Outside Sandton Convention Centre a handful of protestors declaimed his name; inside former British Prime Minister Tony Blair strolled up to the microphone, in the glare of stage lights, for one of those moments politicians refer to as emotional docking—that connection with the mood of an applauding audience.
“It’s amazing how people start being nice to you once you stop being prime minister, except for archbishops!”
<div id="attachment_1228" style="width: 213px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1228" class="wp-image-1228 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/144649913-203x300.jpg" alt="" width="203" height="300" />Archbishop Desmond Tutu</div>
Most people laughed, if slightly nervously, to the reference to the refusal of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to speak alongside Blair because of the Iraq war in 2003. One bearded heckler in a suit at the back, shouted something at Blair, before storming out in high dudgeon.
“A bit of protest there, just to make me feel at home,” quipped Blair, ever the smooth one.
Blair hasn’t changed that much, apart from the grey hair, since the last time I interviewed him on a freezing December morning in 1985. That was in the rugged industrial town, Spennymoor, in the heart of his Sedgefield constituency in the Durham coalfields in the north east of England, which I covered for my evening newspaper. I remember the generous grin and the bright eyes; he was a bit like your elder brother’s best mate. On that day, we spoke of plans to create jobs in a region where unemployment had replaced coal mining. The word was even then that he would go far and he had the look of a man with a winning lottery ticket. As far as I know, people still do not have enough jobs in Spennymoor.
Twenty seven years on and Blair is a world name, with that laddish charm polished to perfection. He is understood to earn $300,000-a-time for gigs like the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Sandton on August 30. On this one, he needed his boyish charm and nerve amid days of hostile headlines. After all, Archbishop Tutu wanted Blair hauled before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, rather than a stage in Sandton, for his hand in the Iraq war. Writing in Britain’s Observer newspaper, the Archbishop said: “The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain, fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand—with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us.”
The Archbishop was referring to the phantom weapons of mass destruction, the grounds for war that could launch an attack on London within the hour, which nine years later have yet to be found in Iraq.
If Blair were a boxer, he could slip a punch; if he were a footballer, he could ride a tackle with ease. The former prime minister sprinkled his speech with safe statements like: “Democracy is not a way of voting, it is a way of thinking.”
Then there were the anecdotes. Blair said he was a technophobe and was not allowed a mobile phone while in office and got one only when he stepped down in 2007. The day after, he sent an SMS to a friend, with his new phone, forgetting that it did not yet carry his name.
“My friend sent me back message saying: ‘Sorry, who are you?’ I thought, ‘It has taken less than 24 hours!’”
The audience laughed along, but went quiet when Blair answered questions from the floor over why he sent the British Army into Iraq.
“I took the decision in good faith and I didn’t take it because I didn’t believe this was a right thing to do I knew it was controversial decision, but I thought it was right. In the end, that is what we elect leaders to do&#8230; I never regret removing a brutal dictator, who was a threat. The intelligence reports are on the website before you ask me questions go and read them and see what I was given at the time,” says Blair.
<div id="attachment_1227" style="width: 214px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1227" class="size-medium wp-image-1227" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/000_DV1182822-204x300.jpg" alt="" width="204" height="300" />Tony Blair</div>
Then there was the question about how he felt that protestors outside the building wanted to make a citizens’ arrest.
“Why don’t they go and protest against the people doing the killing and the bombing and the suicide attacks,” says Blair to a ripple of applause.
There was more applause earlier in the day for Pravin Gordhan, the South African finance minister, and his call for a fight against corruption.
“Let me tell you very clearly, from where I stand and what I see, this is a disease our hospitals are not going to solve. It requires a set of decisions we need to make morally. In South Africa, when you see a bribe it is not the head that must turn, it is your gut. With your guts, you can do something about it,” says Gordhan.
“In South Africa we have too many pretenders who say something in public and another in private. We need to act… We have to fight greed, we have to fight conspicuous consumption… It is the honest people who must come to the front line&#8230; To quote the words of Nelson Mandela, ‘A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination’.’’
One of the surprise packages was former world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, who proved to be a chirpy chap when he is not frowning across the chess board. He opened by congratulating the South African cricket team for beating England, even though he confessed to not knowing the rules.
Kasparov told us his mother put a sign over his bed, when he was a child, saying: “If not you, who else?”
It seemed to work. Kasparov learned from his father how to play chess by the time he was five, by the time he was 12 he was Russian champion and on November 10, 1985, he became the youngest world champion ever—a title he held for 20 years.
In the 1980s, computer pioneers, IBM, pitted its Deep Blue chess-playing computer against Kasparov.
“I won the first match and the second one and then IBM decided to retire Deep Blue. I always wondered what happened to it, I understand it is directing traffic in Philadelphia!” says Kasparov.
The former grandmaster is now a campaigner for democracy on the chess board, that is Russian politics. He told the conference how on, August 17, he was arrested outside the trial of the Russian punk rock band, Pussy Riot.
“You had young girls in an empty church, I stress that, praying to the Virgin Mary to drive Putin away and they got two years in prison. I was there giving an interview to the press and they came to take me away. They threw me in a van and used violence to keep me inside,” says Kasparov.
“The difference between chess and politics is, in chess we have fixed rules and an unpredictable result, in Russia we have the opposite.”
Kasparov hopes chess, with its patience, analysis, strategy and concentration will take the imagination of the young away from video games; like democracy in Russia, this too is a dream.

Blair Tutu Smooth For Words

The year was 1994. South Africa’s political climate was changing; a new president promised democracy and opportunities for all. For Romeo Makhubela life was just beginning. After years of teaching, he decided to register at business school. He put down the chalk and left the classroom, and today he is the CEO of a 100 percent black-owned investment company, a world away from high school teaching.
This epiphany turned him into one of the country’s emerging financial services providers. The reason Makhubela was in the classroom in the first place was no surprise. For most black South Africans at the time, that was the highest you could reach. You could either be a policeman, nurse or teacher.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like teaching. He had studied for a Bachelor of Commerce degree and topped it with a teaching diploma, which led him to become a commerce teacher for final year students, in the North West province of South Africa.
“The most exciting part as a teacher, especially a high school teacher, is when the [matric] results come out, and you realize that the investment that you made [has paid off]. I remember one year ‘I’ had a lot of distinctions and for me that was so fulfilling because you could see people going to university, some are now working and you know that you were part of that product,” says Makhubela.
“I started teaching in 1990… Around 1992 or ’93 I started noticing that a change was coming in South Africa and clearly businesses would start transforming and there would be huge opportunities, especially for people who had a Bachelor of Commerce qualifications,” says Makhubela.
It was never easy, amid the political turmoil of his country. During his university studies, Makhubela was also politically active.
“I matriculated in 1983. Things were quite tough at that stage; I think the upheavals were starting… It was terrible in those days and I had [to take] a break in ’84, then in ’85 I started doing my Bachelor of Commerce degree ’till around ’88. There was one year where we didn’t write exams because of the [political] problems.”
“Politics then was something that you just couldn’t avoid because there were a lot of injustices in this country… Especially at [university] because you started seeing the world and seeing that certain things weren’t correct… The way some lecturers conducted themselves, I can tell you one example; [In our first year] the one [lecturer]… just came and said ‘Look this is such a big class, I’m not used to teaching [so many people] and I can assure you that in third year 80 to 90% [of you] will be gone’. And you sit down and say ‘How could you make such a statement?’.”
Today, he is no longer in politics; he sits at the head of Vunani Limited. The eight-year-old company was launched in 2004 following a management buyout from African Harvest. In 2007, the company listed on the JSE AltX Exchange raising R175 million ($21.4 million). They currently have offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town, in South Africa and Harare, Zimbabwe.
He worked his way to the top, starting out at an insurance company as a graduate trainee, then he became a financial analyst for an asset management company and after around six years in the asset management field, he was recruited as chief investment officer for a life insurance company. And now he is heading Vunani Limited, an emerging company that wants to leave its mark as South Africa’s leading black-owned financial services provider. Vunani Limited is listed on the JSEAltX; it is currently listed 19th in the financial services sector, with R204.5 million ($24.96 million) of market capitalization. The company has a diverse portfolio, which consists of Vunani Fund Managers; Vunani Capital; Vunani Technology Ventures; Vunani Securities; Vunani Capital Markets and Vunani Properties. Now it is going up against the best in the financial services industry and is forging its own way. One challenge they, like many other companies, are facing is growing the industry.
Makhubela’s focus now is on getting his countrymen to start putting away more for a rainy day.
“One of the biggest gripes about South Africa is that if you look at our saving ratio, it’s quite low and clearly that tells to the culture or the environment from which people [come from]. My sense is that, maybe in the white culture it’s much better because at least that kind of information was instilled but in the broader black community… the kind of savings that you generally see within [them] would be pension funds, which is forced, because when you work you get your pension fund automatically.”
Last year, South Africa’s minister of finance, Pravin Gordhan, said that South Africa’s savings rate was low and that it “needed to increase its saving rate if it were to become the ‘China of Africa’”.
Makhubela agrees.
“Savings are critical… look at the Chinese for example. The savings rate there is extremely high—but you could argue that it’s influenced by a number of facts because they don’t have a proper social system… But that helps because if you look at the global crisis we are experiencing now… the Chinese have played an important role in terms of lessening the impact of the global crisis because of their savings.”
According to The South African Savings Institute (SASI), South Africa is the lowest ranking member of BRICS when it comes to saving.
“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) statistics show that since 2001, compared with its BRICS counterparts, SA’s rate of national savings has remained flat… In China, gross savings are over 50% of GDP, in Russia 30% and Brazil over 18%. In South Africa that figure is about 16.5%… It’s 72nd in the world behind Algeria (3rd), Morocco (25th), Nigeria (27th), Zambia (32nd), Namibia (34th), Botswana (42nd) and Lesotho (62nd)”.
The poor argue that saving is the last thing on your mind when you are living from hand-to-mouth, while the middle class chooses to splash out, so where does that leave the future of the fund management industry?
Makhubela says that when the rate of unemployment decreases, and more people start earning and being forced to save, then the tide will change. But while there is no growth in savings right now, Makhubela and his team are looking beyond borders, with Zimbabwe under their belt, they are also currently setting up in Namibia.
From marking exam papers to signing off millions, Makhubela is trying to teach one of the greatest lessons in life—how to save even when it hurts.

Trading The Classroom For The Boardroom

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

It proved a hellish journey to see Pascal Dozie at his Lagos office on a Tuesday afternoon. The nightmare ride across the city, through dense traffic, bumped along to the parp of angry horns and the lurch of battered vehicles. Everyone seemed to veer towards each other in the fight for inches. It is hot and everyone is bothered.
To make matters worse, the pink-shirted traffic police stepped in to slow the lumbering vehicles even more by pulling over cars—including ours—with what looks like trumped-up charges. At one point, the traffic cop and our driver are hurling rapid fire insults at each other inches from my nose. Bizarrely, the traffic cop—who was far from pretty in pink—kept walking away, as if the fight was over, before turning on his heel to launch another finger-jabbing tirade. I felt like a monk in Gomorrah.
“They just want money,” our driver scowled as we drove off.
Then we arrived at the gate of Dozie’s business to find the rain had left a puddle wide enough to breed fish in. The wet welcome ended a torrid hour on the road with a metaphor of which writers dream. The failings of Nigeria, that Dozie wants to put right, lead right up to his door.
“Lagos is the only place in the world where you can utilize all the faculties God gave to man,” chuckles Dozie as we stand in his plush, air-conditioned office.
This is the office from which Dozie commands his investment and finance empire, which has made him one of the richest men in Nigeria. He is a gentleman, in the literal sense of the world, who loves Mozart and Bach, a man who is close to his roots and his family of five sons and 10 grandchildren.
“We didn’t see my father that often when we were growing up but when he came home to see us it was really quality time. We would sit outside for hours while he told us stories and sang us the songs of his ancestors,” says Uzoma Dozie, one of his sons, with a smile.
The polished office contrasts starkly with the dog-eat-dog poverty and chaos a stone’s throw away in the streets of Lagos. After half a century of business, as his own boss, Dozie could be forgiven for shutting out the problems of Nigeria behind his tall gates and high walls—but he says he can’t. He believes crumbling infrastructure and corruption are Nigeria’s heaviest shackles and hopes entrepreneurs will help shrug them off.
“Many people see Nigeria as an entrepreneur’s gold mine—the opportunities abound. Every single disadvantage you see—the traffic and the infrastructure—is an opportunity, but you can only change once the government goes hands-off,” he says.
I counter this with the words I heard Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni utter a few years back, in Kigali, that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to keep government out of business. Of course, Dozie disagrees.
“In Nigeria, we have been moving towards this for a long time. If the government had not been hands-off they would not have a number of major cellphone companies in the country. Some of them got their operating licences on the same day. This hands-off approach has helped us leapfrog communications technology,” says Dozie.
“We won’t get anywhere until we, in Nigeria, can say anything can be done in 24 hours.”
The other big concern for Dozie is corruption. The multi-millionaire says he has been campaigning against it since the dark days of military dictatorship under Sani Abacha.
“This is the only country in the world where people ask what business are you in and you say politics.”
“The clock is ticking, as massive strikes in January showed Nigerians,” says Dozie.
“Nigerians are waking up and the civil society in the country is coming alive. Nigeria is a country that is skewed towards the youth.
The Blackberry generation is using their Twitter and Facebook and you should see the things they are writing. In January, this country was besieged by angry youth when the government removed the fuel subsidy. Nobody could go to work. It is no longer business as usual and things are changing. Look at the number of probes into corruption, before it would have been covered up, but now it is no longer easy to cover corruption.”
Outspoken and salty, Dozie has reaped a fortune through his work and wits on a long and difficult journey from Owerri in Imo State. This is where he was born, the son of a country court interpreter, on April 9, 1939.
“We did not have many modern facilities, but we had the village set up. If you were hungry someone would feed you. If your neighbor caught you doing something wrong they would punish you. When your parents found out they would talk to the neighbor to make sure they had given you a proper spanking. Modernity has changed all of this.”
Along with a generation of idealistic Africans, from newly independent nations, Dozie headed for Europe to drink from the fountain of knowledge.
Dozie went to the London School of Economics where he rubbed shoulders with Mick Jagger, the louche singer who was soon to drop out of college to form the Rolling Stones. Legend has it that Jagger stood up during an economics lecture and shouted: “Eureka!” before walking out to a life of rock and roll.
In reality, it was less dramatic. Jagger studied Economics, British Government, Economic History and Political History, earning mediocre grades. He hedged his bets, by studying in the library, before leaving in 1963 when the Rolling Stones cut their first record.
“We thought he was different. We were very conservative and he had long hair. Me, as an African, coming from Nigeria, I couldn’t believe he was leaving what he was doing to go off and play music, it was against the grain to me,” says Dozie.
Dozie wasn’t the only one to wonder.
“My father was furious with me,” Jagger told a journalist decades later.
“But I really didn’t like being at college. It wasn’t like it was Oxford and it had been the most wonderful time of my life. It was really a dull, boring course I was stuck on.”
Unlike Jagger, Dozie earned his degree in economics and followed it up with a Masters in administration from City University in London in 1963. He went to work in London and consulted in Croydon where he worked at the National Economic Development Office.
Dozie wanted to go home, but his people, including his two brothers in the army, were fighting the Biafran War against Nigerian forces in the cause of secession for the Igbo people. It was a bloody war waged between 1967 and 1970 that cost 30,000 Igbo lives and those of an estimated one million civilians.
“It was a very traumatic period for us. Bombs were going off everywhere and you didn’t know what was the truth. People were being shunted from one place to another and at times I didn’t even know where my own mother was,” he says.
It meant Dozie had to take a job in Uganda until the war was over. When peace came, he moved home in September 1971, at the request of his mother, who was by then in poor health.
In Lagos, Dozie set up his own consultancy, the African Development Consulting Group. He never worked for anyone else again. In the early years, he was fortunate enough to gather consultancies for the big guns like Nestlé and Pfizer. In his spare time, he wrote about economics for the respected publication Business International.
In the 1980s, the road to real riches opened up thanks to a simple idea. Dozie had noticed traders from the remote villages in the east of the country, where he grew up, faced the problem of carrying huge bundles of cash when they trekked to Lagos on business.
“Sometimes they would be waylaid by rogues on the road,” he says.
Dozie pioneered electronic transfers in Nigeria so traders could transfer their cash to Lagos instead of having to carry it. It saw the creation of Diamond Bank, which opened its doors in 1991.
“The first customer was my wife,” laughs Dozie.
The bank started from a third floor office in Victoria Island with 20 people and $5 million.
“The assumption was we were going to come by money easily—it wasn’t easy.”
The problem was most companies, at that time, would not deal with a bank less than three years old. So the small staff at Diamond Bank went out to persuade everyone, from traders to car dealers, to part with their money to generate cash through deposits.
“In my view he is brilliant, driven and a great manager of talent—qualities which helped him in establishing Diamond Bank, especially through the 5 year period, from 1985 to 1990, when nothing was happening, and the early years from 1990 when he says they had it really tough,” says Akintola Akinbamidele of Renaissance Capital in Lagos.
The bank blossomed into a $240 million concern, but this was merely one step on a difficult path. In 2005, disaster struck when a new law that said all banks had to hold a minimum of 25 billion naira ($158.3 million) in share capital. Diamond Bank had a mere 6.4 billion naira ($ 40.5 million) in share capital—so it had to list to raise more, which led to a severe dilution of the family stake.
In the years leading up to this, Dozie had been busy with a deal that was to make his name and a large chunk of his fortune.
A South African cellphone company, MTN, approached Dozie with the idea of setting up a cellphone network in the vast Nigerian market. The South Africans wanted to pump millions into a 60% stake in MTN Nigeria, with Nigerians owning 40%. Dozie set off with high hopes to London and the United States to raise capital among the big money men and Nigerian expatriates. When he got there, it was as if he was trying to sell sand in the desert. Many people saw the struggles of the government telecoms company, NITEL, with its wobbly and sparse landlines. Investors said that if the state couldn’t set up a cellphone network in Nigeria, no one could.
“It was very disappointing. You have a good project and you are turned down. You start to question yourself and start to question your head,” he says.
Dozie could raise merely enough for a 20% stake in the new company. Through debt funding, MTN poured in millions to make up the difference. It was a huge risk, at the time, but MTN prospered and the rest is history. To this day, Dozie is chairman of a solid MTN Nigeria.
“Most of the people I asked to invest now regret not investing—I even regret it myself. They would have enjoyed returns of 20 times their money.”
More than a decade on, Dozie sits atop a family-owned investment company, Kunoch, worth $50 million, which pours money into everything from power generation to gas processing, oil exploration, real estate and banking. One of its investments is in a pilot project that could revolutionize the way power is provided in Nigeria—a country that needs electricity like a thirsty man needs water. The country’s economic progress is slowed by the fact that it produces a few thousand MW for tens of millions of Nigerians—around a tenth of what South Africa produces for a third of Nigeria’s population. Not for nothing do Nigerians call the state power company, PHCN, Please Hold Candles Near.
Dozie is investing in a pioneering independent power project, the Aba Power Project, in the south east of the country near Port Harcourt and not too far from the border with Cameroon. It will generate a minimum of 188 MW, from gas turbines, with plans to expand. In a region which has 20% of the power it needs, it will be like manna from heaven. The company running the project was founded by the former Nigerian minister of power, Bart Nnaji, who resigned in August over a conflict of interest. He was meant to sell his six power generating companies and 11 distribution companies.
It is part of the infrastructure that Dozie believes could be the salvation of his country. Travelers to Nigeria will be cheered to hear that this grand old man of Nigerian business has the crumbling Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos on his agenda.
“It erodes the image of the country. When you come through our airport you say, ‘Is this the Nigeria I have flown to see?’” he says.
Dozie reckons the government will concession the airport to private business in a bid to spruce it up. Others, close to the aviation industry in Lagos, believe the government will be loath to relinquish any control over the airport as it is the only one in the country that brings revenue into state coffers.
“I will give it a long shot… it will happen in the next five years,” says Dozie.
What about corruption? Even the pink-shirted traffic police on the way were a heavy hint that it permeates Nigerian life right down to the streets.
“It is very solvable. When we start seeing politics as a sacrifice, when it is a self-sacrificing exercise from those who want to serve… We need strong institutions with integrity and political parties with a well-known ideology.”
A stable political environment could clear the way for the virile entrepreneurs of Africa.
“I think they are counting on the political will of African leaders to smooth logistics, the factors of production and the movement of people. There are a lot of bottlenecks that need to be removed. People like Aliko Dangote have done us well and created a lot of employment. For me, what is lacking here is that we don’t have that critical mass in the genuine middle class, which is the bulwark of democracy. Once this happens we could start absorbing more young people into employment and our creative forces will be unleashed,” says Dozie.
“We all worry about food, shelter and health and until those things are made accessible to all people we will never change… Be patient don’t expect miracles to happen.”
In this yearning for a new Nigeria, Dozie draws on one of the entrepreneurs he admired, the late Steve Jobs.
“I loved his never quit spirit, he lost his position in the company, but did not despair,” he says.
A new Nigeria may have been a tall order, even for Steve Jobs. It is an ideal worth cherishing, but it does help if you believe in the sound of generators disappearing from Lagos forever, taking 15 minutes from the city to the airport, or fairies.

Tag: October 2012

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