The Rat Race Against  The silent Killer

Carl Ikeme was born in England’s Second City and retains it as his home while striving to reach the Premier League with Wolverhampton Wanderers. But he has a flourishing other life, in Africa.
The 29-year-old Brummie – the term for an inhabitant of industrial Birmingham – is the new safe pair of hands for Nigeria’s Super Eagles, setting out on the difficult mission to fill the gloves of Vincent Enyeama, the country’s undisputed number one for 12 years.
Eight seasons on from when he was first selected for the squad, Ikeme has found opportunity knocking again and grasped it superbly. National treasures Nwankwo Kanu and Jay-Jay Okocha have been united in their praise.
Flattered though he was to hear the former Arsenal striker saying ‘we gain a son’ after his debut in Tanzania last September had turned into a starring role with his saves during a 0-0 draw in the Africa Cup of Nations qualifier in Dar es Salaam, this taking-to-hearts is no lopsided arrangement. Ikeme’s feelings for his family’s ancestral homeland are equally strong.
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“The timing of the call-up to the squad was a surprise because it was 2007 when I was first named in it,” he says. “Berti Vogts was in charge then and it wasn’t too long after Glenn Hoddle had given me my Wolves debut. Unfortunately, I had to withdraw through injury.
“I had long spells out of the Wolves team after that and time on loan elsewhere. Although I have regained a regular place in the last few years (he now has around 170 appearances for the club), I thought it was a wind-up from a mate when I had this call last summer. I was actually out of the side, with Emiliano Martinez just signed from Arsenal, but things happen when you don’t expect them to.”
Ikeme, 6 foot 3 inches tall and unfailingly laidback as Wolves near the end of an underwhelming second season back in Championship football, may speak with the twang of his West Midlands birthplace but is no innocent on this vast continent.
More than once, he has used the phrase ‘I haven’t dropped from the moon’ if asked how he is coping with the African experience. When we meet at Wolves’ training ground, three miles from their famous Molineux home, Ikeme is at pains to stress that he tries to fully embrace a culture with which his upbringing familiarized him.
“People seem to assume that because I live in Birmingham and was born nearby in Sutton Coldfield that Nigerian life was alien to me,” he says. “But I had been there many times from the age of eight – for funerals and family things. I was certainly aware of my roots.”
“I went about four years ago when my dad, Ikemefuna Ikeme, was made a chief of the village he’s from, near Onitsha in the east of the country. It’s an ancestry, bloodline, thing but the ceremony went on for two days and he hardly slept. He stayed in a shrine where my granddad is buried.”
“Dad came to England in about 1983 to study computing at Aston University. He still lives in Birmingham and I was brought up watching plenty of Aston Villa and Birmingham City.”
“I have tried cooking a few Nigerian dishes but I’m nothing like as good as him, so he brings something round each Monday. Stew, with chicken, goat and mutton, are typical. So are yams and rice. His pepper soup blows my mouth off!”
“I have three or four aunts and uncles over there, some in Lagos. One or two family members were doubtful when I went into football and thought I should get a proper job! But they can see now I made the right choice.”
Ikeme, restricted to a solitary game when Wolves rubbed shoulders with the Premier League elite from 2009-2012, lifts his shirt to show how family pride has influenced his appointments with a tattooist on Wolverhampton’s outskirts. Onora, his middle name and the one given to his great granddad on his dad’s side, appears high on his chest. Those of his dad and granddad show on his left arm. His mother’s dad, in military uniform, is seen on his stomach. His Dad has accompanied him for all his early Nigerian games.
The workload of Wolves’ 46-game league season dictates that trips have been about little more than airports, hotels, training grounds and stadiums. The window on his other world should open wider, though, in a few weeks’ time.
“I will be hoping to stay for an extra few days as long as I am in the squad against Chad in June,” he said. “I plan to take my daughter Mila, who is two-and-a-half, over for the first time.”
“It would be good to learn more about the culture and get better at the language. I’m not the only player to have been born in Europe, so the coach speaks in Pidgin English and am picking up bits of Nigerian as well as having some tapes to listen to.”
“The travelling has been an experience. It’s exhausting because it’s seven or eight hours to Abuja, then a few more hours if it’s an away match. But I’d still rather do that than have the games in Europe. There was a friendly against Cameroon in Belgium where we still had good support but I am keen to visit Nigeria as much as possible.”
“In England, the bus can be quiet. Some players have headphones on, some are having a chat. With the national team, there is singing and dancing in the aisles. That eradicated any nerves I had on the way to the Tanzania game. It’s all in English, a bit religious and spiritual&#8230; someone starts it off and everyone joins in. They have to! It’s more than gentle swaying. There’s a lot of clapping and foot stamping. It’s very rousing and inspirational.”
In case I’m not getting the picture, Ikeme accesses film on his mobile phone of the fans, complete with small band, welcoming the bus in similar fashion for a game against Swaziland.
“It’s good for togetherness because it creates a bond. I might try it on the Wolves lads!” he says.
“We pray together on the bus and before and after training and before and after a game; some Christian, some Muslim.”
So who inspired him? What are his dreams in an international career that is still at the fledgling stage but with an encouraging proportion of clean sheets?
“My heroes were Daniel Amokachi with his famous goal celebration at Everton and in the 1994 World Cup – and Kanu, of course.”
“As well as reaching the Premier League with Wolves, my aim is to qualify and play in the Africa Cup of Nations and then the World Cup in Russia in 2018. That would be a dream. We have a young side, so results should get better.”
“Long term, I would like to do something to help in Nigeria. I have looked into setting up a charity there. It’s not just about chucking money at it. I would like it to be something football-based so I can give back to the people in the community when I have finished playing.”
You can take a man out of Nigeria, but you can’t take the Nigerian out of him.

The Super Eagle With Snowflakes And Stars In  His Eyes

This was the bizarre tour of a lifetime, arranged by world football legend Sir Stanley Matthews for youngsters he had trained in Soweto in defiance of apartheid laws.
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“At the airport I was riddled with nerves but tried to overcome them by busying myself shepherding my young charges and allaying their obvious fears. Large, forbidding men in light blue suits and dark glasses with inscrutable looks on their faces watched our every move but, uncomfortable as it was, they never approached us. At any given second I expected us to be rounded up, hustled into vans and taken away to one of South Africa’s infamous police stations but it never happened,” wrote Stanley in his autobiography.
“I couldn’t believe it and neither could Stan’s Men. We were on our way out of the country bound for Brazil, the first ever black football team to tour outside of South Africa.”
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Yet, apartheid followed the youngsters to Rio de Janeiro, in the shape of an intelligence man who sat at the back of the plane.
This strange journey was the work of one of the greatest English players ever. Matthews was the first European Footballer of the Year in 1956, who played top flight football until he was 50. They called him the ‘Wizard of the Dribble’ and he was loved the world over.
For the love of the game Matthews came to South Africa and defied the country’s segregation law to turn township talent into stars. This story is to be told this year in a United States documentary, called Matthews.
In the summer of 1975, Matthews spent months scouting talent from schools in Soweto, Johannesburg’s biggest township, and formed a team called Stan’s Men which he took on tour to Brazil. It was born of a question from a youngster on whether Matthews had ever played against Pelé. This led to an unheard of trip from South Africa. Matthews used his influence to get sponsors in the shape of Coca Cola and the Sunday Times, as well as passports for the boys, against the norms of the time.
“Sir Stan was a brave man, it was unlawful for white people to be in townships at that time but he was in Orlando every week to train us. He would come to our home to meet with our parents. Initially the parents thought we were crazy when we told them about going to Brazil but because Sir Stan was known to them they soon believed we were telling the truth,” says Hamilton Majola, then aged 17.
“During those days, Orlando Stadium was our mecca of football. For the Brazil tour, it was not easy, we trained hard. There were hundreds of talented footballers from all over Soweto but only 15 could be selected. Dedication and discipline were key to Sir Stan,” says Isaac Masigo, another youngster who boarded the plane for Brazil.
March 21, 1975, was the first day of the month-long tour to Brazil. It had taken weeks of hard training that created a good deal of excitement.
“On that Friday, learning in Soweto schools was disrupted… learners were running mad, so many children were bussed to Jan Smuts (OR Tambo International Airport) for our send-off… I will never forget that day, it was surreal,” says Masigo.
On the Boeing 707, destined for Brazil, the lads were anxious and smart. They dressed neatly in tailored navy suits with a gold badge, with Stan’s Men printed on it, blue shirts, navy ties, with red and white dots, and shiny black shoes. Upon arrival in Brazil, they were treated like stars and journalists flocked around them. They felt like stars staying at the Hotel Regina, in Rio, on the famous Copacabana Beach. Most had never seen the sea.
They went to practise with Flamengo Football Club and met Arthur Antunes Coimbra, better known as Zico, who was to star in the World Cup for Brazil. This was one of the players they had only seen on the bioscope, a makeshift cinema back home; televisions didn’t come to South Africa until a year later.
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“Carlos Alberto Pereira, who coached Bafana Bafana in the 2010 World Cup, I met him in 1975. We played and took pictures with Brazilian stars. We trained with big teams like Flamengo, Fluminense, Vasco da Gama and Americana. The culture there was different from what we know in South Africa. The clubs there had coaches for different departments, kit manager, physiotherapist and that was not the case in Johannesburg. We trained from 6AM to noon. There they start training you from childhood, in South Africa we are playing games,” says Masigo.
The first game in Rio was a huge disappointment. The youngsters played alongside their coach Matthews, then aged 60, the first game against Gama Filho University and were drubbed 8-0.
“That was embarrassing; their ball was different from ours. Our dribbling skills couldn’t get us anywhere. They man marked so tight that we couldn’t manage a single goal. Brazilians meant business; our goalkeeper left the field with swollen hands. He cried. If it was not for Sir Stan things could have been worse,” says Majola.
One of the spectators was the white South African intelligence officer who tracked their every move.
“We were followed but we couldn’t see. The security police followed us from the airport to Brazil, they couldn’t trust black boys… One day, on our way to the hotel, a white Afrikaner man shocked us: ‘Ja (yes), you blacks of South Africa, you stay nice here’,” says Masigo.
Although the boys didn’t do anything to warrant jail back home; they broke the rules of Matthews when he wasn’t looking.
“After the training, when Sir Stan was resting, we were free to go the clubs and beach. There was this Copacabana Beach, the best beach in the world. It was women galore, I sweated as if I was running under the sun,” says Masigo.
The Brazilian women in swimwear mistook the African boys, kitted out in red-and-white tracksuits, for Americans, laughs Masigo.
Majola knows Matthews, a teetotaller and vegetarian, did not approve of these outings.
“Sir Stan taught us life values; from the beginning he said we mustn’t go for girls because they would destroy our football future. He warned us against alcohol,” says Majola.
Soon after Brazil, Matthews returned to England but he left a foundation in Soweto. The team continued playing friendly games, outside the country, in Swaziland and Botswana.
“When we returned from Brazil, the Sunday Times, which was one of our sponsors, reported on our tour and one of the headlines read ‘They are now internationals’. There was so much jealousy from other local teams as a result we were not allowed to affiliate to the local leagues. We played friendlies. Things started to get unfriendly. We can’t be pointing fingers now, maybe it was God’s will. The fact Sir Stan left his country and family to share his football skills with us, we had nothing to offer him in return,” says Majola.
“I had seen and experienced what football could do for an individual and I wanted others to realize not only the possibilities that football can bring, but to get in touch with the possibilities that lay within themselves, irrespective of how hard and demeaning their lives were. If I could enjoy such benefit from football, I was determined to show others such benefits existed for them as well,” wrote Matthews.
“It would have been easy for Sir Stan to start a commanding club with us but he was threatened against doing that. Every big company wanted to sponsor our team. We were treated well, we had sponsored transport to all our matches,” says Masigo.
The team dissolved and many went to other clubs. One, Vincent Tsie, Masigo’s only schoolmate on the Brazil trip, found the country’s laws unbearable after the Brazil trip and took off.
“After he saw the life in Brazil he refused to stay in the racist South Africa anymore. In 1976, he went to exile in Canada where he died,” says Masigo.
“I was also tempted to leave but I couldn’t do it because I was the eldest of my siblings and couldn’t leave them. I knew what happened to Kalamazoo (Steve Mokone, the first black South African in the European league who died in exile).” Masigo, now a pensioner, still lives in Orlando.
At 50, Matthews played his last professional game for Stoke City, the town of his birth. He died on February 23, 2002, aged 85. In February, Matthews would have been 101 years old.
His contribution to African football is timeless and will never be forgotten in Soweto.

Soweto To Rio  With A Spy On Your Tail

The arduous chopping and grinding that has molded Olympians into shape may be over, but now the heat is being turned up. It’s an intense process that takes intuition, passion, technique, and persistent, but slight, adaptations to extract the last remaining drops of excellence from us. This is our final preparation.
The massive 30x100m sets thrown at us in the beginning have peeled away the unwanted layers, priming us for the imminent refining process. Getting to this level is not about the how, it’s about the why, because when the purpose is greater than the pain, anything is possible.
Most of what we do now is technique-driven, focusing on efficiency: every stroke we make needs to take us further faster and with less energy. Little surprises start popping up as we begin to see our times getting faster and we are constantly comparing the most recent race to the previous one. I’m still about five seconds off my world record time of 2.04.81 and if I am to get anywhere close to that again, every stroke, kick, and turn needs to be perfect. This process can be frustrating due to the continual failures but also the most rewarding, because when we add the perfect touch at the right time, we create magic. We can’t go through those enormous sets again as we need to focus – so our sets are condensed to somewhere around 8x100m. This allows every set to be scrutinized, consistently testing and adding pinches of change to get the perfect form.
The testing and competitions we go through are essential in bringing our bubbling nerves to a simmer. Our minds become clearer as the sensory impact of these ‘good nerves’ help sustain our focus. Overthinking is an unnecessary energy that can cloud our mind and create the potential for our nerves to boil over. “Did I do everything in my control,” is a common question among athletes and I came up with a method that uses four basic, yet not-so-easy, rules to follow: never skip practice; arrive early; do what the coach tells me; and leave late.
I have often been jeered and laughed at because this is the behavior of a ‘teacher’s pet’. I have learned to make sure that any noise like this dies down in the last few months of training. I become selfish. This is my time to marinate. A time when the perfect balance of everything we have worked on begins to slowly release and all the goodness needs to rise to the surface. Any major changes, pointless additions or negative stimulus will have an adverse effect on just how good this will be. The little surprises we start seeing elevate our confidence, clearing our mind from any negativity. Then it arrives, the time to trust that we’ll be rewarded for all the sweat we’ve poured into our work.
Every day has been about focusing on the Olympics but now, the night before an event, is the longest night; our thoughts begin to stir and the ‘bad nerves’ can set in. Athletes are extremely self-critical and we can generally handle this internal pressure. Tomorrow is different. We are about to be judged by the world. This external pressure is internally motivated and can allow self-doubt to build up. Athletes need to find a way of letting off steam: my coach has a list of jokes at hand and we talk a lot about nothing.
I don’t need an alarm clock to wake me up in the morning, an inner timer lets me know I am ready. We have breakfast. I’m not thinking about that. We get on the bus that takes us to the pool. I’m not thinking about that either. I know my coach is telling me jokes because we are both laughing. I know I need to walk to the starting blocks because an official escorts me there. I know the spectators are loud because I can see their excitement. I know I’m supposed to wave to them because they will be announcing my name. I hear nothing. My body instinctively explodes forward on the sound of the starter. I hear a single voice now. It’s the voice of my coach encouraging me forward, driving me harder and pushing me faster than I have ever been. This is when it all comes together, all the hard work, long hours, and tedious workouts. This is the moment when I can finally share my efforts with my friends, family and fans.

The Last Length To The Olympics  – Nerves, Jokes and Pain

Despite preconceptions, you will find women in powerful roles are more than capable of outperforming their male counterparts across the infrastructure value chain.
As a sponsor of Woman in the Built Environment initiatives and training and career development, my former company, Group Five, led from the front. But it’s the girl power that we unearthed and nurtured that was an inspiration to me.
We committed ourselves to targeted recruitment at student level to attract ladies in all the engineering disciplines, quantity surveyors, construction management, finance and HR, to drive gender and racial transformation. Dedicated gender orientated programs followed.
The success stories are legendary. The 14,000-employee Group Five created an environment where women rose to the highest ranks, including board level and divisional unit directors, through to technical and support roles.
The most incredible stories came from the construction divisions. We placed newly graduated female students to fast track local-based programs and then deployed them to participate on an equal footing with the guys in some of the most remote sites across Africa.
One young lady was a construction management graduate who was bored with building another Sandton office block. So, we sent her to a mine construction site in Ghana. A few years later, she rose to become the successful multidisciplinary construction manager responsible for the complete mine construction project in a remote site in Mali, with a workforce of over 300. She did this while in her twenties!
HR is often a female-dominated field, but not historically in construction, given the robust male-dominated manpower, and remote location, challenges. Group Five changed that and after only a few years many of the most senior human and industrial relations posts were occupied by a group of tough, confident ladies. They dealt with violent labor disputes at home and in Southern and West Africa, but were able to stand as role models for the young recruits and we started to see long-term careers being nurtured across the group after many years of countering the notion that construction is not sexy or rewarding. For the next generation, particularly for females, we changed that perception.
The group won the right to construct the iconic Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital as a direct result of the strong female and demographically representative team that inspired the trustees of the Children’s Fund. The team delivered on every promise made in the execution of the project, which included tough social and transformative targets.
Female leadership in finance and commercial law is an inspiration to the construction industry, from gender activists and shareholders to the many aspirant female accounting graduates who rapidly rose to manage the finances of a suite of highly complex businesses. From basic construction to the securing of turnkey power plant and transport projects across Africa, where the group took an equity stake and executed the turnkey engineering design and construction, or led the debt and equity strategies with financial services partners, females led the way.
Group Five’s CFO won the 2014 Business Woman of the Year award for her leadership in driving business systems re-engineering, transformation, shareholder relationships and women in construction initiatives within the industry, and raised two kids at the same time. How many men can follow that?
In African construction, “if the mossies don’t get you, the taxman will” – some may recall this amusing tale from an earlier column. We nurtured another young star from the finance team who became an industry authority on African tax, the law, and what coercion one might find at a site when the taxman arrives with his own militia. Our team knew more about their tax laws than the taxman himself.
Our protégé was so successful that she became the tax lead for a big branded legal firm.
We attracted and developed skilled females across Africa and beyond – our brand had become synonymous with enlightened attitudes, was recognized as a socially responsible organization in many countries. To drive our geographic strategy, we needed skills from across the target countries. This gave us technical, construction, finance and HR skills from as far afield as the Philippines, India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe.
Fast forward to 2016 and look at which construction companies are surviving, if not thriving, amid an industry in deep recession. I wonder if it’s the female touch that has made the difference?

A Woman’s TOUCH

Retail and consumer markets are buoyant in developing countries throughout the globe. Personal incomes in many of these regions have increased steadily over the years, prompting the emergence of a growing middle class. Africa is no different. According to World Bank estimates, our continent is home to more than a billion people, a figure expected to increase to more than 2.5 billion by 2050. Perhaps, more crucially Africa has one of the fastest growing youth populations in the world.
PwC recently released a report, So Much in Store, which is an in-depth study into sub-Saharan Africa retail and consumer goods industries. The findings are compelling. The report provides a five-year outlook by focusing on 10 African economies that PwC believes offer substantial opportunities for retail and consumer businesses looking to expand into African markets. These countries include: Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Zambia and Côte d’Ivoire. Despite a slowing Chinese economy, and subsequent lower commodity prices, having a knock-on effect on real GDP growth in a number of African economies, there appears to be a silver lining. African economies predominantly reliant on commodities are beginning to diversify.
The growing consumption of the middle class in Africa has been driven by several key factors, such as: an increase in internet usage and accessibility; ubiquitous use of social media; private healthcare; and budding retail property developments (malls). Consumers in sub-Saharan Africa in particular are becoming more brand conscious and aspirational; they are willing to satisfy their needs and wants at a whim provided they can afford it.
“Africans are becoming more connected to global trends than ever before as a result of growth in internet penetration and travel,” says Anton Hugo, PwC Africa Retail and Consumer Industry Leader.
There’s been a spike in the level of consumer discernment when it comes to their purchasing decisions, thereby stimulating retailers to create new products to meet this demand.
One issue highlighted by PwC is that there are several misconceptions about doing business in Africa. Like going into any new business venture, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach. Firstly, Africa is home to more than 50 countries, with even more languages, including indigenous dialects. It’s integral that companies seeking to enter African markets get their hands dirty, on the ground, to gain an understanding of the region. A business can ill-afford going into any part of Africa with preconceived notions. Instead, firms should take the approach of immersing themselves into the culture of the local people to understand the dynamics of business in that country.
In addition, having the right strategy cannot be over-emphasized. Strategy can strengthen or decimate a business in an instant. Some firms fail to recognize a strategy that has been successful in South Africa, for example, does not necessarily translate to success in other African countries. Firms must formulate a unique and well-thought strategy for the different markets it aims to enter to avoid becoming another casualty, similar to Woolworths in Nigeria.
Despite the varying challenges that are slowing growth in the retail and consumer businesses in Africa, the PwC report assures companies that the opportunities far outweigh the impediments. There are enormous opportunities yet to be realized: retail trade in Africa is still largely concentrated in informal markets; the online retail industry is still in its infancy and intra-African trade is incredibly low.
“Each country in Africa has its own value proposition. Smart investing in Africa means investors need to understand key regions and local markets. Furthermore, investors need to note that there are specific risk factors underlying the development of Africa. Despite these risks, investors and retailers will continue to see the African market as a huge opportunity,” says Hugo.
When opportunities aren’t realized, they remain idle. Development in Africa and expanding African retail and consumer businesses in Africa will require collective action from business and governments. Governments need to invest in infrastructure, such as transport networks, in order to open more markets.
It will be interesting to witness the progress of the African retail and consumer business sector in the next five years. The odds are in its favor; now let’s see whether it can thrive.

Opportunities must be seized

Nigerians are currently hard at work. What sort of work, you might ask? Economic reconstruction and the quest for social and political rebirth. The new sheriff in town seeks to sweep the dregs of a shattered polity into the cesspit of history. Clearing the skeletons and cobwebs of the past is, however, proving to be a delicate dilemma for the good people and managers of the Nigerian nation.
Grappling with sluggish growth, dwindling external revenues, double-digit inflation and a prolonged currency constipation, Nigerians must now wrestle with the seen and unseen forces of corruption and ineptitude, the gods of inertia and impunity, and the innumerable anti-development demons in its social democratic space.
A nation which was once embroiled in a two-and-a-half-year civil war in the 1960s, without borrowing a dime and without experiencing a run on its national currency, now finds it difficult to maintain a healthy balance sheet in peace time. No doubt, Nigeria has earned its spot in global economics by virtue of its position as Africa’s largest economy. This status will, however, not produce social harmony, wealth and economic growth for Nigerians.
Nigeria’s one-year-old government continues its search for the Chibok girls (#BringBackOurGirls), abducted two years ago from their school in the north east of the country. President Muhammadu Buhari has embarked on a global search for the country’s missing money, embezzled by past leaders and cronies of previous governments. Currently struggling to wean itself off crude oil addiction and diversify its productive base, it’s taken almost a year for the president and his All Progressives Congress (APC) party to begin to translate their social and economic agenda into a “SMART Framework”.
In what seems to be a blueprint and agenda-setting address to selected private and public sector leaders during a National Economic Council (NEC) retreat in March, the president listed agriculture, solid minerals and infrastructure investments as the fulcrum of his agenda, with national targets for self-sufficiency in tomato paste production by 2016; rice production and milling by 2018; and wheat by 2019. He also introduced a new phrase into the lexicon of governance: “import competition”, where states focus on growing selected crops in which they have natural comparative advantage.
These confidence boosting steps notwithstanding, Nigerians are increasingly wary of the future. They have come to terms with that fact that the path to the future is riddled with dead promises.
On the political rostrum, campaigning for votes between 2014 and February 2015, APC big wigs made numerous promises to Nigerians. Granted this was all done in the heat of politicking, Nigerians now want the current Lords of Aso Villa to quit blaming previous administrations and simply execute their well-intentioned strategies.
The president has been blamed for not ‘radicalizing governance’ fast enough, which was one of the reasons Nigerians voted for his party. He has also been blamed for reneging on a campaign promise to provide a monthly allowance for unemployed youths. The APC’s manifesto also promises to: “create additional middle-class of at least two million new homeowners in our first year in government and one million annually thereafter; by enacting a national mortgage system that will lend at single digit interest rates for purchase of owner occupier houses.”
Good idea. But have two million new homes been built in the last year?
In just one year, the national mood has swung from politically-induced hope to a calm and unnerving anxiety about “personal survival in a regressive system” as it becomes increasingly clear that things will get worse – for much longer – before they become better. Thankfully, Buhari has also said this much, as he pleads for patience against the growing wave of disappointment and despondency.
So, El Nino has finally caught up with the nation’s 2016 fiscal budget, as GDP growth for the 2016-2017 period is likely to remain below 3%, according to the IMF, unless of course global crude oil prices shoot up to $100 per barrel.
This is very unlikely, observes Bismarck Rewane, renowned economist and CEO of Financial Derivatives Ltd.
“That era is gone for good. The chickens (of decades of economic profligacy) have come home to roost. We are now going into a likely prolonged phase of belt tightening,” he told members of the Harvard Business School Association of Nigeria recently.
The smart, hard, work must go on.

Recalibrating Expectations

It is April 16th, 1964; the day before the launch of the Ford Mustang.
For three years, motoring mastermind Lee Iacocca had nurtured plans for his “baby” – a sleek and exciting sports car that would sell for less than $2,500.
Ford runs commercials on the three major television networks at 9.30 that night.
The next morning there is a buying frenzy at showrooms around America. Ford sell 22,000 Mustangs that day and 418,812 models that year. Wilson Pickett’s Mustang Sally adding to the equine fever.
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It is one of the casebook success stories of motoring history. Forget the fact that it was based on the compact Falcon, the Mustang was to become the American standard. Once again, the production plant in Dearborn, Michigan was pushed to the limit.
On the famous date of the Soweto Uprising, June 16th, but way back in 1903, the company was founded by Henry Ford after a sequence of financial flip-flops in the evolving motoring world.
Even in those early days, the ability to optimize production under the stress of burgeoning order books became a part of the Ford work ethic.
Starting with the Model A, the designers energetically worked through the alphabet and the engineers and mechanics sweated blood to piece together 10,000 Model T Fords in 1909.
The basics of an assembly line were slowly developed and by 1920 Ford were turning out a million cars a year! From then on, assembly lines ruled. The 200 carmakers in the United States (US) were trimmed down to just 40 over the next two decades.
More than a half century after the first pony car stunned the US, the Mustang has arrived in full livery on South African soil – the first country to get the right-hand drive version.
Apart from a clichéd ride down Sunset Boulevard in a hired topless Stang more than a decade ago, I can’t claim to have the stallion’s blood running through my veins.
We were on a trip to interview the modest New Age guru Deepak Chopra in La Hoya and there was a certain irony in showboating in Los Angeles. It was hard to be humble when driving the new Mustang 2.3 Ecoboost convertible around Sandton streets – especially the Race Red version with black cloth roof. Although, it does snap closed in a few seconds if you are feeling the heat of glaring motorists – possibly tinged with envy.
The Mustang has often been referred to as a muscle car, but the sixth generation would definitely be earmarked for a steroids test. Angry headlights, angry grille to host the iconic emblem, and a fastback rear that screams catch me if you can.
That galloping horse, uniquely running right to left, will not only light up your life – it will light up your feet as well. A bright image of the pony shines on to the tarmac as you open the door.
You will be greeted by a stylish black and silver interior with a clinical instrument layout and a battery of controls on the steering wheel. The class and design, dare I say it, more German than American. The clumsy handbrake nestling by the passenger seat, however, is surely the relic of a bygone era.
The speedometer in the entry model reflects an optimistic ‘ground speed’ of 260 kilometers per hour (kph), and to get yourself in the right mode you can choose normal, sport, race or snow/wet. Pothole dodging would be useful addition in South Africa.
What you can’t fault the new Mustang on is being conservative with is detailed feedback. It will tell you about every facet of that churning turbocharged engine, from inlet air temperature to the air/fuel ratio. Maybe I’m not a dyed-in-the-oil petrolhead but I can’t imagine myself checking out the cylinder head temperature on the way to work.
But you are probably not all that interested in the cockpit and coachwork, or the user-friendly MyFord touchscreen, and want to know what is under that long, sleek bonnet.
Well, let’s face it, most long sleek bonnets are a lie these days. With the revolution of small turbos replacing the naturally aspirated gas guzzlers with magically enhanced power and performance, you could no doubt fit most engines into the nose of an old VW Beetle.
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I had a nervous feeling of anticipation before flooring the right-hand pedal of the six-gear auto. In terms of stats and performance, it does not disappoint. With faultless response you are thrust back into your body-hugging seat in less than the six-second mark.
It is silky smooth and doesn’t drown out the infectious cacophony that is playing on the radio.
The fact is the 2.3 Ecoboost is a beautiful, stylish vehicle that is not really going to boost your pulse rate or adrenalin levels. Even the terms Ecoboost and Mustang don’t really belong in the same sentence – or the same world.
Or do they?
Although we might always envisage fire-breathing V8s in the lineage of the Mustang, and the pony wars with the Chevrolet Camaro, a teensy engine is nothing new for the marque.
The Mustang II, influenced by designer Ghia in the early seventies, came out with a 2.3-liter in-line four-cylinder engine because of the fuel crisis. Not exactly an Italian Stallion! The third generation in the eighties was almost killed due to diminished sales despite (or because of) the offer of the Ford Pinto pint-sized “power” plant.
Then it was back to the brawn and punch of the big guns – the 2005 fifth generation going back to the Stang shape and spirit with a four-liter basic right up to the awesome GT500 housing a monster 5.4-liter supercharged V8.
Right now, if you still have a vestige of the boy racer in you, you can opt for more ponies under the bonnet with the 5.0-liter V8 which will whisk you to 100kph in less than five seconds.
Naturally you get more of a punch in the kidneys and aural excitement than with the Ecoboost. But not, according to many scribes, matching the trembling thrills of some AMG, M and RS badges.
So, you are looking at a healthy degree of refinement since Henry cobbled together his first auto in his Detroit garage 120 years ago. It’s all part of the dream of making the Mustang a world muscle car not just for red-blooded Americans – described by one hack as putting Bruce Springsteen on stage in a bespoke suit. It’s also available in colors from deep impact blue to triple yellow.
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By the way, that famous quote that customers can have the T in any color as long as it’s black didn’t apply to the early Fords. It was only after the elementary assembly lines came into operation and they found that ‘Japan black’ was the only paint that dried quickly enough.
While your Mustang may emanate from Flat Rock in Michigan, you are supporting a company that has massive financial interests in South Africa with plants in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria.
Now the Gauteng operation has been boosted with a $170-million investment for local production of the Everest SUV and expansion of the all new Ranger program. Creating 1,200 much needed jobs in the process.
It might surprise you that in the incestuous modern motoring world, Ford has owned four other luxury brands – Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar and Aston Martin.
But now the largest family-controlled business in the world is much more focused – if you’ll excuse the expression. They are really built for the road ahead. Have you driven a Ford lately?

A Muscle Car On Steroids

It’s a dark and strange way to earn a living – in which you can die. If you survive, it is often prostrate on a pile of pills or swimming in an ocean of alcohol.
It is a painful story for one of Africa’s most accomplished journalists, Angus Shaw, to tell. It is also painful to listen to his excruciating experiences.
“A warzone produces two types of journalistic victims – one is shot at and injured or dies and the other type ends up screwed up in their brains,” says Shaw.
“I realized that you can’t drown your sorrows because your sorrows in most cases have learned how to swim. I try not to worry about things I cannot change and always remember that as a journalist my role is to shed light and not to bring change.”
Shaw had his own fight with alcohol. In covering wars in three decades, he says it was not all gloomy.
<div id="attachment_4869" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4869" class="wp-image-4869 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/006-300x175.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="175" />United Nations media accreditation card, Somalia. Sgt. Rocko who typed it out clearly wasn’t familiar with the first name Angus</div>
“People should know that the African story is not all about wars, poverty and savagery. Journalism for me has been enriching, rewarding, except financially,” he chuckles.
Shaw has been on the frontline in a string of Africa’s nastiest wars: Liberia, Rwanda’s genocide, Ethiopia, Somalia, two wars in Mozambique. In Zimbabwe, the country of his birth, he saw war as both a journalist and a conscript.
The story of the Shaw family is intertwined with a century of tumult in Africa. His grandfather came north from South Africa with the pioneer column in 1890. Settlers were looking for gold and diamonds but ended up farming. Shaw’s grandfather and father prospered in tobacco and lived the life of Riley.
“My father was part of the Salisbury Club and, like many of his peers, he drank hard and worked hard. Due to his drinking lifestyle one day he forgot to come and pick me up from school and only showed up late and drunk.”
Shaw senior also smashed his car into the Salisbury Club, a gentlemen’s club in Harare, after a few drinks with one wheel of his car landing in the hotel lobby. The authorities took his driver’s licence. So, he had to be driven later by his chauffer over 1,500 miles from his Miegunyah farm, 30 kilometers from Harare to Durban, for the Durban July horse race.
Along the way, Shaw’s father put money away for his son to choose between business or school. Shaw chose the latter and went to a minor public school in England.
“After a short stint in the United Kingdom, I returned to Southern Rhodesia, where I would start my journalism career at the Rhodesian Herald in 1970. Those days there were no journalism schools so one had to go for attachment,” he says.
Shaw was soon thrust into reporting the violent bush war leading up to Mozambican independence in 1975. When Samora Machel took over Mozambique, a civil war broke out that would last nearly three decades.
“In Mozambique we were traveling in the company of the Zimbabwean forces and UN peacekeepers. The Zimbabwean forces were mainly protecting their pipeline, while Samora Machel was fighting to keep control from the Renamo rebels.”
After Mozambique, the Rhodesian army drafted him to fight the guerrillas back home.
After he served his time in the rank, he left to interview nationalist exiles in Lusaka and Dar es Salaam. It was not easy.
“Every able bodied white man going through an airport needed to have a clearance,” he says.
“All of the nationalist leaders whose names are inscribed on roads in the capital, Harare, related to me on first name basis.”
They included Robert Mugabe, Josiah Tongogara and Simon Mazorodze.
“I first met Robert Mugabe when I had gone to the townships. I asked if I could interview him and he said he could only talk to me if I arranged a press conference for him in the city center, which I did.”
His experiences in his country’s war would lead to his first book- Kandaya, Another Time, Another Place.
When he moved on it was to the hell of Idi Amin’s Uganda.
“Kampala was on fire, the city was in ruins as there were bodies all over. What I saw made World War Two look elementary,” he says.
The 1978-79 Ugandan war pitted the Tanzanian liberation forces against Amin’s army.
“There were mass graves and as we accompanied the liberation forces to Luzira prison where opponents of Amin were caged, one could not fight back emotions. Prisoners were starved and in one of those prison cells, I threw up. It’s all about wealth, power and corruption,” says Shaw, whom many journalist friends believe is too ideological.
His memories of the Ugandan war would lead to his second book, written in a hotel room in London, Last To Kill, The Rise And Fall Of Idi Amin.
“I wrote the last chapter of this book in the plane to London. A limousine waited for me at Heathrow Airport and with Concorde the book was on its way the following day to New York. Four days later, the book was on sale.”
There was no stopping after Uganda.
<div id="attachment_4868" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4868" class="wp-image-4868 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/0005-300x191.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="191" />Media evacuation from Rwanda aboard a U.N. C130 cargo plane</div>
“In 1979, I also went to cover the Somalia-Ethiopia war. This was a conventional desert war and because of a 16-hour drive on a tractor when one was injured, many died before they could reach medical services. The hum of trucks, tractors and aircrafts drowned the heat of the desert. Journalists were isolated as fighting forces didn’t want anyone outside to know what was happening,” he says.
Shaw returned to Somalia after a clan war broke out. This war almost took his life.
“This was during the famine relief efforts that turned nasty. There were Americans, Germans, Canadians and UN representatives. Americans took a lot of causalities and it’s the same war that Mujahedeen shot down an American Black Hawk,” he says.
Hollywood made a movie out of this, called Black Hawk Down. The reality was worse.
“Americans were sending bodies back home in body bags. One African American said to me ‘we came to help our brothers but they are shooting us’.”
Shaw says war reporting can be seductive as well as disruptive.
“I remember being in Nairobi and felt it strange not to hear any gunshots.”
“I was lucky not to be killed; it was dangerous that we had to always move with bodyguards. Out of seven foreign correspondents that were covering the clan war in Somalia, four died in the country.”
Then came Rwanda in 1994.
“I spent several months there, I saw nice people killing nice people. I cannot describe the experience,” he says.
Nearly a million people are believed to have died in this ethnic war in 100 days.
“The United Nations had burned their fingers in Somalia and when they sent peacekeepers in Rwanda, they didn’t send enough. We went to various massacre sights, in some places we saw people running through the bushes with machetes. In Rwanda we saw piles and piles of bodies.”
What Shaw saw in Rwanda would never leave him.
“I have never been a church person, when you see such horror; you look to the skies and ask God what’s going on. That is where I saw that human nature is imperfect,” he says.
After traveling and covering wars it was time to write about events in his country.
“Between 1988 and 1998 we experienced a lot of multicultural and multiracial relations. The country was prospering but as Mugabe started losing power, all that changed,” says Shaw.
Shaw survived war, but in peacetime Zimbabwe, he was arrested three times. Mugabe saw journalists as agents of the West and supporters of his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai. From his journalism experiences sprang a third book, Mutoko Madness, A Memoir Of Angus Shaw.
“Seven years ago, I went into rehabilitation after a friend convinced me to. I was taught to count my blessings.”
He also believes the changing nature of news gathering led to him being rendered redundant.
“The media has changed so much; I am an old newspaper guy. News agencies are having a hard time. You can’t write a story with 700 words. I like ink on my fingers.”
Shaw has proved this in the dangerous business of shedding light in Africa.

Shedding Light  On Renewable Energy

‘You Can’t Drown Your Sorrows; They Have Learned How To Swim’

It’s a hot summer’s day in Sandton, Johannesburg. As we meet, the sun blazes bright like Titan’s fiery wheels. Brightness has played a big part in Johan Botes’ journey to entrepreneurship. On this day, the future is even brighter; he has just opened an office in Fourways, Johannesburg, 254 kilometers away from Mokopane, in northern Limpopo, where he took his first breath in 1962.
“I am so happy that the company is growing from strength to strength and most importantly providing jobs for young people who deserve every opportunity,” he says.
Botes employs 55 permanent staff and 12 contractors in five countries. The average age is 27. The company merges accounting and IT to make businesses quicker and reliant on fewer staff.
“The drive and energy of our team is one reason we’re growing so fast. We recruit entrepreneurial, self-motivated people at a young age and embed them into our business. They’re adaptable, quick to learn and ready to work overseas independently. We’re very strategic in our recruitment process – we’ll only take people with the right cultural fit, business acumen, and energy level to succeed in a global workplace,” he says.
Building a successful business was hard and sweaty. For three years after high school, Botes came face to face with rifles and drill in the army as a conscript.
With teachers for parents, he was inspired to save for university fees. Hard work earned him a career as a chartered accountant, working for Deloitte, before going into private practice as an auditor and then returning to Deloitte for a five-year stint. Here he learned about the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market. Botes swapped his well-paid job to start Consilia Technology Investments – a company that provides technology for business – in 2012.
“First we started the business as Consilia Consult; after a year, we realized we are not a consulting company but a technology business and we changed it to Consilia Technology. We can take all your database services; optimize it to make the business work,” he says.
According to Botes, the management information system integrates areas such as planning, purchasing, inventory, sales, marketing, finance and human resources. He started the business after realizing that clients in South Africa were finding the existing high-end ERP packages expensive and complicated. He decided to build a business around Sage ERP X3 software – a solution designed to be more flexible and affordable.
“Our view is that accountants are a dying breed. Systems are taking over. You can automate almost all the accounting systems in a business today through, for example, barcoding and scanning. It changes the fundamentals of business completely. One of our clients is a logistics company that requires daily costs per vehicle everyday per component such as tyres, fuel and maintenance. We give them a report per vehicle in different categories so they can see which vehicles are making profit, without having to capture one thing. Everything is available on a phone, iPad or computer. You can sit in front of a TV and authorize payments,” he says.
Botes says that the immediate priority for Consilia is to bed down its businesses in its new offshore territories before looking at other markets.
“We’ve been cash-generative since the start and have not had to take on debt to grow our business. We believe that if we offer a skill that is in demand worldwide, and do good work at a good price, we’ll continue to grow strongly in the years to come.”
He says there is a market for businesses like his in the continent and entrepreneurs should take note and keep employees smiling.
“As a young person, to start up a business and get funding is difficult. Since we started, 21 people have gotten shares. They haven’t paid for them yet but they pay from dividends. They have three years to pay up. We give them a discount of 80 percent. If you show someone that you trust them and you give them something, they become involved and want to see the business grow. One of the young guys said to me no one in his life has ever given him anything,” he says.
The future seems bright for Botes.

‘Accountants  Are A Dying Breed

Once upon a time, there was a poor little boy named Haile Gebrselassie in Asella, a village in Ethiopia’s dusty south. One of 10 children, he watched his father farm wheat and maize and tend to his cows and sheep. Poverty was the only constant in their life. School was 10 kilometers away, and every day, the young boy would run to his classes and back, covering the distance in minutes. Those were baby steps to global fame.
Years later, he would become Ethiopia’s most famous man entering record books as the world’s greatest distance runner.
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It all began when one day, on his father’s radio, a seven-year-old Gebrselassie heard of Miruts Yifter, the Ethiopian runner who won two golds at the Moscow Olympics in 1980. That made him decide his own course in life – he too would become a runner. The green countryside and rugged mountains of his hometown became his inimitable training ground.
While in high school, a 14-year-old Gebrselassie pleaded with his teachers to compete in the local marathon. He was the youngest in the competition, but was at least 60 meters ahead of the rest when he eventually won. The prize was a dollar – a princely sum. Overnight, he became school hero.
And in time, Ethiopia’s hero, winning two Olympic golds and eight World Championships, and setting 27 world records. The golds were for Atlanta in 1996 and for Sydney in 2000, when he competed with Kenyan Paul Tergat in an epic finish.
Many still remember the rapturous reception when he landed in Addis Ababa from Sydney; thousands thronged the streets all the way from the airport, hailing him like a king. To this day, he is known as the ‘Emperor of Long Distance’.
It’s March 2015, two months before announcing his retirement from competitive running, when FORBES AFRICA meets him for the first time.
Gebrselassie is seated on a pale leather sofa in a dapper suit, sporting a winning smile that people say is his greatest asset. He is undeniably affable. His office is on the eighth floor of the Haile &amp; Alem International building on the arterial Bole Road in Addis Ababa. There is raucous traffic below and the city is a giant construction site – new buildings coming up on either side of the road, and with them, swirling columns of dust.
The building we are in was constructed by Gebrselassie, all nine floors of it, now let out to other offices. Every business he owns has his indelible stamp: the Haile Gabrselassie Avenue in Addis Ababa (he has a road in his name) has another one of his iconic office buildings, so designed as to inconspicuously bear the letters H&amp;A on its face (A for Alem, his wife and business partner). He owns resorts in and en route to Awasa, about four hours by road from Addis Ababa, all of them five-star and named Haile.
It’s hot and Gebrselassie rues Ethiopia is not getting enough rain.
“I am the son of a farmer, I know this is not good,” he says.
He has a 1,500-hectare organic coffee farm in Ethiopia’s south, and he fears the land will be too dry.
Talk of his farm and village evokes memories of his childhood, and that first overseas trip to Belgium from there.
“In 1991, there was a cross-country race here in Addis and I finished fifth. That year, the top six finalists were taken to Belgium for the international competition. I finished eighth but I can never forget my first international trip,” smiles Gebrselassie.
The following year, he flew again, this time to Seoul in South Korea, where he won the 5,000-meter and 10,000-meter championships. The prize was a C180 Mercedes-Benz. He also won another C180 Mercedes-Benz in 1995. He says they are both proudly displayed at his resort in Awasa.
In the 2013 book Haile Gebrselassie: Emperor of Long Distance, he recounts that emotional moment when he won gold for the first time at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
“…I had no worries about the sprint. I kicked with 200 meters and crossed the line with a new Olympic record of 27:07.34. My dream came true. Many things crossed my mind when I stood on top of the podium – pressure from Ethiopians, my promise to Alem, the hopes of the family… As soon as the national anthem started, I began to cry. It’s the only time I’ve cried on the podium.”
“I have run for more than 300 competitions so far. I have run for 27 years. But now, it is a different kind of running,” smiles Gebrselassie, referring to his multiple business interests in real estate, hospitality, imported cars, coffee and cineplexes.
“But I don’t think I am an entrepreneur, I am trying,” he says modestly.
He never expected his businesses to grow the way they have.
“I have built office blocks, shops, resorts, cinemas, gyms and schools,” he says.
Since 2014, he has also tried his luck at gold mining, working on exploration in Ethiopia’s southeast.
“Our geologists are working very hard. And we are investing a lot, a lot of money. We have found gold, but production will not be [now],” he says.
He has enough of the gleaming metal in his trophy cabinet too. How many gold medals, we ask.
“That is a good question. I didn’t count them, but could be more than 200. From 1992, until 2008, I have run an average of 15 competitions a year. That is a lot, [enough] to have run at least two times around the world,” laughs Gebrselassie.
The marathon man appears pensive before he speaks again.
“Because I travel a lot, I always think of how to improve my country. For example, if I walk in London, I would look around and wish we had those buildings in Ethiopia. And when I [have] the money, I would come back, and want to build. One building would lead to another.”
His drawing board includes a five-star hotel in Addis Ababa, named Haile, of course. Gebrselassie introduced local cinema to the city. His cineplexes currently showcase Ethiopian films to packed houses. He has even tried his hand at acting. In 1999, he starred as himself in the film Endurance, screened at his cinema house.
The film didn’t do well.
“It was not appreciated,” smiles Gebrselassie. “But the next film we screened was a love story [he was not in it], and that’s when the people came.”
Every November, Gebrselassie organizes the Great Ethiopian Run, commencing from Addis Ababa’s Meskel Square. The turnout in 2014 was 40,000 and growing each year; it’s a resounding success on the continent’s marathon map. In addition, in 2015, he was also part of the Two Oceans Marathon in Cape Town.
“Actually, my business [philosophy] is like this: there is business for money and business for satisfaction. I opened a school in the village I was born in and another school in west Ethiopia. The fees are minimal and I didn’t open them for profit… If you ask me how much my businesses are worth, it’s not only the property, it’s the people too. I work hard and I don’t see how much I have. I am happy,” says Gebrselassie.
He wants to make sure he’s setting the right example for the upcoming generation of athletes.
“Most runners or sportspeople; how many of them invest in business?” he asks. “I haven’t seen anyone invest money this way. And I know many sportsmen around the world. For me, the chances I have given my people, is worth more than a billion dollars. Most of the younger athletes [now] invest here. They say ‘Haile has inspired us’. To copy is not difficult, but to create something is hard. My farms, hotels and buildings give job opportunities for others. All the money has been from athletics. If you want to see a true billionaire, in terms of money, come back in five years. Don’t ask me how much money I have in currency, but the goodwill [I enjoy] is priceless.”
And who did he look up to for inspiration? “If you ask me who the world’s best long-distance runner is, I would say it is Nelson Mandela. If you have to be a runner, you have to be patient. After 27 years in prison, he forgave [his captors].” Gebrselassie met Mandela in South Africa in 1996 at a world cross-country event and they shook hands.
Addis Ababa being a small city, word, good or bad, gets around. It’s easy to see Gebrselassie is well-respected in the business community.
“He is not just an athlete, he is a smart businessman. What I like about him is he developed himself, is self-made,” says Tihitina Tutu Legesse, one of Addis Ababa’s top entrepreneurs in the furniture business.
On May 10 last year, the two-time 10,000-meter Olympic champion announced his retirement from competitive running. He ran his way to fortune, and there are now rumors that his next turn will be in politics, and that he will be running for parliament in Ethiopia in 2020. He told the BBC in an interview in February this year that he would like to be a politician.
“I think he is very brave. I really admire his strategy,” says Saba Kahsay, the Managing Director of REVO Construction in Addis Ababa. “He knows which fights to pick in terms of business. He has a very strong advisory committee. He does not do everything by himself. He has people doing it for him. He is not just a businessman but also a community man.”
Gebrselassie is expected to be at the Olympic Games in Rio in August where he will be television commentator.
But he is not packing away his running shorts, even though he has changed track to the boardroom. His sprawling hilltop home, where the 43-year-old lives with his wife and four children, overlooks the city. He wakes up before dawn every day to run on the hills of Entoto and their verdant paths. He cannot do without it; he says running is his life.

Farmer. Marathon Man. Businessman.

Two sailors from two very different worlds. One never expected to set foot on a boat. The other was born on one but thought his yachting dream washed-up. Together they are striving for gold for Africa.
Asenathi Jim grew up in a mud hut in the outskirts of Fort Beaufort, a town in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. At the age of 10, he thought that was it. By chance, Jim went on holiday to visit his cousins in Simons Town, Cape Town. His cousins were learning to sail and for the first time he set foot on a boat. Forgive us; he took to it like a fish to water.
“It was chance luck that I ended up in a boat in the first place. I was picked up by the right people, I started performing,” says Jim.
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In 2011, the 18-year-old protégé Jim teamed up with his coach, and future racing shipmate, Roger Hudson. The South African sailor grew up in the affluent suburb of Newlands, Cape Town, and on the water. His father had also been an Olympic athlete, but as far as Hudson was concerned his career was over.
“I always had my eye on being an Olympic sailor. When I was 13 years old, I was competing in the under-15 nationals and my dad was going to the Olympics&#8230; I had shelved [the dream of competing in the Olympics] and thought it was over. If you don’t find the right teammate, if you don’t find the right kind of campaign, it’s just not going to work in an Olympic sport,” says Hudson.
Together, Jim and Hudson qualified for the London Olympics in 2012. It was the dream start to a partnership that has lasted six years. Now the 38-year-old Hudson and 21-year-old Jim are sharing an even bigger dream.
“Our goal in the last Olympics [London] was to get into the Olympics, and then we made it, especially when Asenathi was so young. It’s unusual for a sailor to be that age and at the Olympic Games… Our goal this time around is to be in the top 10. That’s the medal race, a very ambitious target, because of the 27 teams there, probably 23 of them are thinking the same thing,” says Hudson.
It’s going to be tough.
On a two-man 470-Class yacht there’s nowhere to hide when winds rip your sail to shreds and snap your mast like a twig. This has been the danger at the 470 African Championship. It’s been a tough week for the 11 teams from Angola, Algeria and South Africa, who tested their mettle over 10 races in the trying winds of Granger Bay, in the shadow of Table Mountain, Cape Town. A true test, if ever, to compete for Africa’s spot at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.
The competition was as fierce as the wind. On day two, Hakim Djoulah and Samir Ksouri, from Algeria, were forced to retire after the wind bent their mast and broke two fingers. The pair were in hospital before their wetsuits had dried, dreams of the Olympics as shattered as their fingers.
On the final day, the sea was as calm as a mill pond. The wind was soft and dolphins and seals swam alongside the catamaran.
It was a tight finish; Hudson and Jim claimed gold, a few points clear of the rest of the pack. The pair fought tooth and nail to represent Africa.
Hudson and Jim returned to shore flanked by the other yachts in a small guard of honor. Hudson’s five-year-old niece, Hailey, and seven-year-old nephew, James, jumped aboard to help the exhausted sailors pull their yacht to shore.
Someone who was not surprised to see the pair win was Nikolaos Drougas, a respected trainer on the international sailing circuit and now the coach of the Angolan team.  Back in 2002, Drougas was sent by the international 470 Class to train coaches and sailors. It was here he met Jim.
“Suddenly we found someone special who had talent. I still remember, in my report to the officials, saying we had a raw diamond in the Class,” says Drougas.
At the time, Drougas recalls Jim was living with his grandfather in a shack in the township of Khayelitsha, 30 kilometers outside of Cape Town.
“It was painful for me, he was living in a tin box of Coca-Cola [signs], fitting four or five people inside. It was so touching, this is what convinced me to pull strings from the 470 International Class to support more sailing,” says Drougas.
Still in their wetsuits and with sea spray crystallizing on their foreheads, Hudson and Jim are every inch the conquering heroes. They jump from the boat and give each other a high-five and a hug. It’s been a long journey. It took Jim many years to explain to his family why he wanted to become a professional sailor.
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“My mom wasn’t really convinced about me sailing because most black people were suspicious of sending me into the sea or in a boat. It’s just not in our nature to sit in boats or be a swimmer,” says Jim.
“In the Eastern Cape, no one realized what I was after. I would say that no one cared at the time. Now, when they see me, they are more interested&#8230; At the time they vaguely knew what sailing was, but I also didn’t mention it to them a lot&#8230; I am really stoked that my family members now understand. I spent so much time putting it down in detail,” says Jim.
Hudson’s upbringing is a stark contrast to Jim. He grew up in a family that lived on the sea. Hudson wasn’t the only late bloomer in the family, his father, Dave, went to the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona at the age of 46.
“It was inspirational him being part of that team and seeing my dad. I wanted that,” says Hudson.
At the age of 19, Hudson tried to make it as a full-time sailor. He ended up doing a business degree and headed off to Europe to look for work. For seven years, he worked with real estate developers building large scale projects in eastern Europe.
“We were building up finance and sales networks for them in London. It was an entrepreneurial activity that went very well, all in the pre-2008 markets.”
Then in 2008, Hudson took a chance to revive his dream. He came home to found RaceAhead, a non-profit organization, with his father. They wanted to identify and train a new generation of Olympic sailors, one of which was Jim.
“When we team up we have a great synergy, and the combination of our different strengths is very powerful&#8230; It’s a bit like saying opposites attract. We come from such different backgrounds, such different worlds, we are not dealing with the same kinds of qualities. We have different styles and we have different views. Sometimes when you put those two together and have good chemistry you are able to do something quite special,” says Hudson.
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Their dream doesn’t stop in Rio.
“We are looking towards Tokyo. We have a very clear goal, we want to be the very first Olympic sailing team from South Africa to win a medal. The best ever result was a fifth place in the 1956 Melbourne Games. It takes 10 or 15 years to be a team like that. We are hoping to do that in 10,” says Hudson.
There is much more to come from South African sailors.
“Our three training partners came second, third and fourth [in the 470 African Championship], it’s fair to say that at least one of them can make Tokyo,” says Hudson.
Coaching is not as easy as it looks, says Jim.
“I saw it with me and [Hudson], when he was trying to nurture me. Now I can see how difficult it is to try and nurture youngsters into the ranks. Now I can see how difficult it was for [Hudson] to train me, when I have to teach others.”
“In life you start something, then you achieve something that you want, then there is more. You want to do more, beat a record. There is always something you want to beat, whether it’s time or competitors or to win all the races,” says Jim.
And how do both sailors intend to pay for the bills?
“What secures the funding is when you gain a profile for one reason or another. Then that makes you relevant. Normally you gain a profile from getting results. I think what the media like and the sponsors who have come on board like, is the fact that we are a unique South African team. Two from different races, from different backgrounds and parts of the country – two very different people,” says Hudson.
If you thought that after becoming African champions the pair would take some time off to recover, you’d be wrong. The next day the team were on a plane bound for Miami, United States, to compete in their next race. Their hope riding on a steady mast, comradeship, skills and a true wind.

Hope Floats

DJ Kumbula is a brisk, no-nonsense entrepreneur. If you look closely, beyond the sharp suit and sculpted face, you can see traces of tough times that steeled him for risk.
The journey began in the dusty road of Chipinge, a tea planting town near the border with Mozambique, in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands. Here he woke before the cock crowed and worked barefoot in the market.
“We woke up very early, scrubbed the floors and made breakfast before going to school. My mother wasn’t very educated so she started knitting jerseys and my siblings and I were the sales people. She also had a big garden and we grew vegetables on it after school and sold them when ready,” says Kumbula.
At high school, Kumbula graduated from market to salesman.
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“My parents invested the hard earned cash into a grinding mill and small shops and by the time I finished high school I was in a private school funded by my parents. My parents inspired my dreams to have my own business. They had nothing but I saw them work hard to change their lives,” he says.
Kumbula moved to Johannesburg where he met fellow chartered accountant, Zakhe Khuzwayo, while working at Rentworks, an independent rental and asset management company. While there, they saw the demand for equipment thrown away by most companies in the industry.
The pair teamed up to open InnoVent, a rental and asset management company with a twist, in 2003. They squeeze every dollar out of a laptop by renting it over and over before selling it.
“InnoVent rents out equipment to clients, for example, to corporate clients for three years. When those computers are obsolete and can’t be used by those clients who need fast speedy technology, they bring them to us and our other business, Qrent, refurbishes the equipment and re-rent it into a second market to someone who doesn’t need high powered equipment,” says Kumbula.
Then there is a third phase.
“We put in, for example, 40 computers in a lab for a dollar per child per month and it means each child has access to a computer and the computer is maintained for three years. We also offer these computers to teachers and deduct monthly payments for 12 months from their salaries.”
When they opted to start the business, Khuzwayo had just qualified as a chartered accountant.
“When DJ came to me and told me about building a company like this, I jumped at the opportunity. I had no children or any responsibilities. Not once did we ever doubt that this was going to work,” says Khuzwayo.
They swapped their well-paid jobs for the uncertain world of entrepreneurship.
“We felt that there was a gap. We had seen some good and bad things in the company and we decided to build a better model, take what we had learned and add a number of things to create a better model we believed would work better for the clients we targeted,” says Kumbula.
It was easier said than done. For seven months, the pair worked day and night with zero clients on board.
“One of the companies that funded us gave us a desk, two chairs and a phone in a tiny room as our first office. We were convinced the business would work… We knew it was just a matter of time. We had structured our financing to allow us to survive for 12 months without any income and we did,” says Khuzwayo.
Nearly 13 years later, they have swapped the small office for a whole building in Africa’s richest square mile, Sandton in Johannesburg.
Where there is a laptop, there is a hidden dollar.

How To Squeeze A Laptop Dry

During my first weeks in the United States (US), far from Africa; tension gripped a dimmed hall, as did a compelling voice narrating the chilling events of World War 1 more than a century ago. The war raged for more than four years, killing 17 million people and leaving millions more injured and bereaved.
Today, young and old, can sit on a bench and look down at a trench which has a group of soldiers walking in a line through the mud. A warplane soars over the exhausted soldiers. This is an astonishing reenactment of the Great War. It is one of the breathtaking sections of the 48-acre National World War 1 Museum and Memorial in Kansas City in Missouri State.
Since 1920, the National World War 1 Museum and Memorial, previously called the Liberty Memorial Museum, collected artefacts and documents from around the world. With about 75,000 items – ranging from a British soldier’s belt to a huge aircraft – the museum, in partnership with the Edward Jones Research Center, is home to one of the world’s largest Great War collection. This is how obsessed the Americans are about the war; despite the fact the country sent troops to the bloody trenches only in June 1917, nearly three years after the first shot was fired.
One would think the US alone won the war against Germany. They didn&#8217;t, the allies did – including hundreds of thousands of troops from a score of African nations.
Regardless, the grandstanding illusion stands. At the very least, the experience made some sense to the convoluted verses of outstanding poets, TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney, that I struggled to decipher two decades ago.
A short drive away there is life and style in the shape of the American Jazz Museum, that also houses the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. This is a world away from the gore of war.
Jazz legend Charlie Parker, known as ‘Bird’, grew up in this neighborhood. His huge portrait hangs over the entrance and his Grafton saxophone is here. There are many relics to rave about here, but we shall keep it tight: Ella Fitzgerald’s passé sequined gown and matching glasses; Louis Armstrong’s booth with the cover of TIME magazine, priced 20c, dated February 21, 1949. It is a cool portrait of the young Armstrong with eyes cast skywards; a golden crown made of six trumpets rests on his head. Armstrong was the first jazz musician to make the cover of TIME; quite right too.
Then there’s Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue around the corner on Brooklyn Avenue. They say it’s the first grilled meat shop in the US. It dates back to 1908 and its first owner was Henry Perry. The Bryant brothers, Charlie and Arthur, worked for Perry. When the founder died, in 1940, it was up to the brothers to run it and they named it after Arthur. The name stuck, despite ownership changes.
I couldn’t fathom why Arthur Bryant’s is still in business. For over five minutes, tables were heaped with fries, left-overs and leaked barbecue sauces that could drive your appetite out of the window. So, I cast my eye to the wall-of-fame.
Years before Barack Obama, the one who thinks Africans should be grateful for US toxic chicken, was elected as president of the United States, he dined here and took photographs with the staff. So did director Steven Spielberg, actors Danny Glover and Harrison Ford, and Republicans Sarah Palin and John McCain. Anyway, I still prefer my Stellenbosch braai back home to the dry ribs I had. Their famous sauces saved the day.
Phew! A day’s excursion to Kansas was a welcome break from a year’s study, squeezed into two weeks, for this journalist. Back in Columbia, my host city, after a two-hour drive, a New York band called The Wood Brothers was playing at the Blue Note bar. Forty dollars got my Turkish fellow, Gokce Aytulu, and I in and the drinks weren’t too bad for $6 a jug. For the first time in my life, I stuck out like a sore thumb in the crowd of 100 or so whites who found my accent akin to gibberish.
As they say, music is a universal language – who cared about being understood when The Wood Brothers were slaying it?

The American Shock

It is a peaceful 200-yard walk from the Cape Town city streets to the gates of Parliament, but inside it was loaded like a gun; anger blazed in the eyes of many for Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa for nearly seven years and head of the African National Congress (ANC).
A small group outside Parliament held up placards reading ‘ANC Betraying South Africa’. The leader, in a navy suit, who wishes to be known only as Michael, said they had taken their lunchbreak to voice their disgust.
“The ANC members here today must do the honorable thing and fire this president who flaunts our wealth.”
A man dressed in the darkness of death contrasted against Parliament’s bright white walls. He held a cardboard match to a cardboard Constitution as MPs floated past in their luxury vehicles.
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Curious students across the way ran to see what the fuss is all about. One claimed Zuma is running the economy into the ground, another countered that he is too powerful to be ousted.
The street vendor, a few blocks down, didn’t care. He sold sweets and cigarettes to anyone who had money, be it Economic Freedom Fighter (EFF) red or ANC green and gold, as they shuffled toward Parliament. No one wanted to miss this one.
Inside, the debate raged like a fire on Table Mountain. The gallery was packed as leaders of the opposition parties tore into the ruling ANC. Mmusi Maimane, the first black leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), likened the ills of his opponents to a disease.
“Corruption has infected the entire party like a cancer. While our attention today focuses on a large and malignant tumour, we know that under the surface, the disease has replicated itself in every cell,” said Maimane.
“Today, it will be recorded that ANC members of Parliament chose to defend a crooked, broken president instead of the constitution and the rule of law. Today will signal once and for all that the ANC has lost its way and there’s absolutely no way back.”
Nhlanhla Khubisa, National Freedom Party secretary-general, called for the president to be elected by the citizens, and not by the party.
Pieter Mulder, Freedom Front Plus leader, reminded the ANC of the fate of their predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, who was recalled in 2008.
“His mistakes were 10 times less serious than Zuma&#8230; Sir, if ANC members once again ignore the facts of the last week… take my word for it, history will in a couple of years from now judge them very harshly and negatively,” said Mulder.
ANC MP and Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, John Jeffery, bit back.
“The DA claims the president seriously violated the Constitution, but here is the issue: the court did not find a serious violation of the Constitution as Section 89 (1) requires&#8230; The court did not declare Zuma violated his oath of office as the EFF had wanted.”
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A statement was read out:
The Presidency wishes to correct media reports wrongly stating that the judgement by the Constitutional Court found that President Jacob Zuma had broken his oath of office. The Constitutional Court did not make such a declaratory order.
The Constitutional Court instead ruled that “The failure by the President to comply with the remedial action taken against him, by the Public Protector in her report of 19 March 2014, is inconsistent with section 83(b) of the Constitution read with sections 181(3) and 182(1)(c) of the Constitution and is invalid.
Votes were cast, results read, the dust settled and the opposition walked out – oh, by the way, Zuma won: 233 votes to 143.
<h1>How Did We Get Here?</h1>
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Even if President Jacob Zuma does survive, this fragile democracy will face an acid test on August 3. Millions of South Africans will go to the polls for municipal elections in which the ruling ANC is expected to lose ground.
How did we get here? Well, the tension has built since 2009, when the story of Nkandla broke. Seven years later, South Africa&#8217;s Constitutional Court – the highest in the land – found Zuma to have unduly benefited from $15 million worth of upgrades to his personal home in KwaZulu-Natal. The court stated Zuma failed to uphold, defend and respect the constitution as the supreme law of the land.
A humbled Zuma apologized publicly to the country on television. The ANC backed him.
&#8220;I wish to reiterate that any action that has been found not to be in keeping with the constitution happened because of a different approach and different legal advice&#8230; I never knowingly or deliberately set out to violate the constitution&#8230; It was never my intention not to comply with the remedial action taken against me by the Public Protector [Thuli Madonzela] or to disregard her office.&#8221;
Other loyalists called for more than an apology. Trevor Manuel, South Africa&#8217;s former finance minister, wanted resignation. Even Ahmed Kathrada, who faced death with Nelson Mandela in the 1960s, wrote a letter calling for Zuma to go.
&#8220;I know that if I were in the President’s shoes‚ I would step down with immediate effect,&#8221; wrote Kathrada.

Tag: May 2016

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