Sola Owoloja has been working in the business for five years; he understands how to please. He had to transport a comb from New York to Johannesburg. It must have been a very special comb. He naturally said: “Yes”. You have to.
The patron staying at a Johannesburg hotel had left the comb, given to her by her dying mother, in a hair salon in New York. West Chauffeurs got in touch with the New York hotel and within 48 hours the comb was hand delivered to the patron.
Running around, chauffeuring, catering to and cajoling the rich is what makes concierge services pay. On another occasion, a patron asked to deliver an elephant across the Atlantic to the United States as a gift to his daughter. Luckily, the request was not followed through, again Owoloja would have said: “Yes”.
“Integrity is very important. If you make a promise to your guest, you have to keep that promise. We made a promise to our guests. We will bend, we’re flexible. We’ll do anything to keep them satisfied,” says Owoloja.
In 2008, Owoloja and Kagiso Dumasi saw a gap in the market for a concierge company in South Africa that would cater for the needs of wealthy travelers. Owoloja oversees the operational, financial and recruitment side of the business, while Dumasi looks after the marketing.
West Chauffeurs can make dinner reservations; find scarce theater tickets and presents in a hurry, as well as deliver combs.
Nigerian-born Owoloja learnt early on at home, in Lagos, that you have to do business however you can.
In Lagos, while in his twenties, he dabbled in the supermarket business with a friend. He moved to South Africa with the hope of running an oil services company, but failed. He moved back home but later returned to South Africa to start a business with the little entrepreneurial experience under his belt.
“When the chips are down, in the face of adversity and massive challenges, you need to still inspire people to get them to see beyond the challenges of the day,” says Owoloja.
Their Johannesburg business prospered through a link to Quintessentially, a global luxury lifestyle company, known for its high net-worth clients.
With a little help from the National Empowerment Fund, West Chauffeurs increased its fleet from two cars to eight, after making more than R1 million ($108,800) in its second year.
They relocated from the central business district of Sandton to another affluent suburb, Melrose Arch. This opened up the business meetings market. The company had to swear its drivers to secrecy as many deals were struck on the road.
Towards the end of that year, an opportunity came to run the travel desk for two new five-star hotels in Cape Town but it all went downhill from there. The two found that they had expanded too quickly.
They had entered into unfamiliar territory, in an international tourist city that has well-established hotels. West Chauffeurs found itself exposed, a small business that relied too much on the hotels for guests for business. The two new hotels were unable to fill up enough rooms to secure business for West Chauffeurs. The Johannesburg office had to keep Cape Town afloat.
“For a small company, expansion should be managed very carefully. We were profitable in our first year, but we did not think through that move carefully. We expanded very quickly without the structures to manage the expansion in terms of cash flow, record keeping,” says Owoloja.
At the end of each month the business was short of around 65% of their costs, which they had to source from the profit made during the previous year.
“It dried up very quickly. We tried to get overdrafts, personal funds to pay salaries but it was quite difficult. We picked up heavy losses in Cape Town but yes those are lessons learnt. They were painful,” he adds with a chuckle.
Owoloja says a big mistake was for the company to go without a management account and financial statements for nearly a year.
But that’s all in the past now. In early 2011, West Chauffeurs packed up office in Cape Town and focused on business at its headquarters in Johannesburg, where the company was doing well.
They signed a contract to run the travel desk for the five-star African Pride’s Melrose Arch Hotel located in the trendy precinct. Again, they struggled with being too small and having to run a high occupancy hotel with demanding clients. The hotels patrons were skeptical about making use of their services because they were much smaller than established car rental companies.
Through it all, things started to look up. The company now turns over nearly $800,000 annually.
“We went from nothing to quite a bit. There’s this very nice feeling that comes with making things work,” says Owoloja.
West Chauffeurs currently has twelve cars and employs 17 drivers and consultants. They drive clients from First Bank of Nigeria, Liberty Life and Barclays, to mention but a few.
One of their biggest achievements was beating more established companies to drive members traveling with the British Lions during their rugby tour to South Africa in 2009.
The softly spoken Owoloja says they are wary of leaping without looking, the scars of the Cape Town run deep. For now, their plans are to grow other services within the West Chauffeur brand in Johannesburg and capture the leisure market.
Surely, when the time is right, the answer will be: “Yes”.

The perils of the “yes” business

Argyropoulos was used to the vagaries of the luxury cruise business that had made him his fortune. Born in Athens, in 1962, the son of an engineer, Argyropoulos spent his life working in the luxury cruise business, including a spell in New York.
In 1991, came an assignment that was to change his life. The Greek cruise line employing Argyropoulos sent him to South Africa in search of new business. It proved an eye-opener for Argyropoulos and he saw a South Africa on the cusp of freedom where the shackles of uncertainty and sanctions were about to be cast aside. The country was about to be a booming emerging market full of people with money to spend, who wanted cruises, but didn’t know where to buy them.
Argyropoulos smelt cash and within a year had told his employers, politely, that he was setting up on his own. From a desk and a telephone in the corner of a Johannesburg office, Cruises International was born. His nose for business didn’t let him down and more than 20 years later he employs 20 people and turns over more than $17 million by sending Africans around the world on the finest ships.
On April 17, 2010, Argyropoulos had every reason to be pleased with himself. Business was bearing up, despite the recession, and he had just packed off 60 employees of a big South African pharmaceutical company on a dream cruise to Croatia and the Greek Islands—a break on the blue Mediterranean, in the gentle spring sunshine. It was even more pleasing for Argyropoulos that this cruise was a reward for people, like himself, who had beaten the recession by exceeding their targets. The tour group was to fly from Johannesburg to Istanbul, in Turkey, then on to Venice for a few days of cruising in the sun to the clink of ice over cocktails in frosted glasses. Even the name of the ship sounded promising: Splendor of the Seas.
Over this happiness loomed a dark, swirling, ash cloud.
Argyropoulos was sipping coffee quietly in the Johannesburg suburbs and making plans for the weekend when the telephone rang.
“Turkish airlines can’t land in Venice because of the ash cloud,” said the tour operator bluntly from Istanbul.
“We are now hiring a bus to drive through to Venice.”
This was a journey-and-a-half to Italy, via the Balkans, that would take 20 hours.
“At that moment I was quite calm, until I heard it was going to take 20 hours.”
Argyropoulos worked it out that by the time the group drove into Venice the cruise ship would have left. He phoned the group and told them to head for Dubrovnik, in Croatia, instead so they could meet the ship on Sunday night. That was that, he thought.
Then, at the crack of dawn on Sunday morning, Argyropoulos woke, with a start, and unable to sleep, went check his e-mails. To his horror, he saw that the Splendor of the Seas wasn’t going to Dubrovnik, the very place he had directed the unlucky 60 from Johannesburg. It turned out the cruise ship had waited in Venice for its missing passengers and ironically was going to skip Dubrovnik to make up time.
“So after 11 hours on a plane and 20 hours on a bus, with a driver who doesn’t speak English, they were going to miss the boat anyway. I had to inform the tour leader,” he replied, with something that you would find very difficult to print in this article.
“Now, this was a cruise that was supposed to be a thank you for working hard throughout the year. Now, here you had people [who had done] more than 30 hours of travelling, who were sweaty, dirty and uncomfortable, upset, anxious and angry.”
The only course of action was to send the bus back the way it came. The next chance of catching the Splendor of the Seas was in Corfu.
“I contacted my port agent in Dubrovnik on ways to get them to Corfu. I explored the option of chartering a flight and quite quickly this became impossible as they wanted letters of credit needed to hire an aircraft. With the ash cloud there weren’t many planes. The second option, was to charter a ship to sail to Corfu, which is about 12 hours. They would have made it, but we couldn’t find a ship.”
There was nothing for it. The bus had to go back the way it came towards Corfu. Argyropoulos had organized a hotel for the tourists and they were feeling a bit better. Even so, the tour operator waited until everyone was settled on the bus, before he informed them of the grueling journey ahead. It was to be a journey through Montenegro to Albania, then on to Greece and by ferry to Corfu—a trip of more than 11 hours. That was the plan before another setback struck. The bus driver said he had reached his driving limit, stipulated by law, and had to take a rest. The tour operator tried to find a new driver and bus, but, as it was a Sunday, this was impossible. It was decided to wait for the driver to rest, meaning another delay.
While they were waiting, panic went through the 60-strong group over whether everyone had a valid visa for the trip. Luckily, everyone had a Schengen visa in their passport.
“At the very least this was a dim light at the end of the tunnel,” says Argyropoulos.
“They left Dubrovnik at 5pm on the Sunday and at 10pm I had my last communication from the tour leader and she said the roads were very winding and narrow. It was raining, so the speed was about 40 kilometers an hour. Then at 6am on Monday, we tried to get in touch with the bus, unfortunately there was no cellphone reception. Eventually, at 8am in Johannesburg, I had an SMS to say they had crossed the border into Skopje in Macedonia and they would need another eight hours to reach Igoumenitsa to catch the ferry to Corfu.”
“I then calculated their estimated time of arrival in Corfu, which at best would have been five in the afternoon, which again would have been too late because the ship would have left Corfu by then. The ship couldn’t wait because of the cost of port fees, keeping up with schedule and available berths at the docks. I didn’t want to alarm the clients on the bus any further, so I allowed them to reach the border with Greece and once they were through the border I spoke to the people on the bus again and informed them of the situation.”
The tired and frustrated travelers took the bad news with remarkable aplomb.
“At that point, I was informed that the group didn’t want to chase the ship any further and wanted to enjoy the rest of the time in northern Greece. I gave some time to allow them to come to terms with the idea, then I called back and told them they had five days left, so it didn’t make financial sense to stay in northern Greece, where there wasn’t much to do, so I advised them to meet the ship in the next port of call in Santorini,” says Argyropoulos.
They drove to Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, where Argyropoulos had booked them flights on to Athens, luckily Greece had not been affected by the ash cloud. The group spent the night in a hotel at the airport in Athens and next day flew on to Santorini where—finally— they caught up with the Splendor of the Seas. There were four days left and they settled onto the cruise liner for a trip to Venice via Dubrovnik.
“Once they were on the ship they were totally spoiled and the crew went out of their way to do everything from cocktail parties to free laundry. They had a very, very, good time on board ship,” says Argyropoulos.
By the time the cruise ship arrived in Venice the ash cloud was gone and all flew back to Johannesburg.
“The feedback that we got once the group was back was that they understood the situation and as much as it was unpleasant they knew that everyone had tried their best to reunite them with the ship. We had done everything humanly possible.”
The cruise liner gave the group a complete refund for the days missed.
“Earlier this year they contacted to go another cruise!” smiles Argyropoulos.

Ashes To Ashes,  Port To Port

“I may have left Nigeria, but Nigeria has not left my heart,” says Beatrice Hamza Bassey, a Nigerian partner at the New York offices of prestigious law firm Hughes Hubbard. She is a product of a country many have fled to seek greener pastures in the great Nigerian brain drain.
Nigerians are fanatical about tertiary education. At home and abroad, they pursue exceptional professional qualifications; however, only a handful, willingly invest their expertise in the country as many a Nigerian are caught in the zeitgeist of ‘finding the golden fleece’. The gross underfunding of educational institutions has left the quality of education questionable as many migrate to develop expertise abroad.
Expatriate skills are highly sought after to make up for the lack of skill in the country. For many, the causes of the brain drain, is a double-edged sword. Those who were privileged to be educated in the West easily secure employment in Nigeria, which prompts young Nigerians to follow in their footsteps. At the same time, there is a high rate of unemployment among local graduates.
This shows a dire need to establish more educational institutions to accommodate the country’s expanding population while simultaneously providing the same standards as Western institutions.
Bassey, who also sits on the board of the Nigerian High Education Foundation, says: “Nigeria produced people like me. The education I had there prepared me to compete on the global stage. This means that we once had an excellent structure which we must find a way to return to. I’m very passionate about issues concerning education in Nigeria and the plan is to help raise more funds to push this course forward.”
She is a product of the famous Queens College, Lagos, University of Maiduguri and Nigerian law school. Bassey believes that in spite of the good, corruption still has the country in its firm grip.
“I was noticed because I worked hard. With hard work, the sky is your limit here. In Nigeria, hard work is not just enough.”
At the Pan African University, home to the prestigious Lagos Business School, FORBES AFRICA meets graduate students who are passionate about entrepreneurship.
Graduate student, Chivuzo Offiah, is positive about the future.
“We have the resources, the human capital and immense potential, this is why there are so many expatriates doing business here. Yes, a lot of professionals have left the country but there are still a lot of equally smart people here who can turn this situation around.
“Nigeria needs to give these people a chance. Executing the right policies at government level will make all the difference. Nigeria is a market for any economy. We need a critical mass of Nigerians who will clamor for change. You don’t wait to be empowered, you grab empowerment with your hands,” he says.
Offiah’s view is echoed by Godson Ikiebey, a PhD student in government policies.
“The government is inept, corrupt and incompetent but I still believe in the future of this country. I believe in remaining here to be the change we are clamoring for,” he says.
Jeremiah Iyamabo, a PhD student in marketing communications, is from a different school of thought.
“Based on the status quo and my goals, I do not intend to remain in Nigeria as the structure is not enabling. I tie the issue of the brain drain to the collapse of our collective value system, which has led to the breakdown of infrastructure. Why would I be faithful to a system that doesn’t have an enabling infrastructure for our development? There is a great disconnect between the educational institutions and what the industry needs. It is the responsibility of the government to bridge that gap and put the right structures in place.
Tope Falade, another master’s student, is also concerned about the future.
“I blame the citizenry of this country for not being bold enough to demand accountability from those we put in power.”
Previous attempts to reverse the brain drain, by attracting talent that had left the country, proved futile. For Nigeria, the impact of the brain drain is too costly and cannot be ignored any further.
In recent years, the Nigerian government—under the leadership of President Olusegun Obasanjo—addressed the issue of turning the brain drain into a brain gain through the formation of two new organizations. Nigerians in the Diaspora Organization (NIDO) and the Nigerian National Volunteer Service (NNVS) were created to harness the skills and talents of the Nigerian diaspora.
Bassey said: “On the brain gain, I won’t hesitate to find ways to lend my expertise to my country where required and I will embrace the opportunity to bring my skills back home in due course.”
From the halls of Nigeria’s finest institutions, to the corner offices of prestigious firms across the globe, all voices lean towards one truth—the future of Nigeria’s work force, dangles on a precarious precipice.
“We will be doing ourselves a great dis-service as Nigerians, if we don’t find a way to return to the previous level of excellence on all facets,” says Bassey.

Should I Stay  Or Should I Go?

Ganiyu “Tarzan” Balogun, managing director of Tarzan Marine Enterprises in Lagos, Nigeria, is not a poker player and he’s never taken big business risks. His success story is riddled with serendipity so that he now owns one of the oldest boat companies in Lagos. Tarzan was born in 1943 and spent most of his early childhood in Tarkwa Bay, close to Victoria Island. As a boy, he took a 15-minute boat trip to and from school. After completing his studies, he worked for the African Insurance Brokers Company (AIBC) as a driver. His father, then an engineer for the Nigerian army, was unhappy with Tarzan’s career choice and forbade him to continue working as a driver. It took an AIBC senior management official to convince the old man that it was in his son’s interests to work for them. Nine months later, AIBC bought Tarzan a boat.
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Soon after acquiring the boat, Tarzan began ferrying passengers. He soon realized there was good money to be made from the waterways. A cargo ship about to dock, gave him an idea: the crew would make excellent tourists. Captains and crew rented his boat to go ashore and his bus to tour Lagos. “I used to take them to night clubs and wherever they wanted to go to have fun and take them back to their ship of around 11,” says Tarzan. He expanded his business. By 1990, he had opened his first boat yard in Eleke Crescent, home to 65% of Nigeria’s foreign embassies. Tarzan ferried diplomats visiting the country.
He later moved to Lekki Expressway where he still conducts his business. The old building on Ozumba Mbadiwe-Lekki Expressway waterfront is deceptive. It hides Tarzan’s success story. He carries 4,000 passengers a week. In a good month, this company could generate more than $50,000.
Tarzan has now been operating for 30 years. Many times, he could have given up. He tells an anecdote of the impact of government policies on his business. “I have been beaten so many times by the Nigerian army and police because I used to buy fuel with the 20-liter jerry can for my boat,” says Tarzan. The government had banned the sale of fuel in jerry cans to curb the practice of hording petrol and later selling it at a higher price. This, however, had unintended consequences for boat operators who relied on these cans to refuel their boats. Today, fuel stations have been built in Cross River State and Rivers State but they are still to be built in Lagos. Rather than close shop in the face of the challenges, Tarzan persevered.
A tourism industry, which could help companies such as Tarzan’s expand, is still in its infancy. The industry suffered during the recent military and civilian governments. Despite the government’s declaration in 2002 that it intended to make tourism one of the six key areas for economic development, Nigeria is not a popular tourist destination. Countries such as Kenya, with its vast game reserve, have invested heavily in tourism making it one of the most popular tourist destinations in Africa. The West Africa sub-region has lagged behind attracting only 770,000 tourists representing 10% of the 2,6 million international tourist arrivals in 2009. Six of the 14 countries in the region recorded 100,000 international tourists. Paradoxically, Nigeria was ahead of the pack attracting 30% of the sub-regional market.
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If waterways business in Lagos was a game of luck and timing for Tarzan, then for Soji Adeola, CEO of Salmon Multiservices, it was about risking it all. Despite the challenges in the industry, Adeola believes there is potential in Nigeria’s waterways. “A city the size of Lagos cannot survive on a single mode of transportation,” says Adeola. The population of Lagos is estimated to be 18 million and it’s growing at about 8%, which means that the city is growing faster than Los Angeles and New York. The World Bank predicts that Lagos will be the third largest city in the world after Tokyo and Mumbai by 2015.
This is why Adeola is betting on the waterways. While working as a banker, he bought a boat. After completing his MBA studies in 2009, he resigned and focused his efforts on his new company. He operates two boats that ferry corporate officials in the Marina-Apapa Channel. He believes there is potential for his “emerging company”. “As of today, we had 1,4 million Lagos residents using the waterways each month. This is projected to increase to 4 million and perhaps, a lot more than that,” says the optimistic Adeola.
Adeola sees his company as being strategically positioned to provide water transport solutions and meet leisure challenges in Nigeria’s coastal areas. He is proposing a $100 million plan to the Lagos State government to build jetties around Lagos. There are about 60 jetties in the city so far, but these would be insufficient should the market reach the projected 4 million.
Currently, the world’s biggest hotel operators are the only serious investors in Lagos’ waterfronts. The Oriental, Four Points, Peninsula Resort and Radisson Blu hotels got in early to line the picturesque Ozumba Mbadiwe-Lekki Expressway waterfront.
For investors looking for returns, your next trip should be to Lagos–there is plenty of opportunity in the waterways.

Tarzan: King of the Water

Who would have thought that a New York removal man would help turn a budding young artist into a history maker? Well, that’s exactly what happened to South African Conor McCreedy.
A helping hand moving a carpet up to his apartment helped land McCreedy his first solo exhibition, at the National Arts Club jsut down the road—the youngest artist to do so.
“I bought an old third-hand carpet from Iran at an old vintage store and I needed someone to help me move it. So we went to my studio, a four-flight walk up the stairs, and he comes up and sees all this art that I’m working on, adorned on my walls, and he’s like: ‘Holy shit, man, this stuff is crazy! You know what? You’ve got to meet someone.’”
McCreedy moved to New York knowing no one, and having spent most of his youth between a secluded boarding school in KwaZulu-Natal and his home in the gated Melrose suburb of Johannesburg. The last thing the 2005 Hilton College alumnus, with a distinction in art, thought was that this removal man would introduce him to the president of New York’s historic NAC.
The art club, located in the Tilden Mansion in Gramercy Park New York, was founded in 1898. It has an exclusive invitation-only membership, which included three former United States presidents:  Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Dwight D. Eisenhower. It also included some of the country’s most important artists and art patrons, such as Andy Warhol.
“I went to boarding school. I know you should never assume, but I did assume. I thought someone who is a mover is not really going to help someone in the art world. I was at a young, tender age and was a bit ignorant.
“He said: ‘You need to go to the NAC—the president of the club is waiting for you.’ So I was like, ‘What is that?’ and he said, ‘Yo, you big dummy, it’s across the street from you—it’s the most historic club in America.’”
It led to an introduction with Alden Jones Junior, NAC president. This meeting saw a solo exhibition for McCreedy, titled Outliers, in 2010.
“That really opened up doors for me; it kind of put me on the map and allowed the world to know who I was and what I was doing. It really helped a lot.”
McCreedy has moved away from styles that made his name, painting abstract animals and portraits, to creating more abstract images with his own style, painting in blues on fine linen.
“You don’t have to paint zebras and giraffes to paint Africa. South African art in New York is quite a niche market. It’s still African art, although some is being created here and some in New York. It is where I feel my proper outlet is now. You finally find your niche; mine is now in blues. Big giant pigments on Belgian linen, French linen and the finest linen you can find, and it’s this big explosion of an ocean. We live in a volatile world, so when you create these oceans, people get lost in this beautiful array of blues. And they like that because it’s kind of like what the ocean does to you.”
His change in style is not only tied to his artistic growth, but also his African roots. With an awareness of the continent’s image among many in the Western world, McCreedy wants his work to change perceptions about Africa and African art.
“I’m trying to get the Western world to understand that Africa is not as bad or poverty stricken as the world sees it. India is way worse, and the poverty in India is so bad, yet they have better investments and the right type of investments going into India, which we do not have.
“We have Bill Gates, who is sending all these mosquito nets into, let us say Malawi, for instance, which is great. But it is not the right investment because what he is doing is putting the guy in Malawi, who is making the mosquito nets right out of business, because you can’t beat something that is for free.
“And we have these advertisements; you see them all over [the world], like ‘Incredible India’—you never see ‘Astonishing Africa’ or ‘Amazing Africa’, you don’t see that.”
Conor McCreedy hopes to change all of this with his blue brush strokes.

Restyling Africa’s Image  One Brush Stroke At A Time

In December, party fever rocked Nairobi—a city already in a festive mood, despite efforts by squabbling politicians to dampen the spirit. From nightclubs to beach parties, the revellers were loaded and speaking with a twang acquired in London or New York. In Nairobi, people call them ‘summer bunnies’, referring to Kenyans living abroad back on holiday in the motherland, flaunting the trappings of success in the West: dollars, the twang and a superiority complex.
And if recent statistics from the Central Bank of Kenya are anything to go by, the economic muscle of the Kenyan diaspora is also growing, with more and more money being sent home by them. In 2011, remittances increased by 39% to $891.1 million. In 2010, they were $642 million, which is the equivalent of 2% of Kenya’s
$31.6 billion GDP. They are the fourth-largest source of foreign currency after tea, horticulture and tourism.
Diaspora Remittances, a new report by Stanbic Investments, a subsidiary of CFC Stanbic Bank, estimated that 14% of Kenya’s 18 million adult population receives money from abroad.
With this flow of money comes opportunity. Firstly, Kenyans are paying a fortune to send home a fortune. The report by Stanbic says the cost of sending money home is 10% of the remittance. At 12.4%, the average cost among banks is higher than the average 8.8% for money transfer operators.
This cost stems the flow of money, a fact that even world leaders acknowledge but look powerless to act. At the L’Aquila 2009 G8 Summit, leaders pledged to halve the cost of remittances by 2014. But according to an analysis by Thorsten Beck, a professor of economics and chairman of the European Banking Center at Tilburg University, and Maria Soledad Martinez Peria, a senior economist in the finance and private sector development team of the Development Economics Research Group at the World Bank, governments have little say on such costs.
Instead, the duo in the analysis titled What Explains the Cost of Remittances recommend that policymakers seeking to reduce remittance costs should focus on improving competition: a private sector-led investment in cheaper ways of remitting money. Some companies are taking up the opportunity. In addition to the traditional money transfer companies like Western Union and Moneygram that dominate the market, Nation Media Group, East Africa’s largest media house, is joining the fray. It is scheduled to launch Nationhela, a visa card that will allow those living abroad to send money directly to relatives in Kenya who will need to acquire the same card.
“More competition will lower the cost of sending money and thus increase remittances,” said the Central Bank of Kenya when releasing its recent report.
Investors need to set up a vehicle that the Kenyan diaspora can use to invest in their homeland. During a Kenya Diaspora Conference in the US, held in October last year in Washington DC, they demanded such avenues. And the government took up the challenge and was rewarded. Infrastructure and savings bonds sold to the diaspora last year raised $383 million.
Investment vehicles would attract even more remittances. The data in the Stanbic report is an indicator that many would want to invest, if only there were good channels to do so. Around 52% of total remittances are used as living wages by recipients, while 44% is invested. Approximately 36% is invested in small businesses, while 8% goes to Kenya’s previously booming, but now faltering, real estate sector, and only 4% to savings. Mama Mikes, a website that allows Kenyans abroad to buy various things for their relatives in Kenya, has recorded phenomenal growth.
Kenya’s dependence on remittances is expected to grow, thus providing more numbers, a fact that drafters of the country’s Vision 2030 economic master plan acknowledged. The plan, which is expected to catapult the country into a middle income nation by 2030, is targeting the diaspora to raise remittances from the current 2% to 5% of GDP by 2030.
The diaspora’s muscle is growing, not just in Kenya but also the continent. More than 3% of Africa’s population has migrated to other countries, including within the continent. Remittances to Africa reached $40 billion in 2010 and are the continent’s second-largest source of money inflows after foreign direct investment. Their impact on the population is also staggering. More than 120 million people receive money from 30 million migrants, with Nigeria, Egypt and Morocco being the top three remittance-receiving countries on the continent.
Summer bunnies are not only changing their voices when they leave their country, but our economies too.

Summer Bunny Money Comes On  In Leaps And Bounds

<h3>Jide Zeitlin</h3>
<h3>Country of origin: Nigeria</h3>
<h3>Industry: Finance</h3>
om Jide Zeitlin’s office, on the 44th floor of a sleek building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, you can see the soaring skyscrapers and iconic New York City landscape stretching out ahead of you. Standing self-assuredly, hand in one pocket, the man himself cuts a dashing figure in a sharp black suit over a white shirt.
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Zeitlin isn’t even 50 yet. But, he has spent 20 years at Goldman Sachs, rising to partner and global operating officer of investment banking. He owns a telecommunications outfit in India, has his own investment firm, The Keffi Group, and is a director of Coach Inc, one of America’s premier luxury brands. He also sits on the boards of various philanthropic, educational and commercial organizations. He looks like a man who has always been destined for success.  Zeitlin’s life could have turned out very differently.
He was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, to a young single woman who worked in Lagos as a domestic servant. Her employers were a foreign family who were working in the bustling, dense city. While his mother was working in the city, Zeitlin lived in the Nigerian countryside with relatives.
By luck—which Zeitlin says is a major thread in his life—one of his mother’s jobs was with an American family. The father, who was a journalist, was there with his homemaker wife and their two young daughters.
One weekend, Zeitlin went to spend the weekend in Lagos with his mother and her employers. There, he met the American family and quickly formed a friendship with their eldest daughter, who was roughly the same age. Encouraged by the good relationship between Zeitlin and their daughter, the American family came up with an idea. Rather than send the young boy back to live with relatives in the countryside, they proposed that he live with them and that they place him in the same school as their daughter. His mother agreed; and the boy went to live in with the American family, the Zeitlins, and was put into a new school in Lagos.
Eighteen months later, the Zeitlin family was due to be posted to Pakistan where the father was going to work as a correspondent for the Associated Press. They asked the young Jide if he would like to go with them. If he did, they would become his legal guardian, providing him with the opportunity to have a much better education than he would get if he stayed behind with his Nigerian mother.
“She was an amazing mother who just didn’t have a lot of resources,” he says.
“My American family did not have a lot of money. They were solidly middle-class—but the one thing that they both had was they both came from strong educational backgrounds. On my mother’s side was a long line of university professors and even though she was American she had been born in China and lived there until she was a teenager because her father was a professor there. So the family was very big on education.”
Jide left Nigeria when he was just five years old and moved to Pakistan, which was going through the Pakistan-India war, with his new American family, and became Jide Zeitlin. Five years later, the family moved again to the Philippines—which was under martial law at the time—where they lived for three years before being given 48 hours to pack and leave the country because of critical articles that his adopted father had written about the then premier, Ferdinand Marcos.
By then, his American mother had decided to go back to graduate school and was admitted to Boston’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to get her PhD in biochemistry. The family moved yet again, this time to America, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although he’d paid some visits to the US during vacations, this was the first time that Jide, then 11 years old, had spent any real time in America.
On the recommendation of a friend who’d advised his parents that public schools in Massachusetts were not very good, Zeitlin was sent to Milton Academy, a top boarding school where the Kennedys were educated.
Having spent the previous 10 years of his life in developing countries that were going through political and social upheaval, he suddenly found himself thrust into the very traditional elite world of Milton Academy. It was something of a culture shock, but he survived. He is still proud that on graduation from the school, he was awarded a prize for being someone who most epitomized the school’s strongest values.
Then it was on to Amerhurst College to study economics and English. To this day he is still very much involved in his alma mater, sitting as chairman of the board of trustees. In his role, he has helped transform it into one of America’s most diverse and selective colleges.
It was in his sophomore year at Amerhurst that his journey into the finance world in New York City began. Summers spent washing dishes at McDonalds to pay his college fees became boring and he decided an office job would be nice. One of his father’s cousins, who had gone to Harvard Business School and was working at Morgan Stanley, gave him the names of some firms to write to. He wrote to them. Every single bank wrote back, turning him down.
Zeitlin was unperturbed. He’d known from the age of three or four that he liked business and would pursue a path in that arena.
“When you grow up in Nigeria, you have it in your blood—it’s a very commercial kind of environment. I didn’t know what kind of commerce or business but I knew that I enjoyed negotiating for things and trying to create things. I’d always had little businesses, like shoveling snow for $5 per hour. There was always that commercial side to me.”
One day while visiting his father’s sister outside Philadelphia, he was told that her neighbor’s best friend was a partner of a firm that Zeitlin had never heard of. That firm was Goldman Sachs.
He wrote to the partner at Goldman Sachs, receiving a response which said that while Zeitlin basically seemed like a nice kid, there were no jobs available for him. However, the partner added, should he ever be in New York, he would take him for tea.
On receiving the letter at his room in Amerhurst, Zeitlin immediately, not recognizing it as a brush off, decided to board a Greyhound bus to New York City. He showed up in New York, at Goldman Sachs’ offices, and ended up going for tea with the shocked partner who eventually decided to give him a chance, offering him a summer internship at the investment bank. When, decades later, Zeitlin became a partner of the firm he was shown the original letter that he’d written.
After that first summer, he ended up going back to Goldman Sachs every summer while he was an undergraduate student and then while he was at Harvard Business School after graduating from Amerhurst. When he earned his MBA, Goldman Sachs offered him a full time job.
Starting out as a Merger and Acquisitions banker, a pure generalist working across multiple industries, one of the first people that Zeitlin got to work with was Hank Paulson, who later became the chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, and then 74th United States Secretary of the Treasury.
It was Paulson who encouraged him to run Goldman Sachs’ global healthcare business. It was also Paulson who, after being promoted to CEO of Goldmans, asked Zeitlin to come and work in the company’s executive office along with himself and the company’s co-presidents which he did for three years, cutting costs and helping rationalize after the dot com bubble exploded.
After Zeitlin was promoted to Global Operating Officer, Paulson came to him yet again. Remembering that Zeitlin had lived in Pakistan as a child, he asked him to go and figure out what the company’s strategy should be in India.
While in India, Zeitlin met with a number of Indian government officials and business people including Sunil Bharti Mittal, owner of one of the largest telecommunications companies in the country. Zeitlin noticed that Mittal still owned large parts of his physical infrastructure whereas in the US and some parts of Europe, they’d mostly been sold off to third parties. Spotting a tremendous business opportunity, Zeitlin asked Mittal if he’d be willing to sell some of his assets to Goldman Sachs. Although Mittal didn’t give a firm answer, Zeitlin began looking further and put a team on the case. Over three months, he attempted to convince Goldman Sachs to do it but having never invested at that scale in India before they ultimately declined.
Spotting a tremendous business opportunity, Zeitlin told Paulson that since Goldman Sachs wouldn’t invest, he was going to leave to go and do it himself. “It was an interesting opportunity, given my childhood, and where I could see the global markets going. I didn’t want to just be in New York with contacts in the west. I wanted to start reaching out into the emerging world more.”
Zeitlin eventually retired from Goldman Sachs in 2005, although retirement is hardly the right word. He went on to build a wireless infrastructure business in India, a place in which he’d never done business. He also had no experience in telecoms. However, over a period of three years, he built out a “modest” sized business. Bharti Mittal eventually decided not to sell his assets but endorsed Zeitlin’s business concept.
His company, The Keffi Group, currently invests in wireless infrastructure, life sciences, and financial services in India, Israel and West Africa, respectively. Since leaving Goldman Sachs, the father of two, has also been asked to use his finance experience in wider roles. He spent some time on President Barack Obama’s economic transition team and was ultimately offered a role as a representative of the United States of America to the United Nations for UN Management and Reform. Although he eventually turned the role down, he was pleased to have had the experience of Washington, especially as he increasingly acknowledges the intersection and convergence of business, civil society and politics.
Zeitlin is proud of his African roots and his Nigerian mother. He is equally thankful about the opportunities that were afforded to him by his American family. Whether it’s being adopted early on or meeting Paulson when he started at Goldman Sachs, he says about his life: “It is just a huge amount of luck from one step to the next.”

The Lucky One

When he was young, Evander Holyfield’s dream was to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. Considered too small for a heavyweight, some gave him no chance against the big guys of the time. So Holyfield went about it the correct way.
<div id="attachment_215" style="width: 778px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-215" class="size-full wp-image-215" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/RTR1J8AF.jpg" alt="" width="768" height="1003" />Evander Holyfield</div>
First, he unified the Cruiserweight division by defeating the likes of Dwight Muhammad Qawi (WBA), Carlos De Leon (WBC) and Ossie Ocasio (IBF). That was when only the WBA, WBC and IBF world belts mattered. Nowadays, of course, we are talking about the alphabet soup; IBF, WBC, WBA, WBO, IBO, IBC, WBU, WBF and goodness knows what other titles are yet to emerge. The result is that in this day and age, it is pointless and meaningless for boxers to even think about being called undisputed world champions.
Holyfield then went about chasing his dream right from his first fight—a six-round victory over unknown journeyman, Lionel Byarm, at Madison Square Garden, New York in November 1984. He proved his worth as a heavyweight and earned his right to fight for the world heavyweight championship by defeating James Tillis, Pinklon Thomas, Michael Dokes, Adilson Rodrigues, Alex Stewart and Seamus McDonagh. He could and should have then faced the undefeated, undisputed heavyweight king of the time, Mike Tyson.
The only problem was James Buster Douglas knocked out Tyson in the 10th round in Tokyo to claim his title.
So it was Douglas that Holyfield faced and knocked out in the third round at the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in October 1990 to be crowned the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world.
So then, what is Evander Holyfield talking about when he says he is still boxing because his goal is to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world? He is telling anybody and everybody who will listen, including me, that he continues to fight at the ripe age of 48 because he hasn’t reached his goal of being called “undisputed” champion. He says for as long as it takes to become the undisputed champion, he will continue to box. I gave up continuing this line of questioning when I realized I was not going to get anywhere.
Moving quickly along, next question: Do people ask him a lot about the infamous ear biting courtesy of Mike Tyson? This happened in June 1997 at the MGM Grand Las Vegas when Tyson, facing certain back-to-back defeat at the hands of Holyfield, took the easy way out when he got himself disqualified by biting off a piece of Evander’s ear, not once but twice. Holyfield’s answer to this question was a terse NO; no one asks him anymore about that fateful night these days, he says. Holyfield had to be rushed to hospital that night for doctors to attach a piece of his ear. Holyfield does say, though, he has forgiven Tyson and the two last met and spoke a year ago at a function.
Holyfield says he has no connections with Africa but has ambitions of fighting on the continent before finally hanging up his gloves. He thinks given resources and time, African boxing could be great.
In his twilight years, Holyfield has travelled the globe, fighting in Moscow in 2007, Switzerland in 2008, and Denmark in 2011. All his other fights, 57 in total, happened in the USA.
Without revealing much, Holyfield says he has enough business outside boxing and like most people, has lost money in the past in bad investments. He earns a lot from speeches and celebrity appearances.
Holyfield says sometimes he feels like boxing takes too much of his business time. But he loves who he is and still enjoys boxing, and wouldn’t swap careers for anything.
Another pugilist who appears to have had no problem leaving the ring and going into business is George Foreman, the man who lost his title to Muhammad Ali in the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa in 1974. Foreman has since made a fortune selling grills.
Holyfield says whereas he is happy for Foreman, he will still remain Evander Holyfield and does not wish to trade places with Big George. Holyfield beat Foreman on points in April 1999 when he defended his three titles.
All said and done, the man they call the Real Deal, despite fighting way past his sell-by date, will always have his place in boxing’s hall of fame. The only man to have won the biggest prize in boxing, the world heavyweight championship an unprecedented four times, he remains humble and professional. He never enters the ring less than 100% fit and always gives more than 100%.
For one so fit, incredibly, Holyfield was struck down by a heart attack in his mid-30s. He was told by the doctors he would never fight again.
Miraculously, his heart healed completely and he has boxed on, undeterred, for more than a decade.
Fighting spirit has driven Holyfield on. He hopes that big money deal to fight in Africa will come one day, but even for the tenacious Real Deal, time is surely running out.

The Real Deal — I Will Box In Africa  Before The Final Bell

The international art world in which he finds himself is complicated, like the artist himself. South African artist William Kentridge strides confidently in this tough and demanding world, whether he is showing his work in a gallery in Sydney or Paris; featuring in a retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York or the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto; or premiering an unusual opera at the New York Metropolitan Opera or at the Festival d’ Aix en Provence.
<div id="attachment_99" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-99" class="size-large wp-image-99" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/kentridge68_1-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Artist William Kentridge at his &#8216;Arts on Main&#8217; studio, Johannesburg; 11 August 2011 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
The art world requires excellence in execution, but most of all, it requires a unique spark of creativity, of individual expression that sustains itself. Kentridge has been blessed with this. One cannot describe him by any glib epithet. He is South African, yet he is internationally recognised as one of the world’s greatest contemporary artists. In 2009 he was on Time’s 100 list of people who most affected the world. His exhibition, 5 Themes, was second on Time’s Top 10 list of exhibitions in 2009. He has won several international accolades, including the 2011 Kyoto Prize for outstanding contributions to society. Kentridge may frequent the art capitals of the world, but he is firmly rooted in South Africa, in Johannesburg specifically, where he has two studios. One at home in a leafy suburb, where the bulk of his solitary work is done, the other in downtown Johannesburg, in the Arts on Main complex. The latter is a large space, ideal for the expansive drawings used in theatrical performances, and for rehearsals for performance pieces.
At the time of writing this, Kentridge and his team were working on Refuse the Hour a series of live collaborative performances to be staged at the Market Theatre in Newtown, Johannesburg in September. Among them is the lecture performance I am not me, the horse is not mine, which incorporates eight short films, and which is being staged for the first time in Johannesburg. It was inspired by the short story The Nose, written in 1837 by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. Gogol’s story inspired Dmitri Shostakovich to write his opera The Nose in 1928. The main character’s nose takes on a life of its own, and thus opens the discourse around matters of social hierarchy and division of the self. In turn, I am not me, the horse is not mine formed the basis for Kentridge’s interpretation of the Shostakovich opera, which premiered at the New York MetropolitanOpera, and garnered him his “best reviews yet” at its
European premiere at the Festival d’Aix en Provence. So good, in fact that several international opera houses have expressed interest in staging the production, with its massive painted canvasses and video projections. Several large mechanical contraptions are ranged around the studio. Kentridge steps up to one, turns a lever, and the wooden machine which sprouts metal megaphones at its tips, moves. These structures are larger than life, curious. Looking at them in this space makes one aware, in Kentridge’s words, of the process of looking and seeing and making sense of the world.
Against one expansive white wall a film image is projected. It is of Kentridge walking. Behind him walks dancer Dada Masilo. He throws a book from a stack on his head back towards her. She catches it and tosses a book back at him. They continue walking in a timeless loop. It is fascinating to watch. This too will be part of the September performances. While preparations for these performances will take up the next few weeks at the downtown studio, Kentridge spends most of his time working on his own in his studio at home. For the past 18 months, he has been working on a new film and exhibition that will show at the Goodman Gallery in Rosebank, Johannesburg in November.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-98" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/I-am-not-me_02-1024x680.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="315" />
Other Faces is the 10th in a series of animated films that he started working on 23 years ago. The films feature the same characters, and primarily use the same technique. He makes drawings with charcoal on paper. A drawing is done, then filmed with an old 35mm animation camera. The same drawing undergoes “many, many” erasures. Through the animation of these drawings, the artist leads the observer to understand the world as process rather than as fact. Kentridge continues to work on one drawing until the sequence in the film is finished.
He doesn’t work on the series constantly, but comes back to it every few years. The films are invariably about Johannesburg. The themes in this one are about xenophobia and the changing look of streets of downtown Johannesburg. It has to do with the further erasure of the mine dumps and Johannesburg memory. It’s about “one’s relationship to one’s younger self”, Kentridge says. Other Faces brings back the character of Soho Eckstein, who along with the character Felix Teitlebaum, is a constant in Kentridge’s films. It took a while for him to understand that they each represented an alter ego, a “self-portrait in the third person”. Kentridge talks about our collective amnesia as South Africans about the apartheid years. It is always easier to forget about the uncomfortable things. Yet when I look at Kentridge’s work (I was lucky enough to get a preview of Other Faces), I am jolted back into the past.
As lyrical music sometimes juxtaposes with his stark images, deep passions rip around my interior. I am struck by the horror, the poignancy, and the irony of his themes and the beauty of his art He strives to evoke or recreate the strength of a passionwhen first experienced, whether it is anger or distress. He does this so successfully that the viewer cannot remain distant from his work. It engages one on a deep, even subconscious level. The Goodman Gallery will show the film as well as about 30 or 40 drawings that were made in the process of the film. These will be for sale, but the artist won’t talk about value. This is where one of the grey areas of the art world comes in. Artists create art for the sake of creation. They are not motivated by money in the same way as investors and stock market traders are. And yet, there is an art market. And there is always a local art market and an international art market.
So I ask Lisa Essers, the owner of Goodman Gallery, for an estimated comparison of the investment value of a Kentridge work. If, in the late eighties one had bought a Kentridge drawing for around R40 000 ($5 600), today it could fetch somewhere between R1.6 million and R2 million ($235,000-$280,000). Kentridge is one of only a handful of contemporary African artists who are part of international art history, and therefore part of the international art market. Essers says the South African art market is quite far behind the curve as far as other art markets in the world are concerned.
The top international curators handpick the talent that is brought to the art markets, and it’s the collectors who put a price on the work. Often, it is on auction that works bring in the largest amounts, and more often than not it is the collector who benefits, rather than the artist. In brief, there is one essential difference between investing in art and investing in stocks. Stocks are more liquid and offer dividends, whereas an art investment takes a number of years to mature. The joy of investing in art in the short term is about aesthetic pleasure and status. In the long term, the value of a work is determined by a number of variables, one of them being the name and reputation of the artist. That, Kentridge undoubtedly has.

Tag: New York

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