When you walk off the main street in Graaff-Reinet and into Derek Light’s office he has to talk to you over a mountain of files. The small-town lawyer, who is taking on a number of the world’s largest energy companies, apologizes for the mess and very carefully moves his pile of lever-arch folders onto the floor. Scribbled on the spines with blue marker pens are the names Falcon Oil and Gas, Bundu Oil and Gas, and Shell.
“I have another eight cabinets full, all to do with fracking,” says Light.
It could have been a quieter twilight of his professional life in the Karoo, when he moved back to his hometown to raise his two children. It could have been measured days of drawing farm-owners’ contracts and settling disputes over wandering sheep. Now he has to tackle big businesses and its threat to turn his backyard into one giant fracking well pad.
“The problem is that the process of explorative fracking is not normal. It’s invasive and has the potential to destroy the environment,” says Light.
“Things like land, air and water are emotional subjects. In Britain, we’ve seen people super-gluing themselves to fences and being incarcerated for wanting to prevent the development going ahead. Those are extreme conditions. People act in that way because they don’t have any other way of resisting. They don’t have the means of accessing the courts and employing the scientists and economists,” he says.
According to Light, fracking will change the face of the Karoo.
“If the reserves are there and you go into well fields, you won’t recognize the country. You will have well pads every 5 kilometers in every direction. You will have flaring, false lighting, masses of vehicles on the road. The air quality will deteriorate. The effect is massive.”
He disagrees with the suggestion by Shell and others that it won’t.
“They will be using multi-well pads, with 30 wells on one site. The point is that rock formation needs to be targeted as broadly as possible; if you can only drill horizontally you would have exhausted the rock within 2.5km. You would have to establish another well 5km away.”
The legal costs to fight fracking have been daunting.  Until November 2011, Light was by himself with hardly a budget at all. It was light at the beginning of the tunnel for the lawyer.
“Now there is a big team of councillors, scientists and environmentalists. It would not have been possible without the help of  Africa’s third richest man, Johann Rupert. He made it possible to get the expertise of people to take on the biggest companies in the world like Shell,” he says.
The lawyer has no problem taking on the big guns of the fossil fuel industry. He believes that if you are standing on the right side of the law you can take on anyone, no matter how deep their pockets are.
Light also put his own money on the line.
“I know as a professional you have to be objective, but in this case it is my whole community that is being threatened. I want to keep what we have here, it’s a great environment to bring your family up in and it should never be destroyed,” he says.
“I try not to get caught in that sort of emotional debate because it clouds your own judgment. But I can only achieve what I have set out to achieve with the support of individuals. We have just been very lucky that we have sufficient access so far.”
One of his biggest worries is not enough people know about fracking to make an informed decision. According to Light, most people in the cities do not understand the impact this will have on the countryside.
“I remember about two years ago, of all people interviewed in the urban areas, only 50% knew about fracking and of them 15% knew what fracking really was. So I think it’s a question of if it doesn’t affect you nobody cares.”
“It’s moving as quickly as the oil and gas companies are allowed to move. And we’ve said no. We didn’t make the same mistake that the United States made. They allowed it to happen and then tried to regulate it,” he says.
At a time when most people are looking to retire, he looks set to become a household name.
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<h4>The world refuses to frack down</h4>
From London to Perth people have been fighting police, clashing with truck drivers and super gluing themselves to fences all for the same reason—fracking. In South Africa the debate is still in its infancy. Fracking in Australia, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland and the United States has provoked violence. In France it was banned completely, Tunisia soon followed.
One of the most violent protests came in a small town in West Sussex, Balcombe in Britain. British oil and gas exploration firm Cuadrilla, built a test well to take samples of rock.
Protestors super glued themselves to fences. The 1,000 protestors also set up camp by the road to the site. In August, police moved in to evict them and it was reported to have cost tax payers £3.7 million ($5.8 million).
In September, Cuadrilla announced it would suspend operations until a new planning application had been approved. Its drilling rig was moved to look for oil elsewhere.
“The drilling rig and associated equipment will be removed from site in September and testing equipment will not be mobilized to site until planning consent has been granted,” says Francis Egan, CEO of Cuadrilla in a statement.
On the other side of the coin, in North Dakota, United States, oil-fracking is seen as a boon. From 2005 to 2011, it helped the state’s economy grow from $4.4 billion to $30.5 billion. Eight thousand wells, producing more than 820,000 barrels a day was just the start. These wells are expected to increase to 50,000.
Among the landowners of North Dakota, 2,000 new millionaires are made every year, according to Bruce Gjovig, founder of the Center for Innovation at the University of North Dakota. Oil royalties range from $50,000 to $100,000 a month.
The quest for oil has drawn in thousands from across America to towns such as Watford City, which has grown from 1,700 to 10,000, according estimates in March.
The fracking revolution has been bitter sweet for some. Many long-term, low income residents have been priced out of their homes through property price rises. The population boom has led to overused roads, polluted streams and created the worst aspects of urbanization.
In South Africa, residents of the Karoo are the latest to join the battle. According to Julius Kleynhans, head of environmental affairs at AfriForum, the biggest problem is only one in five South Africans have heard about fracking.
“At the moment the government is doing nothing. It’s refusing to address the public outcry. They are just power drilling their wants through,” he says.
“Why would they care if the Karoo was contaminated? What they were told was the value of getting this energy game-breaker gas was far more important than the value of the Karoo. The fact that the Eastern Cape has a third of the country’s livestock population; I cannot tell you how important this part of the country plays in production. We also produce more wool, mohair and ostriches than any other part of the country and 25% of the citrus in the country,” says local farmer Doug Stern.
You can be sure this time next year many more Africans will know what fracking is and how it could change their lives.
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Light At The Beginning  Of The Tunnel

It was a long walk to farming for Marlin De-Jager, ending at a 3,000 hectare plot, near Aberdeen. In these parts, De-Jager’s background is as rare as the famous Karoo lamb. His persistence, as solid as the rocks on his land.
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He was born and raised by a single parent after his father walked out. He skipped town while in high school after a brawl at a rugby game. He wound up struggling in the Western Cape province digging a train tunnel along the Hex River.
A few years later, he returned to Aberdeen and changed his fortunes by starting his own farming business; buying unwanted sheep with black wool from farmers and selling the mutton.
“When you slaughter something, it doesn’t matter what their hair looks like. When the skin is off it doesn’t matter. That’s how I started,” says De-Jager.
Next, he bought 21 small pieces of communal land and taught the community how to plant gardens.
Last year, after 20 years of saving, he bought his own farm for R4.2 million ($420,000).
“As an emerging farmer, I want to become a commercial farmer. For me, one day, it’s to see my son and his children also becoming commercial farmers,” he says.
One morning, De-Jager read about fracking in the newspapers.
“I was very interested to know how it works. For me, I don’t know how they are going to get it right. Water underground is like blood in the veins. To stop one vein affects the whole body,” he says.
Since then De-Jager has been talking to his community one-by-one.
“I’m only a drop in the ocean. I am trying to convince the colored community about my concerns with fracking. Our people are mostly small farmers. I sat and asked them about fracking. They said ‘we haven’t got land so why must we worry?’ That is their view. I don’t think they realize what will happen,” he says.
De-Jager fears many people don’t understand what fracking means and believes energy companies are taking advantage of this.
“They [fracking companies] don’t care about the land. They care about their pockets. You can see all the big companies. They are sitting there and making their money. Then when it’s finished, they pack up and leave and we must deal with the land,” he says.
The emerging farmer intends to fight fracking before it happens, he says. De-Jager doesn’t want to see the farm he spent so long saving for, destroyed, before his son takes over.

No Land For My Son

A cold gusty wind whistles through the branches of hundreds of thousands of dust-weary bone-dry four-inch high scrub. This is the Karoo, southern South Africa’s desert, which has changed little in 250 million years. The valley creaks to its own song, carried on the wind through rusted windmills and crags of prehistoric rock.
These days, a new tune is in the air—fracking. Thousands of miles away big business rubs its hands at the prospect of drawing $100 billion (R1 trillion) revenue, within three decades, out of this land. Standing against this, are 3,000 landowners pledging millions for their fight.
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An estimated 485 trillion cubic feet of shale gas could be buried 4,5km below the Karoo, according to Econometrix, South Africa’s largest independent macro-economic consulting firm. The only way to get at it is through the so-called invasive mining underground, which has been used for no more than 15 years.
Farmers in the Karoo say this will destroy their livelihood. Johann Rupert, Africa’s second richest entrepreneur, who now lives in retirement on a farm in the area, is one of them.  Rupert made billions selling luxury consumer goods for Richemont and under his South African-based company Remgro. He has been shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars, says Derek Light, a small-town lawyer from Graaff-Reinet defending his birthplace, in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.
“The bulk of the cost we have incurred so far has gone into research, to equip ourselves and to be informed. We have hired some of the best scientists to understand each step of the exploration, so that we can understand every aspect of the process. We won’t go to court unless absolutely necessary. It’s not first prize to us,” he says.
Thousands of farmers across the Karoo are following the billionaire’s example. Fifty five-year-old Dickie Ogilvie, who farms mohair near Aberdeen, has pledged R3 [R1=$0.10] for every hectare on his 14,000 hectare farm.
“Some guys have given a lump sum payment. Most of the other money is per hectare basis, from 20c to 50c up to R2-R3 depending on how strongly they feel about fracking. It might sound like a lot of money, but it’s actually nothing. If I lose my property, at the end of the day it’s not money at all, we’ve lost everything,” says Ogilvie.
“But how effective at the end of the day is it going to be? Are we going to be able to stop the workings of a huge company like Shell? Have we got the finances to do it? Or are we just delaying the inevitable? We might as well just close our doors and move on. Lord alone, help us if it does happen. My big concern, particularly in the Aberdeen district, is the apathy of a lot of the farmers. There are many who have pledged, there are many who haven’t and they are actually not even interested,” he says.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves drilling underground and pumping a high-pressure mix of water, sand and chemicals to crack shale rock to release the gas.
Among the companies targeting this resource is Shell. They want to frack an area that is larger than Sierra Leone, an area of 90,000km squared. Jan Willem Eggink, the man charged by Shell to find viable oil and gas in Africa, believes if fracking is done correctly, it won’t harm the environment.
“I understand that people are concerned about it. If I was living in the Karoo, I would be concerned if Shell came to my farm and started drilling on it. I feel if I could talk to farmers in the Karoo and tell them what we planned to do, in most cases they would say ‘okay I now understand it and I am significantly less concerned’… What is true, I must admit, is there have been cases of gas leaking where wells have not been sealed off properly. You need to seal and test them properly.”
Eggink thinks fracking could be a game changer for the country. The South African government thinks so too. They estimate that fracking will create 700,000 jobs and make the country self-sufficient. Right now 70% of its gas is imported.
“The most logical one [use for gas] for South Africa, would be to convert it to power… I’m not saying gas is the only answer. Our view is that South Africa needs more energy than it can lay its hands on… The point is, if you operate at high standards, which Shell intends to do, then there is no reason why your water would be contaminated. You need good companies in place to operate this,” says Eggink.
Many farmers disagree.
Doug Stern farms sheep near Graaff-Reinet and has seen the damage first hand. He went to Pennsylvania, United States, as a guest of anti-fracking groups.
“The sealant material the industry will use can only consist of steel and cement. They are their only options. There are between two and 32 holes on each well pad. Assume that every well is drilled perfectly. However, with the Karoo being on an artesian formation, there is huge upward pressure from the subsurface. All of this over time is guaranteed to corrode the seals under the exerted pressure. The cement is going to crumble and the steal is going to rust, releasing impurities into our water and into the air. This will destroy our environment. You can do without gas, you can do without electricity but you cannot do without water. It’s the stuff of life,” says Stern.
“The amount of energy and effort that has to go into this particular resource, given the estimated lifespan, is disproportionate…we’ve already used up the gold reserves in this country. One of the aspects in mineral exploration that I was glad to leave behind was the sense that, while one is involved, you are party to the pillaging of the planet. My sense of reality, says it [fracking] ultimately will happen. It would be a sad day and the people in authority of this country to should be indicted if they enable it to happen before there are cast iron guarantees,” says Jeremy Harper, who worked for six years as an exploration geophysicist and whose farm, SandKraal, is in the fracking zone.
By spending his days buried in files, Light, the lawyer, has stalled fracking for five years. In 2008, one farmer objected to proposals by Sunset Energy, now Light represents thousands of farmers.
“If they had not objected, the government would have gone ahead with fracking in 2009, in a totally unregulated fashion. We wouldn’t even be here. The real issue is whether fracking can go ahead and if the country has the capacity and the infrastructure for it? Right now I don’t see it. So we will keep opposing them until it is safe,” says Light.
In September 2012, South Africa lifted its 18-month moratorium on fracking. The licenses have not been issued a year later, but look set to before South Africa’s elections next year, according to Rob Davies, the trade and industry minister of South Africa.
Matt Ash, director of Norton Rose Fulbright Sub-Saharan Africa energy, says the South African government wants gas to play a big part in its National Development Plan (NDP) for 2030, which estimates that the country will need 41,346MW of new power. The country currently has half that capacity with 33,000MW.
The controversy over fracking, according to Ash, stems from the country not having any fracking regulations.
“Under the present framework, a landowner is obliged to give mineral rights holder’s free and unfretted access to the land without compensation for the unhindered exploration of mineral resources. However, only a land owner can apply for rezoning of property appropriate for the mining activity concerned. The land owner can refuse to rezone on environmental grounds.”
According to Light, government decided to forego a strategic environmental impact assessment (EIA), a standard global practice. Light is worried that if gas is found, then the company has the right to drill, without proper regulations in place.
“Currently in South Africa there is no drilling legislation. The mining industry in the country has a shocking track record. There is a lack of observance of the laws as they are,” says Light.
Also in question is whether gas companies will pay for any damage to the environment.
“When these companies move on in forty or fifty years’ time there needs to be something to recover the environment. You have a fund to restore the land. There is inadequate financial provision made for rehabilitation. Inevitably for this country, the taxpayer has cleaned up the mess. The mining companies will spend money on what earns them money. They are not inclined to spend money on something that doesn’t generate income,” says Light.
Eggink says Shell will put money aside to repair the land.
This is unlikely to placate protestors. According to Light, there are still many more questions: Who will regulate fracking? How can gas be shipped out without an existing pipeline? Will the environment be able to cope with thousands of trucks grinding through the dust of the Karoo? Where will the millions of liters of water come from?
There are signs that the government is starting to listen to the worries of the farmers, says Light.
In September, Edna Molewa, the minister of water and environmental affairs, released a notice to declare fracking a controlled water activity.
“It means companies wanting to explore shale gas deposits under the Karoo will first have to get a water-use licence. Their water usage can be regulated,” says Light.
According to Eggink, it’s going to take 10 years to explore the area.  Shell will take two years to complete an EIA, once they have been given their licence. Most of the tests can be done above ground, he says.
“We would like to start drilling and demonstrating to the people of South Africa that these wells can be done in an environmentally acceptable way,” says Eggink.
Light says the farmers will push for fracking to be regulated more tightly, before a drill touches the ground.
“Our position is that until the gaps have been filled, we shouldn’t go ahead with operations… our plan is to challenge until it is guaranteed to be safe,” says Light.
In the Karoo it is said that farmers need to farm 25 years ahead. It is a place so delicate that tyre tracks can linger untouched for three years. It could soon be filled with the choking dust from thousands of trucks laden with shale gas, in a country where energy is needed. Until then, a small-town lawyer, some 3,000 farmers and a billionaire intend put up a roadblock.

No Fracking Way

Strikes have hit Africa’s biggest economy with a vengeance and the losses are high.
Hundreds of thousands of South African employees went on strike, crippling the gold mines, car factories, petrol forecourts, and the national airline South African Airways (SAA) in August and September.
Towards the beginning of September, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) ended a three-week strike of around 30,000 workers in the motor manufacturing industry, after accepting a revised wage offer from  Volkswagen, Nissan, Ford and Toyota.
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However, as car manufacturers returned to work, thousands of petrol station attendants, affiliated to Numsa, downed tools after serving a 48-hour notice of strike action.
Their demands included a R30 ($3) per hour increase and that maternity leave be paid in full.
The SAA employees, affiliated to the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu), ended a 15-day strike a day later.
By far the most expensive strike was the one organized by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in the gold mining industry, which was reported to have cost R32 million ($3.2 million) per day. In 2012, similar strikes cost companies R349 million ($35 million) a day and employees lost a total of R100 million ($10 million) in salaries each day.
The strike was effectively ended when NUM, the United Association of South Africa (Uasa) and Solidarity accepted an 8% wage hike, backing off from its initial demand of 15%.
In addition to the wage increase, the monthly living allowance of miners was raised from R1,640 ($164) to R2,000 ($200).
The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), however, refused to accept the pay deal. The mining companies were taking a hard-line stance and refusing to give in to the demands while the union was threatening a second strike.
The morning after the strike began, when FORBES AFRICA visited the mining area in Carletonville, Johannesburg, a handful of NUM members gathered outside the union’s office at Sibanye Gold mine in Driefontein, as rival union members reported for work.
“An estimated 14,000 miners had downed tools in the area of Carletonville on Tuesday evening. Our members have not clocked in for the night shift at several mines. The strike is on,” says Mbuyiseli Hibana, NUM regional secretary.
Amcu spokesperson, Jimmy Gama, tells FORBES AFRICA the union had not been given a mandate and was considering strike action.
“We remain unchanged to our wage increase demands. We rejected the offered 6.5%. Amcu demands a living wage of R12,500 ($1,250) and R11,500 ($1,150) for underground and surface employees respectively,” says Gama.
All labor unions in the gold mining sector, besides Amcu, have accepted the revised offer and operations at the mines are back to normal.
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The Chamber of Mines had confirmed that it would continue to talk with Amcu in an attempt to get everyone back to work.
“This tentative agreement is encouraging because it signals a number of important developments for an industry battered by labor instability, fast rising costs, declining market conditions, and continued regulatory uncertainty,” says mining analyst and Eunomix managing director, Claude Baissac.
“Unions have been forced to change their strategy from one of expecting large increases to one that is more achievable. If initial demands were completely unrealistic, these demands were largely part of the posturing unions are doing in relation to one another, notably NUM, and Amcu, the disruptive newcomer. They needed to show their members and each other that they will fight on for the best deal.”
That fight is far from over.

Strikes Strafe  Africa’s Biggest Economy

It’s one of the cruelest cuts in business. You start a company, it does well, you bring people on board, they let you go and then you disappear from sight. Even the late Steve Jobs was booted from Apple, only to return to bring them greater success. But for Alan Knott-Craig, founder of World of Avatar and the youngest member of the “I got fired from the company I started” group, it was one hurdle in life that he didn’t see coming.
“It was very sad for me… I cried and became paranoid and incredibly embarrassed because it was quite public… Combined with a little bit of time all those wounds have healed and I’ve realized that it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
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What really hurt was that everywhere he turned were signs of his misfortune, he had to get away. Knott-Craig flew his family to Washington D.C., put them in a gold colored RV and took to the road. They traveled across the United States through West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, California, Texas, Nevada and Arizona. It gave him time to think.
“While America is an amazing place, it reminded me that I’m living in the best place in the whole world. Africa is the place I want to be.”
Jobless and still reeling from his departure from World of Avatar, Knott-Craig returned home and took a solo road trip though the Eastern Cape. He visited Robert Sobukwe’s memorial and Steve Biko’s house, two of South Africa’s struggle heroes. It was here that he found inspiration.
“I started thinking about information and that people make better decisions when they have all the information, it really boils down to that. I thought the way to make the country a better place would be if everyone had access to all the information. I knew how to do that, it was the internet… All it is, is taking existing resources and connecting them. It’s not asking people for new things.”
Knott-Craig wanted to take advantage of the fact that many households in South Africa already have Wi-Fi through cellular devices. He partnered with Ubiquiti Networks, a group that broke off from Motorola after they went bankrupt, that supplied the equipment.
The road trips paid off. Project Isizwe was launched in April and Knott-Craig was back in business. He opened avenues for people to donate money and bandwidth. The government supplied access points and they found a local supplier. For R2 ($0.20) per person they would supply internet.
Of all the problems with finance and getting people on board, Knott-Craig’s biggest challenge was getting people to believe.
“… you don’t have to have an American company do it for you; they don’t have to hold your hand. We have the skills, we have the competence here, we have the infrastructure, we have the money, we’ve got everything. Why on earth do we need an American company to come and save us? We don’t.”
Unlike the case of Jobs and Apple, Knott-Craig has no intentions of going back to World of Avatar.
“This stuff is like girls. You can be really in love with someone and then have a break-up and it can really hurt you, but the worst thing you can do is go back to that. Once you’ve moved on, you’ve moved on… I don’t know how I would go back.”
Despite no office hours or stable income, Knott-Craig is optimistic about the future of Project Isizwe. By the end of the year, he hopes to have the NGO running five sites throughout Tshwane, north-central South Africa, and by the end of 2014 over 200 sites. After that he has set his sights on the whole of Africa but wants to start small.
“I’ve made the mistake of having dreams that are too big… I’ve learnt to under promise and over deliver.”
An epiphany from pain to enlightenment.

Free Wi-Fi For Africa… Really?

It was a contract scribbled on a paper napkin that catapulted Barcelona’s footballer, Lionel Messi, to international stardom. History almost repeated itself when Ashley Uys signed a contract on a train to Frankfurt.
Ashley Uys and Andrew Smith*, his previous business partner, were on their way to Frankfurt airport to catch their plane home to South Africa after signing a deal with a German company. As the train rattled to the airport, Smith turned to Uys with what seemed to be a sweet deal. For Uys it turned into a rotten headache.
It had been a long journey to the railway car.
In 2006, Uys, a biotechnologist scientist, was working from the University of the Western Cape’s laboratories in South Africa, trying to run his own operation.
Two years later Smith, a businessman based in the United Kingdom, approached the Cape Town-based scientist with an interest in the type of work and research Uys was doing and a suggestion of starting a joint venture.
Smith knew of a German company that had been struggling for nearly two years to find a test developed for long-term alcohol consumption. The joint venture would develop a test that can detect alcohol consumption in urine. The German company wanted to sell the product to rehabilitation clinics.
Uys flew to Germany and within three days he had developed a prototype and it worked. It was a world first.
“I was like, ‘My word! My first big development,’” says Uys.
Smith and Uys had struck a deal in the German town of Gottingen and were on a train to Frankfurt to catch a flight to South Africa. Smith then proposed they go 50/50 on the test and split the profits.
“I said ‘We can’t go 50/50 on this test because my organization develops test kits. Our joint venture is a vehicle for drug testing services. Your company does hair testing. So obviously this component of work is my company,’” says Uys.
He proposed to Smith that he gets shares as he introduced Uys to the German company. Smith said he’d give him R6 million ($580,000) and suggested he set up his own operation, which Uys was in the process of doing.
“I said yes and signed with this guy. I finally got the break. I was over the moon. After all this hard work, after waiting a year for sales, all the studies and research, sacrifices and stress, lack of resources and money —I had finally made it,” says Uys.
A year later, Uys had still not received the R6 million ($580,000). He called Smith and asked for his money because he didn’t want to raise investment or lose equity to set up his operation.
“He told me there was no date on the contract and he can give the capital whenever he wanted,” remembers Uys.
Smith threatened to sue Uys if he went ahead with the product. The Germans phoned Uys saying they wanted him in their country to work on the product, while they negotiated with Smith on his behalf.
Uys went to Germany. Smith sued him and the court battles began. But the court favoured Smith and he won with costs. It, however, didn’t end there.
Smith didn’t know how to make the test after numerous trials, so the court ordered Uys to hand over his books to help Smith to develop the product.
“Even with the formulation, it is important to have the know-how. He struggled for a year. He eventually blackmailed me and said ‘I’m going to tarnish your name now’. He put the judgment on his website and actually paid ad words so it would appear on the first page if you Googled my name. He was trying to burn my name,” says Uys.
A few years later, Smith failed with the product. He showed up last year and settled for 2.5% for two years, short of the 50% he had proposed two years before.
“That was really nice for me because it showed who the culprit was and it was reported in a newspaper and people could see I was not a crook. I just made a big mistake by signing a contract. I was then being sued for my own product,” he says.
Now, after lying dormant for two years because of the legal disputes, Uys says they will continue with developments of the prototype. It could make him a fortune.
“I’m very happy I went through this experience. It was a learning curve. I was only 25 or 26 at the time and still naïve and excited. So I’ve learnt a lot from this court case and I’m really happy that it happened without damaging my reputation,” says Uys.
In 2010, he started Medical Diagnostech, developing around 1.5 million kits per year for HIV, pregnancy and ovulation or fertility tests. He employs around 20 people, three of whom are family.
The 30-year-old has made most of his money from the R4, three-step Malaria test kit, which has sold almost 600,000 units this year.
“We’re listing with the World Health Organization. They accepted us in their round five testing to become the preferred supplier. We also got accreditation now to operate on a global scale.”
Uys grew up in the Cape Flats, a neighborhood notorious for gang violence and drug abuse, in a country where most of the people live below the poverty line. Few can afford drug tests which often cost around $6 a piece.
Uys created the Oculus ID range, software that can test for drugs and impairment. He also developed the smartphone application, OculusMobi, and the OculusPro unit. They are used for facial recognition and to test for impairment. OculusLaw, a portable professional camera, takes a picture of the eye. If the eye does not react to the flash, the person could be on drugs. Drugs such as crystal meth and cocaine can enlarge the pupil, while heroin makes them smaller.
Uys is a man changing the world, one medical kit at a time, and has a current potential revenue of up to $12 million. But for now, the small company turns over around $500,000  a year.
He may not have received that $600,000 from Smith, but his reputation as a scientist remained intact and appears destined to make his fortune through his innovative projects.
It’s been a long journey since the train to Frankfurt and now Uys appears to be on track.
*Andrew Smith is not his real name

Tag: October 2013

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Light At The Beginning Of The Tunnel

No Land For My Son

No Fracking Way

Strikes Strafe Africa’s Biggest Economy

Free Wi-Fi For Africa… Really?

A Sweet Deal Turned Sour