, at a dinner. Ndou, who had the hopes of Africa on his shoulders, suffered a technical knockout to the American in their 2003 fight in Las Vegas. This encounter at Emperors Palace, in eastern Johannesburg, was equally excruciating for the South African, who is making a comeback after the brain damage he suffered in 2004.
“There’s a gentleman in the audience by the name of Phillip Ndou, I believe you know him, I believe you punched him, I believe you knocked him out,” the master of ceremonies and local sports reporter, Robert Marawa, said to Mayweather before calling Ndou up on stage.
Once on stage with Mayweather, Ndou appealed for a rematch.
“Look, as I stand here I can proudly say I fought the best in the world and I would like to do it again,” said Ndou.
“If you wanna be the best, you gotta fight the best. That particular time he was one of the tough guys. He put pressure on me, he bruised me,” said Mayweather.
Marawa declared that Ndou was not fit enough to continue boxing, which many in the audience thought was condescending. Mayweather politely suggested that his former opponent consider retirement.
“To fight Mayweather you need to have a chin. In Phillip Ndou’s fight, his chin wasn’t too bad for the seven rounds, Mayweather caught him out. Mayweather is a class act, you have to be really good to beat him,” says Brian Mitchell, a South African manager and former WBA and IBF world champion.
“When he says he is the best, he is not just saying it in words. Many men had fallen [when facing Mayweather], and among them is our own Phillip Ndou,” says Mbalula.
When FORBES AFRICA later interviewed Ndou, he said he was unfazed by the suggestion that he should consider retiring. The 36 year old says he has a few years of boxing left in him.
“Wow man, I never thought I would ever meet with Floyd again. We are friends on Twitter but he doesn’t reply to my tweets. I wasn’t joking about the rematch in South Africa. I believe I am the only guy who can stop his unbeaten record. I know the media have written me off,” says Ndou.
Before the American returned home, Steve Masike, a co-founder of the renamed gym, fired a salvo. Masike acknowledged the plan to rename their gym was announced at a memorial service for Matlala, but claims there was no further consultation with them.
“As a sensible man, I expected someone from the minister’s office to call us and discuss the way forward. The gym has a committee, there’s a constitution, [we are] not a one man-show,” says Masike.
Galane disputes this claim.
“We are aware of the people who are rubbishing our efforts to build the Baby Jake Matlala Boxing Academy. The founders of the gym are not involved, hence they were never part of the discussions, the club has its management that we consulted with,” he says.
Galane says the gym is the property of City of Johannesburg.
“We didn’t need the founders’ permission, we had the consent of the Johannesburg Boxing Organization,” he says.
Jeff Ngwenya, the Johannesburg Boxing Organization chairman, said that the correct people at the Dube gym were fully involved in the renaming process.
Mbalula initially attempted to get Mayweather to attend the South African Sports Awards, a ceremony that was criticized because of the large amount of money spent on it. Whether Mayweather’s visit to the country was a success or not is still up in the air, but Mbalula’s dream of hobnobbing with the American superstar was certainly fulfilled.

Money, Secrets And Low Blows  As Mayweather Lands In Africa

It’s the first day of the strike, on January 23, and a huge crowd gathers at the Wonderkop Stadium, near Rustenburg in South Africa, to listen to Joseph Mathunjwa, the chairman of the Association of Construction and Mineworkers Union (Amcu). Seventy thousand union members have downed tools at the platinum mines.
As early as 7AM, police officers and the mine’s security guards keep watch. The venue is surrounded by razor wire and armored vehicles. The stadium is a few hundred meters from Marikana, the site where 44 people died in a clash between striking miners and police in August, 2012.
<div id="attachment_2516" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2516" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-2516" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_6885-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />The Miners are Coming</div>
“People are watching this strike, speculating it is Marikana II. That will not happen. We’re peacefully fighting for our rights as workers. We want a better life. The blood of our brothers was shed fighting for better wages. We won’t betray them,” Mathunjwa says in Zulu to the roaring crowd.
Despite the leadership’s assurance of a peaceful protest, a few strikers are seen carrying traditional weapons, sjamboks (heavy whips) and sticks.
“It is not a foreign thing for Nguni men (a broad ethnic group of South Africa) to carry their sjamboks and sticks. We are not going to war or planning to violate others rights to choose who to associate with,” says Jack Mkhoba, the chairperson for Amcu’s Lonmin branch.
Mathunjwa calls for tolerance and respect for those who continue working. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which lost its majority at the platinum mines to Amcu, is not part of the strike. There is still simmering tension between the unions.
Mathunjwa also accuses the mine of trying to make the negotiations drag on.
“The time to fool around with black people is over. The African economy must benefit Africans. We are not negotiating percentages, they mean nothing to us; we only understand the rand, our currency.”
Mathunjwa says the government, media and economists are too quick to criticize the union  for destabilizing the economy.
<div id="attachment_2515" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2515" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-2515" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_6517-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />The Miners are Coming</div>
“When CEOs and bosses give themselves more than R21 million ($1.9 million) in bonuses, they do not condemn that. Whose side are they on?”
Mathunjwa had the crowd in stitches when he shared anecdotes of the encounters he had with the management of the mining companies.
“One Sunday afternoon, I was invited over by the employers. Upon leaving the discussion, I left them with homework to figure out how much they are spending on their dogs, which is ridiculously way over what the employees take home?”
James Nichol, the British lawyer representing the victims of Marikana, gave the workers a surprise visit in a striped red tie. He stood out like a sore thumb.
Nichol danced to struggle songs with the workers and encouraged them to fight for their demands.
“It’s your duty to get justice for yourselves and families by fighting for R12,500,” says Nichol.
Amcu’s national organizer, Dumisani Nkalityana, encouraged the strikers to not let up.
“There’s no red carpet towards achieving our demands, we need to make sure we make it for ourselves,” he says.
The union members are far from united. A faction of Amcu say Mathunjwa is a dictator and accuse him of living large at the expense of workers. Mathunjwa dismisses the allegations, referring to the group as mischievous former Amcu members.
The mines, losing a fortune every day the strike continues, are hoping a solution can be found-quickly.
On this day, Anglo American Platinum, the largest platinum company, says its losing approximately 4,000 ounces and R100 million ($9 million) per day.
<div id="attachment_2518" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2518" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-2518" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_6411-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />The Miners are Coming</div>
“We are adamant that we will continue to engage with Amcu and have accepted the offer by the deputy president for a government-facilitated mediation process in order to find a resolution. Striking is not a constructive solution if we are to return the company to a sustainable financial footing and secure existing jobs,” says Chris Griffith, the CEO of Anglo American Platinum.
Griffith says the company will work with law enforcement agencies to help maintain peace and stability during the strike. His words were in vain.
Anglo American reported a 10% employee attendance rate on the first day of the strike and closed operations.
&nbsp;
DAY TWO
On the second day of the strike, South Africa’s mining minister, Susan Shabangu, brokers a three-day wage negotiation between Amcu and three of the big mining companies at the Southern Sun Hotel in Pretoria. Amcu books rooms at the hotel for its officials.
The Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) is appointed as the facilitator between the union and Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), Impala Platinum (Implats) and Lonmin. The companies’ initial offer of an 8.5% increase falls short of the union’s demand of a R12,500 salary for entry level employees.
By the end of the negotiations, the mines have a new offer of 9% on the table. Amcu is unimpressed.
“How can you be satisfied with an offer that does not address the living wage?” asks Amcu spokesman, Jimmy Gama.
“The talks were cordially conducted in a positive atmosphere but I can’t say they were amicable as we are not getting what we wanted, which is R12,500.”
The companies’ response is unchanged. They say the demands are unrealistic and unreasonable.
“We are not issuing any threats to anybody at this point. We are very clear that employers can afford what the union demands,” adds Joseph Maqhekeni, the chairman of National Council of Trade Unions (Nactu)—the federation that Amcu is affiliated to.
On the last day of negotiations, union members are seen checking out of the hotel. It doesn’t look good. They are in a somber mood and are seen milling around nervously. Two shop stewards play struggle songs and the national anthem, Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika, on the hotel’s piano.
Most of the union members do not believe they will receive positive news; they are all keen to continue with the strike.
&nbsp;
DAY EIGHT
January 30 is D-day for the striking mineworkers. An offer of a 9% wage increase is on the table.
On a scorching morning, Amcu members, in their green union shirts, gather outside mine shafts around the North West province of South Africa to hear from shop stewards on the negotiations.
Striking workers at Amplats’ mine in Bleskop, Rustenburg, are among the first to turn down the revised wage increase. The mineworkers sit in the shade of a tree, talking and drinking beer. At least it is peaceful. A security guard confirms there is no intimidation.
At Batho Pele mine, another Amplats operation a few kilometers away, striking miners play cards and listen to music in their cars. Under the watch of security guards in armoured vehicles, the miners meet in the shade of a marquee.
The irate miners stand firm. They say the increase is insufficient and will not cover their bonds or match rising inflation.
Meanwhile, the mining bosses are counting the cost. Griffith says the strike halted production of around 40% of global platinum supply.
“We estimate that the daily cost to the country is closer to R400 million ($36 million) a day,” he says.
&nbsp;
DAY 15
A week later, a clash between strikers and police officers, at the Amplats mine in Limpopo, sees the death of a shop steward. A non-striking miner also was attacked near the Khuseleka mine in Rustenburg, while one vehicle and an excavator were set alight. Fourteen other vehicles were also damaged.
“It is with sadness that we learnt of the death of one of our employees. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the families, friends and colleagues of the deceased. We strongly urge striking employees to adhere to the picketing rules and remain within the picketing designated areas as agreed with Amcu. We condemn any act of violence, intimidation and damage to property,” says Griffith.
This violent period does not deter strikers. As of going to print, there was no end in sight to one of the most expensive strikes in African history.

Tag: March 2014

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Williams Okpara

The Problem With Sharing is Glaring

The Ball Bashing Role Model On A Roll

Could It Be Too Good?

‘You Can’t Be Weak You Have To Step Up’

The Bug Man Who Is Father To Half A Million Trees

The Profits That Drop From The Bat

‘People Feel That We’re Going To Run Away With Their Money’

The Unlikely Millionaire Cleans Up

You’re Mad. You Can’t Be Selling Secondhand Computers

Google Wants It All

Africa In The Alps

No More Easy Money In Mining

Money, Secrets And Low Blows As Mayweather Lands In Africa

‘The Time To Fool Around With Black People Is Over’