The CEO and co-founder of FORT, Shukri Toefy, a creative production company present in five African countries, speaks about a ‘youth board’ and why failure has never been an option for him.

<ol>
<li> What are your plans for promoting youth development in Africa?</li>
</ol>
They are our future target market that will consume our content. [The stance] is so important for us that we started a youth board [with people] in their early 20s and we can ask them what is cool. [We ask them] is Snapchat still cool and are they still on Instagram? Because as we get older [as a way] to future-proof our company, we need to have our ear to the ground to know what young people are talking about. As the CEO of a creative agency, I have quarterly meetings with my youth board in which I speak to them to find out what are they wearing, where are they going and what is cool and not cool anymore, so that I can be better resourced to implement that with my clients and the rest of the people. It is a cool way of future-proofing who we are and what we do.
<ol start="2">
<li>What was your biggest risk?</li>
</ol>
It was starting our network across Africa. I think we put a lot of money in opening our offices in Kenya and Nigeria. If we count the flights, legal structures etc. it would be an estimate of R2 million ($136,000) to R3 million ($204,000).
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/7-questions-with/2018/09/03/37097/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: 7 Questions with Award Winning Designer – Paledi Segapo</a>
<ol start="3">
<li> What has been your greatest challenge in the industry?</li>
</ol>
Our greatest challenge right now is that when we are in recessionary times, [so usually] marketing and communications is the first thing that is to be cut. Secondly, independently, African companies don’t have the financial backing that some of these globally-owned agencies have. So they don’t have the ability to go out and scale up [on production] like they could.
<ol start="4">
<li> Who is the most influential person you have worked with?</li>
</ol>
The Oxford facilitator I met in June…gave me a different perspective on life and I came back with so many tools on how to see the world and view things. He calmed me down.
<ol start="5">
<li>Your views on mentorship&#8230;</li>
</ol>
I have had the benefit of having coffee or breakfast with highly successful people and I think that is one of the most valuable things you could have as an entrepreneur, to actually have people that you could bounce off ideas with. That you could learn from them and their mistakes and they could guide you.
<ol start="6">
<li> Your biggest fear…</li>
</ol>
I am not fearful of failing because I don’t think failure is an option. I just don’t see it. It is not constructed for me…You can’t beat me. Today you might beat me and tomorrow it will be me [on top of things] because I see it as all part of my journey.
<ol start="7">
<li> What would you say to your 16-year-old self?</li>
</ol>
Slow down and enjoy the ride because it goes so quickly. I was in a hurry to try and take advantage of every opportunity that I had. [As a young person] you have that militancy in you to say ‘you need to take every opportunity that comes your way’. I think that is why I am here but you later realize that it is all part of the journey and there is no such thing as failure. It is about failing forward and it is about failing often. And it is about seeing it as a much bigger journey rather than your day-to-day failures.
 
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Why Youth Can Future-Proof A Company

The growth economy suffers from a productivity paradox. Corporations compete to reduce the time and effort that goes into production processes, which is generally seen as a sign of efficiency, but in reality has a troubling outcome.
Unless more stuff is produced and consumed, people lose their jobs as the same output can be achieved with fewer workers. This is why so many well-meaning people around the world fear the prospect of low growth, even when they recognise that the current form of industrial development is destroying the social fabric and natural ecosystems of societies.
Such a structural unemployment problem is further compounded by the real prospect of massive automation replacing humans in production chains. A <a href="http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/view/1314">study</a> by Oxford University predicts that robots are likely to displace no less than 50% of jobs in the US and Europe in the next 20 years.
Machines are putting people out of work in emerging economies too, including in <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966">China</a>, which has long been the global job creator. According to Martin Ford, bestselling author of <a href="https://www.amazon.de/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465097537">The Rise of the Robots</a>, most routine jobs are becoming obsolete. As Ford says:
<blockquote>We must decide, now, whether the future will see broad based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity.</blockquote>
Unless societies change their approach to growth and development, they will not only end up with a broken planet and conflict-ridden communities: they will also face massive unemployment. There is no way the vertical structures of production dominating the current industrial system will generate enough jobs, let alone good jobs, to satisfy our needs.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2015/10/01/teslas-secret-formula/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Tesla&#8217;s secret formula</a>
As I describe in <a href="http://panmacmillan.co.za/catalogue/wellbeing-economy/">Wellbeing Economy: Success in a World Without Growth</a>, the only way out of this predicament is to empower people to become producers and consumers at the same time. Or what I call “prosumers”. They must be capable of making most of the things they need through local systems of co-production and networks of small businesses.
And certain technologies can help develop a new form of post-industrial artisanship. Thanks to <a href="http://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/eve-v-uses-open-source-concepts-to-take-on-microsoft-s-surface-pro">open source hardware</a>, small business networks are building computers. With the assistance of <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2011/06/23/3d-printing-will-revive-american-manufacturing/#19f194e12548">3D printers</a>, artisans are taking on big business in a way that may challenge conventional assumptions about the efficiency of economies of scale.
<h2>Changing the focus</h2>
Rethinking work is crucial for industrialised economies as well as emerging economies, where job losses are being felt even in the presence of substantial, although diminishing, economic growth.
For instance, Africa is <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/region/afr/publication/africas-demographic-transition">expected</a> to achieve a record<a href="https://qz.com/878513/university-education-is-still-a-dream-many-in-africa-are-yet-to-attain/"> 2.8 billion people by 2060</a>, becoming the largest continent in the world. Most of these people will be young and thirsty for work. There is no way the continent will create decent employment opportunities by adopting an industrial model that’s already eliminating jobs globally.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/technology/2014/11/01/the-nerd-herd/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Nerd Herd</a>
A new approach is needed. The well-being economy forces us to rethink the nature of work by shifting the focus from the quantity of the production-consumption cycle to the quality of the relations underpinning the economic system. The growth economy pushes for mass consumption through an impersonal relationship between producers and consumers (which can be more efficiently performed by robots). The well-being economy must embrace a customised approach to economic exchanges, in which it’s the quality of the human interaction to determine the value.
Take a doctor as an example. From the perspective of the growth economy, the best doctor is the one that visits as many patients as possible in the shortest period of time. In theory, this function could even be performed by a robot. By contrast, in the well-being economy, the personal attention invested in the doctor-patient relationship becomes the key to value creation.
Intuitively, all of us associate the value of good health care with the personal attention that comes with it. The same holds true for education: any reasonable person would frown upon a school that asked teachers to teach faster and faster to an ever larger number of students. Common sense tells us that value is being lost through the mass consumption of these relationships, even when profits (both for the clinic and the school) may increase.
<h2>Rethinking productivity</h2>
Productivity is certainly a good thing, but it should not be embraced blindly. Above all, we need to ask what productivity is for.
The economy is nothing else than a system of social relations. If productivity undermines those relations, the economy itself crumbles, even when profits (at least for someone) may go up.
Many professional activities based on the quality of the performance cannot, by their own nature, become more productive. Asking an orchestra to play faster would not increase productivity: it would simply turn a melodic experience into a nightmare. The same applies to painters, dancers, barbers, teachers, nurses and the like.
This is why it still takes the same number of people to play a Mozart opera today as it did when Mozart first composed it. So, what about extending the same intuition to the rest of the economy?
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2016/09/01/young-jobless-angry/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Young, Jobless And Angry</a>
What if the mechanic of the future won’t be a robot churning out new spare parts every second, but rather a qualified artisan that helps us fix, upgrade and upcycle our vehicle for the entire duration of its life? What if the engineer of the future won’t be a remote computer taking care of our house appliances but a personal advisor helping households produce their own energy. They would help optimise the use of natural resources, from water to vegetable gardens, and make sustainable use of building materials?
A circular economy in which production is optimised and no waste is produced can be achieved in two ways. It can be achieved through robots-dominated production chains or by a horizontal network of qualified artisans and small businesses operating as a collaborative organism. In the first case, a few people will dominate the global economy. In the second case, everyone will be empowered.
A well-being economy cannot exist without empowerment, access and equal opportunities for personal and collective fulfilment. Developing countries can now leapfrog to such a new trajectory without being held back by a model of industrialisation that’s increasingly unfit for the 21st century. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/lorenzo-fioramonti-176997" rel="author">Lorenzo Fioramonti</a>, Full Professor of Political Economy, University of Pretoria
Originally published in <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Conversation</a>.
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How To Create Jobs In The Age Of Robots And Low Growth

For entrepreneur, Oresti Patricios, it was a long and tiring climb to the top from the very bottom. He knew struggle. His father went bust when he was 16.
“My dad had a laundry business and when he went insolvent, I remember him trying to give his clients their clothes when the shop was being locked up by the authorities. Seeing the love he had for his customers and the pain he was going through because he couldn’t service them made me swear I would never be in that situation,” recalls Patricios.
It was so bad his mother had to go to work as a seamstress to put food on the table. Patricios even applied for a study loan just to make ends meet.
“My father taught me how to work hard and I learned a lot about business sitting around the dinner table with my Jewish friends and speaking about business,” he says.
It was 1978. While still at university, Patricios waited tables in his hometown of Johannesburg, and juggled odd jobs for extra money. His great-grandparents had moved to South Africa from Greece. Life didn’t promise to be the immigrants’ dream, until one day, a piece of good luck came along.
“My friend’s cousin had a camera he had bought for leisure. The three of us started using it for a wedding video business. As jobs and money came in, we started investing some money back into the business. Eventually we bought a top of the range camera and we tried to keep up with our competitors.”
They named the business Ornico – a mix of their names – and it grew to make corporate videos, where the big money was.
“Your network is your net worth. We used our network and began to have more and more clients,” says Patricios.
The other two partners left Ornico for new ventures. Patricios roped in his brother.
“At this time, the camera we were using broke. My dad cashed in his life insurance policy to pay for fixing the camera and to buy a new one. A friend got us a gig to freelance edit videos for another company. When we got there, I asked the managing director if we could also edit our videos there. He agreed and that month we made more money than we had ever made because we didn’t have to rent edit suites anymore.”
It meant the years between 1984 and 1988 were boom time. Patricios says they took their competitor’s clients rapidly. They also saw the hunger for information. Ornico grew into a media monitoring business and expanded into five divisions.
“The company was doing well. We had property, advertising, production, TV commercials and web development divisions in the Ornico Group.”
Money was pouring in. But, it didn’t last. A few years later, Patricios and Ornico hit rock bottom. He was thrown in that dark hole he swore he would never see. The same hole his father suffered in. He didn’t know it yet, but his past had returned to haunt him. It meant the worst day of his life. It sprang from his company’s books.
“I had hired my friend from university as an accountant. After a while of him managing my books, I had a gut feeling as the numbers were not feeling right. I found out he wasn’t giving me the right reports. He was giving me creative accounting. From a group perspective, it looked like we were doing well when in actual fact he was shifting expenses across the businesses. Some businesses were not doing as well as others but the books didn’t show that,” says Patricios.
The fear of running his business into the ground made him panic.
“I felt very frustrated with myself as I should have picked it up sooner but also felt I should have been a lot closer to the numbers. I panicked, as we were not sure how we would handle it. How do we provide funds to stabilize the business? Which business do we close? Which ones will be able to trade out of the mess?”
He politely asked the accountant to leave, who took a third of the staff with him.
“We had to close some of the businesses and retrench people. It was the hardest decision I have ever had to make. The most painful thing is that it wasn’t their error but mine,” he says.
It bruised his ego. In 1997, he sold Ornico and worked for the company that bought him out. It was four painful years.
“That was definitely the worst time of my life. Even my family life suffered as I was really very unhappy. My wife’s positivity could not pull me through some of those dark days. I did not believe that the company was moving in the right direction strategically, the reporting lines were blurred and as an entrepreneur I did not have the autonomy I needed. I felt I was powerless to make a difference, I felt hamstrung, frustrated and demotivated,” says Patricios.
Being an employee frustrated him. He had to get his company back.
“I needed autonomy and freedom. It was not the money that drove me. The best day was when we bought [the company] back at a lower price than I sold it into the listed organization. It showed that they had no clue about the business but now I could start again in a business I was very passionate about,” he says.
Today, from his sunny office in Sandton, the richest square mile of Africa, Patricios runs Ornico, the business he bought back. The media, advertising and brand intelligence company has departments in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. He employs 200 people. Capitec Bank, Hollard Insurance, Old Mutual, Revlon, South African Breweries and Wimpy are among his customers.
After two decades, he hasn’t forgotten his worst day. He might have fallen into a hole but he climbed out fitter, stronger and wiser.

Beware The Dark Pit And A Haunting Past

The first thing you notice when you step onto Tesla Motors’ production floor are the robots. Eight-foot-tall bright-red bots that look like Transformers, huddling over each Model S sedan as it makes its way through the factory in Fremont, Calif., on the eastern, shaggier side of Silicon Valley. Up to eight robots at a time work on a single Model S in a choreographed routine, each performing up to five tasks: welding, riveting, gripping and moving materials, bending metal, and installing components. Henry Ford and the generations of auto industry experts who have followed would dismiss this setup as inefficient – each robot should do one task only before moving the car on to the next Transformer.
The first thing you notice when you step onto Tesla Motors’ production floor are the robots. Eight-foot-tall bright-red bots that look like Transformers, huddling over each Model S sedan as it makes its way through the factory in Fremont, Calif., on the eastern, shaggier side of Silicon Valley. Up to eight robots at a time work on a single Model S in a choreographed routine, each performing up to five tasks: welding, riveting, gripping and moving materials, bending metal, and installing components. Henry Ford and the generations of auto industry experts who have followed would dismiss this setup as inefficient – each robot should do one task only before moving the car on to the next Transformer.
It’s a $3 billion criticism, to be specific. That was the amount shaved off the company’s market value in early August after Tesla cut its sales forecasts for the year by 10% to 50,000 vehicles, citing delays in teaching the robots to make both the Model S and the new crossover SUV Model X. “The Model X is a particularly challenging car to build. Maybe the hardest car to build in the world. I’m not sure what would be harder,” admitted Elon Musk, Tesla’s billionaire founder and visionary CEO, who also serves in those same roles at SpaceX.
But neither delays nor the cash burn ($1.5 billion in the past 12 months) particularly fazes Musk. He just wants to focus on making the world’s best car, and the $90,000 Model S, by all rights, can claim that prize. An all-electric vehicle, it offers a week’s worth of driving on a single charge from any one of a nationwide network of free solar-powered charging stations. It goes from 0-60 in under three seconds in “ludicrous” mode, the fastest of any four-door production car on the planet, and is also the safest car in its class. When it collides with the crash-test machine, the crash-test machine breaks. You can order it online and have it delivered to your door, get software updates beamed wirelessly and receive maintenance alerts before bad stuff happens. Plus, it’s beautiful. The door handles reach out to be opened as you approach, then fold flat for better aerodynamics. Don’t believe us: Consumer Reports called it the best overall car on the market for the past two years.
These are the kinds of superlatives that shoot Tesla Motors to the top of FORBES’ World’s Most Innovative Companies list in the first year we’ve had enough financial data to consider the company. The word “disruptor” gets attached to Tesla all the time. For several years we’ve closely studied the phenomenon of disruptive innovation, identified in the late 1990s by Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen. We quantify it, based on the difference between a public company’s market value and the measurable intrinsic value of its existing business – an innovation bonus, if you will. Despite all the buzz – and that’s something we try to factor out when measuring the premium – we were initially puzzled by Tesla’s growing success. Unlike classic disruptive innovations such as steel mini-mills, personal computers and, in the car business, cheap Japanese imports, Tesla never pursued the classic route of going after low-end, price-sensitive customers first with cheaper, inferior technology. It doesn’t pursue nonconsumption, or customers who don’t currently drive cars. Tesla automobiles look and drive much like other cars, use established infrastructure like roads and confine much of their product innovation to only one aspect: the power system.
These facts don’t fit the required mold for successful low-end disruption – a traditional case study would point to Tesla hitting a wall. Even Musk wasn’t sure at the beginning. “I didn’t ask for outside money for Tesla, and SpaceX, because I thought they would fail,” he says. But Tesla has instead proved to be a different kind of disruptor, a high-end version that can be just as troublesome for the incumbents.
High-end disruptors produce innovations that are leapfrog in nature, making them difficult to imitate rapidly. They outperform existing products on critical attributes on their debut; they sell for a premium price rather than a discount; and they target incumbents’ most profitable customers, going after the most discriminating and least price-sensitive buyers before spreading to the mainstream. If you look within some large companies, you can flesh out previous examples: Apple’s iPod outplayed the Sony Walkman; Starbucks’ high-end coffee drinks and atmosphere drowned out local coffee shops; Dyson’s vacuum cleaners now have solid market share; Garmin’s GPS golf ­watches have taken much of the business from range finders. The incumbents didn’t react fast enough, and the high-end disruptors took over their market.
Tesla has built its entire company around this idea. The Model S and X will be followed in 2017 by a cheaper Model 3, a $35,000 Tesla for the masses, if all goes according to plan. And despite the fact that Tesla abandoned its forecast of turning a profit this year (even with its unusual and pro-company lease accounting), investors can’t get enough of it: Musk has raised $5.3 billion in equity and debt for Tesla since 2010, with each round increasingly oversubscribed by investors, including a $650 million secondary offering in mid-August, partly to complete its giant battery-making Gigafactory in the Nevada desert. “The willingness of the markets to support the company with various financing structures leads me to believe that everything will probably be okay, assuming the model proves viable,” said Jacob Cohen, senior associate dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
That viability moment should come around 2017, say analysts at Credit Suisse, when Tesla is expected to show its first significant dose of free cash flow, or operating income after capital expenditures (see charts, p. 28). The other metrics look golden: It is on track to gross $5.5 billion this year, up 54% over 2014. Its shares have soared 15-fold since its 2010 IPO to a recent $33 billion market capitalization.
Meanwhile, incumbent automakers face the same challenge now and long term: If much of the auto business ends up going electric (and that’s a big if right now with sub-$3 gas and sales falling overall for electrics and hybrids) Tesla will be miles ahead at the high-end and coming down-market to eat away at the $1 trillion industry. Detroit finds it easy to dismiss Tesla as a moneylosing startup, but it has changed the industry. “[In 2001] GM crushed all of its electric models in a junkyard,” Musk says. “When we came along and made the Roadster, it got GM to make the Volt and then Nissan felt confident enough to go with the Leaf. We basically got the whole ball rolling with electrification of cars. The ball is rolling slowly, but it is rolling.”
Peel back the aluminum skin of a Tesla Model S and you will see what high-end disruption looks like. The motor and gearbox are a fraction of the size of a combustion engine drivetrain, mounted low between the wheels to create a larger crumple zone for passenger safety. The chassis is like a giant skateboard built to accommodate lots of battery wattage.
To create a car that looks this different, Musk has engineered a team and process that look different. Call it the Musk Way. Most car companies try to capture value with an established product. Laboring under radical uncertainty, Tesla has a process that is centered on a single purpose: speed. Like the big automakers, Tesla stamps its own body panels in-house, but it also makes its own battery packs and motors in the Fremont assembly plant. It even makes its own plastic steering wheel casings – a part easily and usually outsourced – because suppliers (much to their regret) tried sending their B teams and took months to turn around designs.
Tesla cannot wait – it updates designs continuously, borrowing ideas freely from its sibling SpaceX, including its extensive use of aluminum in both the body and the chassis of the Model S, as well as drawing and casting techniques used to produce the aluminum bodies of SpaceX’s Falcon rocket and Dragon capsules. “It’s very helpful to cross-fertilize ideas from different industries,” says Musk.
You’ll rarely find someone at Tesla who worked at GM, Ford or Chrysler or an automotive supplier (Aston Martin is one notable exception). Sterling Anderson, a former McKinsey associate and MIT-trained expert in self-driving cars, was hired in the summer of 2014 to work on Tesla’s autopilot systems. Now he’s the program manager of the Model X. The reason Tesla will occasionally put someone in a position without prior industry experience is that Musk is known for selecting people based upon their ability to solve complex problems—not based upon experience. Says Tesla Chief Information Officer Jay Vijayan, “Elon doesn’t settle for good or very good. He wants the best. So he asks job candidates what kinds of complex problems they’ve solved before … and he wants details.”
Musk’s team screens job applicants for their ability to learn under uncertain conditions. Every new employee, no matter which department, has to have proven some kind of ability to solve hard problems. “We always probe deeply into achievement on the résumé,” says Musk. “Success has many parents, so we look to find out who really did it. I don’t care if they graduated from university or even high school.”
Promotions and bonuses at both Tesla (and SpaceX) are built around a 1-to-5 rating system, with 4 and 5 being “great” and “phenomenal”, respectively. “You don’t get the two highest ratings,” says Musk, “unless you have done something innovative. It has to be significant in the case of phenomenal, something that makes the company better or the product better. Anyone can be an improver: HR, finance, production, they can all figure out how to improve things.”
When Tesla first called Vijayan to ask him to consider the CIO job, he said maybe but then pulled himself out of contention. He had a cushy CIO job at Silicon Valley blue-chip software firm VMWare and wasn’t looking to step out on any ledges. Tesla appeared to be taking huge risks, and Elon Musk had a reputation of making monumental demands of the leadership team. But 18 months later he got a call back and was asked to reconsider. During his interview with Musk he became convinced this company could change the world.
Vijayan’s first major task? Build all the software to run the business, from scratch, in three months, for one-fifth the cost. Typically big companies spend millions of dollars on enterprise resource planning software – which handles product planning, finance, manufacturing, supply chain and sales – from large vendors like SAP and Oracle. When Vijayan told him such a task wasn’t possible, Musk simply stated, with a Steve Jobs-like confidence: “Let me know what you need from my side to make this happen.” Says Vijayan, “He doesn’t accept constraints as ‘givens’ the way most people do.”
Vijayan and his team implemented a basic but functioning homegrown system in four months, and with steady improvements it now gives Tesla a lightning-fast feedback loop. “We have a seamlessly integrated information system that gives us speed and agility like no other automaker,” says Vijayan. By comparison, GM outsourced its entire IT function after spinning out EDS in 1996, and only since exiting bankruptcy has it rebuilt its IT strength, but at huge cost.
After hiring folks with a demonstrated ability to solve complex problems, Tesla deploys them in small teams that sit cheek-by-jowl to hasten the solutions. “Our communication allows us to move incredibly fast,” says chief designer Franz von Holzhausen. “That is an element that isn’t happening in the rest of the automotive world. They are siloed organizations that take a long time to communicate.” Von Holzhausen was able to design the award-winning Tesla S with a team of just three designers sitting next to their engineering counterparts. Bigger automakers typically have 10 to 12 designers working on each new model.
Even the car itself is designed for speed of learning. Customers are continuously connected to Tesla via their car’s 4G wireless connection and 17-inch touchscreen control panel, which sends usage data to the manufacturer in real time. Tesla will release fixes via overnight software download or make physical ­changes at a moment’s notice. That ludicrous mode that shaves the zero-to-60mph time by 10% on the top-of-the-line P85D Model S sedan is available as an over-the-air $10,000 software upgrade. And in 2013, after receiving feedback that the back seats in the Tesla S were uncomfortable, Tesla service workers changed every owner’s seats in a matter of weeks, midyear.
Learning in an environment of uncertainty requires a willingness to admit mistakes and move quickly rather than digging in and doing nothing for fear of admitting failure. In fact, obsessively attempting to avoid failure can lead to the greater failure of missing the big opportunity.
When the Model S was introduced in June 2012 it came with a “smart” air suspension system that automatically lowered the car at highway speed for better aerodynamics and range. One day a Model S owner was zooming down the highway and ran over a three-ball trailer hitch. It punctured the underbody’s ballistics-grade armor and the battery pack above it with incredible force. No one was hurt; the car’s warning system told the passengers to exit the vehicle before a fire started in the front compartment. Tesla quickly added a titanium underbody shield to the existing armor on all new cars and made it a free upgrade on existing ones, and it updated the software so the car doesn’t automatically lower at highway speed.
Most automakers lay out their shop floor once to minimize costs and plan model lines that will remain unchanged for several years. Tesla’s production engineers are continually changing the layout of the factory to learn as much as possible. Over time, as Tesla wrings out the uncertainty in the development and manufacturing process, it will transition to a more familiar arrangement, a process that is already starting to happen in the second and third production lines for the Model S and Model X. Tesla learned the benefits of staying nimble early on with the Roadster when, in an effort to reduce costs, it tried to establish a global supply chain similar to a giant carmaker’s. Tesla wasn’t ready for that setup, and having manufacturing spread out over the world led to massive coordination problems. “We definitely don’t get it perfect on the first try, not even close,” says cofounder and chief technical officer J.B. Straubel. “But that’s how we learn.” The stakes will go way up when Tesla adds the future Model 3 on another production line. If one part isn’t right, the whole factory can grind to a halt. FiatChrysler, for example, delayed the launch of the popular Jeep Cherokee by about six months because of problems with its new nine-speed transmission.
Tesla’s innovation process is neither easy nor comfortable. A recent Musk
biography tells the story of the time when, after asking already overworked employees to continue pulling overtime before the launch of the original Tesla Roadster, one employee said, “But we haven’t seen our family in weeks.” Musk’s response: “You will have plenty of time to see your family when we go bankrupt.” Musk also looks down on holidays, having nearly died from malaria following a trip to Brazil and South Africa in 2000. “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: Vacation will kill you.”
The Tesla team is successful at achieving seemingly impossible goals not just because they work harder than anyone else. It has a process for solving complex problems that is effective. “I operate on the physics approach to analysis,” says Musk. “You boil things down to the first principles or fundamental truths in a particular area and then you reason up from there. Then you apply your reasoning to those axiomatic principles to assess what is really possible and what is simply perceived to be possible.” This method leads to innovative solutions that even Tesla executives didn’t think were possible.
Says Straubel: “Musk challenges everyone to work incredibly hard.  I know that sounds stereotypical, but I think he does it to a degree that is pretty unusual, and it is highly uncomfortable for most people, but the results are fairly undeniable. If you challenge people to work hard, they achieve more than they think they can. Most leaders don’t want to do that.” Adds Doug Fields, vice president of engineering: “We take leaps of faith that are like jumping out of an airplane and designing and building the parachute on the way down.”
That’s the necessary approach when you’re making the transition from a one-car company to a multi-car company, and doing it at scale, while simultaneously building a giant indoor energy-storage business. That’s the Musk Way.

Tesla’s secret formula

Before money was invented, before the word entrepreneurship was formulated, people in ancient times traded by offering value. As far back as the Stone Age, people had to transact by exchanging goods that were of equivalent value to what was  to be received.
Today, this concept can be described by two words: value proposition. This has gained currency over time, but some entrepreneurs still miss the mark.
Business is based on the following basic principles; you are either saving your clients time and money, or making them more money. In supply and demand, distribution comes as a value-added product.
Geographic proximity to a product does not mean others have the same advantage. Cocoa is a good example. The product is largely found in West Africa. Any entrepreneur setting up a distribution channel to Singapore will be adding value on two fronts; firstly that area of Asia doesn’t have in the same abundance of cocoa as West Africa, and secondly from the logistics front.
In the knowledge economy, access to rare information elevates the value of those who have it. This is why companies call in consultants and advisors at an inflated cost. It is also why we keep going to conferences, paying international speakers large amounts of money to speak for 30 minutes. It’s all about the value one can bring to the table, and that comes from experience or study.
Scarce skills, like firewall experts, are rewarded handsomely, as cyber security threats rise. A shortage of something increases its value; art collectors can attest to that.
Marketers use this strategy to create a craving for a product and service. You are unlikely to see a Bugatti advertised on billboards and in newspapers. People who can afford the supercar know where to find it.
Entrepreneurs need to reprogram themselves to create value, rather than looking for money. Money chases value. No one holds a monopoly on cash; if you offer customers value, they will gladly give you their money.
Even Albert Einstein, a man of science rather than business, said, “Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”
There are survivalist entrepreneurs who keep complaining as if money repels them. We need to be innovative in how we sell our products and services. The market will pay for the value you provide.
Jannie Mouton is well known for creating value. He did something unique through Capitec Bank. They entered a market which had gigantic financial institutions; they added value through two things in particular. They lowered bank charges and demystified the banking system. This related to the general population, most of whom were clients of other banks. Today, Capitec is one of the largest retail banks with four million clients, and they claim to be registering around 100,000 new clients every month.
Adding value is reliant on the industry that the entrepreneurs find themselves in. You need to make promises to clients that differentiate yourself from your competitors. You have to appeal to what they want. The successful execution of this can convert prospects into new customers.
While you are trying to make millions, never forget that at some point almost everyone in Zimbabwe was once a billionaire. It’s not really about the money, it’s about the value that you add through your company. Align yourself with a sense of value, then all these others things will fall in place

Forget Money  Create Value

It has been a tough seven years in Barbourfields, a suburb of Bulawayo in Matabeleland North in Zimbabwe, where drought has driven people within an inch of their lives. Here children wake up to a spoonful of sugar and hot water.
This is life at the sharp end of the global food shortage and it is hungry and painful. Their only comfort is that it was even worse seven years ago.
“There was no food at all. Most food products were imported from Botswana and South Africa. We didn’t even have corn. When I saw a queue, I would just join, even though I didn’t know what it was for. It was the norm. There were queues everywhere,” says Xoli Dube.
In tough economic times, Zimbabweans queued for everything from food to fuel.
“It was like an everyday job for us. I remember a day I even fainted while queuing. I remember my neighbors used to eat pap with water and sugar. Many people couldn’t even afford to buy beans.”
Most of what the people had farmed was destroyed by the scorching sun in one of the worst droughts in history, in an economy that was already struggling.
Seven year later, many parts of Africa face the same fate. Drought cuts yields making farming a risky business.
According to Grain SA agricultural economist, Wandile Sihlobo, the drought in South Africa has led to a 27% decrease in a summer crops production basket, from 16.5 million tons in 2014 to 11.9 million tons in 2015. Crops that are staple food for most Africans, such as maize, decreased by 30%, from 14.3 million tons in 2014 to 9.9 million tons in 2015.
It means Africa spends at least $25 billion on food imports every year.
In South Africa, the 2015/16 total maize imports in November stood at 536,687 tons, which is 70% of the grain the country used. South Africa’s forecasted imports for this season is 770,000 tons. South Africa contributes a minimum of 630,000 tons annually to the Southern African region.
Hunger knows no friend but a provider. Monsanto, a sustainable agriculture company that delivers products to support farmers, wants to be that provider.
Located in Benoni, a mining town east of Johannesburg, in South Africa, Monsanto says it has created a product to mitigate the effects of drought – Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA); genetically modified (GM) drought-tolerant and insect pest-protected maize varieties. Maize is the staple for 300 million Africans.
“Drought is a very complex issue and there’s no single solution to address it,” says Mark Edge, Director of Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) Partnerships at Monsanto.
For nine years, WEMA has been testing and developing conventional and GM maize hybrids in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. It aims to boost productivity by 20 to 30%, in a project worth $85 million.
“Our first introduction of conventional white maize hybrids, which is sold under the brand name DroughtTEGO, started in 2013 in Kenya and has shown promising harvest results… To date, we have more than 40 unique conventional hybrids approved for commercial release across the five countries,” says Edge.
On its website, Monsanto shares a story of Bertha Otor, a resourceful Kenyan farmer who was one of the first to plant DroughtTEGO.
A year later, Otor says she is continuing to see positive results and has increased the area with maize on her farm. She began farming in 1994.
“There was no rain, there was nothing to eat and I was having a baby. I decided to work with my hands and not wait for my husband to bring food for us. The weather always keeps changing. If you plant your maize and the rains are not there, [crops] will get spoiled and you lose everything,” she says.
Otor says her yields have increased and the maize is bigger since she began using the WEMA seeds.
However, the Director at the African Centre for Biodiversity, Mariam Mayet, says the safety of the drought tolerant gene has not yet been proven.
The safety of genetically modified organisms (GMO) has been an issue of controversy over the years. GM developers and some scientists claim there is a scientific consensus on GMO safety. Mayet says this is due to the lack of enough scientific evidence published to date, which prevents conclusive claims on safety, or of lack of safety, of GMOs.
“They are scale-neutral and can benefit smallholder farmers as much or more than commercial farmers. They are only one of many valuable technologies and tools in agriculture,” Edge replies.
Mayet argues there have been negative consequences for human health and environment in many communities due to use of chemicals in agriculture.
She says Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) maize and cotton have been supplied to smallholder farmers through government-sponsored interventions for free, or at subsidized rates, and farmers have not been able to experience the real costs of the seed.
“Bt maize is currently sold at about double the price of popular non-GM hybrids and five times that of the price of open pollinated varieties,” she says.
Some studies, however, argue that even though Bt maize is expensive, farmers will benefit over a period of years compared to hybrid conventional maize.
“But the resistance of the stem borer has been revealed to be highly variable between seasons, and thus during years and at sites that experience low insect pressure, the economic benefit of planting Bt maize can be negative. It will be hard for smallholder farmers who don’t have resources to counter the impact of these losses in years if the cost of Bt maize seed fails to pay off,” says Mayet.
She says GM crops also have health concerns.
“GM crops heavily use agro-chemicals such as glyphosate, most commonly known as Roundup. This year, the International Agency for Research into Cancer (IARC), which falls under the World Health Organisation (WHO), has classified glyphosate as a ‘probable human carcinogen’.”
Proponents of GMOs claim that the use of the GM seeds reduces the need for pesticides. However, according to Mayet, case studies show that the use of pesticides and herbicides has increased with use of GM seeds, especially in cases where there is pest and weed resistance.
“This has a huge effect on biodiversity with run-off chemicals from agricultural farms which contaminate water sources,” she says.
Her solution to end world hunger?
“Focus on agroecology by government should be key to ensure that smallholder farmers are at the centre of food production and promote food sovereignty,” she says.
Will improved yields and greater paydays come with GM technology or traditional seeds? The choice is yours.

The Dry End Of The Stick

Africa’s economic trajectory is often compared to that of China. The Asian country’s ascent to 21st century economic superpower is rooted in its steel production and coal mining industry that began more than a thousand years ago.
As Cecil John Rhodes attempted to consolidate the South African mining industry in the late 19th century, the economic reverberations of the mineral discoveries cemented the importance the mining sector has and continues to play in the economic development of South Africa.
The production of the many commercially viable solid mineral deposits scattered across West Africa is key to the economic development of the region. A successful marriage of policy reform and privatization is fundamental in ensuring the full economic potential of the region is realized.
To date, interest in West Africa has been negligible. According to many of the governmental mining agencies across the region, a lack of geological information available to prospective investors incapacitates their ability to determine the intrinsic value of the deposits. Wildcat miners indulge in a practice known as concession flipping where discoveries are sold at a profit to larger companies who have the technical and financial capacity to develop the mines.
Globally, the mining sector is integral to the development, diversification and sustainment of many economies and is the rock on which a number of industries – from construction to petrochemicals – are built. Like a phoenix arising from the ashes, Liberia and Sierra Leone, both once ravaged by civil war, are keen to develop their mineral reserves. Along with Burkina Faso and Mali, they have been successful in attracting foreign investment for the funding of a number of mining properties.
Located in Guinea, the Simandou hills boast what is thought to be the world’s largest deposits of untapped iron ore. Economic growth in Guinea has been driven by its mining sector. Although the country has high grades of iron ore and low processing costs, infrastructural challenges remain the greatest hurdle to the production of the many reserves. Railways are often the preferred choice of transportation but provide many restrictions in moving for the mined material. In spite of these challenges, political unrest has abated and with mining titans Vale and Rio Tinto setting up in the region, a slipstream has been created for other mining companies to follow suit.
Ghana has managed to develop a stringent fiscal regime that encourages the production of its mineral wealth. Bauxite, limestone and manganese are mined in large quantities, in addition to gold. In the tragicomedy of Nigerian economics, if black gold is the protagonist, the yellow kind and its kin are the antagonists. Beneath Nigeria’s earth sleeps a giant of huge economic potential. Policymakers have thus far tiptoed around the issue of stimulating the sector. Coupled with a lack of geological data, it remains to be seen whether or not the solid mineral sector will have its rude awakening.
As the West averts its gaze towards Africa, proper resource governance will be essential to ensuring prospective investors operate within a legal and fiscal framework to sustain both economic and community development in the countries they operate.

Unearth The TITAN

It’s hard to believe that two years have passed since the tragic killing of 34 miners in Marikana. The horrific visuals of the shooting on August 16, 2012, remain fresh in the mind. Thousands of mine workers had been protesting against their meagre wages and poor living conditions when police opened fire, killing 34 of them. Police say they were provoked. South African’s were in shock like the rest of the world. Many believe the disaster was waiting to happen while others say the tragic events started a revolution. What did become clear that day is that despite the courageous fight against apartheid being won, the battle against inequality in South Africa is far from over. But has anything changed in the last two years?
<div id="attachment_2969" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2969" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-2969" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/051201050-Desai-683x1024-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Amsterdam, 30-11-2005 International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam IDFA 2005 Rehad DESAI Jury Amnesty Award Foto Felix Kalkman</div>
South Africa has some of the most valuable minerals in the world. For decades, men have slogged, under poor safety conditions, to recover these precious assets from deep beneath the ground, touching and feeling the gems, but never having ownership of them. The mining industry remains South Africa’s biggest revenue earner. Considering the importance, one would assume employees in this sector would be well taken care of, if not by their employers, at least by the government.
For years, mine workers and labor unions have raised their concerns, hoping for change. The recent Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) strike in the platinum sector made sure that this time the pleas of workers will be heard. Relentlessly, for five months, workers were gripped with poverty, hunger and cold until finally there was some respite. The unprecedented 22-week strike made history. The three major platinum producers finally agreed to higher wages, not what Amcu was demanding but enough to get them to return to the mines.
Reaction to the wage deal was mixed with many industry analysts calling it a loss for the workers.  Amcu called it a victory. But will this victory see real transformation in the mining industry?
Amcu leader Joseph Mathunjwa, now a household name, says the strike was not just for social justice but also to honor the workers that were killed at Marikana. Two years later, the Farlam Commission of Inquiry set up to probe the shooting is still trying to find out what led to the tragedy and who was responsible.
Political activist and filmmaker, Rehad Desai, has placed together his account of what happened on that day. In his new documentary Miners Shot Down, Desai pieces together witness accounts, interviews with political heavyweights and even victims that survived the shooting, to expose the social injustices that exist on the mining grounds of Rustenburg, 120 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg.
The film also tells a story of how the ANC, a party once obsessed with fighting for human rights and social and economic equality, lost its way and ended up in Marikana.
Miners Shot Down is a chilling account of the events that led to what has been dubbed the Marikana massacre, using video footage and interviews from the seven days in which miners were striking for better wages.
“I thought it was very important to attempt to set the record straight, to show people what happened and in the process of showing people what happened you begin to understand why it happened,” he says.
Desai was born into a politically active family. His father, Barney, was a leader of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the family had to flee South Africa in 1963. Desai grew up in Britain but his parents constantly reminded him of his roots. While still a teenager, he joined his father in politics, passionate about fighting racism and capitalism. Both returned to South Africa in 1990. Rehad became a trade unionist with socialist ideals but after his father died, he ventured into television and film producing. To date, he has a string of documentaries to his name, many of which have garnered international acclaim for human rights.
His latest film is a story of working class South Africans that have been failed by their government, a government they believed was on their side.
“I think the revolution is coming back, the question is will there be a mature enough leadership to lead it or will the ANC, our ruling party, be mature enough to lead it, to be able to address the very real issues that this country faces or will they continue to follow the same path where the bulk of our people are excluded from the benefits?” asks Desai.
He is steadfast that the shooting on that fateful day was no accident, no measure of self-defense, but a conspired action to eliminate a problem. The film pieces together footage not seen by the public, scenes of the days before the shooting.
“It didn’t just happen, there were events that led to the shooting,” says Desai.
Horrific scenes of dead miners lying on the ground gives you an instant jolt back in time to the attacks carried out on innocent black people under apartheid, children scrambling for safety from gunshots. Desai admits that miners retaliated, but only after they were shot at first.
“Just as they were nearing their informal settlement, a number of vehicles moved in quick succession to sort of box them in, block them off and as that happened and as the miners drew nearer, teargas was fired at them, birdshot and rubber bullets, one of the mineworkers got his pistol out and fired back.”
This was the scene captured by television crews, played out on screens across the world, leading many to believe that the police fired in self-defense. But, Desai wants to know why police had live ammunition and why they had 8,000 rounds of ammunition that day. It is a question that is still being probed by the Farlam Commission of Enquiry. For Desai, it is clear cut; someone from the top gave the order.
Desai’s film takes a poignant look at the ANC as a movement and ruling party over the last 20 years, by following Cyril Ramaphosa.
“Cyril’s story from the 1980s, tells the story of the ANC, a movement which was heroic, courageous, vibrant, responsive, democratic which led a struggle against a white minority regime and succeeded,” says Desai.
Ramaphosa, once passionate about worker’s rights, formed the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1982. He later became a politician serving under Nelson Mandela. He left in 1999 to become a successful businessman, returning to politics in 2013.
At the time of the Marikana shooting, Ramaphosa was a non-executive member on the Lonmin board. The Marikana mine belongs to Lonmin.
“With the political kingdom the ANC gained, they lost sight of the bigger issues related to our economic democracy and we can see that story encapsulated inside the life trajectory of the man who’s become the deputy president of the ANC,” says Desai.
In March, Miners Shot Down was released at the One World film festival in Prague. The film took top honors, winning the Vaclav Havel Jury award for its exceptional contribution to human rights. It also won the Camera Justitia Award at the Movies that Matter Festival in the Netherlands.
The documentary is part of an ongoing campaign for justice by the miners and their families. They want the police to be prosecuted. Instead, miners are facing murder charges for the police that were killed. Explosive evidence recently emerged at the commission about killings committed by mine workers.  Witness accounts of atrocities committed by Amcu members, attacks on their fellow members for defying strike orders, the brutal mutilation and murders of police and of members of the rival union NUM. The commission expects to continue for some time as more new evidence comes to light.
The latest evidence again raises questions, what kind of struggle is this? No doubt there will be more stories to be told about Marikana.

Holding Up A Mirror To A Massacre

Renewable energy has been a hot topic in Africa recently. The increased need to curb coal reliance for energy production has resulted in governments – such as South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana – developing more sustainable energy solutions for the continent.
A worrying reality is that power outages have an impact on the performances of the continent’s economies and might drive away potential foreign investors.
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Off the grid power production has not only been influenced by the need to decrease the reliance on coal, but most importantly carbon dioxide omissions.
Renewable energy is the new gem of Africa. With a favorable climate on the continent, renewable energy has rapidly transformed from being a mere imperative to a lucrative, investment-attracting industry that is growing.
While most energy production on the continent has been state-owned, a brewing phenomenon has been the growth of Independent Power Producers (IPPs).
Female participation within the continent’s renewable energy space is a rarity that is being addressed by governments and policymakers. In South Africa, the department of energy has included the need to incorporate women-owned enterprises in the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP).
With the recent completion of the third bidding rounds of REIPPPP, 17 renewable projects have been awarded to preferred bidders. The estimated deal value for the third round of bidding is said to be around R33.8 billion ($3.1 billion)
One of the successful bidders has been DLO Energy Resources – an energy investment and advisory firm owned by South African entrepreneur Linda Olagunju. Through the Longyuan Mulilo Maanhaarberg consortium and the Longyuan Mulilo De Aar 2 North Wind Facility consortium, the combined capacity of both projects is estimated to be 244MW.
No stranger to sizable deals, this 30-year-old attorney with specialization in energy and project finance was part of the team at Dewey &amp; Leboeuf LPP – now Baker McKenzie – that advised on key transactions in the African energy sector, including Eskom’s $250 million bank loan for its renewable energy projects. Olagunju is also the founder of the Renewable Energy Forum South Africa – a platform that congregates renewable energy players and decision makers within the private and public sectors to engage on key issues affecting the continent’s renewable energy industry.
“Growing up in rural Eastern Cape, prior to the electrification process, therefore having lived and experienced the absence of electricity, I grew up reading about the continent’s vast oil and gas resources and could not understand why countries with an abundance of resources still remained impoverished. Primarily I wanted a further understanding of this, but most importantly to contribute towards making sustainable changes,” says Olagunju.
After being awarded a scholarship to the University of Aberdeen, Olagunju completed her masters in law with a focus on oil and gas law. During this period, she was brought onto a renewable energy organization that was tasked to develop Aberdeen’s first offshore wind farm. It was here that she was introduced to the renewable energy space.
“My introduction to renewable energy occurred at the time when South Africa was facing an electricity deficit and an increase in blackouts. On my return, the national regulator of South Africa was still at the stages of establishing a legal regulatory framework in which renewables could form a part of the energy mix through a feed tariff.”
Olagunju’s perfect timing allowed her to play a contributing role towards the development of South Africa’s renewable energy scene. With Africa set to spend over $72 billion a year on infrastructure development over the next decade, of which energy forms a large part, Olagunju believes that there is still a void within the industry that needs to be filled when it comes to female participation.
“Government is playing an adequate role in ensuring female inclusion, especially in sizable transactions. I do, however, think that the private sector needs to play a bigger role in ensuring that the objectives of female involvement are actually met through ensuring the real involvement of female-owned enterprises and skills transfer,” she says.
With a large part of South Africa’s economy heavily reliant on the mining sector – the biggest electricity consumer – the renewable energy IPP Programme has allowed for the diversification of the country’s energy mix, by integrating renewables into the Integrated Resource Plan. Another benefit of renewable energy projects is the shorter construction turnaround time and connection period, which makes them a favorable solution to address the energy deficit.
International energy companies – mainly from Asia, Europe and the United States – have also been involved in renewable energy projects in Africa. The bidding process in South Africa requires that projects are at least 40% owned by South African companies – a necessary pre-requisite to ensure the sustainability of the projects post-construction and connection. Olagunju believes that there is still a great need for African-owned companies to start investing in such projects to ensure further economic development within the continent.
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“Nigeria has done very well in creating local ownership within the oil and gas sector and it would be great to see some of those companies taking up equity in the renewable energy projects that are in progress. I am a firm believer in inter-African trade and investment and certainly this process provides a platform.”
Olagunju believes that strategic partnerships are the perfect recipe for guaranteed development within any industry, especially in energy.
“It is important to have partners with the right mix of skills in order to grow. It is just as important to align oneself with partners that can facilitate an expansion strategy. In the context of REIPPPP, we have seen companies that have aligned themselves with strong international partners with a solid balance sheet, they have been able to achieve better tariffs,” says Olagunju.
With the on-going transformation of Africa’s energy sector – the privatization of Nigeria’s power sector and South Africa creating a platform for large-scale procurement from independent power producers – renewable energy has been a priority within these agendas.
Other recent developments include: Namibia working on the development of three solar PV plants, Zambia’s Request for Proposal (RFP) for the provision of solar power in the country’s mining region, and Ghana announcing the construction of the largest solar park in Sub-Saharan Africa with the development of UK-based blue energy.
“This [solar] park boasts approximately 155MW capacity and is geared to supply much-needed power to the ECOWAS region. Countries such as Kenya, Angola and Mozambique in their embracing of renewable energy is a clear indication that the continent is slowly moving away from being subsistent to being self-reliant and responsible for its own development, which is a great thing.”
2012 saw Olagunju launch the inaugural Renewable Energy Forum South Africa (REFSA) – a Pan-African conference in which players within the renewable energy space can engage in dialogue and find solutions to challenges faced by the industry.
“The reason why I created REFSA was because I felt that developers and other key stakeholders needed a platform to discuss the sector and issues affecting the sector while sharing ideas,” she says.
It is through platforms such as the REFSA conference that the seeds for intercontinental transactions can be planted.
“For the upcoming 2014 conference, which will be held in March, there will be representatives from Nigeria, Ghana, Mozambique, Angola, Zambia, Kenya and South Africa. What is expected from this conference is the exchange of ideas and insight sharing on the South African bidding process from law firms, such as Norton Rose Fulbright and Webber Wentzel, as well as funding advice from advisory firms such as Fieldstone. Coupled with snapshots into key projects that are out in the market and how one can access such opportunities.”
When it comes to the future of renewable energy on the continent, the road ahead will be a long, arduous and expensive one, but with dedicated individuals like Olagunju driving REFSA the rewards will be priceless.

Shedding Light  On Renewable Energy

It’s 4AM and another golden dawn breaks over California. Mark Tonderai is already awake typing up a script in his home office. He is surrounded by film: his favorite film scores fill the air, to his right is a poster of the movie that brought him a taste of success, House at the End of the Street, and scrawled on three whiteboards are writing assignments, ideas and production schedules for his next projects.
When inspiration is lacking, Tonderai doesn’t have to look far. He simply turns and glances out the window. There, on Mount Lee, stands a symbol that can taunt as the years wear on: HOLLYWOOD.
Tonderai was born to a British father and a Zimbabwean mother, in Hammersmith, London. His parents sent him to Zimbabwe where he completed his education at Peterhouse, arguably one of the most prestigious schools in the country, located near Marondera. After high school he headed back England where he studied architecture, but he knew there was something missing in his life.
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“[Growing up] I was always drawing or typing on my father’s type writer. Looking back, I guess I’ve always been creative.”
Back in England, Tonderai applied for numerous jobs in the entertainment industry and landed a trainee-presenter job at the BBC. Three months later, he had his own radio show, The Mark Tonderai Show. It played a variety of music—hip-hop, R&amp;B, classic soul and reggae—to a fairly conservative British audience in the early 90s.
Tonderai wanted more and went into TV. One of his proud acting credits was a role in the highly-acclaimed 2002 action drama, The Four Feathers, starring the late Heath Ledger, Djimon Hounsou and Kate Hudson. Tonderai played an Egyptian orderly.
It didn’t get any easier behind the camera. A frustrated Tonderai felt he was fighting a losing battle and began making plans to go to Hong Kong where he would teach English, earn a solid income and figure out what to do with his life. Overnight, his luck changed.
“My wife picked up one of my pitches, read it and sent it to a competition… before I knew it, I was in production.”
In 2005, Tonderai’s film Dog Eat Dog brought him back to his mother’s land for the Zimbabwe Film Festival. His light skin and British accent puzzled many.
“Many people questioned whether or not I was really Zimbabwean because of the way I look. I had to defend myself… it was quite amusing.”
His road-film-thriller, Hush, which he wrote and directed, came three years later. The film did not do well at the box office but Tonderai was not discouraged. He worked harder, burning the midnight oil, to churn out what was to be his big break, House at the End of the Street. The film starred 23-year-old Academy Award winner Jennifer Lawrence and grossed over $44 million.
“It was really good for us… Suddenly so many things changed. The film was shown on over 3,000 screens in America and I had to pinch myself.”
Tonderai may be settled in the United States but he dreams of making films in Africa.
“I want to do a film set in Cape Town, based on Roger Smith’s book, Wake Up Dead… It’s is a film I was born to do. I would really like to kick it off early [next year],” says Tonderai.
For the man born in England, raised in Zimbabwe and living in the States he still considers Africa home.
“I always tell people I’m from Zimbabwe, even though I haven’t been there in a long time.”
One of the most important lessons Tonderai has learned on his journey is to leave no room for regret.
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“Life is short, you have to get up and attack it. You have to make things happen because very soon you’ll realize that half your life is gone, then three quarters or your life is gone and then it’ll be too late. You’ll think back and remember all the things you wish you had done but never did.”
Things could’ve turned out very differently for Tonderai. He could have been an architect, he could have taught English in Hong Kong, but he took the road less traveled and that has made all the difference. Now he sits in the director’s chair yelling “Cut! Take two,” but he remembers that in life there are no second takes.   FL

There Are No Second Takes in life

“Finally, after a turbulent seven years, we are on the brink of making history,” enthuses Zwelakhe Sisulu, a journalist-turned-magnate who believes manganese will eventually “do for South African mining what gold and diamonds did” back in the heyday.
The chairman of Kudumane Manganese, one of South Africa’s newest mining companies, makes the remark at a time when one of the doyen families of South African mining, the Oppenheimers, is exiting amid plummeting revenues. In November, Nicky Oppenheimer put an abrupt end to his family’s century-old hold on the diamond industry. He sold his 40% stake in De Beers, the world’s leading diamond company, to Anglo American for $5.1 billion.
Sisulu is finding it difficult to contain his excitement. And it’s not because his company is making money, just yet, but because when it does, it will make bucket loads, for thousands of years.
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South Africa is one of the most resource-rich nations on earth, with mineral reserves estimated at more than $2.5 trillion, according to Business Insider. Manganese makes up a big part of that wealth, with the country known to have between 85 and 92% of the world’s high-grade manganese ore reserves. However, there’s something anomalous about how South Africa benefits from world manganese trade. It produces only 15% of the world’s manganese, compared with China, which produces more than 35%, a lower grade at that, and has less than 5% of the world’s manganese reserves and resources.
Most of the country’s reserves are found in the Northern Cape, in part of the Kalahari Basin, a large area covering 2.5 million square kilometers and straddling South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Most famous for having the biggest mineral deposits in the world, the basin is home to diamond, manganese, iron ore, zinc, copper and a host of other minerals. It also has a significant presence of limestone, gypsum, granite, verdite, mica and rose quartz.
South Africa’s new, albeit slow, manganese rush began more than seven years ago when Sisulu’s Kudumane Manganese—as well as several other consortia including Kalagadi Manganese and Tshipi é Ntle Manganese Mining—were granted prospecting rights that were later converted to full mining rights.
Thanks to the country’s policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), the mines became post-apartheid South Africa’s first green fields projects to be commissioned on such a grand scale and with significantly higher local black ownership.
Three years before, the South African parliament adopted the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act in 2002, which compelled all existing mining houses, including world leaders like Anglo American and De Beers, to cede at least 26.1% of their shareholding to blacks as a means to redress apartheid. The government then promised to ensure that henceforth, any new rights issued would be even better for the locals—guarantee them larger stakes, skill greater numbers of indigenous people, encourage innovation and find more sustainable ways of mining.
Collectively, it is estimated that the new mines have enough reserves to last the next 5,000 years. They are all also building sintering plants so they can participate more meaningfully in the mineral’s value chain—something old mines didn’t do much of.
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Delighted that theirs are “genuine deals”, Sisulu says “there was a lot of paper shuffling” and complacency in previous mining BEE transactions. “Blacks did not care about running a mine. One thing I’ve learnt is that you’ve got to dirty your hands in this business.” Insisting he’s “not reading a political catechism”, he says the new manganese dispensation has given Africa’s biggest economy “a golden opportunity for genuine ownership of assets by blacks, as well as a genuine rise of black professionals. If you look at gold and platinum mining, they remain exclusively white.”
When FORBES AFRICA talked to the budding oligarchs, they had all achieved critical mass. Some are now readying themselves to transport ore to their customers across the globe, while others are about to go into full production.
But it hasn’t been an easy road.
Over the years, the new miners lost a great deal of time and energy in bun fights over the “arranged marriages” the government forced them to enter into with international partners. None were afforded an opportunity to choose their foreign investors.
“The issue of forced marriages was a serious one,” laments Tshipi é Ntle Manganese Mining chairperson Sakumzi Macozoma, “besides the issue of compatibility, there were issues of investment horizons and simple diligence in doing the work that needed to be done.” He considers himself “lucky, in that our consortium worked well from day one”.
Sisulu admits to having it rough in the beginning, but is now pleased that “reason ultimately prevailed” and the relationship between them and their Japanese strategic equity partners is “working like a charm”.
Daphne Mashile-Nkosi, who heads Kalagadi Manganese, has not been as fortunate. The single-biggest shareholder and chairperson of Kalahari Resources has been in constant disputes with the bigger of her two strategic equity partners, giant steel maker ArcelorMittal International which owns half of Kalagadi. It took a High Court order to force ArcelorMittal to meet a R241.3 million shareholders’ agreement with Kalagadi. ArcelorMittal had expressed unhappiness with the way the business was being run by the local partner, claiming that certain material obligations under the Kalagadi Manganese shareholders agreement had been breached and that corporate governance was found wanting in the mining firm. ArcelorMittal also wanted to appoint a joint CEO. The High Court also ordered the company to pay the costs of the legal proceedings and ruled that ArcelorMittal discharge its financial obligations in the future, pro-rata to its shareholding in Kalagadi Manganese.
<div id="attachment_1235" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1235" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1235" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/AV_00012786-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />SOUTH AFRICA &#8211; 6 August 2009: Saki Macozoma is the chairperson of financial institutions STANLIB and Liberty Life, deputy chairman of the Standard Bank of South Africa and a director of the Liberty Group. (Photo by Gallo Images / Financial Mail / Robert Tshabalala)</div>
Other stumbling blocks remain. Transport, over which they have little control, is one of them.
Transporting manganese by road would cost the mines around 75% more than rail, the miners say. But they may not have to go that route, if the government delivers on its promise. After years of shirking its responsibility, the government has finally decided to come to the party.
In February, President Jacob Zuma announced that government-owned transportation utility Transnet would spend R300 billion ($36.7 billion) to increase railway capacity, build and improve port facilities and upgrade fuel pipelines. The plan is specifically aimed at speeding up resource shipments and includes a new railway line to transport 16 million tons of manganese to Coega, a new development zone that’s at the center of the world’s main trade routes, being equidistant from American, European and the Pacific Rim regions.
“It’s going to take time but we are happy it’s finally going to happen. The imponderable here is why did we wait? We knew it had to be done. But it’s not too late,” says Sisulu.
In a country where most leaders of mining consortia are, or were, politically well-connected, some may find it strange that Sisulu and Macozoma would not have been able to do something about the situation they are now finding their companies in.
Zwelakhe Sisulu’s father, Walter, recruited Nelson Mandela to the ruling, 100-year-old, African National Congress. The two went on to become close friends and each other’s confidantes when they were both incarcerated for close to three decades for political activism. When Mandela was released in 1990, Zwelakhe went on to become his press and private secretary.
“No-one would see Madiba if I didn’t want them to see him,” is how Sisulu best describes his role in Mandela’s life at the time.
When Mandela retired from active politics after serving a five-year term as head of state, Macozoma became one of the most powerful men in South Africa. A close confidant of Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, Macozoma formed the nucleus around whom Mbeki’s inner circle was built. Like Mandela, although much younger, he is also a former Robben Island prisoner.
But transport is not the only challenge the new miners are facing. Across the South African mining industry, output has dropped. Unrest and wildcat strikes have reared their ugly head. And the country is facing stiff competition from fellow African countries like Gabon.
All this is happening at a time when worldwide demand for manganese has slowed. South African Chamber of Mines figures show that primary manganese ore production increased by 57% in 2010 to 7.1 million tons, coinciding with the global economic recovery. Of the total production, 5.9 million tons were exported while 17% was consumed locally. Total sales amounted to R10.6 billion and the industry contributed 1.5% to the country’s total merchandise exports.
Right now the figures are nowhere near there. But when that upward curve comes again, Sisulu says, they will be able to take advantage: “For as long as you produce steel, you are going to need manganese.”
Manganese is widely used for steel production, to give it strength, hardness and durability. The metal’s demand is being driven, in the main, by the infrastructure, transport and other development needs of the world’s nations, especially the most populous and resource-hungry ones, like China, which accounts for half the world’s steel and iron production and consumes 676 million tons a year.
Imara SP analyst Stephen Meintjes says: “Short- to medium-term consolidation is likely until steel prices and consumption turn up again. This might dislodge some high-cost Asian producers facilitating more realistic prices in due course.”
South African manganese will eventually perform to its full potential in the world market, he reckons, and “nothing, except our vexed mining jurisdiction problems” will stand in its way.
Macozoma says: “Conservative estimates of world production of steel, in which manganese is a key ingredient, suggest that, barring the usual economic cycles, is going to be strong for the next 50 years or more. This is based on the urbanization rate in the world, which requires extensive infrastructure.”
So, will manganese be as good as gold, as Sisulu surmises?
“Way too optimistic, something like iron ore, which of course is still very good, maybe,” says Meintjes.
“Manganese is different from gold in that the latter was a store of value worldwide and was viewed as wealth in itself. Manganese is an industrial mineral so it depends on the levels of steel production in the world,” says Macozoma
That said, he quips: “Manganese is not a 20/20 game for South Africa. It is a five-day cricket test.”

The Slow Rush

In an increasingly on-demand world, how do you get people to tune in and stay tuned? Take a cue from Ian Sander and Kim Moses. Six years ago the husband-and-wife duo produced a television show called Ghost Whisperer, about a 25-year-old girl (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt) who can talk to ghosts. CBS picked it up and scheduled it to run on Fridays at 8 p.m., a ratings dead zone. Survival meant generating some serious buzz—and not waiting for the network’s help.
The pair organized a conference where paranormal-fanatic bloggers could meet the stars of the show before it aired. They also created a crystal ball game for ghost-fan forums online. Expenses ran short of $100,000, cheap by TV standards. Result: Ghost Whisperer averaged 10 million viewers during its first season—the highest-rated Friday night show that year. Over the next few years (it ran for five) Sander and Moses made a Web series from a ghost’s point of view, called The Other Side. When Comic-Con, a film and TV convention, came around they produced a Ghost Whisperer graphic novel. In some cases sponsors like General Motors covered most of the costs.
Sander and Moses got so good at building buzz they decided to make a business out of it. Today the couple runs two outfits headquartered in the old Animation Building on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif.: Sander Moses, their production arm, and Slam, a marketing agency that helps TV and movie producers use the Web to snare viewers. According to SNL Kagan, a media research firm, even if a show makes it through its first season, it has only a 30% chance of being renewed the next year. “We have to create an interactive playground,” says Moses, 50.
Sander, 56, and Moses started flirting with online marketing in 1996 while working on the show Profiler. Their lead character, FBI agent Samantha Waters, was tracking down a serial killer who called himself “Jack of All Trades.” One episode took place in Jack’s lair, where the killer typed on his computer. The camera peeked over his shoulder to reveal the URL he was looking at—JackOTrades.com. Viewers who went to that website could chat with the creep and tour his loft. The site was such a hit that NBC executives, worried about the message they were sending, asked to have it taken down.
These days Sander and Moses never make a show without a marketing plan. Last year they pitched a reality show, Psychic in Suburbia (about psychic Maureen Hancock and her family), to the Style Network. The attack included a mobile application that allows users to shake their phones like a magic eight ball and get Hancock’s answer to any question. The show premiered as a onehour documentary in July; Style will decide whether to pick it up as a series in October.
In another project, meant to highlight the show Ugly Betty as it went into syndication earlier this year, Slam created an app that lets viewers “Be Bettyer” by decorating a photo of themselves with Betty traits like thick eyebrows and braces. For Regis and Kelly they created an app allowing fans to run a virtual race in high heels, winning coupons along the way.
“We love what they’re doing,” says Eric Berger, head of Sony Pictures’ Crackle, which hired the couple to create a Web series called Monster Heist, about monsters planning to steal jewels. “They think about the 360-degree experience.”
<div id="attachment_65" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-65" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-65 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_021-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Husban and wife Ian Sander and Kim Moses</div>

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