In 2008, a shipment containing one million tons of diesel set sail, heading for the shores of Nigeria. The owner of the vessel, Femi Otedola, Chairman of Forte Oil, a petroleum and power generation company, had grown the company to one of the largest in Nigeria, with over 500 gas stations, according to Forbes. The growth had been rapid and profits were at an all-time high. Then disaster struck.
“I had about 93 percent of the diesel market on my fingertips. All of a sudden oil prices collapsed and I had over one million tons of diesel on the high seas and the price dropped from $146 to $34,” says Otedola.
That was only the beginning of his problems. The naira was subsequently devalued and interest began to skyrocket. When the dust settled, Otedola had lost over $480 million due to the plunge in oil prices, $258 million through the devaluation of the naira, a further $320 million due to accruing interest and then finally $160 million when the stocks crashed.
“I had two options, either to commit suicide or to weather the storm. I decided to weather the storm. I just knew it was a phase I had to go through. You see God prepares you for greater things and of course experience is the best teacher so I had to learn my lessons. I took the bitter pill,” he says.
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Otedola was now $1.2 billion in debt. He sought solace in the only thing that had set him on the path to discovering oil, destiny.
“You cannot compete with destiny, so it was my destiny to make billions every month and lose billions as well. I said to myself ‘I was not going to have friends and enemies, I was only going to have competitors.”
At the age of six, Otedola had already discovered his knack for business. He would provide manicure and pedicure services to his father and his friends and write them a receipt for payment. On his birthday, while all his friends wanted toys, Otedola asked his father for a briefcase instead. His father, Michael, as the Govenor of Lagos State, was a respected man. Now, his son’s public fall threatened to destroy that name.
“After I lost the money, something that struck me was that my father had always been my role model in life and the first thing I had to do was to protect his name. He had a policy; honesty was the best policy, so I had to protect that name and his integrity.”
Just after the global banking crisis had struck, the Nigerian government established the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) to buy up distressed loans. Otedola’s loan was sold to AMCON, by the bank he blamed for his demise.
“Experience is the best teacher. I didn’t have a proper structure and I also put the blame on the banks for not advising me. All they were interested in was the profits. They were not interested in sustainability of the business, they were short-sighted and all they were interested in was throwing money at me. So they never advised me,” says Otedola.
The banks had to shave off about $400 million from the debt leaving Otedola $800 million in the red. AMCON offered him a restructuring deal, which Otedola declined. He opted instead to repay what he owed and start all over again.
“So we got a reputable firm to value my assets. I had about 184 flats, which I gave up. I was the largest investor in the Nigerian banking sector, which I gave up, I was also a major shareholder of Africa Finance Corporation and I was the chairman of Transcorp Hilton. I was a shareholder in Mobil Oil Nigeria Limited, the second largest shareholder in Chevron Texaco, Visafone and several companies which they valued, and I had to give up to repay the debt.”
Otedola was left with two properties, his office space and a 34%-stake in African Petroleum, which he rebranded, to Forte Oil in 2010. In 2014, Otedola bounced back to reclaim his place on the FORBES rich list and currently has a net worth of $1.8 billion according to the FORBES wealth unit in the United States. These days, he is much wiser; there are systems in place to prevent a similar collapse of his mammoth oil empire.
According to the mogul, the day he lost everything was the day he learned his biggest lesson. It taught him that he could overcome anything.

‘I Took The Bitter Pill’

According to the IPSOS Affluent Africa Survey Africa in 2016, this year FORBES AFRICA reached a monthly readership of 163,000 or 4.7% of the affluent in Africa, between the ages of 25 and 64. But, it is with young entrepreneurs, between the ages of 30 and 34, that the magazine strikes a chord, with 21%.
One of Africa’s youngest entrepreneurs, Emeka Akano, CEO and Co-founder of Jara Mobile Ltd, returned from England to Nigeria – his land of birth – to build his own businesses. Akano was on FORBES AFRICA’s 30 under 30 list last year.
“Ever since I started reading the magazine, I’ve been better informed about prospects in different industries and the wonderful work that my fellow entrepreneurs are doing in Africa. It has also opened my eyes to a world of possibilities and creative ideas,” he says.
Akano finds the lists inside the magazine inspiring and motivational.
“Seeing people who make it to the lists from different walks of life and background is encouraging,” he says.
The 2014 FORBES 30 under 30 list caught his eye. Little did he know, a year later, he’d be on it. Since featuring on the list, founder of EBonoko Holdings, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Emmanuel Bonoko, says the magazine helps him keep an eye on other entrepreneurs who are breaking boundaries in their industries.
He says FORBES AFRICA has changed his life and business.
“We got more business opportunities across South Africa and our business network has been expanding across Africa. Through the profiling, we got more companies having interest to work with us. I have been meeting the ministers and other influential business leaders in South Africa,” he says.
Reitumetse Shebe, a 22-year-old reader from Vaal, in Gauteng, South Africa, highlights three stories that stood out for her – ‘Power Of The Hashtag’, from FORBES AFRICA’s March 2016 edition, as well as ‘It Was Like Playing Twister Underground’ and ‘The Children Who Became Women Too Soon’, both from the October/November 2015 edition of FORBES WOMAN AFRICA.
“These stories captivated me and they were well crafted. The story of the children, who became women to soon, was shocking but it changed by perception about Nigeria and broadened my knowledge. Its picture on its own told a story,” she says.
Shebe hopes FORBES AFRICA will mesmerize its readers with more cutting-edge stories in the next five years.
“I’d love to read more about the truths, beauties and hidden traditions of Africa. Keep making us proud FORBES AFRICA!”

What Are People Saying?

Our cover for April 2012, Herman Mashaba, has swapped his entrepreneurial hat for politics and has taken over one of Africa’s most important cities – Johannesburg.
In November last year, Mashaba told FORBES AFRICA he wasn’t interested in politics, within weeks , he changed his mind and started running for mayor, when South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma sacked Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene and sent the country’s market into a nosedive.
“It was the final nail in the coffin for me. I could no longer live with myself to watch my country being captured and destroyed,” he says.
Mashaba, Founder of Black Like Me, was elected as mayor after defeating former mayor Parks Tau, in the local municipal elections, with 144 votes – a case of close but no cigar for Tau who received 125 votes. This was as a shocking and humiliating blow to the ruling African National Congress.
Mashaba, who handed over the responsibility of running his business to his wife, has shifted his focus to his duty as a full-time public servant.
Top of his to-do-list is creating jobs, fighting corruption and bringing basic services to people.
For Mashaba, being an armchair critic was no longer an option.
“I have always believed in personal shaping of my life. I will never allow people with unknown agendas to distract me from exercising my rights and doing things I have to do. Our country deserves a better leadership,” he says.
In 2012, our headline for him was Capitalist Crusader; he loved it so much that he made it the title of his latest book.
A month before, in March 2012, Sipho Nkosi was featured on the cover of FORBES AFRICA. It seems life has just begun, at the age of 62, for Nkosi, who retired from Exxaro Resources, a coal mining company he helped build.
“After eight years in the company, it made sense for me to grow and allow other people with great ideas to take over,” says Nkosi.
Before he retired, and when the unstable currency and commodity markets presented risks, Exxaro had to retrench almost half of their workers. It was a tough time, says Nkosi.
“The business shrunk and I learned that when you’re doing well in business people love you, but when you are in crises they see you as a useless manager. I had to allow another person to rebuild the organization.”
Even though he retired and sold his shares at Exxaro, Nkosi is still a director at Sanlam and council member at the University of the Witwatersrand. He says only death will stop him from working.
He started his own organization, Talent10.
“We look at the challenges the mining industry has. We also want to build resources, such that we are able to get into for example,  enterprise development, to get into things like social interventions that we want to get into, and  to tap into technology because other countries beat us when it comes to technology.”
Mashaba and Nkosi are still proving they have what it takes to grace the cover of FORBES AFRICA.

Where Are They Now?

Trust Matsilele says writing for FORBES AFRICA changed his life. The most remarkable and harrowing story of the lot is his own.
His crisp declamatory picturesque articles, told with conviction over the last two years, were born of years of struggle, pain and disappointment from birth.
At just eight months old, his mother abandoned Matsilele and his twin brother at the door of Harare Central Police Station in Zimbabwe with nothing but a tiny bag of clothing. Luckily, within 24 hours, they were adopted by their aunt, who had just moved back to Zimbabwe, after years studying in the United States.
“My aunt had no kids, but all of a sudden, she had this heavy burden to carry,” says Matsilele.
The twins moved to their new home, a mission school in Mwenezi, a small district in southern Zimbabwe, with their new parent. They lived a middle-class life and almost forgot they had been abandoned. In 1992, their guardian moved to South Africa to work. The twins moved in with their grandmother in the village. This meant goodbye to bread and butter for lunch at school.
“My grandmother tried to make sure we had good lunchboxes when we went away for sports at school but on a day-to-day basis we struggled to carry lunch to school. We walked 10 kilometers barefoot to school and herded cattle after school,” he says.
It was a struggle until their aunt started making a bit of money in South Africa. In 1996, she sent the boys to boarding school where Matsilele traveled in a bus for the first time.
“I was in the drama club and we went in a bus to Masvingo and I was so happy. School was OK but I couldn’t afford somethings like freezit (sweet ice) so I washed clothes for kids from urban areas, who came from better backgrounds, to make money. It was hard. I could see my poverty clearly. I remember my brother and I at some point wishing we went to a poorer high school, with kids like us, but my aunt had done the best she could so we were grateful.”
Matsilele left high school to set foot in his capital, Harare, a bustling city, for the first time. It was a painful reminder of a place where his mother abandoned him, but also a chance to study journalism; paid for by his brother.
Here, 19-year-old Matsilele saw a traffic light for the first time.
“As much as I was aware of their existence, I had never seen them. It was all shocking for me. My brother struggled to pay my fees so I had to work during the day and take classes at night. It was hard to make ends meet. Even money for a taxi to work was hard to get. I remember one of my classmates religiously brought a pie for me. Sometimes even if I was struggling to go to school, I would remember the pie I would get and I would make my way there.”
Hard work, on a pie a day, earned Matsilele a diploma in journalism. He moved to South Africa thinking it would be easy to get a job. It wasn’t.  South Africa has a 25.5% unemployment rate and with 2.2 million immigrants looking for work.
No job, no money, no food and no roof, Matsilele hit rock bottom in a country he thought was paved with gold; to find home was a dumpsite. He lived there for four months picking up scrap metal and bricks to sell.
“We used some rags and plastics to cover ourselves if it was raining or cold. Police came to harass us at any time of the day. I remember it rained one night and my passport was in my pocket and it got defaced,” he says.
Life on the harsh streets of South Africa was dangerous, so Matsilele moved to a squatter camp to live with his cousin.
“We would walk for about two hours to look for jobs on the streets. Any jobs, like cutting lawns or general work. I did that for two years just to have a bit of money.”
Matsilele’s nephew, who worked for The Zimbabwean newspaper, based in Johannesburg, showed him a glimmer of hope and invited him to his office to talk about a job.
“When I got there he had gone for a conference and the people at the office refused me entry. I think I was too scruffy or dirty and looked like a street kid,” he says.
A week later, he went back and the nephew employed him.
“To get meaningful money for someone staying in a squatter camp, about R1,000 ($70) a month, was hard but I was writing about 40 articles a month at R40 (less than $3) a story.”
This resilience marked his entry to the world of journalism.
“I moved to a small place with a friend of mine and together we bought our first bed. This was a huge adjustment coming out of a squatter camp. We had never owned a bed,” he says.
Another friend offered to help pay for Matsilele’s honours degree in journalism, at the University of the Witwatersrand, to better his chances in life.
His honours supervisor recruited him for a job at CNBC Africa, the sister company to FORBES AFRICA, as an online journalist. Here, he met Chris Bishop, Managing Editor of FORBES AFRICA, and he says this changed his life.
“Bishop is one of the best people I have ever met. He has stayed a bit in Zimbabwe so when he heard I was Zimbabwean, we immediately connected… I asked if I could write for FORBES AFRICA and he said ‘yes’… I couldn’t believe it. A man like me who was abandoned by his mother and stayed on the streets being allowed to write for such a publication? Who would have ever thought? It was even beyond my wildest dreams.”
Working here opened doors for Matsilele, one of them— speaking at a conference at the University of Southern California in the United States in 2015.
Three years later, Matsilele walks upright, looks people in the eye and debates with conviction. He says working for this publication has helped him shake off his terrible feeling of being a nobody in a rural village who became a street kid in a foreign land.
Just over a decade after he slept under the stars in the rubbish tip, Matsilele is now studying classics in Vancouver, Canada, for the next three years.
A few months after leaving South Africa, Matsilele has been invited to give talks about his work for FORBES AFRICA.
“My presentations are based on my work at FORBES AFRICA and with Chris Bishop. It was like learning journalism from scratch even though I had written more than 300 stories. If there is anything FORBES AFRICA should be grateful for its having changed the life of a journalist,” he says.
Matsilele is living proof that hard work in Africa, sprinkled with a bit of FORBES AFRICA, can change your life.

‘It Was Beyond  My Wildest Dreams’

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FORBES AFRICA has told many spellbinding business stories in its five years. The story of its own difficult birth is one of the most riveting.
The idea of the pan-African business magazine was born in the heart of a financial crisis which wiped out many investors and left businesses lucky to survive. The media suffered the most.
In the depths of the downturn in 2007, soon after launching CNBC Africa, a business and finance TV channel, the two founders, Rakesh Wahi and Zafar Siddiqi, wanted a magazine. It was the worst time to launch.
“The whole publishing market was collapsing around us. To launch a new title at that time; people externally would have said you are foolish. Some of our other shareholders did not want to invest in the publishing business owing to the economic downturn,” says Wahi.
The pair refused to throw in the towel.
“I had a strong feeling this was going to work. When I told Zafar about it, he only asked if how I felt about it and I told him that the brand would be an instant success and after his thumbs up, we ran with it.”
Towards the end of 2009, a meeting in New York sparked the interest in joining the worldwide FORBES family. The magazine has a string of franchises around the world, from FORBES MEXICO to FORBES INDONESIA.
Wahi followed his gut, in the face of scepticism.
“Every time we spoke about FORBES, people’s eyes would light up,” he says.
It was the right time, he believed. The pair waited for the market to turn around slightly and made their move.
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“We didn’t like that very few African business leaders had made it into the international version of FORBES… people didn’t understand that there is so much entrepreneurship going on in the continent,” says Wahi.
It wasn’t easy. Building a pan-African magazine was expensive and complicated; but the gap in business and finance reporting in the continent was there to be filled.
It took about two years to complete the legal agreements of the franchise. The most difficult challenge was hiring the right people to steer the magazine to the top. Wahi’s 13 years in the Indian army, where he had become one of the youngest to receive the Vishisht Seva Medal (a military decoration in India) in 1986, helped.
“The army teaches you about looking after people. The core of it is that you have to do things together and you have to inspire people.”
He brought these principles with him to the world of entrepreneurship.
“When we were looking at finding an editor for the magazine, I searched around trying to see who would be the right fit… I was impressed by the experience people brought to the table but something was always missing… Chris Bishop’s name came up because he had done a great piece of work for me a couple of years before that, and impressed, so we took him on… He said he would even do this job for free,” recalls Wahi.
Magazines were in trouble everywhere. In the United States, according to MediaFinder, 152 closed in 2011 and 82 in 2012. In South Africa, Heat, Seventeen, FHM, Sports Illustrated and Shape are a few magazines that shut down because of declining advertising, circulation and competition from online.
Despite this, on September 28, 2011, on a night of glitz and glamour in Johannesburg, billionaire Patrice Motsepe unveiled the historic first cover of FORBES AFRICA.
It turned out that Wahi’s decision to hire Bishop was the right one. In just five years, the team has turned FORBES AFRICA into the leading business magazine in Africa against the odds.
The magazine came out ahead of its competitors in the IPSOS Affluent Survey Africa in 2014 and 2016. The independent research study, released on August 4, shows FORBES AFRICA reached 163,000, or 4.7%, of the 3.4 million qualifying adults, aged between 25 and 64, across seven markets.
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“What we have managed to achieve in just five short years is truly remarkable. Our success is attributed to the hard work and dedication of our teams from across the continent,” says Sid Wahi, Executive Director at ABN Publishing (FORBES AFRICA).
The IPSOS 2016 figures show a 7% increase from the 2014 survey.
“As the founding editor of this magazine it gives me immense pride to see our circulation figures increasing; all this at a time when magazine circulation around the world is falling. I think this is a tribute to the hard work and determination of our young band of highly talented journalists,” says Bishop.
FORBES AFRICA’s work has been recognized by various accolades awarded to the journalists and the editor. The hard work is also appreciated by readers. In Zimbabwe, entrepreneur, Blessed Mushamiri, says he drives around the city looking for a copy each month.
“Sometimes I have to drive to five different uptown shops to bump into one but I don’t stop looking. If I can’t find one, I ask people in South Africa to send me some copies. When I read FORBES AFRICA it engages me in an affair of pure pleasure, an exciting brush with business in Africa that shows me, as a young entrepreneur, that I can participate in something rare and thrilling. It is a must-read for every businessperson,” says Mushamiri.
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In West Africa, Emeka Akano, CEO and Co-Founder of Jara Mobile Ltd, says reading about entrepreneurs from different backgrounds who make it to the FORBES lists has inspired and motivated him.
“Features in the prestigious FORBES AFRICA magazine have gone a long way in giving me much more exposure to a credible audience, increased my personal profile beyond measure, opened doors for new business opportunities and business connections,” says Akano.
No matter the praises, Wahi says there is still more work to be done. He wants to grow the magazine to an even bigger success story, as with many of his other businesses.
Wahi is a smart entrepreneur and risk taker. An audacious one, five years ago, put this magazine in your hands.

Tag: October 2016

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

‘I Took The Bitter Pill’

What Are People Saying?

Where Are They Now?

‘It Was Beyond My Wildest Dreams’

Behold The Business Bible Of Africa