In the end there was only one way in and one way out of the besieged city of Sarajevo during the final months of the 1990s Bosnian War, after the air traffic had finally surrendered to the small arms fire peppering aircraft fuselages and the unnerving radar locks of surface-to-air missiles.
The era of the easy route to war for journalists was over. They could no longer hitch a ride on humanitarian dawn flights, from Italy and Germany (boarding conditional on bringing your own flak jacket), to arrive for a late breakfast at Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn near Sniper Alley.
The only route for diplomats, aid workers and journalists to the city was a contour road, more like a goat track, traversing Mount Igman’s precipitous ravines and regarded as one of the world’s most dangerous. The final 60 kilometers to Sarajevo was under the sights of Serbian artillery and mortars; the last 25-kilometer stretch was exposed to heavy machine gun fire.
News cameraman Brian Green and a Danish colleague ran the gauntlet in 1995, with no military escort in an armoured Chevrolet Blazer weighing three or four tons. They traveled under the cover of night, without headlights, along the rain-slicked road.
Deep in the danger zone, a wheel sunk into the road’s soft mud; the two dug themselves out desperately, engine revving and wheels spinning, amid the fear of alerting Serbian forces. Arriving on the city’s outskirts at 4AM, caked in mud and knowing the journey was almost done, they were left stranded in no-man’s land for a couple of hours before the French foreign legionnaires, deployed under UN auspices, allowed entry. This was to be Green’s final war assignment.
“It was a little bit crazy. I was supposed to go for a week and ended up being there for 21 days and you basically lose control when you go into that type of environment. I thought maybe it was a bit silly with a young wife and kid,” says Green.
Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics and eight years later the ski slopes were used as gun emplacements to pound the city with artillery; the ski chalets commandeered for barracks. During the 44-month siege the city averaged 329 daily shell impacts, with every building in the city damaged and 35,000 reduced to rubble.
The Serbian snipers provided the unremitting terror, perching in the foothills to hunt for their victims in the streets below. All residents were fair game, including journalists.
Despite the risks, it was a difficult job to walk away from.
“I loved the element of danger, recording history. It was just absolutely fantastic,” says Green.
In 1992, between covering Middle East wars and the death throes of South Africa’s apartheid state, Green and his wife Lulu bought a house in Johannesburg’s old eastern inner city suburb, Bezuidenhout Valley.
“We bought it for R40,000 ($2,800), fixed it up for R40,000 and sold it for R130,000 ($9,100) a couple of years later.”
Green had at first viewed the renovation through the lens of a fast yield, but it was the process that he found most rewarding. With hindsight he realizes the satisfaction was “to breathe new life into old buildings, giving them modernity and dignity.”
However, he brushes off any common ground between war reporting and property development, as he enters one of the rehabilitated buildings on a 30,000-square-meter piece of previous Lorentzville urban decay, several hundred meters from his property investment 25 years earlier.
<div id="attachment_35122" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35122" class=" wp-image-35122" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Victoria-Yards-16-300x200.jpg" alt="Victoria Yards" width="500" height="333" />Victoria Yards (Photo by Guy Oliver)</div>
His latest venture, Victoria Yards, was once the site for the steam washing of the soiled cloth nappies of the city’s middle class offspring. Among the development’s shareholders are Green and his partner Mark Batchelor, and the Enthoven and Brozin families behind Hollard Insurance and the international peri-peri chicken chain Nando’s.
The walls of Green’s Victoria Yards’ “office for now” are draped with signed limited edition prints by Thomas Pakenham, author of the critically acclaimed chronicle of Africa’s colonization, The Scramble for Africa, who in later life went off script to publish his haunting and evocative photographic portraits of trees.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/entreprenuers/2017/10/10/weworks-20-billion-office-party-crazy-bet-change-world-business/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: WeWork&#8217;s $20 Billion Office Party: The Crazy Bet That Could Change How The World Does Business</a>
Green is inspecting a collection of rusted iron horse shoes found at the site with the same delight as a conchologist, while sitting amid regimented rows of industrial light shades imported from India and awaiting installation. He speaks of Mogadishu’s colonial-era Italian classical buildings, Sarajevo’s Islamic architecture, Johannesburg’s “homogenized” mall culture disfiguring and vandalizing the city scapes and a holiday in the Mozambique capital during its civil war.
“I always saw potential in dereliction. I remember going to Maputo in 1989 with my wife and finding a f***ed-up house. And all we could see was how beautiful it was and how we would so love to fix it.”
<div id="attachment_35123" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35123" class=" wp-image-35123" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Victoria-Yards-44-300x225.jpg" alt="Victoria Yards Brian Green" width="500" height="375" />Victoria Yards (Photo by Guy Oliver)</div>
The disposable nappy ended the reusable cloth nappy cleansing era and when Green and his shareholders acquired the property, in 2016, there were an array of small businesses operating; from chop-shops to carpenters and a film set company responsible for the props of the Oscar-nominated South African sci-fi movie District 9.
Green has eschewed replicating the success of his 44 Stanley mixed use development of restaurants, bars and boutiques, that emerged from a western Johannesburg suburban no-man’s land or pandering to the artist and creatives’ colonies in the adjacent inner city suburbs of Troyeville, Bezuidenhout Valley and Doornfontein.
“There has been a massive interest from the art world… But we want artisans. Cobblers, embroiders, potters, tattoo artists, glass blowers, knife makers, those kind of guys.”
There are exceptions to the Victoria Yards’ ideal. The South African artist Ayanda Mabulu, whose explicit sexual metaphors of Jacob Zuma’s South African presidency has drawn ire and praise in equal measure, is taking up residence, along with former teenage delinquent and armed robber Blessing Ngobeni, who reinvented himself to become an acclaimed surrealist artist.
Victoria Yards “needs to look at other ways of resurrecting the place… the area is very poor. There would be a backlash towards gentrification, because what you do is come here, make a nice place and then eject the locals. That’s not cool,” says Green.
<div id="attachment_35124" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35124" class=" wp-image-35124" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Victoria-Yards-15-300x200.jpg" alt="Victoria Yards Brian Green" width="500" height="333" />Victoria Yards (Photo by Guy Oliver)</div>
However, the development is not to be confused with philanthropy.
“We are businessmen. We have to make a profit and if we don’t make a profit, I don’t want to be here. We have to make a percentage yield from our investment. But I also think we can improve people’s lives.”
The sprawling property feels too limited for Green’s eclectic designs.
“We want an ecosystem where people can feed off each other”.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2017/08/17/boom-come-fighting/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Boom! Come Out Fighting</a>
There is talk of a foundry where the film set building operation once was.
“The Cuban ballet school was looking at the place.”
Urban farming is a given, with orchards and food gardens, cooking schools, test kitchens, a tool hire shop renting work tables on short term leases.
“We want a baker, a coffee roaster, a framer, metalworkers.”
Green’s free-wheeling vision might be confused with a hipster on hashish, but there are sound business fundamentals of the value chain underlying it, coupled with the want to provide opportunity for artisans.
Neighboring Victoria Yards is Nando&#8217;s global head office. By 2025, the purveyor of spicy chicken will have 2,100 outlets worldwide. Every six years the stores are refurbished, with the proviso that franchisees source 75% of their interior decor from South African artisans and artists.
“It’s a hungry machine,” says Green, and the Victoria Yards’ tenants will be ideally positioned to feed it. &#8211; Written by Guy Oliver

The War Cameraman Who Saw Gold In Shells

Nando’s founder Robert Brozin, 53, looks, speaks, and swears, more like a surfer than the head of a food industry giant.
Dressed in a pair of jeans, a button-down shirt, a ‘united against malaria’ bracelet and loafers, he could easily be dismissed as an old man suffering from a midlife crisis. It’s all part of his plan to disarm anyone who has preconceived ideas about how a company chairman should look and act.
The reality is that Brozin is a very smart businessman. At the FNB Franchising Leadership Summit held in Sandton, Johannesburg last year, he told the gathered crowd:
“Our basic vision, when we started twenty five years ago, was to have fun. If you are not going to have fun, do not do it. This is not a dress rehearsal; this is life, boet [brother in Afrikaans]. We are trying to keep that balance while at the same time changing how the world thinks about chicken,” he says.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1729" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Pic3-217x300.jpg" alt="" width="217" height="300" />
Nando’s has certainly changed the way the world thinks about chicken, not only through the spicy meals they dish up but through their infamous, sometimes political, advertising campaigns.
But where did it all start?
Brozin was born in the small town of Middelburg, in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, but finished high school at Johannesburg’s King David High School.
He did a BComm degree at the University of the Witwaters-rand, after which he joined accounting giant, Price Waterhouse before they became PricewaterhouseCoopers.
He did two years of articles before joining his father’s business Teltron as a marketing manager.
While working at Teltron, he met his future business partner Fernando Duarte, who introduced him to a shop in the small suburb of Rosettenville called Chickenland that sold Portuguese chicken. They later bought the shop.
FORBES AFRICA had an opportunity to speak to him after the summit.
“Fernando and I used to go eat in Rosettenville and I liked the chicken. I wanted to be an investor. I thought I would put money in and Fernando would be there and I would just come to check how things were. But this was not the case. I soon found out I had to be full-time,” says Brozin.
Brozin wanted to take the brand global and enlisted the services of various advertising agencies to help him market the brand.
They finally found the right match in HuntLascaris, which was also just starting out. The two companies created some of the most talked about advertisements in South African television.
“We met Reg and John, who became our first proper agency. We were so aligned, whereas before we were running around like chickens without heads. I remember Hunt presenting adverts to us that I thought were terrible that went on to win awards, which I will now take credit for,” says Brozin.
One of the HuntLascaris founders, Reg Lascaris, remembers those early days for both companies that have since grown to become world beaters.
“I met Robbie in the very early ‘90s, when he was looking for an advertising agency to handle his business. He came to see us and we then presented some ideas back to him, which he liked. Our biggest achievement was in creating breakthrough and controversial advertising that helped create the personality of the brand,” he says.
Today, Nando’s can be found in more than 25 countries around the world, across five continents. But it hasn’t been plain sailing for Brozin, and his partner, to get it to this level.
“When we started out everyone knew about the other brands like Chicken Licken and KFC […] but we were passionate about chicken. The front line people are the real heroes at Nando’s. You can’t have a great organization without having good people at that level,” he says.
He also gives credit to his father, Max, and his partner for keeping him going when times were tough.
“There were times when I was ready to throw in the towel. My personal success has been surrounding myself with people who pull you up when you are down. My dad has been a huge influence in my life. He is a Jewish accountant. Everything is about cost. Fernando has been fantastic for me. We disagree many times but he has gotten me out of [trouble] many times. It’s not how you get into [trouble] but how you get out of [trouble],” he says.
Brozin has stepped down as CEO of Nando’s and has appointed David Niven, previously head of the American and European Nando’s divisions, in his place. Brozin says it was time to get some “adult supervision” but admits that he is busier than he has ever been.
“It needed the right time and right guy to come in and thicken the Nando’s brand globally. I gave the new CEO a watch. I said, ‘You might have the watch but Africa has the time. As you get bigger you get tighter and you squeeze people. That is not the way to do it.’”
It is clear that the married father of three is not only driven by profits; he is passionate about his efforts to curb the spread of malaria in Africa.
Nando’s sells ‘united against malaria’ bracelets in all of its restaurants to raise awareness. The proceeds go to buying mosquito nets for people in affected regions.
However, it is in business where Brozin is an expert. He offers some advice to those wishing to follow in his footsteps.
“When Reg and John started they had no cash, no office… they started at the back of a car. Who starts one of the best agencies in the world in the back of a car? You have got to start with nothing. If you start with too much and you have the biggest offices in the world you are not going to achieve much. Entrepreneurs come to me and ask for cash. Cash is the last thing. Money has four legs, man has two legs. Money will always catch up to man.”
Sound advice, indeed, from a Jewish boy from the northern suburbs, who started selling Portugese chicken in the south; and now sells Nando’s to the world.
<h4>CONTROVERSIAL</h4>
<h4>NANDO’S ADVERTS</h4>
<h4>(MOSTLY CREATED BY BLACK RIVER F.C. ADVERTISING AGENCY)</h4>
<h4>LAST DICTATOR ADVERT</h4>
The advert shows a sad Robert Mugabe dining alone at Christmas in a mansion, while he reminisces about “the good old days” with former controversial leaders. Times when he played water tag with Muammar Gaddafi; made angels in the sand with Saddam Hussein; pushed P. W. Botha on a children’s swing and drove a tank with Idi Amin, while Those Were the Days is being played.
<h4>XENOPHOBIA ADVERT</h4>
In this 60 seconds advert Nando’s aims to ridicule Xenophobia. A xenophobe says that he wishes that all foreigners would disappear from South Africa. Frame by frame South Africans from ethnic and tribal groups start disappearing until only a Khoisan remains on screen. He says, “I am not going anywhere, you found us here”.
<h4>NANDO’S CHICKEN BREAST ADVERT</h4>
A customer orders a Nando’s burger and chips, which are delivered while she is on the phone. Her breasts are so big they cover the plate. At the end of her telephone conversation she asks the waiter where her chips are. They waiter says, “Right in front of you”. She only sees the chips when the waiter pulls the plate to the center of the table.

Tag: Nando’s

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