The internet is a web of opportunities. Many look at YouTube for entertainment, but some look at it for business. The highest paid YouTube channel is PewDiePie who reportedly made $12 million last year, according to FORBES. Meet some Africans who are making money online.
<h4>Caspar Lee</h4>
Not many can say they were self-made millionaires by the age of 20. Caspar Lee can— thanks to YouTube.
“At the age of 16, I started making YouTube videos because I was bored and I could use them to procrastinate my homework way more effectively,” he says on YouTube.
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After about a year and two unsuccessful YouTube channels, he started Dicasp (Director Caspar).
“Six months after starting Dicasp, it became fairly popular, so I traveled to England to meet and collaborate with people like Jack and Finn Harries, Sam Pepper, Marcus Butler, Alfie Deyes and Bertie Gilbert. These collabs dramatically increased my following, and I went back to South Africa with one intention: to make a life out of YouTube because there is nothing I love more.”
And it is what he has done. On December 31, 2012, he moved to England. Thirteen days later, he moved into his own flat.
“A huge part of me wanted to stay in South Africa but I am confident and positive I have made the right decision. Living in London allows me to work with some of the best YouTubers in the world on a day to day basis,” he says.
It is this dedication that has earned Lee over 6.8 million subscribers to his channel and over 649 million views.
This is big money.
According to reports, Lee was banking R5 million ($350,000) a year in 2014 and his net worth was estimated to be $2 million in 2015.
Lee says he has no idea how to describe his channel. He posts anything that comes to mind and takes suggestions from his subscribers.
His main source of income is the advertisements before and after his videos. His fame has also stirred him to acting and book writing.
<h4>Martin Lorton</h4>
Lorton started his IT career in 1991 but he lost his job in 2011.
“I had an idea that it was coming but I didn’t expect it to come so quickly,” he says.
It gave him time to tinker and play. He started sharing videos on YouTube for fun.
“I tried work doing solar power, energy audits and heat pump installations but none of that took off. After not being paid for a small solar-powered project and being rather peeved, I decided to try make money out of running my YouTube channel full time,” he says.
It took off.
He has over 2 million views on one video, over a million on another, and many with hundreds of thousands of views. In July 2013, at 18 months, he was earning about $5,000 per month; about $1,900 from YouTube and the rest from a sponsor.
“I have over 21 million views in total across my channel and average about 500,000 views per month with 620 videos… It’s no longer enough to make a viable full-time income from YouTube alone. In the last 18 months, the advertising rates on YouTube have dropped to a quarter of what they were in 2013 and my sponsor did not renew at the beginning of this year. My income now averages about $1,500 per month.”
Lorton has diversified into affiliate sales through Amazon, earns some money from crowd-funding platform Patreon, produces videos for the channels of other companies and sells advertising space on his website.
“It’s very difficult to start out now on YouTube and make a viable income. You really need to stand out among hundreds of thousands of other channels trying to do the same thing. Your chances of success now are really slim compared to when I started out.”
The channel is for people interested in solar power, electronic measurement equipment, and multimeters. He does reviews, tutorials, how-tos, fun testing, experiments, innovative ideas and solutions.
It may take a while for Lorton to start making as much as he used to, but it is $1,500 he didn’t have.
<h4>Nadav Ossendryver</h4>
Ossendryver has always been fascinated by wildlife. As an obsessive Kruger National Park visitor, his favorite pastime was asking his parents to flag down passing motorists asking them what they had seen. Eventually they tired of this and said no. Ossendryver looked to technology to solve his problem.
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At the age of 15, he founded Latest Sightings, a wildlife crowdsourcing site for visitors who are in the Kruger National Park to report the animals and events that they are seeing live. They report their location, time and sighting to Latest Sightings, which in turn broadcasts it on social media.
“At 15 I was naïve and phoned an app development company to ask them to develop my idea. They quoted R200,000 ($13,000) and I said ‘no thanks’ as I didn’t have that kind of money.”
He spent hours on YouTube teaching himself how to code an iPhone app.
“Within three weeks, I had the app out on the App Store. I used social media to grow a community of around 30,000 in three weeks. All of this for only $10 for the domain name for my site.”
Four years later, Ossendryver has one of the top-viewed YouTube channels in South Africa. With over 307,000 subscribers and over 351 million views worldwide, it makes money.
The dream of an eight-year-old boy may make headlines one day.
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<h4>Theodora Lee</h4>
Caspar Lee’s sister, Theodora Lee, is also making money online. She created her self-titled YouTube channel in 2013, and currently has over 230,000 subscribers and 10 million views. She is known for her advice to the young.
“Currently, I post weekly videos on YouTube that aim to uplift and educate people on coming-of-age topics. I like to chat openly about stuff we all go through so that people can feel less alone and find ways to get through their issues and be the happiest they can be,” she says on her blog.
Last year, she won Best YouTube Channel at the African Blogger Awards and was a finalist for Best African Blogger at the 2016 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. She is also working on her debut novel.

YouTube-preneurs

Call him unlucky or dodgy, whichever way you look at it, Zimbabwean financier and moneylender, Frank Buyanga, can fight.
He was trapped in his adopted country, South Africa, after Interpol issued him with a so-called ‘red notice’ in February 2012. This is issued to a person subject to an arrest warrant or one who is required to serve a sentence. He fought,  using the law, to clear his name. He is now free to travel and do business at home.
At the root of it all was his money-lending business in Zimbabwe. Buyanga’s borrowers secured their loans with their homes. Every now and again, defaulters refused to give up their houses, leading to litigation and growing disgruntlement. The government called the loans a sham.
“The police made sure I was absent by arresting me. By me being absent, all these complainants were able to go and lie to the courts, police and judges. To some extent, they were successful because I wasn’t around to defend my position because I was busy fighting a criminal case. There was no element of criminality in any of my transactions,” says Buyanga.
His lawyer Nick Kaufman fought tooth and nail for the matter to be resolved.
“Frank is a colorful character. People don’t like success stories, especially from people who show their wealth,” said Kaufman, an international lawyer who has represented Muammar Gaddafi’s children and the Democratic Republic of Congo leader, Jean-Pierre Bemba, against war crimes, when interviewed by FORBES AFRICA in 2012.
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“It’s a serious defamation of character, when you have somebody who is presumed innocent then his photograph appears with the likes of Osama bin Laden and his henchmen, then that in itself has an effect on a legitimate businessman who is trying to conduct activities,” he said.
Kaufman argued that the red notice offends the Interpol constitution in that it was tainted by political motives and offended the rules of Interpol in that it was essentially designed to coerce a resolution to what was effectively a civil case.
They won.
Buyanga says he later received a two-page letter, signed by the chief law officer in the attorney general’s office, Chris Mutangadura, reversing the notice.
“There was a lot of pressure from my side for the issue to be resolved. The National Prosecuting Authority was incorrectly advised in terms of how they came to the decision of putting me on the Interpol red notice. I think they realized that,” says Buyanga.
Able to travel freely, Buyanga continued with business in the country of his father’s birth.
“If I had it my way, I would sell all my businesses in Zimbabwe and go on holiday for the rest of my life. The problem is that, in that country, nobody can afford my businesses&#8230; I wouldn’t be sticking around there for these headaches,” he says.
In a limping economy, short of hard cash, people are reliant on lending; but problems that caused his red notice still persist.
As you read this, Buyanga has an arrest warrant out for him in Zimbabwe. He also has more than 200 cases before the courts brought forward by people who borrowed money from his company, Hamilton Finance. Most of these are him against “squatters”, as he calls them, living in his properties. He has been labeled a “loan shark” by some, yet others defend his business principles.
“We live in Africa which is still developing… whenever you do something that has some sort of relevance; people automatically look at you like a crook…,” says Kaufman.
Buyanga, the son of a former Zimbabwean civil servant, who was born in London, owns a Rolls Royce, Lamborghinis, an Aston Martin DB9 and others. He lives in a luxury flat at the Michelangelo Towers, in the heart of Sandton, near Johannesburg, and rubs shoulders with celebs, like former Liverpool and England footballer John Barnes.
“Four years ago, I was driving to Durban and my friend and I were following each other driving Lamborghinis. Police stopped us on the [highway] and said ‘can you put me in whatever you are doing, I know you are doing drugs’… this is the perception of people. Sometime ago, I was driving to Harare in an Aston Martin and a cop stopped me and said ‘I am not going to search you, tell me what you are carrying because you probably have gold in there. It’s a mental illness among our people,” he says.
Buyanga has been a subject of investigation for the past 25 years but has never been found guilty for any crime. Yet, if you google him, hundreds of articles of fraud pop up, including an arrest warrant for failure to attend court for conspiracy to fraud in the UK.
“I am not wanted in the UK, because my lawyers have been dealing with that issue. I don’t even know what the merits of the case in the UK are… My lawyers have asked for the Crown Prosecution in the UK to provide them with a file for the facts of that matter which they haven’t done. I have problems even here in South Africa. It doesn’t matter where you are… I follow the constitution in every country I am a resident at,” he says.
“I make sure we pay our taxes, we create employment. Persistence, drive, initiative is the only way I survive in Zimbabwe.”
The entrepreneur says he had his first company, in the UK, when he was 18 years old and he is not about to let anything pull him down.
“My dad and I started Summit Trading, a company that traded commodities. In 1999, I started Fercl Trading, an exporting company to the Middle East and Africa from the UK, at 19 years old,” he says.
In 2000, property was cheap in Zimbabwe because of the political unrest and economic downturn; Buyanga took advantage of this.
“I started buying property because it was cheap at the time. I used to go to auctions and buy and now I have hundreds of properties.”
He is also invested in business in South Africa in mining, finance, infrastructure, and consultancy. He also does business across the continent.
Lawsuits are breathing down his neck, but Buyanga lives to fight another day.

‘The Police Made  Sure I Was Absent By  Arresting Me’

In this home away from home, the grey-haired former British cabinet minister holds forth in a South African hotel – one glimpse of the glint in his eye and you can imagine the long-haired rebel he once was, running riot and giving the finger to authority.
Forty six years ago, Peter Hain was probably the most hated man among white sports fans in South Africa; the country of his birth. He was barely 19 when he earned the moniker ‘Hain The Pain’ and emerged as chairman of the rebellious anti-apartheid campaign, Stop The Seventy Tour, in Britain. With his friends, Hain ran amok, invading rugby pitches and causing mayhem for the touring South African teams between 1969 and 1970. Their campaign helped bring an international ban on the lily-white South African sport teams of yore.
“I was sports fanatic, like a lot of South African boys. I understood that sports could be the Achilles heel of apartheid, because apartheid in South Africa was terrible and was condemned but still (their) cricket team was appearing at Lord’s and the Springboks at Twickenham. Football (was) everywhere and athletics and so on. So, I thought if we hit that then we could really hit white South Africa morale very deeply,” Hain told Forbes Africa after giving a speech in Johannesburg.
Hain graduated from an unruly activist to a Labour Party minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, between 2001 and 2015. Brown was a fellow anti-apartheid activist in 1969.
Back in 1966, his parents, Walter and Adelaine Hain, were jailed for opposing apartheid and were exiled in London. His parents continued their activism, protesting outside the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square. The teenage Hain immersed himself in non-violent, anti-apartheid protests at all sports grounds.
“In 1969, it was a period of a lot of direct action and non-violent protests, students occupying the campuses, protests against the Vietnam War, in 1968 students revolted in America, I was part of that generation. I thought there was no good in standing outside the stadium holding up placards, that doesn’t get you anywhere, so we ran onto the pitch, we stopped the matches.”
That was not all. Hain and his friends booked a young woman into a London hotel where the Springboks were staying. The woman jammed the door locks of the Springboks rooms the night before a test match at Twickenham. In the morning they had to break the doors down. Then the campaigners lured the Springboks’ driver into the hotel. Just a few hours before the kick-off, the protesters stole the bus with half of the team on board. One of the players wrestled with the driver and the bus crashed into other cars. It took the police an hour to unchain the driver who was tied to the steering wheel.
“South Africa was expelled from the Olympics until Madiba (Nelson Mandela) walked out of the prison and became the president. Those South African teams were never South African, they were white South African teams,” he says.
Now, 50 years after his family’s unceremonious exit, Hain was back in South Africa to address the Wits Business School about Brexit; populism, and the European refugee crisis.  Commenting on the thorny issue around the Springboks’ lack of transformation, he says it doesn’t happen overnight.
“You have to have positive action to promote African, colored and Indian players. But you also have to be competitive internationally. And squaring those two is pretty difficult, I would simply say, it’s going to be bumpy, but somehow you are going through a phase of transition. The cricket team is very, very good. Compared them with when I was protesting, it is millions kilometers better,” he says.
The week Hain arrived, the university fees protests raged across South Africa.
“The economy is being neglected by the ANC. The schools systems are horrifying. In the global school performance index out of the 140 countries, South Africa is 138, below Benin and Mauritania, the poorest countries in the world. This is unacceptable. Where is the money going? They have done fantastically in building houses and giving electricity to people who didn’t have under apartheid,” he says.
Hain was sneaked into the Sunnyside Park Hotel in Parktown, Johannesburg, a few miles from the Wits Business School. The establishment that brought him here was under siege from hot headed activists. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

‘Hain The Pain’ All Grown Up

The highlight of my six-month long journalism fellowship in Jersey City, New York, was waking to the madness of the US 2016 election primaries. As an African socialist in New York, the campaign of 76-year-old Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party’s unlikely socialist candidate, alongside Hillary Clinton, had me glued to my television. Sanders had chutzpah as well as frailty. Downtown Jersey City was the hub of electioneering, with youthful socialists of all skin hues, LGBTQ, mavericks and hippies, wearing Sanders badges and wrapped in flags emblazoned: Bernie 2016: Feel The Bern (with red fire). Until the late hours, in beer-fuelled jamborees, we danced in the streets to Fire Is Ours, a song by Hawaiian-musician, Makana. It was also Sanders’ anthem. I want to believe the first four lines got me hooked to the noble campaign. It reminded me of a song back home: “My mother was a kitchen girl, my father was a garden boy…”
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I’ve been lied to. Misled.
Built up by what they said,
Lifted only to be let down,
I’ve been taken for a ride.
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Sanders is an odd creature. I don’t give a fig about politics outside my motherland – Africa – but I couldn’t resist the charm of a man who showed the corporates the middle finger. My Zambian friend, Sam, who had been in the US for seven years, gave me a crash course on this Vermont senator. “Bernie will not be dictated to. This campaign is free of corporate influence,” says the man from Lusaka.
Apparently, our man refused to set up a political action committee that allows corporations and businesses to fund candidates and influence them. I was told Sanders had been a thorn in the posterior of big businesses and Wall Street, as he opted for faceless independent voter’s funding.
On June 7, a cold Tuesday, it was primary elections. I watched Sanders’ supporters accosting and hollering at voters from Grove Street train station, downtown Jersey City, from 6AM to 8PM. From my vantage point, there were no Clinton people in sight. But the opposite was true in other parts of the State of New Jersey – Clinton thumped Sanders by 63.2% to 36.8%. That was the end of his campaign, but the fire didn’t die. In subsequent rallies, Clinton got burned by aggrieved democrats who thought the elections were rigged. Sam from Lusaka was convinced Clinton was an evil politician, hence he never supported her in the first place. He thought Sanders was robbed, I didn’t. It was unthinkable that US elections can be rigged – that’s an African thing, I thought.
Fire Is Ours fizzled out. Now the spotlight shifted to Clinton and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, whom I knew as a businessman who steadfastly refused to disclose his tax returns. I heard he was not legally bound to do so – but that’s something candidates had done in the past nine elections. Sam and I loathed the two candidates from the comfort of our street corner bar.
I was still unconvinced by Sam’s assertions about Clinton, because her husband, Bill, the former president, was a friend of South Africa and was here at the dawn of our democracy.  When he hobnobbed with Nelson Mandela, Hillary was in tow. But it took a Democracy Now! television interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, saying something about emails, to give me a change of heart.
When Assange was asked who was the lesser evil, he retorted: “Well, you are asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhoea?”
Sam and his peers found the reply apt. Both the diseases and the c

I felt the Bern

Felix Sater is not a name that has come up much during the presidential campaign. That he has a colorful past is an understatement: The Russian-born Sater served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight, pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven “pump-and-dump” stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant.
He was also an important figure at Bayrock, a development company and key Trump real estate partner during the 2000s, notably with the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium in New York City, and has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia and subsequently billed himself as a senior Trump advisor, with an office in Trump Tower.
Usually such an association would ignite a political firestorm. From the Clintons’ Whitewater deals to Richard Nixon’s relationship with Florida banker and developer Bebe Rebozo, all the way back to 19th-century industrialist Mark Hanna’s influence over William McKinley, presidential candidates
have long suffered by dint of association.
Sater has been profiled in the Washington Post, on ABC News and in several other outlets. But few have taken much note of him, presumably because Trump has said, under oath, that he barely knew him. “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” he said in a deposition in November 2013. Asked how many times he had ever conversed with Sater, he said, “Not many.” And asked about a previous BBC interview, in which he was questioned about Sater’s mafia connections, Trump said he didn’t recall the interview.
This past December Trump went further: “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it,” Trump told AP, referring questions about Sater to his staff. “I’m not that familiar with him.”
End of story? Not quite. Looking into Trump’s deals, FORBES has uncovered numerous e-mails and sworn statements that indicate Sater was closer to Trump, his organization and his children than previously revealed. Additionally, FORBES has connected three billionaire oligarchs from Kazakhstan to potential deals involving Trump and Sater.
Why does this matter? The story of Sater and the one involving billionaires quietly backing the Trump-Bayrock deals speaks to a key virtue of any good businessman – due diligence – that seems especially relevant for a candidate running on private sector acumen and the need to do “extreme vetting” of those seeking to get into the country.
It wouldn’t have taken much vetting to get the scoop on Sater. FORBES retained a highly regarded global-risk-assessment firm to conduct a background check, using only what was available to it in 2007 – the year the Trump-Bayrock relationship was promoted. The investigative firm (it asked not to be named for fear of political repercussions) discovered many facts that we’re revealing here and others that have come out before, including felony convictions and organized crime ties. Such due diligence on Sater could have been done for $5,000.

All The (Potential) President’s Men

As political unrest rattles one of the world’s biggest minerals producers, foreign investors in the Democratic Republic Congo (DRC) are in a quandary – to stay or pull out?
Peter Leon is a Johannesburg-based mining specialist who helps clients with mine development agreements and resources regulatory issues in Africa.
“It is now clear that President (Joseph) Kabila is stalling in terms of the next presidential and parliamentary elections, now only scheduled for April 2018. Given the concern this has created locally, foreign investors in the DRC obviously have to see how this develops. It is unclear what will happen next and what pressure the EU and the US will bring to bear on the Kabila administration given that the election will be 14 months late. There is growing dissatisfaction, in particular in Kinshasa, as to what is happening, as seen in the recent opposition protests. Uncertainty is never good for investment in any country,” says Leon, a lawyer at Herbert Smith Freehills.
“A lot of South African businesses are involved in various activities in the DRC. A lot of minerals in DRC are exported through South African ports so logistics are a key business for South African companies. The current situation is obviously challenging, but it doesn’t surprise me companies are still there and continue to do business as long as they are able to do so. Obviously if the situation becomes untenable, they will review their position. The fact remains that the DRC is still a good place to do business,” he says.
Thierry Naweji, the chairman of the DRC Chamber of Commerce in South Africa, maintains there’s no threat to business.
“Every country has its own dynamics… we are going through challenges in the DRC based on election organization. I have to advise people to remain in the DRC because it going to be difficult to go back. Do your investment very wisely. This challenge is going to be behind us,” says Naweji.
“There was a budget allocation of $250 million per year for elections, put aside since 2011, so that they can reach a budget of $1 billion after five years. We had a war in the east region of the country. Here we are, looking for a political solution how to get out of the situation,” he says.
According to Naweji, the head of electoral commission, Corneile Nangaa, has said there will be no election in November due to a lack of money. The election is more likely to be held in December 2018, he says.
“The general feeling is not that good for the business at all. They are concerned because we haven’t seen a clear direction yet, whether we are going to have elections in November or not,” says Naweji.
Naweji admits business stability has been shaken; the markets reacted negatively to violence last year. As a result, many investors have not allocated budgets for their operations in the DRC next year, he says.
“Many South African companies on our list don’t know what will happen next year in DRC, so they can’t put in money into DRC. Mining is the biggest concern; we had Glencore suspending mining concessions late last year.”
Naweji is hopeful this too shall pass.
Nqubeko Sibiya, the spokesman for KPMG in South Africa, says companies are not suspending operations, they are monitoring security issues, especially for expatriates. He said feedback from their senior partner in the DRC, Jean-Yves Parant, confirmed smooth operations.
Siobhan McCarthy, of PPC Cement, says the companying is building a million-ton–per-year plant in Kinshasa.
“The plant remains on track to be commissioned by the end of 2016, with cement ready for sale early in 2017,” she says.
Simon Malone is a DRC veteran and retired founder of Metorex, a mining consortium founded in 1975 in South Africa. In 2004, Metorex entered into a joint venture to develop the Ruashi copper mine site in the DRC, and made substantial investments.
“It will be sad day for business if something happens, because the DRC has the world’s best copper deposits but doing business there is so difficult that proposed tax hikes for mining companies will stifle new investments,” he says.
Malone says besides exorbitant taxes, he is confident of the work ethic and the good faith of trade unions.
For now, it’s over to the legislatures to set a date for the elections.

The Angry  Wait

The Kigali City Tower (KCT) in Rwanda’s bustling central business district is a shining example of the country’s rise from the ashes of conflict, the tragedy that killed 800,000 in the genocide against the Tutsi 22 years ago.
The elevators of the high-rise KCT are busy, going up and down without respite as the day progresses.
On the first floor, they open to the Rwanda Stock Exchange (RSE), which on any given day is a hive of activity: young men and women in red blazers indulging in light banter on the trading floor, still using marker pens and dusters on the white boards in front of the reception area.
But this stock exchange of seven staff members is on its way to becoming fully-electronic.
“By the end of the year or even before that,” says the RSE’s Chief Executive Officer, Pierre Celestin Rwabukumba, a Rwandan national, seated in one of the glass offices to the left of the reception.
At 42, Rwabukumba is perhaps one of the youngest stock exchange heads on the continent, but it does not take too long to know this is a man on a mission to contribute to the economic development of the country he came home to 12 years ago after a stint on Wall Street in the United States.
An economics graduate from the University of Buffalo in New York, he decided to return home to develop industry in his own country.
“I decided to chip in,” says Rwabukumba, simply.
And he wears many hats. Also Chairman of the East African Securities Exchanges Association, he is Co-Founder and Chairman of the Kigali Cement Company, which produces, markets and sells cement in Rwanda and neighboring countries. He is involved in investment projects ranging from real estate, poultry and agro-processing to energy.
Yet, when the RSE was incorporated in 2007, in a small office on the fifth floor of the Ecobank building, Rwabukumba was the only employee – all he had was a blank paper and a desk to start with.
“I did everything myself, I was running the whole thing,” he chuckles.
The RSE was officially launched in January 2011 when it moved to its current premises and started with four listed companies. Currently, it has seven (three local companies and four cross-listed from the region) including Bralirwa, Bank of Kigali, KCB Bank, Nation Media Group, Uchumi Supermarket, Equity Group Holdings and Crystal Telecom.
The RSE has a market capitalization of $3.6 billion. The Nairobi Stock Exchange, the biggest in the East African region, sits at $21.24 billion.
“We are small and efficient,” says Rwabukumba.
“We are young, flexible and that makes us different. We try to be as innovative and tech-savvy as possible… We have had a lot of milestones; there is a lot to be proud of.”
The RSE operates in financial markets, corporate finance, investment analysis and portfolio management, international finance and business laws. It aims to lead Rwanda to become a regional financial center.
Robert Mathu, Executive Director of Rwanda’s Capital Market Authority (CMA), echoes Rwabukumba’s optimism.
“Rwanda is a very young economy compared to the rest of East Africa. We had to start from scratch 22 years ago. The country has registered consistently high economic growth,” he says.
In addition to the stock exchange’s efforts, CMA is promoting the capital market by creating awareness among the public, also motivating institutional reforms and development.
Mathu says the services industry is Rwanda’s next avenue of growth, those like financial services, logistics, tourism and ICT.
“It is the plan of Rwanda to use the wider East African market as a platform to access long-term capital and diversify economic growth into the area of services, away from the traditional areas like agriculture,” he says.
“We need to develop skills capacity, but we have a long-term plan and are in the process of developing a master plan.”
And this fits in nicely with Rwanda’s own overall master plan.

‘Small And Efficient’

Competition in Africa’s leading stock exchange market is facing a difficult birth. Next year, South Africa could have three stock exchanges, but the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) has taken the fight against the competition to court.
The Financial Services Board (FSB) granted ZAR X a license to operate on the August 31, paving the way for the first new stock exchange in South Africa for over a century. In a Goliath versus David battle, the JSE filed an urgent application to the FSB Appeal Board to suspend its decision to grant ZAR X a stock exchange license. The Appeal Board dismissed the application.
In a statement, the FSB said Judge LTC Harms, Deputy Chair of the FSB Appeal Board, stated that there was no evidence that the JSE would suffer harm or prejudice.
“He said the JSE’s application was based on the possibilities of harm to the financial system of the country and its investors, which was speculative,” the FSB said.
As ZAR X prepares to launch, Etienne Nel is the man of the moment. He has the mammoth task of taking on Africa’s biggest stock exchange from a small office block in Bryanston, Johannesburg, far from the glamour and glass towers of the JSE in Sandton.
“I’ve basically spent my whole life as a stock broker and in 2011 I co-founded an OTC platform called Equity Express. The explosive growth that we had in that business showed us that there was a very distinct need in South Africa to actually have another stock exchange, away from the JSE, that gives investors another platform to transact on,” says Nel.
In many ways it’s a featherweight taking on a world heavyweight champion. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange is ranked among the top 20 exchanges in the world. ZAR X will have to box clever to survive.
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The competition at the dominant JSE has deep roots. It was formed in 1887 during the first South African gold rush. As the days when people chalked up the trades on a blackboard by hand disappeared, the JSE outgrew its former building in downtown Johannesburg. Today the JSE’s market cap is over a trillion dollars. In the last 20 years it has changed fast.
De-regulation swept away piles of paperwork. June 10, 1996, saw the trading floor become electronic and on July 1, 2005, the JSE became a company in its own right.
Today, the JSE handles over 300,000 trades a day, which are worth $1.4 billion.
As its Capital Markets Director, Donna Nemer is responsible for every trade.
“We just have to make sure that as we add new entrants in the market and, as the market evolves, that we don’t lose the standing that we have in the capital markets as a whole,” says Nemer.
An area that ZAR X believes it could steal a march on the JSE is its trade settlement system. An investor using ZAR X’s T+0 (trade plus zero) settlement model can get their money on the same day. It takes three days for an investor using the JSE’s T+3 settlement model.
“We operate on a T+0 model and there is no real reason for anyone to be operating on T+3 anymore. I mean, Australia is on T+2 and they already have plans to go to T+1. We just decided that T+0 is the way to go,” says Nel.
“Our trading regime that we’re accustomed to is one that is called DVP (Delivery Versus Payment) and in those exchanges you exchange the cash and the trade at the same time. In our case it takes three days and I believe our investors wouldn’t want it any other way,” says Nemer.
So how is this big fight going to play out? Owen Nkomo, the owner of an investment management and stockbroking company, is sceptical about the young contender. Nkomo doesn’t know how ZAR X will achieve its T+0 settlement model.
“I imagine it’s going to be very difficult. If they can do it, that’s going to be a very big advantage. People don’t want to wait for shares once they buy them. There are ways of achieving it and if they do then wow, it will work in their favor,” says Nkomo.
ZAR X’s T+0 settlement model helped win over one of the oldest and largest grain producers in Africa, Senwes, in the South Africa’s North West province.
For the last 107 years, Senwes has been growing its way to a sizeable turnover of about $750 million. It’s the biggest trader of white maize in the world and turns out 1.5 million tons a year. After more than a century of tradition, this company is trying something as new as its business is old. It’s taking a chance by listing on a brand new upstart stock exchange.
“An important factor for us in choosing the model that ZAR X has presented is the fact that the investment risk is low because of the trade plus zero rule that they apply. This means that any investor that wants to invest has to have the money upfront,” says Elmarie Joynt, the Group Legal Counsel and Group Company Secretary at Senwes.
So could the grains of Senwes be the grains of hope for South Africa’s first new exchange for a century, or will ZAR X end up being ground to dust by going through the mill of court cases? Investors across Africa will be waiting anxiously to find out.

Boxing In Africa’s Biggest Market

At’s a regular weekday in Kigali’s lively central business district where single-storied shop tenements, with tables heaving with African artefacts, jostle with gleaming commercial towers. On the arterial street by the high-rise Bank of Kigali, vendors hawk cheap clothing, and shops smelling of dust and sweat sell colorful jewelry and bric-a-brac. Most have a cash-only policy, a far cry from the bank next door, which, in its sprawling air-conditioned halls, doles out digital payment solutions for Rwanda’s consumers.
<div id="attachment_28650" style="width: 616px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-28650" class="wp-image-28650 size-full" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Daniel-Monehin-Division-President-MasterCard-Sub-Saharan-Africa.jpg" alt="" width="606" height="902" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Daniel-Monehin-Division-President-MasterCard-Sub-Saharan-Africa.jpg 606w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Daniel-Monehin-Division-President-MasterCard-Sub-Saharan-Africa-300x447.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Daniel-Monehin-Division-President-MasterCard-Sub-Saharan-Africa-600x893.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Daniel-Monehin-Division-President-MasterCard-Sub-Saharan-Africa-202x300.jpg 202w" sizes="(max-width: 606px) 100vw, 606px" />Daniel Monehin Division President MasterCard Sub-Saharan Africa</div>
But the services-savvy Rwanda is proving it’s ahead of most African countries on innovations, not just in the financial space, but in general. As laid out in its Vision 2020 strategy, it aims to include 90% of its citizens in the financial mainstream. ‘Cashless Rwanda’ are the new buzzwords in the corridors of power.
At the World Economic Forum held here in May, Rwanda’s government signed a deal with Mastercard, the technology company in the global payments industry, to promote the move to a cashless economy. High on Rwanda’s agenda is digitization of school fees and national healthcare claim payments.
At the announcement, Francis Gatare, CEO of Rwanda Development Board (RDB), had said: “We are confident Rwanda’s partnership with Mastercard will be beneficial to the country and its citizens as we are implementing our vision of becoming a knowledge-based service-oriented economy. I believe this can only be achieved as we embrace the fourth industrial revolution.”
The MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth has committed up to $1 million over the next three years to advance economic growth and financial inclusion in the land of a thousand hills.
The country, which famously triumphed over tragedy since the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, is now up for the challenge of embracing technology to overcome concerns like financial literacy and inclusion of the rural poor, who are mostly still reliant on cash.
How big is the cash economy in Africa?
“According to a recent McKinsey report, two billion people remain outside of the formal economy. Various studies confirm over 90% of retail transactions in sub-Saharan Africa are in cash,” says Daniel Monehin, who leads Mastercard’s business across sub-Saharan Africa as Division President.
“In Rwanda, only 42% of adults own a financial account, whether formal or informal… We know that government cannot achieve financial inclusion alone, and neither can the private sector – we need to work together.”
In September, Bank of Kigali, RwandaOnline and Mastercard launched Irembo – an online payment solution to make online payments safer, simpler and smarter.
RwandaOnline developed Irembo, including six government engines, allowing Rwandans to make online payments to any of these government entities through the use of debit, credit or prepaid payment cards. Residents can pay for driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and identity cards. The portal also allows travelers to Rwanda to apply and pay for travel visas.
<div id="attachment_28649" style="width: 760px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-28649" class="wp-image-28649 size-full" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Raghu-Malhotra-MM.jpg" alt="" width="750" height="499" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Raghu-Malhotra-MM.jpg 750w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Raghu-Malhotra-MM-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Raghu-Malhotra-MM-600x399.jpg 600w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />Raghu Malhotra</div>
“At Mastercard, we don’t limit our thinking to ‘traditional’ versus  ‘new’ – we explore what is going to meet the needs of a market and its citizens as there is not one solution that can meet all needs. Rather our focus is on creating a ‘world beyond cash’, developed through partnerships and driven by advances in technology,” says Monehin.
Indeed, Rwanda’s aim for a cashless culture is good news for the city’s new innovators and entrepreneurs.
Afshon Wallace, the 26-year-old founder of 250 Taxi, a web-based transport solutions provider connecting riders and taxi drivers using a mobile app and website, launched earlier this year, says it’s encouraging. Wallace says he caters mostly to expatriates and is witnessing growth of up to 100%.
“The cashless payments ecosystem in Rwanda is still in its infancy. The government’s push for paperless payments through the smart Rwanda master plan has been a great boost and great sensitization programs are being carried out by many players,” says Wallace.
But there are myriad challenges.
“The population lacks the adequate financial awareness on cashless payments. We have had less than three percent of our users asking whether they can use cards.”
Wallace says compared to the M-Pesa service in neighboring Kenya that has seen great success, locally, mobile money is still to catch up.
Yet, products such as Tap&amp;Go (smart cards enabling cashless payments) on Kigali’s public buses are becoming popular.
“We have huge government support when it comes to e-payments,” says Patrick Buchana, the 26-year-old CEO of AC Group, who started Tap&amp;Go in 2015.
David Karuletwa, the Rwandan-Canadian COO of RSwitch, a financial interoperable solutions company, whose passion is financial inclusion using fintech, says Rwanda is primed to be a hub for financial services.
In 2010, RSwitch launched Rwanda’s first debit card issued by banks in Rwanda and later rebranded it to SmartCash card.
“Rwanda and the entire pan-African market are paving the way for financial inclusion using mobile banking and payment solutions,” says Karuletwa.
From paper to e-payments, cash to cashless, Rwanda’s bank notes are moving out of the wallet into the world of www.

From Wallet To www

You don’t have to be there anymore. Last night, 500,000 people rented a roof over their heads in 57,000 cities through the web. Also, 640,000 homeowners and paying guests were matched up by Airbnb, a firm based in San Francisco.
It’s a money maker.
A typical South African Airbnb host, who shares space in his home, can make at least R28,000 ($2,000) a year, according to Airbnb data .
“South Africa is currently the largest market for Airbnb in Africa with 9,400 homes listed. South Africa is becoming an increasingly popular global destination, with the number of people staying in places booked through Airbnb in South Africa increasing by a staggering 257 percent. South Africans are embracing the service as well, with those using Airbnb to travel increasing by 163 percent,” said an Airbnb report last year.
“Airbnb is the worst idea that ever worked,” says Brian Chesky, Co-founder and CEO of Airbnb.
That’s not all.
On the internet, everything is for hire and anyone can make money. It is called the sharing economy. It allows people to make money from under-used things. You can rent out your house while on vacation, or rent out your lawnmower, piano or  car when not using it. It can be anything.
“I travel a lot and whenever I do, I make sure that my entire house in Stellenbosch is rented out for whatever days I would be gone for. I even let them use my helper if they need to and sometimes I even leave them my pets at an additional cost,” says Jean van der Merwe, a sharing economy devotee.
“I also rent someone’s house instead of a hotel when I’m away. This means I get to feel at home and experience the city like a local would at a cheaper fee.”
Van der Merwe says she rents musical instruments for her children, instead of buying.
“Children change their minds. So I just rent to see what they like and when we are done with it, I just return it to the owner.”
The impact is huge. Airbnb in the hospitality sector; Uber in transport; Spotify in media and Poshmark in fashion are leading the way. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), global revenue generated by this growing phenomenon is expected to be worth $335 billion by 2025.
“We’ve definitely seen a shift in consumption habits, specifically as it pertains to music. People are feeling less of a need to own a track of music, which is where Spotify comes into play. They would rather rent or share things instead,” says Amanda Havey, Vice President of On-Air and Brand Creative for VH1.
For Uber, the sharing economy has brought remarkable growth. Since 2013, the online ride-sharing company has taken off in 12 cities in sub-Saharan Africa, with no advertising. Its disruptive nature and low prices has put it on everyone’s lips. It connects customers through a smartphone app that tracks the journey. Leaked financial results show that the company had gross bookings of $3.63-billion in the first half of 2014 alone.
These figures can’t be ignored. But there is a trick to it. It works on trust and reputation. If you hire out your car, you trust someone will bring it back, in good condition.
According to a PwC survey, 51% of people surveyed say they can see themselves being providers in the sharing economy in the next two years, while 72% say they can see themselves being consumers in the sharing economy in the next two years.
“A potential Uber or Lyft driver, weighing the costs of a new car, may choose to spend more for a higher quality, more luxurious vehicle, knowing that it can yield return on investment rather than simply being a depreciating asset. A prospective homebuyer may look into purchasing a three-bedroom home rather than a two-bedroom, mindful that rental income from a spare room can cover the additional mortgage payment,” reads the study.
It sounds almost socialist in nature, but some argue that it leaves a bigger gap between the haves and the have-nots.
In Uber’s case, little by little, the dream of dominating the taxi ranks of the world is crumbling in Africa. For a start, many drivers complain they are exploited. Angrily, they have joined the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) and plan to take the company to the Labour Court – the antithesis of Uber’s free market philosophy. That could be a stumbling block in the sharing economy utopia.
The dispute is over Uber taking a cut from every trip; 20% for UberX and 25% for Uber Black.
“I joined Uber because they promised [we could] be our own boss and get a chance to earn up to R10,000 ($700). We have to work long hours for little income. The cost of living is too much, we’re not benefitting from Uber. They just came to Africa to abuse Africans,” says Joseph Munzvenaga, an Uber driver in Cape Town, who has been driving for the company for more than two years.
Julian Wenn, another Uber driver in Cape Town, says exploitation is an understatement.
“When people are desperate they will do anything, when a firm like Uber has you tuned into the channel of desperation you are bound to be exploited. The sad part is most drivers still don’t realize just how much they are being exploited,” he says.
What may stand up in the court, for the defence, in the sharing economy spirit, is that Uber classifies its drivers as independent contractors and not employees, hence they can avoid paying insurance and other costs companies cover for employees.
Uber spokesperson, Samantha Allenberg, says all drivers are independent operators and are free to work when they want.
“Uber is not a taxi, nor is it a taxi or transportation company. Ridesharing apps like Uber make it affordable and more efficient for riders to get around – especially in places where there is little public transport,” says Allenberg.
This paragon of the sharing economy is also controversial.
The Kenya Taxi Cab Association called for a withdrawal of Uber in the East African country, citing the lack of regulation. The call came on the day violence flared, in the capital Nairobi, as taxi drivers attacked Uber drivers. The association’s organizing secretary, Job Nzioka, says Uber is cheaper because they are not subjected to hefty levies, such as inspection fees, parking fees and operating fees.
In the midst of blood and chaos, investors think that Uber will not just survive, but thrive. They have put their money to drive Uber’s valuation up to $68 billion; much higher than Facebook when it was six years old. Uber has also launched UberEATS, an on-demand meal delivery service powered by its app.
Despite its troubles in Africa, Uber’s ambition is to be ubiquitous, just like many sharing economy companies.
It seems the sharing economy is too big an opportunity to miss.

What’s Mine Is Yours,  For A Fee

Three, two, one…
That was the chilling countdown from over 300 students as they prepared to hurl rocks at private security on the steps of the Great Hall of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).
It came after days of running battles between police and students and eventually spilled onto the streets of Braamfontein in Johannesburg; a bus burned and shops were smashed and looted. The skirmishes got so out of hand that a rubber bullet was fired into the face of a priest. These were scenes reminiscent of the dark days before democracy two decades ago.
There was a nationwide shutdown, from the colonnades of the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the south to the deserted halls of the University of Mpumalanga in the north. For a second consecutive year, angry students, with their #FeesMustFall movement, launched a howl of outrage with demands for free education.
<div id="attachment_5362" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5362" class="size-medium wp-image-5362" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FeesMustFall_Oct10_JC-18-300x206.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="206" />Naitonwide student protest for free education. Using the #feesmustfall slogan.</div>
“We have nothing to lose. At the end of the day, we can barely afford to be here. My mom had to sell her car and downsize her house for me to be here. It’s tough out here and now [Vice-Chancellor Adam Habib] wants to police us if our calls aren’t legitimate,” says Malwande Mhambe, a final year international relations and political studies student.
The protest has escalated since 2015. It has evolved into a call for so-called decolonized universities that students say favour the privileged white middle-class.
“It is something that the youth has been calling for over 20 years now. We want more black students to be able to come to university and to have a better chance of participating in the economy,” says Busisiwe Seabe, leader of #FeesMustFall.
The violent campus backlash this year was sparked by Minister of Higher Education and Learning Blade Nzimande saying ‘those who can pay, must’ at the close of the Fees Commission, a government enquiry set to tackle the issue.
“We strongly condemn the actions of striking students who clearly do not want to see the completion of the academic program. They continue to disrupt and intimidate students who want to continue with their studies and in so doing deny the majority of students their right to higher education,” says Nzimande.
According to Statistics South Africa, university fees have soared by 80% since 2008. Government capped university increases at 8% for 2017. Nearly R300 billion ($21 billion) was allocated to education in 2016, making up 20% of the budget. This is almost double the amount spent on health.
<div id="attachment_5373" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5373" class="size-medium wp-image-5373" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FeesMustFall_Oct10_JC-19-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />FeesMustFall</div>
#FeesMustFall The Tip Of The Iceberg
The students may call for free education, but columnist Max du Preez, argues what has developed is an “extreme race rhetoric”, whereby a “legitimate struggle against whiteness and white privilege is being overtaken by a populist assault on white citizens.”
“It’s time to face the reality. The ‘revolution’ on our campuses is not primarily about university fees any longer. Nor is it about the ‘decolonization’ of the curricula. The subtext, the unspoken agenda, is beginning to look more and more like an effort to create a mini Arab Spring moment and to turn the entire post-1994 dispensation on its head,” Du Preez writes in his column.
Many of the ‘Fallists’, including Wits Student Representative Council’s secretary-general Fasiha Hassan, claim that they are only reacting to police brutality. It is believed that a minority have been fanning the flames of destruction, perpetuated by media coverage.
The rubble and burning debris, on the streets of Braamfontein and on campus, tell their own story.
“Some of these elements, like the Wits protest leader Mcebo Dlamini and UCT’s Chumani Maxwele, are clearly narcissists playing revolution,” says Du Preez.
Western Cape Premier Helen Zille, a former journalist herself, says the protest needs to be tackled head on, without violence.
“We shouldn’t be shooting bullets at kids. We should have our police force with really good shields at all campuses protecting people’s right to study.”
Public policing has overreacted and inflamed confrontation.
“There is no other way out of this. What we have seen is negotiation after negotiation; the goal posts get moved every single time. It’s a deliberate strategy because people don’t want a resolution, they want a revolution and the challenge is you can’t assume people are acting in good faith,” she says.
The fight for free education is fuelled by frustration.
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$400-Million Brain Drain
While the government scrambles to find money, universities say they can’t survive without fees. South Africa faces an even greater threat should universities close down – a crippling R5.6-billion ($400-million) brain drain if graduates are not allowed to finish the year.
The University of Pretoria’s Roula Inglesi-Lotz, Associate Professor of Economics, and Heinrich Bohlmann, Senior Lecturer, believe that the economy stands to lose $400 million if 90% of its 80,000 graduates do not take up positions next year. This is based on an Australian-based economic model designed by the University of Pretoria, in collaboration with global think tank, the Centre of Policy Studies.
Max Price, UCT Vice Chancellor, says if the university does not continue academic activity, it will have to close for the rest of the year. It means thousands of students expecting to work in 2017, including 400 of 4,500 medical students, will not graduate and create a black hole for the economy.
<div id="attachment_5374" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5374" class="size-medium wp-image-5374" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FeesMustFall_Oct10_JC-21-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />FeesMustFall</div>
The University of Stellenbosch is also staring debt in the face. If it does not increase its fees, it will lose R50 million ($3.5 million) in academia and another R80 million ($5.6 million) on accommodation.
Students who have outstanding loans face hard times. Mmakatleho Sefatsa, a 19-year-old second-year education student and her family’s first graduate, is in over her head with R70,000 ($5,000) debt.
“Even if you don’t protest, at the end of the year the university is still going to send you a letter to say: ‘look you haven’t paid for two years, you have to leave’.”
Sefatsa is part of the missing middle – she is not poor enough to qualify for financial aid, and not wealthy enough to pay for her education.
The government plans to restructure fee payments based on students’ wealth: households that earn less than R120,000 ($8,500) a year won’t pay; the government will subsidize the difference in fee increases for the middle class, or missing middle, between R120,000 ($8,500) and R600,000 ($42,500); while the affluent will pay.
Undergraduate tuition fees at Wits can reach almost R60,000 ($4,200) a year.
Back at Wits, classes have continued under duress and with heavy police presence. The university’s spokesperson, Shirona Patel, says they will not give up.
“We need to finish the academic program this year and we need to have exams written. This will be our key focus for the next two weeks. Despite yesterday’s disruptions, we still had about half of our classes going and we’ll keep going every day until we get the academic program back on track.”
UCT, the University of Pretoria, and the Tshwane University of Technology, attempted to keep their doors open. Threats and escalating violence forced them to shut down.  Negotiations appear to have ground to a stuttering, and painful, halt.
“Access to higher education, particularly for the poor is everyone’s concern and therefore all stakeholders must play an active role in saving our 2016 academic program. Ongoing negotiations cannot stand in the way of classes resuming, dialogue is the only answer, and intimidation and violence will never address the legitimate concerns of students,” says Nzimande.
With negotiations stuttering and the academic year coming to an end, time is running out.
Why Free Education Won’t Favor The Poor
Students want free education, but do any of them know what it means.
Nico Cloete, Director of the Centre for Higher Education Trust at the University of the Western Cape, says students are asking the wrong questions.
“There is no such thing as ‘free higher education’. Universities are very expensive. Rather, the issue is who pays what and when? Secondly, international research shows that ‘there is broad agreement among economists of higher education funding that government subsidies are regressive, meaning subsidies favor the rich’. According to Nicholas Barr from the London School of Economics, public universities often argue that low or no tuition fees provide greater equality of educational opportunity, but that the overwhelming subsidy in public universities accrues to students from middle- and high-income families,” he says.
Cloete is one of the academics who submitted documents to the Fees Commission.
“The question to be addressed by the Fees Commission should have been: What is required for a sustainable higher education system with affordability for those who qualify for access?”
Higher education is seen as a ladder into the affluent middle class. The World Bank reports that South Africa has the highest private return to tertiary education. University graduates are three to five times more likely to find a job than high school graduates.
Cloete argues, of the million students who enter school, about 110,000 will enrol at university and 55,000 will graduate after five years. But, 45% of all undergraduates, and 70% of the poor on student financial aid, never graduate.
“So, the issue is not whether there is enough money for free tertiary education, the issue is to fix the undergraduate university and the college systems, provide vastly expanded education and training opportunities, put in place a modern progressive graduate tax (instead of an outdated loan scheme) and stop raiding the treasury. While the Fees Commission and the media are looking at money, the issue is political and systemic.”
The road will be long and arduous. It will take another three years to successfully transform university structures and integrate reform into the national budget, says Price. UCT and Wits also claim that 90% of its students want academic activity to continue and this majority is being held to ransom by a small group of ‘bullies’.
Meanwhile, the frustrated students who bay for change want it now, without paying another cent.

Frustration Fans The Flames

In the build up to the furore over Pravin Gordhan, the African National Congress (ANC) delivered a slap in the face to scores of its biggest names who endured prison and faced death to put the party into power. It spoke of a yawning gap between the principled roots of the party and its current remote and embattled leadership.
Sixty five ANC stalwarts wrote a letter to the General Secretary of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, addressed to President Jacob Zuma and the top five in the leadership, castigating the ruling party and calling for change in way it runs.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5364" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/RZ8F0590-300x286.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="286" />
The letter, in the possession of FORBES AFRICA, was signed by scores of the biggest names in African liberation politics, including three survivors of the so-called Rivonia Trial in 1964 who faced death with Nelson Mandela in 1964. Ahmed Kathrada, Denis Goldberg and Andrew Mlangeni were all found guilty, with Mandela, of sabotage and spent a lifetime in prison.
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Other signatories to the letter:  former Reserve Bank Governor Gill Marcus; former Director General of the Presidency of South Africa Frank Chikane; former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel; former Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin; former Speaker of the National Assembly Frene Ginwala; and former ambassador to London Cheryl Carolus.
“We have observed the ill-begotten wealth among some of our leaders at all levels and the resulting ruinous effects on the organization’s moral and political fabric and on society as a whole,” says the letter.
“We have watched as the leadership of the ANC became mired in a cycle of in-fighting occasioned not by any ideological or political difference but personal interest. We believe that many of the factors outlined have contributed significantly to the political assassinations to which we are sadly becoming accustomed.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5361" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Denis-Goldberg_JC-2-of-3-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
The letter calls upon the president and the leadership to acknowledge its shortcomings, including failing to act against corruption, nepotism and factionalism.
In reply, on October 3, came a standard letter that astonished many party stalwarts.
The letter, signed by Mantashe, asked why the concerns were not coming through the structures of the ANC. It included the following questions of people who had been loyal members of the movement for more than 50 years.
Which branch of the ANC are you currently a member of?
What has caused you to mobilize a group of 65 comrades outside of the structures of the ANC?
Please advise us of who, if anyone, has paid for the costs of the mobilization of your group?
Please provide a brief summary of your understanding of the objectives of the group?
Many of the ANC veterans on the list were flabbergasted at being brushed off in such a manner and vowed to take the matter further; yet another rift likely to cause conflict and ructions in Africa’s oldest liberation movement.

A Slap In The Face Comrade

In 2001, a man looking to buy a bank in Nigeria created a buzz in the financial world. The news caught everyone’s attention because this individual did not come from a wealthy background but was a 32-year-old banker who, through hard work, had become one of the most respected financial professionals in the country. His name was Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede and he was on his way to creating a legacy in Africa.
His journey began while still a boy, in 1971, just after the Nigerian Civil War, when an epiphany struck him as he was stranded at an airport in Kaduna, Nigeria.
“I went to the airport to come home from school and I remember vividly that Nigeria Airways was the only airline available, which was a state-owned monopoly, and they had atrocious services. I got to the airport and I was left to go get my ticket at the age of 11. With all the hustle and bustle, I didn’t get on the plane and I remember standing on the tarmac, with the other losers, with my suitcase and I was crying because I wasn’t on it,” says Aig-Imoukhuede.
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“People ask me ‘why were you crying? Did you think you were never going home?’. But that wasn’t why I was crying. I asked myself, ‘how come there were other people on that plane and I was left on the tarmac?’ I said to myself ‘it would never happen to me again and I will never be left on the tarmac’. I surround myself with people who think the same way, people who are not prepared to be left on the tarmac.”
With this newfound philosophy, Aig-Imoukhuede’s path started to take shape. At the age of 12, that path became clearer when another realization dawned on him.
“We didn’t have to be rich to go to good schools, go abroad on a holiday, or for your father to own a Mercedes-Benz. But with the economy in very poor shape by 1983 and the structural adjustment program by 1984, the ability of a civil servant to keep their family in that lifestyle was greatly challenged. So we had to adjust and I noticed that adjustment and that was the first time it dawned on me that some kids came from parents who were wealthy and certainly my parents were not. I observed that my father’s brother, who went into the private sector, did not struggle. So I made a career decision at 12 that I was going to work in the private sector.”
Aig-Imoukhuede looked at the leaders of the top multinationals at the time – they all had a legal background so he decided to study law at the University of Benin. After qualifying as a lawyer, he joined the legal department of Continental Merchant Bank in 1988.
“I wanted to be an executive director of a multinational. Merchant banks recruited the crème de la crème. I remember after applying, one of the guys who interviewed me told me that he saw something in me. I was posted to the legal department and that is where everything changed&#8230; From that point, people will tell you, that in terms of professional output, I wanted to be number one,” he says.
Aig-Imoukhuede stood out among his peers. When some members of the senior management team were leaving to create a new bank, Aig-Imoukhuede was headhunted to join the team as the youngest member of staff.
“One of the assignments I was given, one year after they took me, was to get a commercial license for the owner of the bank. So, at 22, I did just that. I relished the challenge. I didn’t think there was anything I couldn’t take on. I was like ‘bring it on whatever it is’.”
Aig-Imoukhuede had caught the financial bug; he wanted to move from the legal side of business and immerse himself in the banking game.
“My friends in banking were 10 years older than me and most were assistant general managers. But I brought something to the table, so they tolerated me and gave me advice. Some of them broke away from the bank to start Guaranty Trust (GT) Bank and they said I should come over with them. I went to GT Bank and I was given the responsibility of setting up what will later on be called retail banking or commercial banking. I hadn’t done it before, I had four people in this team and we started with me leading these people. Very quickly we became the most profitable unit in the bank and every three to six months we were revising our targets,” says Aig-Imoukhuede.
With a high staff turnover in the Nigerian financial markets and a culture of poaching at the banks, those who showed loyalty were able to climb the corporate ladder. Aig-Imoukhuede used this opportunity to work in many areas of the bank, including the treasury, financial control and strategy departments. By the age of 32 he was an executive director who was responsible for running the bank in the absence of the managing director and deputy managing director.
His rapid rise, he says, is down to self-belief.
“Some people call it arrogance and I say no, it is just simply confidence. I believe if I set my mind on something… I can do it.”
“I also had this sense to prove that Nigerian professionals were as good as banking professionals or financial professionals anywhere in the world. I didn’t want to be held by Nigerian standards. So if I look at something like a product or an event or a team of people, say I was running the investment bank in GT, I would say how does the investment bank in JPMorgan function and I would say this is how my investment bank must function,” he says.
Aig-Imoukhuede enrolled in a three-month management program at Harvard University to figure out his next move but he would find the answers he needed in the pages of a book.
“My late brother-in-law who had just finished an MBA at Harvard had a conversation with me and I told him I was not happy professionally and it was difficult to come to terms with that because I had just been made executive director and I was the youngest at the time and happily married to his sister, so why would I not be happy?”
“He gave me this book called Buyout, by Rick Rickertsen, who had left Harvard Business School a few years before I went in for this program. It’s a book written for professionals and there was a paragraph that says if you are the type of professional that wants to continue working for other people and help them build their worth, where you get your nice salary and bonuses, then this book isn’t for you. But if you are the type who wants to get into the game and you want to work for yourself then this is for you. After reading the book, I said I know what I want to do; I am going to buy my own bank.”
Aig-Imoukhuede looked at how he would do this and decided he was not going to do it alone.
“Very quickly in life, I determined that there are two types of people you meet, people who enable you and people who disable you. People who disable are not bad people; it is just someone who doesn’t impact you in a way that helps you succeed. Somebody who enables you is somebody who, by your interaction with that person, actually gives you leverage to step up. By the time I left university, I didn’t have time for people who disable me. I also began to build a portfolio of enablers,” says Aig-Imoukhuede.
One of those enablers was his business partner Herbert Wigwe. The pair initially met in 1989 when Wigwe was a credit officer and later on in 1991 when they worked together at GT Bank.
“He was my closest friend in the bank and the professional colleague I most respected and I believe vice versa. So in terms of selecting a partner, he was the best person I could choose. I told Herbert, ‘listen we are doing this and we are doing everything we need to run a bank and the only way we can get that reward is if we are risking our own capital. So let’s get out and buy a bank, let’s do it together’. So Herbert’s entrepreneurial juices started running. We didn’t resign immediately, we were still giving GTB 100 percent, and nobody knew and we were talking to owners of banks,” says Aig-Imoukhuede.
Initially, Aig-Imoukhuede was only interested in banks that were doing well but the inflated prices made them rethink their strategy. At the time, a lot of banks were struggling and it didn’t take long for these young Turks to find one that was suitable for them.
“I had never [considered] Access Bank and it was never an institution I had an interest in. Somebody said this bank had done a public offer looking to recapitalize and they had not been doing well therefore 51% of the bank was up for grabs if you could raise the money. We looked at it and, with limited due diligence, we said ‘fine we can do it’. It took everything we had; we borrowed money and put it together and invested it,” says Aig-Imoukhuede.
Now that they owned a bank, the entrepreneurs had to build trust.
“First of all, the acquisition was deemed to be hostile. We were working somewhere and we were young and we were not the children of rich men, we were 34 when we started and in the eyes of the public, when they knew the full story, all hell broke loose and it wasn’t very easy.”
While trying to gain credibility with the public, they also had to win the votes of the board.
“I delivered a presentation I had been practising for one week. We hadn’t slept in maybe four days. We came up with a transformation agenda and we convinced the board. We presented our track record and the fact that we were risking our own money and everything we had on this venture, so there was an alignment of goals between what we wanted to do, our personal aspirations, and what the bank needed.”
With a resolution signed, Aig-Imoukhuede was appointed Managing Director and Wigwe Deputy-Managing Director. They could now start to transform Access Bank into one of the top banks in Nigeria within five years.
The impact of the bank’s new owners was obvious in just one year. According to Access Bank, the bank doubled its balance sheet, with profit before tax more than the cumulative profit made by the bank in the previous 13 years. The bank’s shareholders fund today stands at over N430 billion ($1.4 billion) with an expanded shareholder base of over a million domestic and foreign investors.
Aig-Imoukhuede attributes the success to three things.
First was the vision.
“Initially our vision was to transform the bank into a world-class financial institution. The idea of this horrible institution taking on the renowned banks was mind-blowing and our mission was to go beyond the ordinary and deliver the perceived impossible and quest for excellence.”
The second factor was the people. Between 2002 and 2012 Aig-Imoukhuede interviewed every person the bank recruited, ensuring they hired the best of the best. Then, finally, the timing was perfect.
“I was in GT Bank representing the bank for the interaction with the government. I could see from what President [Olusegun] Obasanjo was doing that Nigeria was going to enjoy an economic renaissance that was going to be phenomenal. I said to myself if I am going to buy a bank, I am going to do it before these changes in government take off, because otherwise the train would have left the station and it is not that you can’t do it, but it would be much more expensive and difficult to do it if you got your timing wrong.”
With his objectives achieved, Aig-Imoukhuede stepped down as CEO of Access Bank in 2012. He wanted to try something new.
“I am so entrepreneurially driven and not just in the sense of making money, but I knew I would get bored eventually. Also from the perspective of managing an institution as CEO, I don’t think anybody can successfully manage a business beyond 15 years; you will begin to make more mistakes than you should. You will begin to experience diminishing returns. I think a CEO owes the responsibility to his stakeholders to leave at the top of his game. And I knew 15 years would be the maximum. The third reason was that there was a requirement that had been put in place by the central bank that, after 10 years as CEO, you had to leave”, he says.
Aig-Imoukhuede needed to figure out what life after the bank would look like. He knew it had to involve helping and transforming people.
His next venture combined his belief that nobody should be left behind with his vision to build something that lasts for generations. This led to him founding Coronation Capital, a Mauritian-based private equity investment management and advisory company.
“I like sustainability and I don’t like one-hit wonders, things that come and go or a shooting star. I believe in generational institutions, it has to be sustainable and something that would last and leave a legacy.”
“In Coronation Capital you have people that we have told ‘this is how we do it, look at the Access Bank story and let’s find out if there are any more opportunities’. So, when we find the opportunity, we see if we can come up with any compelling stories and then we look at the vehicle we invest with and we attract the people to that investment. We call it the Coronation way,” says Aig-Imoukhuede.
One of those opportunities is Wapic, a company that Coronation Capital is trying to turn into an insurance giant. It is currently the second fastest growing insurance company in Nigeria, says Aig-Imoukhuede.
Aig-Imoukhuede believes that efficient management of the capital market is the only way for Nigeria to become an advanced economy. As the current President of the Nigeria Stock Exchange, Aig-Imoukhuede is well placed to develop the country’s capital market.
“If you are worth $1 million, it will be represented by financial assets of some sort which you will keep somewhere. It could be your pensions or your savings account and you earn and continue to build. If I am someone in Kogi State who needs money to build a factory, I am not going to be able to find you and you are not going to be able to find me to get access to that $1 million. So the capital markets create the infrastructure by which the sources and users of these financial resources interact. The more developed the financial markets are, the more developed the economy becomes.”
Having just turned 50, Aig-Imoukhuede is  launching the Africa Initiative for Governance (AIG) to attract talented people to the public sector.
“I have had a front row seat and seen how the public sector works and I know its weakness and what is clear to me is simple, whenever you have gifted people in the public sector, just like you have gifted people in the private sector, transformation takes place. The difference is that in Africa every gifted person is going into the private sector and nobody is going into the public sector. So I am dedicating resources towards a scholarship and a fellowship, which we have signed with Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government who have a fantastic one-year post graduate program, called the Master of Public Policy (MPP).”
Those given scholarships for the MPP course are required to work for the public sector in their respective African countries for five years.
Aig-Imoukhuede is humbled by how far he has come. Spending time with his wife and three children is a priority for him but is not ready to relax yet. For Aig-Imoukhuede it is all about building a legacy and creating an advanced economy in Africa.

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‘When We  Started,  All Hell  Broke Loose’

It was a night to remember for Kagiso Rabada on a chilly July evening as Cricket South Africa handed out their annual awards. Not only did Rabada claim a virtual a clean sweep of all the individual accolades, taking a record six awards, he became the youngest cricketer to be named the best in the country.
Less than 12 months earlier he was still on the brink of a dramatic introduction to international cricket, a virtual unknown with plenty of promise but untested at senior level. His rise to stardom has been impressive as the 21-year-old from Johannesburg is now firmly fixed as the next hope for the game in South Africa.
His first international summer saw him bowl the second best figures by a South African in test cricket, claiming 13 for 144 against England at Centurion in the last test of a disappointing series for the Proteas.
His One Day International (ODI) debut delivered a return of 6-61 against Bangladesh, including a sensational hat-trick in a dream start.
If what he produced in his first year with the national sides is anything to go by, South Africa can only savour what lies ahead.
It is not just his raw pace that has batsmen hopping around the crease, but his skill with the ball. He can swing it both ways and also has an unerringly accurate yorker that has already got him a lot of wickets.
As the test team now heads to Australia for a thorough examination of their credentials and then host the mercurial Sri Lankans over the holiday period, so the scrutiny on Rabada will become much more marked.
The trip to Australia will be particularly taxing as the game is played as much in the mind as on the pitch Down Under and how he handles the verbal pressure from the home team and the local media will be intriguing.
He is on the cusp of taking over from Dale Steyn and Vernon Philander as the country’s leading bowler, having already led the attack when the pair were absent through injury against India late last year and England at the start of the new year, and then playing a complimentary role as first change to them as South Africa swept aside New Zealand in their brief series in August.
<div id="attachment_5435" style="width: 236px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5435" class="size-medium wp-image-5435" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-508738696-226x300.jpg" alt="" width="226" height="300" />PORT ELIZABETH, SOUTH AFRICA &#8211; FEBRUARY 06: Kagiso Rabada of South Africa bowls during the 2nd Momentum ODI between South Africa and England at St George&#8217;s Park on February 6, 2016 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. (Photo by Gareth Copley/Getty Images)</div>
“A diamond,” says his first coach Ray Jennings, who brought him through the development ranks with a “don’t pull any punches” approach that many youngsters would have bristled at but Rabada seemed to revel in.
“He was always going to be something special but it took a lot of work,” Jennings says in his brusque manner. “The thing about Kagiso was he was prepared to learn and work.”
So much so, says Jennings, that Rabada’s appetite for specialist knowledge has become more and more intense the more he has succeeded.
“During the England series, he kept seeking me out to say we must have dinner, he really wants to speak to me. He is the kind of guy who wants to extract as much information as he can, to analyse what is going wrong and what is going right. I didn’t want to be seen to be interfering so I kept telling him I was busy, but he kept persisting. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
Rabada went to play briefly for Kent in county cricket in mid-year rather than the much more lucrative Indian Premier League because of the lessons the English wickets could offer his bowling.
Rabada’s performances mark him out as already a roaring cricketing success but his profile makes him much more than just a successful test and limited overs player. Along with batsman Temba Bavuma, he represents the future pool of talent for South African cricket as the transformation speeds up the process that makes the national teams better reflect the population make-up.
Unlike Makhaya Ntini, who was pulled from rural obscurity, Rabada is the product of the emerging middle class. His father, Mpho, is a doctor and sent his son to St Stithians College, an exclusive private school in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs.
“His first love was soccer,” jokes his father, who admits being amazed with the steady progression of achievements Rabada has made since emerging as the star of the South African team at the under-19 World Cup two years ago.
That his son is now a poster boy for the future of the game has not gone unnoticed in the Rabada household. “He does realize what his achievements do to inspire people, although his top aim really is to play as best he can.”
For Rabada himself, the last 12 months have whistled past almost like a dream.
“Ever since I was young I wanted to play for the Proteas, and it is amazing to be playing with the guys who were my heroes as a kid. It’s so cool to be with them. I’m just being myself. I don’t want to be like anybody else,” he said in one of the early press conferences on tour when he was put up to be interviewed by the assembled media.
This is usually a daunting prospect for players but every time he has done it since, Rabada has reflected a genuine enthusiasm and a level-headedness than tempers the heighted attention he has been subjected to.
“One matures quickly on tours because you spend a lot of time alone in a foreign environment and have an opportunity to find yourself. Of course I’m learning from guys like Dale Steyn but mostly I’m just being me,” he added. “I love this job and I wouldn’t want to do anything else.”
For captain AB de Villiers, Rabada is the real deal.
“He’s shown the maturity of a guy with 100 test matches and the pace of one who’s played in just one or two. It’s difficult to find all the right compliments but he has impressed us all. He is the future.”
That future is bright.

Tag: November 2016

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