If you have just moved into the cities of Cape Town, Maputo, Lusaka or Windhoek, you have become part of the problem. A big driver of climate change is urbanization and scientists say these four African cities are at the top of the list.
That was one reason why 2016 ranked as the hottest year on record, according to data analyzed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United Nations’ authoritative voice on weather, climate and water.
One of the leading causes of this is carbon dioxide and methane concentrations from burning fossil fuels, which surged to new records, claims the WMO. This based on evidence from the likes of NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, UK-based Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
The world’s cities are responsible for 60% of all carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases while occupying just 2% of Earth’s surface, according to the United Nations Human Settlement Programme.
It means, unless humans find ways of reducing their carbon emissions, worse is yet to come.
Climate change, according to the South African Weather Service, is the natural cycle which the earth and its atmosphere experience from energy received from the sun. The climate goes through warm and cold periods, taking hundreds of years to complete one cycle. The changes also influence rainfall, but the biosphere is able to adapt to a changing climate if these changes take place over centuries.
As many as 100 million people could slide into extreme poverty because of rising temperatures, which are caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the World Bank reports.  It also says climate change has led to crop failures, natural disasters, higher food prices and the spread of waterborne diseases, creating poverty and pushing people at risk into destitution.
In 2015, the UN, in its report on climate change, noted that it is expected to cause shorter growing seasons and force large tracts of peripheral agriculture out of production. Without action, climate change would likely spark higher agricultural prices and could threaten food security in poorer regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Climate variability is also at play.
This year has been aggravated by El Nino, a Pacific Ocean weather pattern which decreases moisture in the sub-Saharan region and causes other extreme weather patterns.
Examples of climate variability could be seen in Cape Town in March; a disaster was declared by authorities as dam levels dropped to 31.5%. At the time of going to print, the city estimated that it had 105 days of useable water left. Meanwhile, in Mozambique and Madagascar, countries lying just north and east of South Africa, the category four tropical cyclone Enawo hit. The cyclone, which ravaged their coastlines with winds of 190 kilometers per hour, was dubbed the most destructive storm in years.
The next problem is how people deal with it.
A large group of people within the FRACTAL project, led by the Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), is trying to tackle the problems associated with climate change in cities through novel approaches.
“We need to move away from the ‘sausage machine’ type of model whereby climate data is produced on one end by scientists, then follows a path to be spat out at the end to decision makers who are expected to use the data. Decision makers need to be engaged in the process of producing relevant climate knowledge from the beginning.”
So says Alice McClure, the coordinator of the Future Resilience for African CiTies and Lands (FRACTAL), a four-year project that aims to build relationships between scientists, practitioners, and the people whose elected representatives decide what’s best for the city.
“In this process, science should not be king. We argue that the knowledge that decision makers in the cities have is more relevant than the information the scientist is going to produce. For the purpose of decision making, scientists can produce as much rigorous climate data as they want, but the uptake of climate information and eventual impact that it might have, is undermined without considerations of context,” says McClure.
Started in 2015, FRACTAL is working in nine cities: Blantyre, Gaborone, Harare, Lusaka, Maputo and Windhoek. Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa have joined the program as self-funded cities.
FRACTAL is part of an initiative called Future Climate Change for Africa, which runs five projects to understand Africa better during climate change and integrates this into decision making.
FRACTAL’s approach enables particular issues, focused on water and energy, to be identified in each of the cities in which it is working, for which relevant and significant climate knowledge can be produced by scientists and decision makers.
What is becoming evident through the initial engagements is that each city has its own problems. For example, in Maputo issues associated with potable water, drainage and sanitation have surfaced, while in Lusaka groundwater recharge, drinking water, flooding and solid waste in peri-urban areas surfaced as pertinent issues.
“We need to understand the region within which the city is located, and how this might affect resources in the city, such as energy and water. For example, Lusaka is located within the Kafue river basin. So we need to understand how changes in the broader surface water system &#8211; as a result of climate or other non-climate drivers &#8211; might affect water supply in Lusaka. City-regions are very integrated, complex systems with multiple actors, stressors and scales. We need to have a deep understanding of the city-region context to understand what climate information might be relevant and significant.”
As part of the project, FRACTAL has embedded researchers into offices in the cities to gain a better understanding of how governments work. The idea is that the work undertaken by these researchers is mutually beneficial for the city officials and the researchers working on the project.
“The scientists are learning about the city-region and the decision makers are learning about climate variability and change. Together, we would like to build an understanding of what climate change might look like in the future in each city.”
It means cities need to come up with tangible solutions that can adapt to the next 40 years of increasing droughts and stronger typhoons in the face of growing cities.

Africa Is Heating Up  And Not In A Good Way

In the Africa I know, we sing and dance when we are happy, when we go to the battlefield, and in times of bereavement. We did it at the memorial service of 86-year-old South African female jazz trailblazer, Thandiwe ‘Thandi’ Klaasen on a warm January day. She died a week before, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
Could we have celebrated the colorful and illustrious career of Klaasen without the music and renowned Sophiatown style, the multiracial suburb she lived in until it was cleared away by apartheid?
Born in 1931 in Sophiatown, Klaasen and her contemporaries used music to fight the oppressive system and patriarchy. Tired of being an appendage to male bands, she formed a female vocal quartet called the Quad Sisters that shot to stardom with a hit song Carolina Wam, in 1952. They influenced the formation of younger female groups, including Miriam Makeba’s The Skylarks.
On this Wednesday afternoon at the memorial service at Germiston City Hall, east of Johannesburg, songs intertwined with messages of condolences from politicians, musicians and family. One outstanding tribute was the family band’s adaptation of Louis Armstrong’s hit, What A Wonderful World.
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I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself Mam’ Thandi,
Was a beautiful soul, A great dancer
and entertainer, If you agree just clap
your hands, Say how did you do.
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This classic was followed by words of Lorraine Klaasen, the image of her mother.
“I was a good observer of my mom. When I grew up I wanted to be like my mother, I wanted to travel the world like my mom and make people happy with my music. And I am really living the promise I made to myself… Music made my mom very happy… She travelled with me as artists but she played that role of a mom…,” says Lorraine, a 2013 Juno Award winner for World Music Album of the Year in Canada.
“What I am going to miss about my mother is her big heart and courage to start something and see it to the end. She taught me to trust in God. She was hardly in hospital. She was a very strong woman and a disciplinarian,” adds her son Roger Phambane.
The snazzy great-grandma’s penchant for wine drew chuckles.
Klaasen’s spells of inebriation were rarely boring. A friend and protégé, Abigail Kubeka, told tales of cooking and empty bottles.
“After all, she was a mother, a housewife and everything. She loved cooking her mutton curry for her husband, Lucas. One day she didn’t realize a cloth fell into her pot. So, she dished out for her husband and Lucas was eating with a fork, but the fork couldn’t pick up the meat. He called her: ‘Thandi, what have you cooked? You said you wanted mutton curry, that’s mutton curry. Ja, mutton curry, but this is a dish cloth,’” says Kubeka to raucous laughter.
Klaasen, among other things, was a magician. She would make a wine disappear in a second, says Nandipha Ndlovu, a granddaughter who called her a role model. Ndlovu is a young doctor in Germiston.
All the speakers agreed on Klaasen’s stoicism and resilience, mentioning how she survived the horror of 1977 when someone – maybe a rival – threw acid in her face. She was in hospital for almost a year.
“That day the fire was set to put an end to her rising star, but they were wrong. That was the day she was truly born. Everyone has got their turning point in their lives. We can rather choose to pursue it, chase your dream or you can turn back, or you can fail. But she didn’t choose to fail,” says Ndlovu.
She would tell people ‘they can burn my face, but they can’t burn my voice,’ says Khubeka.
She also used to joke that she never had one wrinkle in her face. Clearly she never lost the love and respect of her family, nor her sense of humor.

They Can Burn My Face, But They Can’t Burn  My Voice

Michael Phelps is sprawled on a couch in a Lower Manhattan hotel, sporting a beard, a gray beanie
cap, a white T-shirt and Under Armour sweatpants and sneakers, an athlete in repose. He’s in New York to accept yet another lifetime achievement award for his triumphs in five Olympic Games, another chance for him and others to revel in his past glories. What Phelps wants to talk about now, however, is the future. “I’ve spent decades staring at that black line at the bottom of a pool,” he says.
“I’m ready to do something new. I’m ready to channel my competitiveness into something else.”
Phelps, 31, is four months removed from what he swears was his last Olympics. The second phase of his life has begun, he says, and it has two main parts: He wants to create a brand that burns brightly for decades to come, but he also wants to become a global champion for the causes that mean the most to him—swimming and the wellbeing of children.
On the brand side Phelps is, of course, well established as a corporate pitchman. Under Armour, Omega, Intel, Activision and Beats by Dre are among his well-known sponsors. (Some of the lesser known: Master Spas, Krave and Sina Sports.) At the height of these sponsorships he earned an estimated $7 million a year. Many of the companies are longtime partners and plan to stay that way. “We hope he’s with us forever,” says Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour, which signed Phelps in 2010.
But Phelps is not content simply to be the face of someone else’s brand. In 2013 he left his longtime sponsor Speedo, and the following year he started a swimwear line called MP. He found a partner in Aqua Sphere, a swimwear and swimming accessories company, which now sells Phelps-branded suits that range from $40 to $475. “I’d like to someday have the biggest and best brand in swimming,” he says.
His business role model is, of course, Michael Jordan, whose Nike Inc. Jordan Brand sold $2.8 billion worth of shoes and apparel last year.
Swimming obviously isn’t as merchandisable as basketball, but Plank says Phelps’ ambitions shouldn’t be dismissed: “Michael has that special trait, the ability to be clutch and win when it counts, which he demonstrated over and over at the Olympics. I think he can be the king of all things water.”
Phelps’ other main post-Olympics goal involves his foundation, which he started in 2008 with the $1 million bonus he earned from Speedo for his record-breaking eight gold medals in Beijing. His biggest initiative is the im program (“im” for “individual medley,” one of his strongest events, and for the affirmation “I am”). The program focuses on making children “water-safe.” (Drowning is the leading cause of injury-related deaths for kids ages 1 to 14 in the U.S. and the third leading cause worldwide.) Phelps’ mother made him take a water-safety course when he was a boy, and he says that’s the reason he became a competitive swimmer.
The im program has 104 teams in all 50 U.S. states and another 176 in 33 other countries, and through it 16,000 kids have learned how to swim (for three-quarters of them, the program was their first time in a pool). “I’d like for that number to be 50,000 someday soon and then 100,000,” Phelps says. “The goal is to get every kid in the world water-safe.”
To accomplish these dreams, Phelps will need to become a lasting global icon, no easy task for even the most successful Olympians. Jesse Owens, in the end, was more a powerful symbol than a brand. Muhammad Ali’s boxing career spanned two full decades after his Olympic gold in 1960. And Caitlyn Jenner remains famous four decades after decathlon heroics in Montreal but for reasons no one could have foreseen in 1976.
Yet Phelps was no ordinary Olympian. He began as a 15-year-old prodigy in the 2000 Games and provided a glimpse of the greatness to come in the 2004 Athens Games. Then came the triumph in Beijing in 2008 and the weary wins in London in 2012, followed by the drinking and depression and the stint in rehab. All of which culminated in the redemption in Rio in 2016. In the end Phelps had won an Olympic record 28 medals, all but 5 of which were gold.
That level of longevity and excellence in the Olympics has given Phelps the kind of global profile most American athletes lack. And with his longtime agent, Peter Carlisle, Phelps has been laying the groundwork for a global presence since the beginning of his career. He started visiting China and making deals there five years before the 2008 Games (the Chinese call him the Flying Fish). Phelps and Carlisle used the same playbook for Rio—he made four pre-Olympics visits to Brazil and has since signed a deal with the Brazilian media giant Grupo Globo. And he will soon embark on a tour of Vietnam, Ethiopia, South Africa and Latin America.
Phelps, of course, has been through this before, when he retired for the first time after the 2012 Games. “This time is different,” he says. “Back then I just wanted to dig the deepest black hole and be left alone.” Now “life is so different and so much better. I have Boomer [his 8-month-old son] and Nicole [his wife]. I have other things to worry about than just myself.”
Phelps says he travels three weeks out of every month, and at meetings he doesn’t just show up for the grip-and-grin but really dives in. “I’m actually sitting at the table now during the discussions, asking questions,” he says. “Some of this is self-reinforcing. I want to be out there now. If I isolate myself as I’ve done before, I know the road I’ll go down, and I know it won’t be pretty.”
A question remains: Is he really done competing? “Yes, definitely,” he says, while admitting that he said the same thing in 2012. The 2020 Olympics is out of the question, but Carlisle has been floating an intriguing scenario regarding the 2024 Games. “I think Michael is 100% sure he’s done right now,” he says. “But what if the 2024 Games are awarded to Los Angeles? And what if there was a spot open on a relay team?” Carlisle leaves the thought there, as any good agent would.
Phelps just smiles when this idea is brought up. “I’m happy now,” he says. “And I’m excited for what’s ahead of me.”

The Flip Turn

South Africa mourns the death of its Rugby World Cup hero Joost van der Westhuizen who fought motor neuron disease, with the same aggression he showed on the rugby field. Van der Westhuizen was diagnosed in 2011 and succumbed on February 6. Many remember Van der Westhuizen from his heroic show when he threw his body at All Blacks bully winger Jonah Lomu, denying them a 1995 World Cup victory at Ellis Park stadium, in Johannesburg.
On that day June 24, 1995, millions of South Africans, many watching rugby for the first time, watched the final against the 1987 World Cup winners. Both teams were undefeated. The match was a bookie’s headache.
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The All Blacks menacing winger Lomu, a 120-kilogram giant, was the man to mark. The 20-year-old carried his team throughout the tournament. He crashed his way to becoming the tournament’s top try scorer. But the Springbok scrumhalf Van der Westhuizen, who stood at 1.88 meters and weighed 88 kilograms, was having none of it. Undoubtedly, he was the best scrumhalf that ever played in my lifetime. On defence, a scrumhalf is the weakest link, but Van der Westhuizen reinvented the position. He was what the coaches call an extra flank. The opposition avoided breaking in his channel because he scared you with his green eyes before destroying you, ball and all, with his massive shoulders.
Needless to say, Van der Westhuizen stole the spotlight as he cut down the aggressive attacks from Lomu. At full-time the game ended at 9-9, no tries. Seven minutes before the end of extra time, Van der Westhuizen picked up the ball behind a moving scrum and unleashed a bullet pass to the hands of Joel Stransky who booted it to victory.
In November 1993, a young Van der Westhuizen made his debut for the Springboks against Argentina, and within two years he was a fixture in the team. He captained the Boks 10 times and scored 38 tries in 89 test matches.
It is rare for a South African player to represent only one province, Van der Westhuizen played for one team only – the Blue Bulls of Pretoria.
In 2009, almost six years after retiring from the sport, all the good work that Van der Westhuizen did came close to destruction when a video with a blonde woman in a compromising position was leaked to the media. In the video he wore only underwear while sniffing white powder, believed to be cocaine. After denying it for some time, Van der Westhuizen manned up and admitted he was the man in the video. But that could not salvage his marriage to his popstar wife, Amor Vittone, who wanted a divorce.
Shortly after the devastating separation, the big-hearted Van der Westhuizen lost weight and   was diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 2011. From then on he became a different champion, this time off the field. Van der Westhuizen dedicated his time to raising awareness about the disease. The J9 Foundation was formed – the name was in honor of his scrumhalf position.
Van der Westhuizen epitomized fighting spirit on and off the field.
“It’s a reminder that I achieved a lot in my lifetime. It’s a reminder of success. It’s actually a reminder of what it took for us a team to win the World Cup, if I can take that characteristic into my personal life in trying to fight this disease. That’s what I am doing at this stage,” said Van der Westhuizen before his death.
His former Springbok captain, Francois Pienaar, spoke at his memorial service in Pretoria.
“Joost loved winning, he was a competitor… In the times of amateur rugby, Joost had professional mind-set and discipline… Captaining Joost was incredibly easy and incredibly difficult. He always pushed the boundaries. An individual spirit that would do anything for his teammates. On the field he played like a rock star. Off the field he partied like a rock star. He was after all a rock star. He was funny and bloody naughty,” says Pienaar.
Apparently he was truly the naughty guy among his teammates. One of the tales says Van der Westhuizen sneaked under the table and tied teammates’ shoelaces together.
He was 45 years old and is survived by his two children, Jordan and Kylie, and his mother Mariana and father Gustav, and two brothers.

The Life Of A  Brave Fighter Who Could Be Naughty

Lot 234, the Preller, Space Angel, signed and dated ’71, oil and gesso on canvas.
“I have three million one hundred thousand. Three two, thank you. Three four, three five, six, seven, eight, nine, four million. Four million two hundred thousand with you, four million four, four six, yes, I saw that nod, go ahead, five. Now five two, five four, five six, I’m at the back of the room now, she’s got it at five eight, it is with you madam, at five million eight hundred thousand rand, at five eight, all done? This is fair warning, I’m going to sell it …”
Bang, goes his gavel on the desk. “Your number please?” asks auctioneer Dendy Easton in his plummy British accent. We are at the Wanderers Club in Johannesburg on November 7, 2016.
It has taken one minute, 40 seconds for somebody to spend R5.8 million ($440,000) for Alexis Preller’s painting. There is scattered applause.
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“Lot 235, the Edoardo Villa …”
Bidding continues for nearly 300 lots until the final one, Lot 293, a Keith Alexander painting, goes for R360,000 ($27,000).
There is a lot of money in art, and a lot of it in this particular room. Here in Johannesburg, among these bidders, the South African economy looks pretty robust. Apartheid  marginalized South African artists, which means that collectors from China to New Zealand, America to Britain, South America to Europe, are now greedy for South African art. Greediest of all, it seems, are South Africans themselves. While the country’s economy may be stressed, the wealthy have cash for pretty things to hang on their walls. A lot of it.
Of course there are good artists in Africa. Some of the best from the continent are South African.
“The fact that there is so much money for art now is to some extent because we were marginalized. And our artists are good. Very good,” says Emma Bedford, Senior Art Specialist and a Director of Aspire Art Auctions.
“We have a history of good art schools in this country. The rest of Africa doesn’t,” interrupts Ruarc Peffers, the tall, suave and experienced auctioneer of Aspire, a brand new South African auction house that on Halloween night in Johannesburg sold over $2.2-million’s worth of South African art, at an auction a week before the big Strauss one. Discovery boss Adrian Gore is a major Aspire investor, as is Brian Joffe of Bidvest.
It’s a funny business, art collection and auctions.
Frank Kilbourn, Executive Chairman of the biggest and oldest South African auction house, Strauss &amp; Co, which sold the Preller mentioned above, tells me he is reluctant to tell people art is an investment. “But it is,” he adds. “If you bought South African art a decade or two or three ago, you have made a lot of money, or could make if you sell now.”
“The whole world is waking up to our art. It is reaching record prices. If you did invest, you made money. But that’s not what art is all about.”
It is about appreciation, culture, civilization, aesthetics, collecting, pride, knowledge, historicity, philosophy.
To show just how the market is booming, Kilbourn, who has separate degrees in law, commerce and philosophy, explains that three huge new galleries are being built in South Africa.
In Cape Town there is Zeitz MOCAA (Museum for Contemporary Art in Africa) at the Waterfront – old grain silos with a five-star hotel on top of an eight-story gallery; Javett is being built in Pretoria, in collaboration with the University of Pretoria, and the third is a private one being built at Steenberg in the Cape.
“This is a wonderful thing for the country, and for art,” Kilbourn, a collector himself, says with a happy smile. His team tell me I mustn’t fail to mention that their auction in Cape Town earlier this year realized $4.2 million, the second highest ever for an art auction. “And that’s in Cape Town!”
At the Strauss auction in Johannesburg exactly a week after Aspire’s auction, Kilbourn buys two paintings himself. One is an Erik Laubscher Still Life with Pumpkin Slice which was expected to reach R300,000 ($22,000) to R400,000 ($30,000).
At R400,000 the auctioneer pauses, Kilburn just nods, “420?” Easton looks around the room … “430!” he says triumphantly. There is another bidder, bidding against Kilburn. Now it is rapid fire from the auctioneer, finger pointing left then right, like watching tennis at Wimbledon: “440, 480; 500, 520; 550, 580; 600, 620; 650, 680; 700, 720; 750, 780; 800… 820. Fair warning… R820,000, I’m going to sell it, here in the second row.”
Bang goes Easton’s gavel. In half a minute, the price doubled.
While interviewing Kilbourn after the auction he greets somebody mischievously, giving him a big smile, asking “Were you the bastard pushing me up on the Laubscher? I thought you were my friend?”
Small auction rival Aspire has been in business since July this year. They are a chip off the older Strauss house, for which most of them worked. The four Aspire art specialists have qualifications in fine art, art history, art theory, criticism and curating.
Aspire Auctioneer Ruarc Peffers, a graduate of the famous Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town, tells me he has done “Oh, over 100 auctions” in his career, but the Johannesburg one was his first for Aspire. He describes how it is “left foot, right foot” stuff: the auctioneer must ensure he has the momentum on his side, as he goes up in about ten percent increases.
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In South African law the auction house is allowed to bid, so one of the auctioneer’s tasks is to get the bid to a real bidder, not the house. There are a bunch of bidders on phones from New York, Australia, even New Zealand – and they are not ex-South Africans, he says. Plus there are internet bids being controlled by Aspire staff member Rafael Powell. Hunched over his computer, every now and then he lifts his bidding number to bid for somebody on the net, who is bidding from somewhere on the planet to get South African art.
If the reserve price is in the millions, the auctioneer goes up in hundreds of thousands.
Estimates in the catalogue usually have the reserve price as the bottom estimate. If that’s not reached, the item is not sold. Although the auctioneer ‘closes’ at say R450,000, if the ‘estimate’ was R500,000 to R1 million, the item is probably going to remain with its owner.
After the auction a lot of buying and selling activity takes place, people making offers, bringing down reserve prices, offering to buy an already bought item. Frenetic stuff for staff for the 24 hours after the final hammer falls.
I went to both auctions, a week apart, one by Strauss and one by Aspire.
Emma Bedford says: “Modernist artists on our sale who performed best included JH Pierneef, Hugo Naudé, Alexis Preller, Edoardo Villa, Erik Laubscher and Douglas Portway. But what really excited us was how well the contemporary artists did, many breaking records. Like photographers David Goldblatt and Pieter Hugo, as well as artists Peter Schütz, William Kentridge, Diane Victor and Athi-Patra Ruga.”
The top Preller on Aspire’s sale Profiled figures (Mirrored Images) reached $468,000 on the auction.
I ask the Aspire auctioneer: “Why don’t you say something about the painting during the auction? You only say ‘Lot 14, the Irma Stern. I have a bid of 500 (thousand)’ but nothing about the work?”
He says: “Bidders know the works, there were three days of viewing, they have the catalogue. And you only have about three minutes for each lot, otherwise ‘bidders’ fatigue’ sets in, and you don’t want that. We did 121 lots in two hours.”
At the Strauss auction, I realize how right he is. I find myself nodding off when we get to lots 260, 270, 280.
Lot 249, a Preller Woman with Red Hair goes for R2 million ($150,000) although it was expected to only reach R200,000 ($15000), and Lot 248, another Preller, Revelation which was expected to get R400,000 ($30,000) goes for R2.4 million ($180,000) to a telephone bidder. A tiny Preller painting, Ritual Bull, only 7.5cmx9cm, goes for R550,000 ($41,000).
Strangely enough, the real star of the Strauss auction, the so-called lost Preller Adam – a heavy piece of art the size of a big coffin, absolutely exquisite in my untutored opinion, goes for a bid of only R6 million ($450,000), a huge bargain. (Commission of about  $59,000 will be added to the price the bidder will actually pay.)
“This was the wrong audience for that work. It is a museum piece, not really for a public auction,” Kilburn shrugs and says. It was expected to reach $490,000 to $680,000.
This is a world of wealthy people, who acquire art to enjoy it on their walls, invest in it, and show it off. Their disposable income is serious money. Strange then, after watching these folk jump up bidding in hundreds of thousands of rands without blinking an eye, to hear them in the Wanderers’ parking lot debating whether to give the car guard a R5 coin or a R10 note.

Art For Art’s Sake – but give us your Cash

Just in case you haven’t noticed – the personality of the top-end sports car has changed drastically in a few short years. Size does count… and the smaller the better.
Well that’s what the manufacturers tell us as virtually every new model emerges with decreased engine size but, miraculously, better top speed, acceleration, fuel consumption and emission figures.
And the clue is in those last two words. Environmental regulations have shepherded us into a sterile new world where normal aspiration is no longer the norm and turbocharging is de rigueur.
If you are suffering from displacement envy, you could still go for a Ferrari F12 TDF 6.3-liter V12 or even a Dodge Viper 8.4-liter V10. But, I fear, they are a dying breed.
And how can you logically argue in favor of cubic centimeters when one of the fastest production cars on the planet is the Tesla Model S P100D – an all-electric family four-door sedan!
The new Porsche 718 Cayman, and it’s virtually identical topless twin, the 718 Boxter, follow the genes of the new generation and are now turbo fours rather than flat sixes and are trimmed down to a mere two liters.
In a weird way it echoes the ethos of the man who founded the company back in 1931.
“In the beginning, I looked around and could not find the car I&#8217;d been dreaming of: a small, lightweight sports car that uses energy efficiently. So I decided to build it myself,” said the late Ferdinand Porsche.
But don’t confuse economy with performance – the new 718 will whisk you to 100km/h in under five seconds and the S (with a 2.5-liter engine) shaves off another half second.
Turbo lag is fast becoming a part of ancient history and, thanks to a crafty fellow called Dynamic Boost, the new models are practically as spontaneous as their predecessors.
The Helshoogte Pass in the Western Cape linking the winelands of Stellenbosch and Franschhoek provided a fine test of the retuned chassis for dynamic cornering and the more direct steering.
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What you may miss are the gutsy aural tones of old and the subliminal thrust of the bigger engine. But get over it; you are helping to save the planet in a vehicle that is technically superior in every way.
So now that performance across the spectrum is merging closer and you can no longer brag about your brutish motor, we can get to the real selling point – looks.
And that can be dangerous ground. How do you compare a Ferrari 488 with a Lamborghini Huracán, a McLaren 570S with a BMW i8?
The difference I see with Porsche design is that they retain a more understated, almost sculptured design throughout the range. And that includes the more “modestly” priced 718 Cayman.
Porsche assert that the 718 embodies the shapes and proportions of legendary mid-engined racing cars like the 550 Coupé , the 718 GTR Coupé and the 904 Carrera GTS, which is all rather romantic.
Yet the new Cayman certainly catches the eye with a front end that is wider and more muscular in appearance, the narrow front indicator lights winking above the enlarged air intakes, and completed by the newly designed bi-xenon headlights with integrated LED daytime running lights.
And the derrière, which really seemed to be unfinished before, gets a major makeover through an accent strip in shiny black with the Porsche badge emblazoned on it and very fancy see-through tail lights.
The interior is everything you would expect from Porsche with all the controls (apart from the hard-to-find hazard button) at your fingertips amidst a tasteful, if safe, blend of leather and metal.
Although the familiar environment has been upgraded with new elements, the instrument cluster could have been blessed with a stronger dose of new age technology. Like the Audi TTS Coupé which has emerged with what is claimed to be the technological benchmark and is certainly impressive.
The virtual instrument cluster is in the form of a high resolution LCD screen that switches between a classic view with round instruments, to a futuristic full-screen view at a touch on the multifunction steering wheel.
It seems that some marques have remained conservative when it comes to forsaking the classic dials and embracing modern virtual displays.
Hopefully Porsche will lead the way in developing the future sports car with their Strategy 2025. The aim is to blend the history and values of the brand with innovative technologies. And they state clearly that digitalization, connectivity and, of course, electromobility will play a major role.
Let’s not forget that Porsche is one of the most profitable car manufacturers per unit in the world and makes more money for Volkswagen than the VW brand itself. Although VW sell about 25 times more cars!
In 2015, Porsche deliveries were up 19% up on the previous year with revenue rising by 25% to $3.6 billion. And in a tough year for global automakers, Porsche managed to keep the Zuffenhausen flag flying high in 2016.
Driven by Ferry Porsche’s dream of the perfect sports car, the company follows a plan called the Porsche Principle – basically to get the most out of everything.
“From day one, we have strived to translate performance into speed – and success – in the most intelligent way possible. It’s no longer all about horsepower, but more ideas per horsepower. This principle originates on the racetrack and is embodied in every single one of our cars.”
So reads the website blurb. And it is the way you feel behind the wheel of every Porsche.

Defending The Cayman

We meet Dikgang Moseneke exactly three years after Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Dikgang, the retired deputy chief justice and the executor of Mandela’s will, is in a pink Polo golf-shirt, navy chinos and matching loafers; reclining in a floral sofa in his home study in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital city. It may be three years after Mandela passed away, but Moseneke shows deep emotion as he relives the day the man, who mentored him on Robben Island, left him.
Upon entering Moseneke’s home, two large portraits of Mandela and Robert Sobukwe, the founding president of the Pan Africanist Congress and a fellow Robben Island prisoner, greet you. On the day Mandela passed on, Moseneke was at a year-end dinner for judges and his phone was off.
“Towards the end of the dinner I switched on my phone. There were these several messages from Mama Graca Machel (his wife) and Bongi Mkhabela (CEO of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund), and they were all saying ‘Tata is gasping. You have to be here.’ I ran out of the dinner to [Mandela’s] house in Houghton. And the old man had just surrendered, he had just passed on. And Mama Graca was seated there crying and on the side was [Mandela’s daughter] Makaziwe. It was terrible. It was like a father who had passed on. I have my own father of course, but he was a father on Robben Island,” he says.
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Politics brought them together a lifetime ago. By the age of 13, in high school, Moseneke, born in Atteridgeville, a township near Pretoria, was engrossed in the African Students Union of South Africa (ASUSA) and later the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). It was a risky passion under apartheid.
“Our headmaster at Banareng (Primary School), Mr Ramopo, had related to us the fables of James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey, a champion of African nationalism, and in 1960 I had been horrified by the Sharpeville (massacre) corpses I had seen on the pages of the newspapers we read daily,” he says.
The headmaster had planted a seed in young minds.
“I hated oppression. I hated the difference and I still hate it now. I dedicated my life in trying to advance equality, to get African people out of bondage, out of oppression. The fact that we have failed to do it now makes me angry. Too few of us have come out of that terrible economic situation for African people. Even then, when I was growing up, I could see the differences between the suburbs and townships, the lawn and the dust, differences in our schools, we had great teachers but the facilities were inferior. Young people have a deep sense of what’s right and wrong.”
It was at the crack of dawn, in March 1963, when Moseneke was at the mercy of a dozen rough policemen who kicked open his front door, ransacked the house and took him away.
“Mercifully, they missed all the banned literature and leaflets that were meant to rouse the populace into a revolt that morning. I froze with fear, but I didn’t cry… They cuffed my arms behind my body. I was under arrest for terrorism, they told my crying mother, but they were not permitted to tell where I would be kept. They blindfolded me and we sped off into the darkness,” Moseneke says.
He faced a gruelling trial on charges of sabotage and treason, and spent nearly a year in solitary confinement in a Pretoria prison.
In July 1963, in the winter rain and piercing wind, Moseneke paid the price for his principles when the guilty verdict came out. The 15-year-old Moseneke and other political prisoners were chained in pairs and cramped in the back of a police van all the way from Pretoria to Cape Town, where they were ferried to Robben Island. In oversized prison clothes, he started a 10-year sentence.
Despite Moseneke’s group affiliating to the PAC, a breakaway of Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), senior prisoners from the ANC and other banned political formations took the youngsters under their wing. Between toiling in the prison quarry, Moseneke studied English, political science and law through the University of South Africa. He co-founded the Makana Football Association, a prison league.
On the day he was released in 1973, grinning policemen came to his home and told him he was banned for another five years. This meant he was on curfew and couldn’t mix with more than one person at a time.
Mandela remained in prison but the bond between the two was strengthened.
“In fact, I went to see Mandela in Victor Verster Prison before he was released. I did a lot of assignments for him, very critical assignments in his life. And he relied on me in a variety of fronts; for example Mandela asking me to write the interim Constitution.”
Upon retirement in 2016, Moseneke published a book called My Own Liberator: A Memoir, in which he talks of his political rite of passage and time with Mandela.
“I have a chapter in the book where he says ‘Dikgang, I am glad I have found you’. He traced me down to the Kruger National Park, I was in the Malelane Lodge, hiding, and he said ‘Well, Dikgang I am glad I found you, you must come and run the elections’, so I became the deputy of the IEC (Independent Electoral Commission). I made it quite clear I was not going to run for a political office. I am going to become a lawyer, and possibly a judge, but not a political leader.”
Indeed, Moseneke was true to his word. He stayed as a lawyer. Moseneke and George Bizos, the lawyer that defended Mandela in the Rivonia Trial, represented Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, his ex-wife, when she appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997, for the abduction and murder of a 14-year-old Stompie Seipei. Moseneke was on Mandela’s defence team when he divorced Madikizela-Mandela in 1996. Madikizela-Mandela hired Moseneke when she was fired by Mandela in Parliament for visiting Ghana without permission.
“I won that case against him. Winnie was reinstated. But that didn’t tear us apart, it got us even closer. When the Mandela Children’s Fund was formed, he asked me to chair it, which I did for 16 years non-stop. It was one of his first loves, the children. That’s why we opened the hospital which was conceived under my leadership, and Bongi Mkhabela ran with it. I retired from the Children’s Fund and allowed for a new leader. Otherwise, I would have been like President Mugabe and stayed on forever.”
“This day, I am still the executor of the will. Mandela said: ‘Dikgang will you look after me when I am not here?’ It was big ask, from a big man. I said ‘yes Tata’.”
Moseneke is one man who can say he was close to three South African presidents but he cannot be accused of being a lackey to the powerful.
When Thabo Mbeki took over from Mandela in 1999, he appointed Moseneke to be the judge of the Constitutional Court and as Deputy Chief Justice, in 2005, a position he retired in.
“He asked me to go to Zimbabwe to monitor the (2002) elections; I wrote a report which Mbeki didn’t quite like. It wasn’t made public until the courts ordered that it be revealed. I said the elections weren’t free and fair. Even though we were close but he came to know that Moseneke was independent,” says Moseneke.
Mbeki, who wrote the foreword for his book, had told Moseneke if he had not been recalled in 2007, he would have made him the chief justice.
“Our world view has a lot in common, he’s by and large an Africanist, he believes in African renaissance and the greatness of African people, and the need for them to rise again. I believe in the

The Young Rebel With A Cause That Shone Through Tears  And Violence

We drive to Tshepo Sedumo’s home in Atlasville, an affluent part of Boksburg, east of Johannesburg, to learn about the loud speakers he makes in his quiet neighborhood.
We get lost and suspicious security guards start trailing us before we find his double-storey house. Sedumo welcomes us in and offers us something to drink.
The 24-year–old entrepreneur, from the Free State province, is tall and light-skinned, and runs his business from home.
When he was growing up, his family of five moved from province to province as his father found work around the country. In 2001, his father secured a job as an accountant in Johannesburg; from then on the City of Gold was home.
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“My life began when we came here; I made a lot of changes, new schools, new environments, big city, it was meant to be,” says Sedumo.
He was always a DIY person as a young boy; he liked messing around with things he found around the house. That’s because he never really had toys, he says. Sedumo passed the time by putting random things together which he enjoyed and kept him off the streets.
In high school Sedumo learned new skills and started using power tools, like drills. However, he was an accounting student – he studied BCom finance at varsity, but still did handy work in his spare time. Later, spare time became full time as Sedumo dropped his studies to pursue a business making boomboxes.
It was a simple start – it all began with wooden boxes and hinges. Sedumo put computer speakers in the boxes and connected them to the iPod he had recently bought.
It wasn’t the best design but it worked well and people loved it, he says. Encouraged by this, Sedumo wanted to improve his product and make his speakers sound better.
“As time went on, I added moulding on the inside to make it steadier; I worked on it to a point where I actually messed it up. I overworked it,” he laughs.
He kept trying different styles but couldn’t settle on something he was happy with, until he went to YouTube for ideas to better the speakers.
In 2013, Sedumo, for the first time, tried to build something that is battery powered.
“Most of my information didn’t come from school. I learned, on the internet, of a few things, bought some components online and built something that was ugly but powerful and worked with auxiliary. A year later, I decided to use a car stereo and built it into the ugly speakers and that boosted the power and had auxiliary, a SD card slot and USB; it was great,” he says.
YouTube is where his idea was sparked. He saw a boombox made from cardboard, but Sedumo thought it would look better in wood and gathered more research online.
In 2014, he built his first boombox, using wood and veneer. It worked well, the sound was great and it was portable. His friends suggested he make a business out of it.
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“For me it was just to have a sound system and to impress girls, and that’s how I started to lose interest in my studies,” he says.
Sedumo failed his second year and decided to take a break. He turned his attention to boomboxes and has never looked back. His heart was never in school, his passion was in boomboxes and his business Grove Audio was born.
He took it seriously, experimenting with different styles, builds and material, including a backpack boombox.
Sedumo loves hip-hop and associates the music with a boombox. He says the boombox also brings back nostalgic memories for people older than him, like his mom, who owned one when she was younger.
In 2016, Sedumo released a range called Grove Audio G2 (Groove 2). Priced at R2,000 ($150), and able to play for 10 hours using Bluetooth, they sold out within a month.
“I want to differentiate the boomboxes; there is the G series and the S series which are special boomboxes and in 2017 I want to come with the R series; large boomboxes for rent to house parties, etc,” he says.
Sedumo’s custom-made boomboxes are available online, and occasionally at pop-up markets around Johannesburg, and selling internationally.
Sedumo is making a name for himself by creating old-school boomboxes with modern technology. Like the songs they play, these boomboxes are sure to be a hit.
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The Sound Of A  Booming Business

It was an idea that inspired a doctor to walk out of his practice. Dirk Koekemoer, the founder of biomedical engineering company eMoyo, spent the next 18 years building a device that helps tens of thousands to hear – all they have to do is sit under a tree and listen.
&#8220;It was 1999, I literally sat in practice and realized this is going to go on forever. I was going to see 30 patients a day for the rest of my life. I wanted to be able to treat thousands. I cancelled all my appointments that day and took the bold move to start a company,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
It cost Koekemoer $1.2 million and saw the birth of the KUDUwave, a mobile audiometer that looks like a set of headphones. Its size and the fact you can use it under a tree made it a game changer.
&#8220;A basic sound booth, at minimum, would cost R35,000 ($2,600). They can be the size of a fridge and are good for screening. But, the moment you want to do proper audiology the booths go up to R250,000 ($18,700). Then the moment you look at mobile audiology you need two booths on a mobile trailer, with a 4&#215;4 and on a heavy trailer. You are looking at costs of R500,000 ($37,000).&#8221;
The R65,000 ($4,800) headphones are cheap and smart. They won’t operate unless the conditions are just right. One of the best places to use them is under the shade of a tree, just as well as Africa has plenty of them. They are used in the rural areas, like Zambia, where audiologists need to get around.
&#8220;Open air testing, in an area with open windows or under a tree, is the best for ear testing. A booth needs ventilation, it needs soundproofing and probably doubles the costs.&#8221;
&#8220;There are 3.5 billion people in the world that don&#8217;t have access to adequate equipment. I thought let&#8217;s create devices that can actually do the tedious things that a doctor and a nurse have to do that don&#8217;t need brainpower,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 360 million people have hearing loss and most of them live in low- and middle-income countries.
&#8220;It&#8217;s a huge need. There are 30 million people in this country with hearing problems, 2 million need hearing aids. There are not enough audiologists and there are not enough facilities,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
&#8220;Hearing loss is a serious problem. It causes dementia and depression. Also isolation, especially in the elderly; literally their life expectancies shorten if they are unable to hear well.&#8221;
In Khayelitsha, a township 28 kilometers south east of Cape Town, this is a common challenge. This is also where we follow Koekemoer to meet with head audiologist Shireen Martin, of the Khayelitsha Hospital, who has been working with the device since July.
Koekemoer’s device has transformed the way audiologists, like Martin, work. Employed by the South Africa’s Department of Health, Martin uses the device to test patients’ hearing loss in multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB).
&#8220;At first I was against the idea. I think there was a lot of speculation about it. It has to do with changing the way people work and think. I was used to sitting in a booth, sitting with a patient one-on-one. It kind of made me adverse to the idea of a mobile audiometer.&#8221;
The department employs decentralized TB treatment, which means Martin needs to travel to treat patients.
&#8220;I don&#8217;t have access to any other audio equipment. With many TB clinics that decentralized their treatment and initiation of MDR-TB, many patients are not able to go to an audiologist, with them being so far away,&#8221; she says.
Martin is the only audiologist who operates here and sees up to 60 MDR-TB patients a month.
&#8220;[Patients] do appreciate it. Because it is not far away from home, they don&#8217;t have to wait long for transport to take them to far-away hospitals. Bringing the service to them is the importance of primary healthcare, not just audiology.&#8221;
MDR-TB patients need to be monitored carefully. Hearing loss can be a side effect of the drug used to treat the disease.
&#8220;Some can lose their hearing in as short a space as a month,&#8221; says Martin. &#8220;It&#8217;s devastating, especially if it happens in a short space of time. That&#8217;s why counseling is very important; so patients know what the early signs are and the importance of them coming back.&#8221;
Koekemoer believes Martin&#8217;s work is a mere drop in the ocean, considering there are 20,000 MDR-TB patients in South Africa and the disease is very infectious.
&#8220;It&#8217;s scary. Patients can&#8217;t just jump into a taxi with their disease. They need special transport. It’s why it makes sense that the audiologists go to them,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
Koekemoer&#8217;s dream started on an even grander scale – a full mobile body scanner. It was a eureka moment in his small home office in Pretoria.
&#8220;One night at two or three o&#8217;clock in the morning, I was sitting at my desk and I started drawing a picture. It was a horrible picture. It was a full solution on how to examine a patient as good as a GP would examine a patient. Things you had to put on a patient. It wasn&#8217;t like the Star Trek scanner version you see in movies, but we are getting there,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
Koekemoer has learned the business of building medical equipment is tough.
&#8220;In 2001, when I started developing these medical devices, it was so difficult. Voice over IP wasn&#8217;t even legal then. In that type of environment, it was difficult just to find information on audiometers. At that stage I was doing deep searches on university FTP sites. I had to invent my own software to actually find the information. Now it&#8217;s easy. The rate of inventiveness increases significantly.&#8221;
Patents are expensive. According to Koekemoer a single patent costs R1 million ($75,000), and a further R500,000 ($37,000) every year after. It still doesn&#8217;t protect your devices; poached product designs are common. It can be as simple as changing a small part. Koekemoer says that in the field the headphones have a two-year advantage before similar devices appear.
&#8220;The problem is KUDUwave had got about 16 patents. It&#8217;s better to take that money and get first-mover advantage. If I can give any advice to any entrepreneur, just give up on thinking you are going to protect yourself on patents. Just get the flipping thing in the field.&#8221;
&#8220;You need to be fast, constant improvement and add additional things to the KUDUwave. In the next few days we are adding a crosscheck that will allow calibration of the device in the field.&#8221;
Next is getting the product certified. With huge backlogs worldwide, inventors struggle to get their products on shelves. The process can add years of painful delay. The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), the governing body which approves devices in the country, has no facilities to test the device as it is so unique.
&#8220;We need alternative European certification which can take five months just to get a quote for audit. It is really difficult to say no every day and not go to the US, where it is so easy to get FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approval. FDA registration doesn&#8217;t count in South Africa, but it’s accepted in the rest of the world,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
Despite the uphill battles, Koekemoer is adamant that Africa is the place where his device can make the most difference.
“Re-engineering healthcare, that is what we are doing.”
So, when you see a patient with a set of headphones on while sitting under a tree, chances are they are taking a test that could change their lives.

Huh? Say That Again?

It doesn&#8217;t look like much but it&#8217;s the first of its kind on African soil that could turn a stinking problem into a profit. This $400-million plant takes the black rubbish bags of Cape Town, with their rotting food and heaven knows what else, and converts it into gas – methane and carbon dioxide – for sale.
The plant, owned by New Horizons Energy, a subsidiary of Clean Energy Africa, is the fruit of five years of planning with family-owned Waste-Mart, one of the largest waste collectors in the city. It was also backed by African Oxygen (Afrox) and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC).
This machine was born of a shortage of holes in which to put rubbish in Cape Town.
&#8220;WasteMart brings in 500 tons of waste a day. Cape Town produces 2 million tons a year. It goes to landfills sites and sits useless. We plan to convert 10 percent of Cape Town&#8217;s waste into something. The city of Cape Town, in effect, has become our mine,&#8221; says New Horizons Energy CEO, Egmont Ottermann.
<div id="attachment_4621" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4621" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-4621" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/biowaste-plant_JC-2-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Preparation of apricot juice for the plant.</div>
It is a 15-year dream Ottermann has realized. He says he first came up with the idea when looking at how to make gas that is produced in the cement industry.
At the heart of this are millions upon millions of bugs that live inside the huge vats and eat the rubbish to produce the methane. In their teething days they were fed nothing but cow manure before moving on to 50 tons of apricot juice. The bugs will mature in May and be strong enough to chomp their way through waste, turning it into valuable gas.
“We’re very excited about the plant. It can help to replace imported fuels by taking the waste and making gas out of the resource. Most importantly, it’s creating jobs. We also believe that there is massive opportunity for replication throughout South Africa and Africa,” says Raoul Goosen, the IDC’s Green Industry Specialist, who played a vital part in securing a 60% finance backing for the project.
The plant will release 20 tons of carbon dioxide and 540 gigajoules of biomethane, which Afrox will buy.
“For Afrox it&#8217;s a sustainable green offering that our customers are looking for. It&#8217;s a good news story from birth to graveyard in terms of managing a waste stream,” says Silvia Schollenberger, Afrox Head of Commercial and Projects.
&#8220;We found there was more value to the industries of biogas, rather than energy. Cape Town has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. Afrox has seen shortages of carbon dioxide and methane, especially in summer, so this is a good idea on various levels,” says Ottermann.
Ottermann believes there’s more rubbish than time.
&#8220;It&#8217;s not the silver bullet solution, but it&#8217;s a start. The idea is to use 100 percent of the landfill. We’re enhancing the recycling economy. There’s great potential in the future to make products such as plastic bricks and roof tiles. Over the lifetime of this plant, we expect many more little industries to be established close to the plant, so that we can drive zero waste to landfill.”
Where there&#8217;s muck there&#8217;s brass – there is also gas.

Rubbish. Bugs.  Profit.

It’s only six blocks from James Proud’s office, a brick-walled converted bakery in San Francisco’s Mission District, to Central Kitchen, a hip restaurant owned by fellow FORBES 30 Under 30 alum Thomas McNaughton, but that’s plenty of time for the 25-year-old to take on more or less all of Silicon Valley. People who complain about finding good talent just don’t know how to recruit. Traditional venture capital firms? Unnecessary. By the time we reach the host stand, he’s deriding the entire tech community for their “airy-fairy bullsh-t about changing the world.”
This absolutism feels all the more jarring given that his short, bulldog frame and pudgy baby face make him look like the high school computer-lab nerd he once was, a persona buttressed by his wardrobe (a sweatshirt and sweatpants almost all the time, a black T-shirt if he’s feeling dressy) and diet (no vegetables, no fish). The latest in the 21st-century cavalcade of cocky prodigies in the mold of Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Spiegel, Proud was born thumbing his nose at other people. “No one can make me do what I don’t want to do,” he says. He’s been professionally bred this way, too.
James Proud was in the first class of Thiel Fellows, the upstarts – 122 and counting – who for the past seven years have taken $100,000 each from billionaire contrarian Peter Thiel on the condition they skip college. And he’s also the most successful. Over the past four years he’s raised roughly $40 million for his startup, Hello, mostly at a $250 million valuation. He’s recently been raising bridge financing, at an even higher valuation, including a direct $2 million ante from the godfather himself, Thiel. It’s his first personal investment in one of his fellows. “James stood out from the start as extremely tenacious and determined,” Thiel says.
And now he’s rich, too. Proud still owns about half of Hello, pushing him well into centimillionaire territory.
Proud’s chosen market is right up there with death and taxes in terms of universality: sleep, which has suddenly become a bit more sexy and a bit less sleepy than it has been for the past few millennia. “You’re starting to see a shift in conversation around sleep that happened in the ’80s around exercise and in the ’90s and 2000s with organic and healthy eating,” Proud says. Arianna Huffington has raised $7 million for Thrive Global, which offers a suite of products and services driven by the idea that more sleep translates to a better life, and Casper, the mattress-will-change-your-life startup, has raised $70 million.
Proud’s focus is on hardware, specifically an orb the size of a tennis ball that sits on your bedside table and uses a variety of hidden sensors to track your movements and the surrounding nighttime atmosphere. The $149 gadget, called Sense, grades your sleep on a scale from 0 to 100 – and tries to help you improve that score over time. Proud claims that the Sense holiday rollout at Target is the biggest the retailer has ever done for a new electronics product (Target says that’s incorrect).
Big orders won’t guarantee big success, at least not immediately. A source close to the company says the internal sales projection for 2017 is 250,000 Sense units, implying net revenues in the ballpark of $20 million. Tiny compared even to a flagging competitor like Fitbit, which likely finished 2016 with sales of more than $2.3 billion – and even at that size, it’s barely profitable. Meanwhile, a triad of monoliths – Amazon, Apple and Google – stand determined to put connected devices on every conceivable surface of your body and in every space in your home.
What does Proud think of his trillion-dollar competitors? Looking up from his lamb ribs and roast pork, he lifts both hands in a double-middle-finger salute.
It’s the kind of brashness that a Peter Thiel could love. That tack surely worked for Zuckerberg and Spiegel. But youthful hubris goes back to Icarus, and that tale didn’t end with an IPO. Given his complicated market, dotted with pitfalls and entrenched enemies, Proud will ultimately demonstrate whether unswerving self-confidence is a necessary entrepreneurial attribute or a potentially fatal flaw. At the FORBES Under 30 Summit in Boston last October, Proud was asked backstage whether he’d ever met Richard Branson, whom he would soon join on a panel. “The real question,” Proud responded, “is whether Branson has ever met me.”
&nbsp;
Proud grew up less than an hour away from Branson’s childhood home south of London. His father worked for the British civil service, and his mother was a secretary who later stocked grocery-store shelves at night. Proud preferred haunting the computer lab to making friends on the playground. His first Internet payday came at the age of 12, when he built a website for a scammer he had met through an online forum (he spent the money on a Sony Ericsson mobile phone and Creative Labs MP3 player). As a hired hand for Web projects, he began making hundreds of dollars per job. At one point his PayPal account was frozen because he was underage, so cash arrived in the mail, prompting questions from his parents.
At 17 Proud started GigLocator, a website that aggregated concert ticket information, and persuaded his parents to let him take a gap year to work on it. He fed himself by faking hole punches on loyalty cards from a British chicken chain, Nando’s, or else schmoozing venture capitalists and other European techies over lunch, always letting them pick up the check. “Already back then, James had this laser-sharp focus about what he was going to do for the next ten years,” says Spotify founder Daniel Ek, who met Proud playing Ping-Pong during that period. “It was incredibly rare to see that from someone who should have been more focused on girls and school.”
Proud would have been the first in his family to attend college, but when the day came to enroll, he refused to go, despite his parents’ pleas. Then, on a September day in 2010, Proud found his savior at 1AM while watching a live stream of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. There Thiel announced his eponymous fellowship: a $100,000 grant to each of 20 teenagers who wanted to skip college to pursue another dream. Proud decided to apply on the spot.
When Thiel flew the finalists out to hobnob in San Francisco, Proud was surrounded by preppy American kids with acceptances to Harvard they wanted to turn down. He returned to London, sure he wouldn’t make the cut. “I wished I didn’t even come,” Proud says. “I was going to have to go back and hate my life because I’d seen that this would be so much better.” But in April 2011 Thiel’s organization called to give him the good news. They also told him to sit tight until July. Proud, of course, was in a hurry – and not listening to anyone who would stop him. He quickly emptied his savings to buy a plane ticket and then demanded the first Thiel check be sent early, lest he end up sleeping on the street. They caved.
The fellowship changed Proud’s life, turning him from an unknown programmer living with his parents to a member of an inaugural class of wunderkinds. While crashing on air mattresses and couches for most of the next year, he took advantage of every door the Thiel brand opened across Silicon Valley. For a time Proud worked out of PayPal cofounder Max Levchin’s incubator, and in June 2012 he offloaded GigLocator to the concert promoter Peter Shapiro, earning himself a cool six-figure payday. (“That’s one young, smart mother–ker,” says Shapiro.)
Soon after, Proud began raising money for a new stealth startup that would become Hello. “I said, ‘I’m in for whatever amount you’ll let me in for,’” says Shakil Khan, an early Spotify investor that Proud befriended in London. “He said, ‘I still haven’t finalized what it’s going to be.’ And I said, ‘That’s irrelevant.’”
The original idea for Hello was to build a better version of the activity-tracker wristband pioneered by Fitbit and Jawbone. Proud recruited a handful of young hardware engineers and spent 18 months developing a prototype, which included a magnetic strap similar to one that would later appear on the Apple Watch. But over time Proud quietly soured on its potential. He noticed that no one on his team wore any existing product on his or her wrist for more than a few weeks. Consumer surveys show similar results, with estimates that about a third of wearables owners give up on their devices within the first six months. Plus, competition was fierce. Google would announce Android Wear in March 2014, and the Apple Watch debuted in September. Proud was already late to a category in which he no longer believed. “So what do you do? Do you give the money back to investors and send everyone home?” he asked.
The epiphany came when Proud flew out to New York City to attend a birthday party in March 2014.
Distracted by his dilemma, he brainstormed about products that wouldn’t need to be worn at all times and suddenly arrived at sleep tracking. People enjoyed the feature on wristbands but hated wearing them overnight. He brought the team together when he returned and told them they would be scrapping a year and a half of work to start over. “I wore the wristband prototypes for a good two weeks after, holding on to the work we had done,” says Hello’s first industrial designer, Rob Shook.
Proud also had to sell his decision to an angry group of investors who had supported a $7 million Series A only months earlier. To placate them, he granted additional shares to everyone who participated in the round, including Khan, then-PayPal president David Marcus and Xiaomi vice president Hugo Barra. “Had the decision to pivot come three months later, I don’t think the company would have survived,” says Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president of partnerships and Hello’s only board member other than Proud.
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Proud’s move away from wearable devices took Hello out of a crowded but expanding market – an estimated 67 million smart watches will be sold this year – and made it the pioneer of a completely new one. “If it can work, it can end up being a consumer device on par with the iPod,” Thiel says. A huge if. Searching for scientific backing Proud hired Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep &amp; Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, as Hello’s chief scientist. Walker believes that lack of sleep is an “epidemic” in First World countries and that Sense can help fix that. After one year of use, 71% of Sense users slept longer on average than they had before, and 57% had more regular wake-up times, the company claims. Hello hopes to do even better as it tests more personalized sleep techniques.
Proud proved there was a market for sleep-centered products, at least among early adopters, with a successful Kickstarter campaign in July 2014. After racing to build a basic hardware prototype and marketable software façade, Hello launched its campaign with a slick video and a goal of $100,000. It blew past the finish line, scoring $1 million in the first four days and $2.4 million after one month, just a hair shy of VR phenomenon Oculus Rift’s crowdfunding haul. That summer proved an intoxicating high, but there was so much to do to make the marketing pitch a reality that four bottles of celebratory champagne sat in the office refrigerator unopened until this past Thanksgiving.
Hello promised delivery by November 2014 but delayed the first shipments until February as production challenges mounted. Sense is a two-part system that includes a bedside device – an amalgam of LEDs, circuits and sensors to detect light, sound, temperature and air quality, all stuffed into a small sphere – and an accompanying battery-powered, Bluetooth-enabled “Sleep Pill,” which clips to your pillow to track movement. The team had to design many of the manufacturing tools themselves. That following June Hello brought in a $30 million cash infusion at the $250 million valuation from the likes of Temasek Holdings, a government-owned investment fund in Singapore, but the rest of the year was lost to fixing bugs and rewriting core features. In 2016, as Amazon rolled out the Echo and Google revealed Google Home, both voice-enabled wireless speakers, Proud pushed the team to add voice controls to the latest Sense, which went on sale this past November.
“The big challenge is always: Can you lock in the market enough before people develop copycats that are cheaper and roughly equivalent?” Thiel says. “This is always something a little harder for hardware than software.”
Unfortunately, even the new version feels like an unfinished product searching for a market. After trying it for a week, I enjoyed Sense’s novelty as a smarter alarm clock with limited voice commands and the ability to turn off the alarm with a wave of your hand. But for my $149, the core functionality is too inconsistent. It’s supposed to detect when you fall asleep and wake up, and analyze your tossing and turning to see how many hours you’re in deep sleep. Yet the Sense interprets data gathered from the clip on my pillow rather than a band on my wrist, so it frequently fails to register when I get up from bed and often confuses my fiancée’s movement for my own. Even if it were accurate, neither the sleep results nor other measurements are groundbreaking. Everyone already knows that blackout curtains are good for beauty rest and a barking dog is bad.
Other warning signs abound. Proud boasts about the new Hello displays in nearly 700 Target stores across the country, but the only inventory in Oakland was one Sense tucked in a side cabinet next to some Apple TVs and Linksys wireless routers. A survey of Best Buys around New York found only one with the product in stock; other stores indicated you needed to order it. And when I brought a Sense home, I nearly abandoned the set-up process after an hour of trying and failing to plug in the charging cable. Hello says a new manufacturer had constructed the USB port a millimeter off target in a few units.
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While plenty of questions remain about Sense, Proud now treats his risky pivot as a thesis statement. He trashes devices that need to be worn (like the Apple Watch) or require direct interaction (like the home assistants from Amazon and Google). His goal is to cover the entire 24 hours of your day with a few “nonengagement” health-tracking devices like Sense. “It’s a tragedy that we  can’t build and release them all right now,” Proud asserts.
He’ll need to diversify his product line soon to avoid the fate of other hardware startups like fellow Kickstarter darling Pebble, which shut down in December, and drone maker 3D Robotics, which crashed after burning through $100 million in funding. Even public companies like Fitbit (trading down 86% from its peak) and GoPro (down 90%) have struggled. “On one hand, it’s easier than ever to build a hardware product,” says Jan Dawson, analyst at Jackdaw Research. “But in some ways it’s harder than ever to be competitive and build a sustainable business.”
In the meantime, Proud must mature as the leader of a 50-employee startup trying to go toe-to-toe with companies that outnumber and out-finance him. While friends extol Proud as wise beyond his years, former Hello staffers describe him as a smart but inveterate risk-taker who often unravels in tense situations. “You could see the pressure got to him, and sometimes I would think it’s because he’s young,” a former Hello engineer says. “He would suddenly rush in saying, ‘We need to do X because people are complaining about it.’” Instead of patiently adhering to a long-term plan, Proud is prone to rash decisions. “The ability to take risks and be aggressive is the foundation of James’ decision making, and it may eventually come back to bite him,” says one ex-Hello employee who worked closely with Proud for more than two years. “If that day never comes, he’s a genius. If it does, the warning signs were there.” Proud doesn’t deny he can be a capricious boss. In December 2014, on the morning an engineer was set to fly to China to install the final firmware for the Sense’s first manufacturing run, Proud decided to add one more feature. His CTO, Tim Bart, told him it was insane to change anything in the code at such a late hour, but Proud was suddenly convinced that Sense should light up and play a sound when it was plugged in for the first time – like a computer booting up.
After a bruising argument, Proud got his way. The engineer finished coding the change on the cross-Pacific flight, and through skill and luck avoided introducing new bugs into the final product.
Was that last minute intervention a Steve Jobs-like moment of product genius or the power trip of an enabled, immature founder? Proud’s analysis of his behavior in hindsight is simple and unapologetic: “Well, I was right.”

The Black Sheep

They keep their heads low, always looking forward. Shying away from the sun, they pull a load larger than the cars that aggressively race past them. Sweat pours over their worn out shoulders as they struggle for breath. It’s tough work, but they need to eat, they need to live.
This is the daily struggle of informal waste collectors in Johannesburg. They are part of the city; but the city doesn’t appreciate them. They’re called walkers of the street, or the cockroaches of the suburbs.
The waste collectors, however, don’t have any other option. They do this work to survive.
“I had no choice. After [the Marikana massacre] I was retrenched. My mother died and I had no food. I heard here in Joburg that people were making money, maybe R100 to R150 per day. So I thought this is what I need to do to make sure my family and I have something to eat,” says Lebogang Rapoo.
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He smiles when he talks about his five children, but his work means he hasn’t seen them in years.
“I haven’t seen my family in two years, but what can I do?”
Rapoo had no money to go home for Christmas last year.
“I would rather be dead at Christmas time than to suffer the way I did. There was no food, nothing at all. The dustbins were empty and there was nothing I could gather to exchange for food. I was so hungry I did not know what to do. I walked from door to door, the people chased me away thinking I am a criminal.”
Rapoo lives on less than R300 ($22) a week. The bulk of that money is sent home, the rest he uses for food. It is a daily challenge to find recyclable goods they can trade. Finding white paper is considered a treasure for them as one kilogram can pay about R5 (around $0.40). To make an amount worth their while, they need to find at least 10 cardboard boxes a day to earn about R1.20, depending on the sizes of the boxes. Twenty plastic bottles will get them about R5 ($0.40) and cans trade for up to R1 ($0.10) per kilogram.
They are slaves to their own survival.
“Welcome to my home,” says Rapoo, pointing towards a space next to a wall of an abandoned building where Corlett drive meets Oxford street, near the plush suburbs of Melrose and Illovo. He dusts off an empty bucket and spreads a dry washcloth over it, making a seat for me. Rapoo and his eight street-dwelling friends are all sitting on buckets around a small fire made of twigs and dried grass. He stirs a pot of rice and empties a packet of soup powder into a burned coffee tin. His bed is a couple of cardboard boxes stacked on a torn piece of industrial plastic. At night, he covers himself in the plastic to keep dry and warm.
The waste collectors are breaking by-laws by trading on the streets and by using the roads to transport their goods.
“Last week the police came; they chased us away. They burned our beds and all our blankets, telling us to go find another place to sleep. They say the residents don’t want us here. But what must we do? We have nowhere to go,” says Rapoo.
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The unregulated informal industry works on a first come, first served basis. The collectors get up at 3AM every morning. They have to get to the dustbins before the municipalities take away their treasures. They walk without counting the steps; on Mondays they walk to Linden; Tuesdays to Rosebank, Melrose, Parkhurst and Killarney; Thursdays to Northcliff and Fridays to Blairgowrie. The routes they take to collect trash range between five  and 20 kilometers. On Thursdays, Rapoo sometimes sleeps on sidewalks between Northcliff and Rosebank because his ‘house’ is too far for a day’s walk. For this, he earns less than R300 a week.
“I made my trolley into a double decker, so I can carry more waste to recycle. Sometimes I pull 180kg, and then I get more money. Sometimes I only collect 90kg. Every three days, when my trolley is full, I walk to the recycling depot in Alexandra. Then I get money; I can eat again,” he says.
According to Plastic SA, the umbrella organization for the local plastics industry, the informal waste collectors’ treasures make up more than 80% of all recycled material in the province of Gauteng. Without the informal waste collectors, companies like Plastic SA would be out of business.
John Xakaxa, a 50-year-old man from Soweto, has been relying on his eight friends for three months after his recycling trolley was stolen during the night. He says members of a rival group, who wear balaclavas, steal from them. When the men from the other group get to a dustbin and find Rapoo and his friends there, they fight them and take all the ‘goods’.
Supermarkets sell trolleys to the collectors at R150 ($11) each, but Xakaxa has not yet raised enough to buy one. His friend, Gerard Moloi, from Daggakraal in Mpumalanga, has been sharing his food with Xakaxa every night since his trolley was stolen. The eight men living at this very busy intersection also look after their friend Petrus Mpbunda who is wheelchair bound after he lost his leg in a shootout between drug lords in Diepsloot, one of Johannesburg’s largest townships. Mpbunda accompanies his friends on their daily walks from dustbin to dustbin in the leafy northern suburbs of the city.
Despite attracting the ire of many in Johannesburg, some residents and NGOs are reaching out to the waste collectors. WastePreneurs, an NGO in Parkhurst, a trendy suburb in the north, was set up less than a year ago to assist the waste collectors. The NGO provides custom-made trolleys to collectors and pays them R250 ($18.80) if they fill a trolley bin. The collectors deposit the waste at the plant next to the office that was established next to Pikitup, the governmental waste collection company. Godfrey Phakedi, manager of the WastePreneur plant, says the collectors bring the waste to the plant where it is sorted and packed by various employees, creating more jobs for street dwellers. The waste sorters are mostly female. From the 81 collectors, only two are female. The waste is then transported and sold to various recycling companies.
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Sfiso Ngobese, a young entrepreneur from Germiston, has also started an initiative to help the collectors. Ngobese noticed a lady walking past his house every day to search for recyclable goods and decided to build her a reliable and safe trolley. The trolley is bigger and more stable than those from supermarkets and it even has brakes. Ngobese became so inspired that he started a business, called Abomakgereza, to specialize in building these trolleys. His trolleys can be used by waste collectors and be used by companies as mobile billboards. He also buys and sells the waste collected by the trolleys he hands out, thereby managing his own team of collectors. This might be a form of regulation that is much needed for the wellbeing and safety of the waste collectors.
For Rapoo, the journey to a stable life is long and arduous, but it is a walk that he has become accustomed to.

Slaves To Survival

At least the new president Nana Akufo-Addo is optimistic. In a press statement he called for reflection on what makes Ghanaians who they are. This year’s theme, according to him, is:  “Mobilizing for Ghana’s Future.” That is, a year for Ghanaians to understand their country’s shortcomings and look at ways to improve.
Good timing, when growth is falling. According to figures from the World Bank, Ghana’s economy grew by 4.9% during the first quarter of 2016. However, overall gross domestic product (GDP) growth for the whole of 2016 could be below the 3.9% achieved in 2015, due to production problems in oil.
Inflation is at 16.7%, made worse by the country’s erratic energy supply that sees businesses put prices up when they use generators.
Victor Ohene Oppong, Founder of Invest Hub, a financial advisory firm in Accra, is, like many of his countrymen, in no mood for jubilation.
<div id="attachment_4605" style="width: 245px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4605" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-4605" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/GettyImages-146126958-235x300.jpg" alt="" width="235" height="300" />Dr. Kwame Nkrumah of newly independent Ghana, Ghana, mid to late 1950s. The British crown colony of the Gold Coast, became its own country of Ghana on March 6, 1957, with Dr. Nkrumah as its first President. (Photo by Underwood Archives/Getty Images)</div>
“Sixty years ago our founding father, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah famously opined, Ghana your beloved country is free forever, and we all thought managing our own resources would lead to prosperity for everyone but that has simply not been the case. We have issued our fifth Eurobond debt for $750 million and the oil crisis has led to a sharp contraction in oil exports. Businesses are fighting for survival because when there is no cash flow you die. So what is there to celebrate?” he says.
Economic hard times have hit Oppong in the pocket. Last year, he had to lay off five expatriates and close down one of his two branches because of low revenues.
“The debt to GDP ratio stands at about 70% and the last unemployment figures show at least 42% of people are still struggling to find jobs. I think the president is right when he calls this a time of reflection, we need to think very hard and carefully about the future of this country,” says Oppong.
Richmond Nartey, Managing Director of RN Shipping in Tema, agrees.
“Sixty years is a lifetime. For most people that is the age when they begin to think about retirement and enjoying life. But that is not the case for Ghana. The value of our currency is still very weak against the dollar and even though we decided to use our own local currency, many companies still charge in dollars. Foreign currency restrictions in Ghana are still a big issue for our kind of business. What happens to businesses that cannot get their hands on the much-needed dollars to be able to run their business?” says Nartey.
Following the end of decades of rule by former coup leader Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, Ghana has done its best to clean up its democratic act. Ghana’s two-party electoral system is earning the confidence of the world for its peaceful political transitions. For this reason alone, Mary Osei, Account Manager at HFC Bank, believes there is cause to celebrate.
“This is a time to remember all the things that make this country a wonderful place to live. Yes, there are several challenges we are facing, but which economy isn’t facing challenges? We have to continue to work together to build on the achievements we have and make this nation great,” says Osei.
“If there was ever a day to be proud of your Ghanaian heritage and to be patriotic, there is no better day than March 6, so I do not agree with the naysayers and people who believe there is no need for celebrations,” she says.
Yet the debate over how to celebrate Ghana’s 60th birthday has been fierce. Akufo-Addo set up a 30-member committee to plan the celebrations with a budget of GHc20 million ($4.57 million), which has proved controversial on the streets.
“If there is anywhere that money needs to be spent, it should be in the creative industry instead of throwing it away on branding buses with faces of old presidents or parties. There are failing sectors in the economy where that money could be put to much better use,” says Adamz, a hip-hop artist in Ghana.
The influence of Ghana’s independence over Africa cannot be underestimated. It was the first black African nation to cast off colonialism and inspired many others to follow suit.
&#8220;At long last, the battle has ended!  And thus, Ghana, your beloved country is free forever!&#8221; said Ghana’s first leader Kwame Nkrumah on independence night in 1957. The new leader wore his prison cap – a symbol of his incarceration by the British during his independence struggle – with the letters PG, for prison graduate, embroidered on the front.
Martin Luther King Jr. was with half a million Ghanaians at the ceremony and saw a parallel with Ghana’s freedom and his struggle for civil rights in the United States.
“Before I knew it, I started weeping. I was crying for joy. And I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment,” recalled King in an interview years later.
Nkrumah, the father of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which evolved into the African Union, drew many admirers in his first bold steps as a pan-Africanist leader. They included a young teacher by the name of Robert Mugabe who had been seconded to Ghana, by the then Rhodesian government, to a training college.
Mugabe was very taken by the sight of confident Africans in an independent nation and returned home determined to fight for an independent Zimbabwe.
Independence turned out to be bittersweet for Ghana – it was followed by assassination attempts and coups. The idealistic Nkrumah disappointed many when he declared himself president-for-life in 1964.
At least, in the 21st century, democracy in Ghana is closer than it probably ever has been to the shining ideals of 1957.

Ghana At 60

Engineer Hein Reyneke should be very pleased with life right now. He has overseen the building of two mighty wind farms ready to feed clean, green energy into his country’s national grid. The windfarm at Paardekraal, in the Karoo in South Africa’s Western Cape, will generate 110MW; at Kangnas, near Springbok in the Northern Cape, will generate 140MW; two shining power projects that took millions and the best part of seven years to build.
Instead, Reyneke is frustrated. His company, Mainstream Renewable Power, is one of the 37 renewable power projects left in the lurch by Africa’s biggest electricity generator Eskom. Between them they have sunk more than R50 billion (about $ 3.8 billion) into the projects left in limbo for more than two years.
The worst part is that all 37 projects have been signed off by the South African government’s enormous Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPP).
The problem is that Eskom won’t sign the 20-year power purchase agreements that will connect the projects to the national grid and pay their owners for the electricity they generate. Even then, it’ll take these 37 renewable power projects years to recoup their investment. The renewable energy entrepreneurs share the view of many in the industry that Eskom is both referee and player in the power game that guards its turf.
“I think the problem is Eskom can see its role diminishing. In short, it doesn’t want other people selling bread in its bakery,” says Reyneke.
The reality is Eskom can afford to take its time over signing new power agreements. The blackouts that have plagued South Africa since 2008 have receded. This is down to a combination of a massive repair and maintenance operation, the coming online of two new coal-fired power stations, and falling demand due to a sluggish economy. All this has left the national grid with a healthy surplus that could be as high as 5,600MW at peak times. That is nearly twice the output of one of South Africa’s biggest coal-fired stations.
It means Eskom can also afford be picky over price. Renewable energy may be gentle on the environment, but it is expensive to produce. In the first three rounds of the REIPPP process, Eskom was prepared to pay more than a rand per kWh. Now Eskom says it does not want to pay any more than 62 cents per kWh.
“Let us first sign the 62c/kWh bids. We would sign 13 immediately. That would be a move in the right direction. Those that are more than 62c/kWh must sharpen their pencils,” says current interim CEO of Eskom, Matshele Koko.
“The South African Renewable Energy Council (SAREC) counters that apart from legality and the risk of far-reaching negative economic consequence, Mr. Koko does not appear to have thought through the direct power sector consequences of his position. A 62c/kWh ceiling for new generation would be a death knell for other independent power additions. Nuclear is expected to come in at least double this level. Recent coal bids were around R1.03/kWh. Eskom’s own new-build coal stations, Medupi and Kusile, are both well north of a rand per unit,” says SAREC in a statement.
SAREC, representing the owners of the 37 renewable power projects, sought legal opinion. It fears that foreign investors in the industry could be deterred by the impasse with Eskom and claims that the national power producer has no authority to negotiate tariffs with signed-off bidders.
Senior counsel at Webber Wentzel, in Johannesburg, has issued a legal opinion letter, which confirms that preferred bidders are entitled to approach a court to enforce Eskom’s signature of power purchase agreements.
“In our opinion Eskom cannot sidestep the binding determination of the Minister; they are bound by the Ministerial determination, which includes signing the power purchase agreements,” stated Advocate David Unterhalter, Senior Counsel at Webber Wentzel.
“As an origin of state, Eskom cannot raise the reservation of rights in the request for proposal to defeat a claim for substitutionary relief. Nor, can it refuse to conclude a power purchase agreement.”
So, the 37 renewable power producers could have a glorious day in court if they put up the money for the lawyers. The question is will they take on the giant Eskom that could tie them up in a long and expensive court case?
“I think it is an option but not our preference at the moment,” says Reyneke, of the windfarms of Paardekraal and Kangnas.
The bigger question for the South African government is how exactly it will replace coal – which currently generates around 90% of the country’s power – when the coalfields run out and the world demands fewer carbon emissions in the next decade or so. Nuclear is being touted as the answer, but that is likely to be crippling to government coffers.
It appears renewable energy – once seen as the saviour of the national grid and the environment – is on the backburner for now.

A Court Case Is In The Wind

For years, I’ve been a silent observer of the World Economic Forum (WEF), reading about it on the internet, editing reams of copy on it or watching it on TV. But one question has always remained in my mind. What drives thousands of people each year to a small alpine town in Switzerland to live out Professor Klaus Schwab’s dream, who founded the forum in 1971?
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After traveling almost 13,000 kilometers from the tip of Africa to Davos, a semblance of an answer began to emerge.
The answer was not to be found in the sub-zero temperatures that left the entire body numb with cold nor in Responsive and Responsible Leadership, the theme driving the WEF Annual Meeting 2017. Instead it was to be found in the Congress Centre, or on the streets and hotels of Davos-Klosters.
It was to be found among the people – the 3,000 delegates that gathered for the event and the thousands of support staff.
The draw card – the opportunity to mingle and be seen with the most influential and powerful people in the world. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, crossed my path several times at Davos. Mauritius President Dr Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, after sharing her plans for attracting investors to her country on a cold winter’s night, agreed to a photo with me.
Singer and songwriter Shakira shared her passion for early child development advising us that “today’s babies will drive tomorrow’s business. Their capacity to contribute will shape tomorrow’s societies, will solve tomorrow’s problems”.
Anne-Sophie Mutter, one of the world’s most famous violinists, entertained the crowds. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Finance Minister of Nigeria and Board Chair of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, discussed plans to immunize up to 300 million more children all over the world by 2020.
The allure of Davos is that it gives delegates a platform to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, such as the refugee crisis, climate change and can-women-have-it-all?
It offers an arena to do business deals with the richest, to form new contacts and exchange business cards. It provides purveyors a glimpse into where the world stands, shifts in geopolitics and the ironies and contradictions of the world. It allows those present to see who controls the vast majority of wealth and intellectual capital and how this has changed.
WEF 2017 was a world in which the largest bankers, infamous for the financial crisis, such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, could be heard offering their views on Trump making America and stock markets great again, while Ugandan-born Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director at Oxfam, was decrying that eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity, according to a new report published by the agency.
It was an arena that brought into stark contrast the plight of Africa, and the developed world when simultaneously it hosted a panel discussion with CNBC Africa on Powering Africa, while meters away, some of the leading minds in technology were debating what role artificial intelligence should play in our futures; and that the 48 countries that make up sub-Saharan Africa generate almost the same amount of electricity as Spain.
Davos 2017 was a gathering where UK’s Prime Minister Theresa May declared that Britain’s decision to leave the European Union was not a rejection of its friends in Europe but simply a vote to restore its “parliamentary democracy and national self-determination. A vote to take control and make decisions for ourselves”. Juxtapose this with Xi Jinping’s attendance. Jinping, the first Chinese president to attend WEF, led the country’s largest-ever delegation to the ski-resort town to make a statement that China wants to assume a global leadership role as the world struggles with isolationism, populism and polarization. In a speech at the event, he stated: “It is true that economic globalization has created new problems, but this is no justification to write economic globalization off completely. Rather, we should adapt to and guide economic globalization, cushion its negative impact, and deliver its benefits to all countries and all nations.”
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– Vanek is news editor of CNBC Africa and CNBCAfrica.com; she lives and breathes business and financial news, and is now slowly developing a passion for artificial intelligence.

Tag: March 2017

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

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The Flip Turn

The Life Of A Brave Fighter Who Could Be Naughty

Art For Art’s Sake – but give us your Cash

Defending The Cayman

The Young Rebel With A Cause That Shone Through Tears And Violence

The Sound Of A Booming Business

Huh? Say That Again?

Rubbish. Bugs. Profit.

The Black Sheep

Slaves To Survival

Ghana At 60

A Court Case Is In The Wind

Why The Richest And Most Powerful Go To Davos