He is Africa’s king of telecommunications. He’s a frontrunner in fiber optics. And he operates the continent’s largest satellite communications business. Add fixed and enterprise networks to the mix and you get Econet Wireless Group, one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. This is the life story of a man who rose from a poor village in Zimbabwe to take a seat at the top table of world business.
As the company’s founder and executive chair, Strive Masiyiwa is writing entrepreneurial history. His Econet Group is a celebrated example of how to make it in Africa, through constant re-invention and persistent expansion into new countries and sectors. It has earned him a personal fortune of $600 million, according to FORBES.
With well over 30 million mobile customers, thousands of corporate clients and almost 6,000 employees, Econet generates an estimated $3 billion in annual revenue—and that’s probably a conservative figure.
The group has operations and investments in 17 countries, mainly on the continent, as well as in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
Communications technology is written across Masiyiwa’s heart. He already understood in the early 1990s that the opportunity to use mobile phones to drive change in Africa is enormous: the continent is the world’s fastest growing market for cellular technology.
Twenty years ago, less than 1% of Africans had a telephone. Today, the once dark continent is the talking continent, with three out of four Africans owning a cell phone. It’s one of the most phenomenal business successes in the continent’s history.
“There are more cell phones in Africa today than in Europe. More Africans access the internet via the cell phone than Europeans,” says Masiyiwa.
But Econet’s telecoms interests stretch well beyond mobile phones. Recognizing the growing need for data on top of voice services, Econet has expanded into fiber optics infrastructure.
“It’s important to move with the changes taking place in our sector. It’s no longer sufficient to just provide voice. People have increasing data requirements,” says Masiyiwa.
Econet’s British subsidiary, Liquid Telecom, now runs Africa’s longest network across 14 borders from Cape Town, via Kigali, Kampala and Nairobi all the way up to Mogadishu.
Its fiber optics customers are mainly large corporations, including mining and oil companies, internet service and mobile providers, as well as banks.
“It’s about staying ahead of the curve,” says Masiyiwa, listed by FORBES as one of the 20 most powerful African entrepreneurs in 2011.
Over the years, he has become known for having a nose for investments and to sniff them out early: African internet users—who have a growing need for data—have increased ninefold since 2003.
“There’s a tsunami of data. People talk less on their cell phones than they use data. The traditional cell phone networks can’t carry that. You just have to look post-voice,” Masiyiwa says.
To provide a visual image of this data tsunami, if you stacked up the total global data, he says, it would reach 2.5 quintillion bites. About 90% of that was generated in the last two years alone.
Econet’s fiber optic expansion through its Liquid Telecom arm is fairly aggressive, according to TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod.
“They are plugging in a very big gap that exists in Africa,” he says.
“Masiyiwa is a shrewd operator who is very connected and understands the market as well as the conditions on the ground. He knows how to operate in tough business environments and how to make the best of it.”
Diversion of investments is part of that strategy. And whatever Masiyiwa sets his mind on, he does it well. Econet operates Africa’s largest satellite communications business, provides fixed networks, enterprise networks, payment technologies to banks across the continent and has investments in insurance, Coca-Cola bottling plants, hotels and safari lodges.
Yet another arm, Econet Solar, is growing rapidly, offering products from solar lanterns to home power stations to bring lighting to off-grid communities.
It all looks like a smooth ride in hindsight. But it took Masiyiwa years of hard work, persistence and heaps of faith.
He got his first glimpse on what makes a successful entrepreneur when helping out in his mother’s furniture business in Zambia, after the family fled Zimbabwe—then called Rhodesia—in 1965 to escape Ian Smith’s regime after the declaration of independence from Britain. From the age of seven, Strive, his brother and his sister helped out in the workshop, which helped pay them through boarding school in Edinburgh.
“My mother manufactured and sold her own furniture. She was very good at it. It was a typical African family business. You are part and parcel of what goes on in it. I learnt a lot of the basics from her, including the importance of hard work,” he recalls.
Masiyiwa applies these principles to this day. Although Econet is far from a family business, it follows the ethos of his mother’s small firm: people first.
“The most important aspect of a business is its people; how you motivate them, how you keep them. Those are enduring principles,” he says.
Even though Masiyiwa had left his home country at a young age, he always longed to return to Zimbabwe. After he finished school, he planned to join the guerrillas in the armed struggle against Smith’s ruling white minority. He realized that an education might be a better tool to wage the war against injustice.
He studied engineering in Britain instead and returned in his early twenties to what is now Zimbabwe, run by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, to work for the national telephone company, ZPTC.
“I decided that it really wasn’t for me to work for an enterprise, so I started my own business. Because there were no opportunities in telecommunications, I changed sectors and started a construction firm,” Masiyiwa says.
Retrofit, his construction business, was soon snapping up lucrative government and private sector contracts throughout Zimbabwe.
“Even if you visit Harare today, there is hardly a major building that I wasn’t involved in,” says Masiyiwa.
<div id="attachment_2421" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2421" class="size-medium wp-image-2421" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Strive-Masiyiwa4-hires-300x202.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="202" />Strive Masiyiwa, Chiarman of Econet Wireless. Photographed in London this afternoon.</div>
Trained as a telecommunications engineer, Masiyiwa’s ears pricked up in the early 1990s when people started talking about mobile phones. Despite his success in construction, he decided to bet on wireless communications.
“As soon as I saw that the telecommunications sector was opening up, I began to pursue that,” he recalls.
The hitch: state-owned ZPTC had a monopoly. When he approached his former employer in 1993 with plans for a wireless joint venture, they said no, refusing him a license.
Instead of giving up, Masiyiwa thought of plan B. He came up with the idea of telecommunications as a beacon of freedom.
“Being able to talk to someone on a telephone is part of freedom of expression, I thought. That means that monopolies restrict freedom of expression,” he says of his ruse.
Thus began a five-year constitutional court battle, which brought Masiyiwa international prominence, but made him rather unpopular with his government. It was also the end of his flourishing construction business. As soon as he took on Mugabe, doors slammed in his face.
“The day we filed the case, every single contract we had with any government organization ended,” he says.
The intelligence men and the police made life even more difficult for Masiyiwa, his wife and six children.
To keep financially afloat, he eventually sold Retrofit, back then the biggest company in Zimbabwe.
“I scrambled to sell the business because it was in court against the government. When I eventually found a buyer, he said I needed to resolve the dispute first. But I couldn’t wait years, so I set up a new company, Econet, and transferred the litigation to the new company,” he says.
It was a tough time, but what made him hang in there was his irrevocable Christian faith. The constitutional battle coincided with a spiritual awakening, says Masiyiwa.
“When I was in my mid-thirties, I came across the bible and made a commitment to become a Christian and live life according to certain values,” he says.
“When you have faith, you don’t see obstacles. Knowing God was on my side, I never had a sense of struggle,” Masiyiwa, a born-again Christian, says while explaining why he never faltered despite the financial stresses and intimidation.
Masiyiwa, who grew up in a non-religious family, is now a member of a tight-knit church community.
“In fact, it was the church that carried me through. They rallied behind me in an extraordinary way,” he recalls.
Many Zimbabweans supported Masiyiwa’s case against the government. Ordinary people would walk up to him on the street to offer their solidarity, promising to never own a cell phone until he was allowed to operate in the country.
When the court eventually ruled in his favor, in December 1997, removing the monopoly, Econet shot up to become a market leader only six weeks after being licensed. Masiyiwa soon became Zimbabwe’s first US dollar millionaire.
He never forgot the support he received during this difficult time from his church and his people. Every year, Masiyiwa donates a sizable chunk of his annual income to his church. He also listed Econet’s Zimbabwean subsidiary partially on the Harare Stock Exchange—Econet otherwise remains a private business.
“When I got my license, I felt I had to give those who supported me an opportunity to be owners in my company. I wanted them to be more than just customers. So, I sold 40 percent of the subsidiary and kept the rest. I decided it was the best way to show my appreciation,” he says.
“The response was phenomenal. We have the largest and widest ownership of any company.”
Not only Zimbabweans, but people across the continent can be grateful to Masiyiwa. The case was a milestone in opening up Africa’s telecommunications sector to private capital, making mobile phones affordable.
It was also Masiyiwa’s stepping stone for creating an Africa-centered global corporation.
He launched all over the continent; from Botswana to Lesotho, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and eventually South Africa, where he relocated in 2000. Today, he lives between Johannesburg, where Econet is headquartered, and London, where his family lives.
Botswana was the first step of Masiyiwa’s expansion strategy, even before he moved to South Africa. He set up Mascom, short for Masiyiwa Communications, a consortium to launch Botswana’s first cell phone company, and won a public tender called by Botswana’s government. Shortly thereafter, he bought Lesotho’s public telephone company.
“I became known for putting consortia together, because we didn’t have a lot of our own capital. In each country, I found partners and put a strong offer together,” he says.
“To be successful as a business in telecommunications, I had to leave Zimbabwe. And that had nothing to do with politics. Zimbabwe is a small country. There was only so far I could go. Since I had a great management team in Zimbabwe, there was no need for me to hang around there.”
Masiyiwa never set foot in Zimbabwe again, but he never forgot the people he left behind. Ever the defender of freedom of expression, he made a personal loan in 2000 to the country’s then only independent newspaper, the Daily News, which was shut down by the government three years later.
His reputation as an entrepreneur who takes mobile phones to the people, and doesn’t take no for an answer, has spread.
“One day, I got a phone call from the Maori in New Zealand, who had read about my battles in Zimbabwe. They wanted me to help them to bid for an empowerment license for a mobile operator,” he says.
Since Masiyiwa likes a bit of a challenge, he packed his bags and flew to the Pacific. With the help of his battle-hardened team, he got New Zealand’s indigenous people their license. They treated him like a hero and to his pride and joy, the company, 2degrees, remains successful to this day.
Masiyiwa returned to South Africa to pursue his own ventures. He had set his sights on Kenya where the government had put the national telephone company up for tender.
“We won it, but the people who were in office had strange ideas about how to do business. After a very inappropriate proposal came through, I said ‘Thank you, but no thank you’ and called the deal off,” Masiyiwa says.
It was the beginning of his fervent crusade against corruption. Masiyiwa abandoned more than a handful of lucrative but non-transparent government tenders in Nigeria, Malawi and Cameroon.
“Dealing with corruption is simple. You walk away,” he says, claiming he has never paid a bribe and simply says no.
“It’s not the end of the world if the deal doesn’t happen. I have no regrets.”
He has to admit, however, that he was at times persecuted for his tough stand against corruption and at other times had to wait years to launch operations in a country because corrupt officials were blocking his way.
In the example of Kenya, his resolve and patience eventually paid off. A couple of years after walking away from the tender, elections replaced Kenya’s leadership.
“The new government called me and asked me to bid for another license, promising it was going to be open and transparent. I bid and won that tender and began to build a new business in Kenya, which I subsequently sold to (French mobile provider) Orange,” he says.
Instead of wasting his energy on dodgy deals, Masiyiwa poured it into staying on top of his game in Africa.
Masiyiwa is quite a visionary, who must not be underestimated in any way, says Arthur Goldstuck, director of business technology research firm World Wide Worx.
“He created a real pan-African business in a sector dominated by foreign firms and foreign investment. What makes Masiyiwa unique is his pan-African approach while also branching out elsewhere in the world. He doesn’t see Africa as a limitation. That’s very rare.”
Whoever thought Masiyiwa was just about earning top dollar couldn’t be more wrong. When he turned 50 three years ago, he decided to spend half of his time promoting entrepreneurship and social development in Africa, with projects ranging from health to education and agriculture.
“While I’m still interested in the growth and development of my business, I only spend half of my time on it. It was a very deliberate decision,” he says.
Among many other initiatives, Masiyiwa helped to develop a $50 tablet for disadvantaged students, which will be rolled out this year in universities and colleges in Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Lesotho. He also developed solar-powered cell phone chargers for communities without electricity and launched affordable weather-indexed insurance schemes for smallholder farmers.
But most importantly, Masiyiwa works towards making mobile telephony more affordable for the average African. Without communications technology, people are unable to become part of their country’s economic growth, he says.
Years ago, he invented the free ‘call me’ messaging service for subscribers that have run out of airtime. Econet’s latest initiative is tariff zoning based on capacity utilization so that customers in poor rural areas are charged lower tariffs than those in wealthier urban areas.
“I believe that meeting the needs of ordinary people is not mutually exclusive from being a successful, profitable business. We are in constant search for creating greater value for our customers. We are constantly developing products and services that break the barrier,” he says.
Also, Masiyiwa commits considerable time to numerous charities and trusts, including the Rockefeller Foundation, AGRA, which represents smallholder farmers, the United Nations panel for sustainable energy and Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel.
He was appointed by Bill Clinton to serve the Southern African Enterprise Development Fund and sits on the boards of the Nelson Mandela Advisory Committee and Endeavor SA.
One of the most respected Universities in the United States, Morehouse College, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Junior was educated, recognized Masiyiwa’s humanitarian work and philanthropy with an honorary doctorate.
Perhaps most importantly, he supports 42,000 orphans in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Burundi through the Capernaum Trust, which he established with his wife Tsitsi.
Fellow Zimbabwean entrepreneur Tawanda Nyambirai, the founder and chief executive of TN Holdings, once called Masiyiwa an honest, generous, kind and humble man.
Together with British entrepreneur Richard Branson, Masiyiwa now also runs the Carbon War Room, an international non-profit organization, which helps entrepreneurs develop solutions to fight climate change.
“Strive is passionate about Africa gaining full economic freedom,” Branson wrote in his latest book Screw Business As Usual. He also credited Masiyiwa as one of the people responsible for the communications revolution.
No wonder Masiyiwa is often referred to as the Bill Gates of Africa—a backhanded compliment he takes in his stride.
“I thought Bill was the Strive Masiyiwa of America!” he quips.

“Dealing With Corruption Is Simple, Just Say No”

In the next three years, China will spend close to $1 billion buying a share of Africa’s digital satellite television market.
It is big business that is not welcomed by everyone.
As dozens of African countries migrate from analogue to digital television, China has already purchased its way into a strong position that is likely to get stronger.
Since 2000, China has invested in Africa’s broadcast networks. This firm hand has seen China shift from technical support to supplying what is on the screen.
“China has been in Africa for a lot longer than most people think. If you remember most liberation movements, Africa got assistance from China as well as Russia. Back then in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, it was more of cooperation in the struggle for liberation,” says Wellington Radu, head of programs at Media Monitoring Africa, a non-profit media watchdog.
Chinese media group StarTimes is at the heart of Africa’s digital terrestrial migration, with roughly 2.5 million subscribers on the continent.
“We can only speculate as to why China is increasingly investing in Africa’s media space. It is about how African governments choose to handle China’s investments so that they work to their advantage,” Radu says.
So far, a mere handful of African countries have launched digital terrestrial television (DTT), and it is expected that 100 million homes in the continent will switch by 2015.
DTT migration on a national level is a relatively new venture for the continent, and in many cases a number of countries do not have the policy or the strategy to switch to a fully-digital landscape.
African countries are looking to companies like StarTimes, already present in eight of the continent’s countries, to bankroll the migration.
One of the issues is that this could put most of Africa’s pay television market in the hands of a foreign player.
“To me it represents a serious question around how [this] will this impact democratic processes and spaces. On the one hand it empowers you. At the same time it scares me if I think about the fact that if I allow the Chinese to do this, how much power does my government have over what they know I’m accessing on the net, what I’m writing, who I’m talking to?” says Sanusha Naidu from the Open Society Foundation of South Africa.
Meanwhile, StarTimes has spent $127 million in Nigeria to make sure that 16 of the country’s states will receive its digital signals.
“I think what’s interesting as well is the Chinese don’t want to go to the media partner, they want to go to the state. They understand where the power to release licenses lies, who has the power to make the decision,” says Naidu.
Earlier this year, the Pan African Network group, a part of StarTimes, won a controversial signal distribution license tender in Kenya.
The license provides the group with ownership of the platform on which broadcasters will have to grant transmission of their content, giving StarTimes a large portion of Kenya’s television market.
The company has however been accused of attempting to heavily monopolize the continent’s DTT space even before its birth, which has drawn criticism of China.
“In an infrastructure sense, it’s providing that platform, but I think it’s the next step, the content. What’s interesting is [African countries] are earning a name for themselves but not actually creating their own content,” says Yu-Shan Wu, a researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs.
Naidu nevertheless believes that China’s role in Africa’s DTT migration could provide the possibility of a number of countries turning into Big Brother states.
“It does empower African countries, which can be positive and negative at the same time. It can actually be a paradox within itself. What happens with enabling African countries to launch, or helping them with the digital [migration], is that you run the risk of actually using the way in which China interprets its own technology, its use of its own digital space and capabilities to spy on its own people,” Wu explains.
The fear is that Africa is going to lose control of what people watch, and countries will have to be cautious of what China could do once in the continent’s digital space.

Megabucks China Coming To  A TV Screen Near You

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or as they are more commonly known drones, are the latest technology boom that is growing exponentially across the globe and African skies are seeing an increasing number of them too.
What are drones? And how do they work?  Briefly, they are aircraft without a human pilot flying inside. They are flown either by operators sitting in control rooms hundreds, or even thousands of kilometers away, using satellite feeds or radio signals, or increasingly, many drones are flown entirely by computer.
Most people have a vague idea that the Americans have been flying strange unmanned vehicles, called Predators and Reapers over the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan to spy on and often kill suspected Taliban or other militants. What is startling is the growth of drones in the military. A decade ago, according to a recent article in Time Magazine, there were only 50 drones in the Pentagon fleet, now there are some 7,500 and more than a third of the US Air Force fleet is unmanned.
<div id="attachment_1594" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1594" class="size-medium wp-image-1594" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Tsepo-Monaheng-pic2-300x217.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="217" />Tsepo Monaheng, CEO, Denel Dynamics</div>
The military use of drones, particularly by the States, is troubling but it is a reality that is not going away. And one which has changed the nature of warfare. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that there have been some 360 drone strikes in Pakistan, killing up to 3,500 people—over 300 of the strikes have been ordered by the Obama administration—while there have been multiple strikes in Yemen and Somalia. The US confirmed, as far back as 2011, that it had been operating Reaper drones alongside Ethiopian forces battling al-Shabaab militias in Somalia. They also have secret drone bases in the Horn of Africa, the Seychelles and Burkina Faso.  The government of Niger recently gave the US the green light to operate surveillance drones to help monitor the movement of extremist groups in the Sahara and Sahel. The US and France are certainly sharing intelligence over ongoing events in Mali, although there are no confirmed reports of drone strikes as of going to print.
The largest manufacturer of drones in Africa is Denel Dynamics based outside Pretoria, South Africa. They have been making drones and other Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) since the 1980s. They make four different drones aimed at both the commercial and military markets.
Their flagship product is the Seeker 400; it is the only long range tactical UAV made on the continent. It is an upgrade on the successful Seeker II, which was exported to two other countries, neither of which can be disclosed, but Denel Dynamics has “Clients in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, South America, especially Brazil. We are not considering entering the market in North America but in Europe there might be some possibilities,” says deputy CEO of Denel Dynamics, Tsepo Monaheng.The Seeker 400 is what Monaheng describes as an entry-level long range UAV.  In the industry, it is known as a ‘MALE’ or Medium Altitude Long Endurance drone. It can remain airborne for 16 hours and carries two payloads so that it can operate different cameras on the same flight, say, a high-resolution optical camera and an infrared one. It has a range of 250 kilometers and relies on line-of-sight communications. It has the potential to be upgraded for satellite links but at this stage, “We cannot hand control of the communications to a third party”.
The Seeker 400 is also designed to carry an armed payload if necessary. “None of our drones carry weapons at the moment but the system can be customized for different client requirements,” he says.
So, South Africa is a potential player in the game of international drone warfare.
“We can sell anywhere that is morally okay. Anywhere our country is okay with,” says Monaheng.
At the moment only the States, United Kingdom and Israel are known to have used armed drones. But as the pressure builds on South Africa to become more involved in continental peace-keeping missions, the questions of who to sell drones to will become a foreign policy dilemma that could have political ramifications. South Africa will, in the near future, have to contend with the growing use of drones by other militaries, especially by Western forces, on the continent and decide what the country’s response to this will be.
Johan Potgieter of the Institute for Security Studies explains that  in the recent conflict in the DRC, after the M23 rebels had taken control of parts of the east, there was renewed interest in the United Nation’s (UN) use of at least three drones to get real-time information for their peacekeeping forces.
“The US had trained the Ugandan forces in the utilization of drones because the UN had agreed to it but then the Rwandans complained.”
What most vexed the Rwandans was their national sovereignty being violated by drones—an issue for which, at this stage, international law has few, if any, precedents or guidelines.
“Africa shall not become a laboratory for intelligence devices from overseas,” says Olivier Nduhungirehe, Rwanda’s deputy UN ambassador.
Where South Africa, as the largest drone manufacturer and exporter on the continent, might place itself on this question is anybody’s guess at this stage.
“Africa is very sensitive about other people interfering in their airspace—as they’ve often got something to hide,” says Potgieter.
The questions raised on the matter in international politics are only going to proliferate, and the military drones themselves are going to get more and more sophisticated. In recent years, however, there has been a rapidly growing parallel development of simpler and far less expensive drones for civilian use.
“There has been an evolution in thinking about UAV technology. They can be used to courier information, blood samples, data of all kinds. They used them at Fukushima to monitor radiation levels. You can use them wherever you don’t want humans to be involved,” says Monaheng.
With this in mind, Denel Dynamics has developed a much smaller drone called the Hungwe, which is small enough to be transported in a single commercial 4&#215;4 vehicle.
“The design concept is for it to be used in civilian airspace. The challenge is to work with the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority).”
Civilian drone technology, both local and international, is developing so fast that it is now prompting a rapid review of South Africa’s aviation laws to integrate drones for civilian use into our air space, as currently there are no regulations for the use of UAVs outside of restricted military airspace.
According to Sam Twala, certification engineer for CAA: ‘This is not a unique problem to South Africa, the whole world is still searching for a working solution.  The UAV interim policy of 2009 is under review and we hope to have something out by the end of this year. But we need to find a solution that not only suits the South African market but harmonizes with the international market”.
There is huge economic potential for both military and civilian drones.
“UAVs are a successful business for us. Our turnover is about R200 million ($22.5 million) and we employ about 90 people. But the industry is growing and we want a big chunk of that and we expect to grow 10% year-on-year.”
At the moment the potential for making money in the civilian drone business is still at a sort of Klondike stage; everyone knows that there is gold out there but no one knows exactly where it is or how to get hold of it.
A 2012 market study by defense consultants TEAL group predicts that global UAV spending will almost double in the next decade from $6.6 billion to $11.4 billion bringing it up to $89 billion over the decade. But really, who knows? It could be even bigger if certain conditions are met: appropriate legislation, enough air space being made available and the technology being safe enough to operate successfully.
The second biggest players in the African market, Advanced Technologies and Engineering (ATE), are currently undergoing cash flow problems but they have over 15 years of experience in the industry and are confident that a turnaround is near.
“The applications for non-passenger UAVs are unlimited. The only restriction is legislation. The CAA is key but so is ICASA [Independent Communications Authority of South Africa]—they have to make bandwidth available to the industry. We need regulation urgently for different classes and types of UAVs.  We can create an airspace where only UAVs operate. There are two types of aircraft: unpressurized planes fly beneath 12,000 feet, most pressurized craft fly over 28,000 feet, so there is a whole band of airspace that UAVs could operate in,” says Jan Vermeulen, programs manager at ATE.
Their main UAV products are the Vulture Tactical UAS used to assist long-range artillery with finding targets and correcting both aim and range. The mobile Vulture is launched by catapult off the back of a truck, while the Sentinel-LE UAS uses a similar flight body but takes off and lands on a runway.
“We don’t make armed UAVs. Definitely not,” Vermeulen points out.
Like Denel Dynamics, they won’t reveal the identity of their clients but Africa, the Middle East and Asia are on the list.
Perhaps their most innovative project is one that is stalled for the moment as the company’s financial position is being considered. Using a tiny UAS called a KIWIT weighing less than 4 kilograms, they developed a system in conjunction with the National Health Laboratory Service. The KIWIT, guided by a PC, would fly from a small rural clinic, carrying a blood sample to a laboratory or hospital with laboratory services. The KIWIT is then programed to drop the sample by parachute and return to the clinic for another load.
“We got a 97 out of 100 success rate but the program is now stalled because of [air space] regulations,” says Vermeulen.
When asked about the future of the company Vermeulen is positive.
“The last two years our turnover was on average R100 million ($11.26 million) a year but we had one big overseas contract who didn’t pay and our cash flow was badly affected. Everything depends on the new owners but we have the potential to do amazing things.”
It’s uncertain exactly how big the UAV manufacturing sector is in South Africa but there are successful smaller companies like Tellumat, which specialize in avionics for UAVs and exhibited at last year’s African Aerospace and Defense show in South Africa.
S-Plane Automation is a Cape Town-based UAV manufacturer, which builds the Swift and Nightingale drones.
“They are both still in development phase. The Swift is a tactical class surveillance UAV, not designed for armaments, that can fly at 18,000 feet. The Nightingale is a much smaller unit, with a wingspan of only 1.5 meters,” says technical director Iain Peddle.
The company’s website explains that they were designed, like ATE’s KIWIT, to transport blood samples.
S-Plane is still working on its UAVs.
“At the moment they are not mature products. We prefer, for the time being, not to compete with the Denels. We are staying in the sub-system market, flight computers, simulators, power managements systems.”
The Swift and Nightingale are elegant machines that are potentially extremely versatile. Peddle won’t go on the record about what their turnover is.
“It’s a sensitive industry but let’s say we’re a growing player. We’ve gone from 6 or 7 engineers to about 20 now.”
Small companies, such as S-Plane, are part of an exploding international market.  A 2012 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) on drone proliferation states that the number of countries possessing drones has risen to 76, with over 50 countries developing more than 900 UAV systems.
The South African UAV market faces stiff competition. Potgieter points out that, “Seeker is not necessarily cheap. In an open market it will be relatively easy to find a tested and proven UAV that is much more competitive”.
“China and Israel are our biggest competitors. They put together a whole package where they give a country UAVs and build an airport in exchange for, say, coal. We still operate in a traditional business way, where we have to receive money for our product,” says Monaheng.
Perhaps the most immediately pressing and exciting development for civilian and tactical unarmed UAVs in Africa, is their potential for combatting rhino poaching. Damien Mander, an Australian ex-Special Forces soldier and Iraq veteran, who founded the International Anti-Poaching Foundation has pioneered the use of small drones in tracking elephant poachers in Niassa province, Mozambique. He is developing a scheme to track poachers and watch over rhinos in the Hoedspruit area of Limpopo Province in South Africa.
“There are heaps of drones on the market that have a 20-40 kilometer capability. The drones that conservationists need cost $250,000. The components that go into them cost $100,000 tops. The rest of the price is intellectual property. We don’t have that kind of money so we are developing a UAV that is sold for the cost of its parts,” he says.
Mander has assembled an experienced team that is building the UAVs in Australia.
“You can find the parts on diydrones.com, from all over the place. We want to stay comfortably behind the technology curve. We want them to be affordable, easy to operate in rough remote areas and easy to repair.”
He aims to get five airframes to South Africa by September and pending CAA approval, hopes they will be used against poachers soon.
The unparalleled surveillance capabilities of drones mean that very soon they will become standard equipment for law enforcement. Clearly, they can be used to track criminals, watch borders, guard key installations, help protect VIPs among a number of other uses.
They take us into a 21st century world of Big Brother legal issues. What does their use mean for privacy and entrapment issues? CAA concerns aside, lawyers, legislators and courts are going to have to rewrite a number of laws within the ambit of this new and growing technology. In the very near future, at, say for example, the massacre of miners in Marikana, there will be police drones recording crowd movements; anticipating where they might move next; pinpointing individuals with GPS and face recognition software. Some of them will probably be armed with tear gas or, perhaps, even missiles. At the same time, the mine owners will have their own drones flying overhead, as will the unions and this is not to mention that all the major news companies will most likely have drones too. There will be so many competing streams of information that can be cross-referenced that the whole nature of the investigation will be changed.
The psychological, social and economic effects of this are difficult to predict.  Increasingly, drones will become an indispensable tool of the media. We will expect to watch events across the world in real-time video fed from drones overhead edited in with pictures from cameras and cellphones from journalists and even members of the public on the ground as they are happening. Live broadcasts have been around for decades but drone technology takes it to a new level. Journalists will be able to fly drones over police cordons, prison walls, national borders to be able to bring the events to their audience. Laws might make certain areas or events out of bounds to drones but there will be equally compelling arguments in favor of freedom of expression and the public’s right to know. In purely practical terms, to prevent drones being used, the police might have to shoot them out of the sky or interrupt their flight control signals, which will potentially bring them crashing down. We’ve hardly even begun to imagine what the widespread availability and use of drones will mean for the future.
The unstoppable morphing of drones from the military to civilian worlds and the inevitable growth in their availability and use is not all good news. As Vermeulen points out, “Any guy can buy the components and, with a little bit of technical knowledge, slap them together and then you have a drone.”
The web is filled with sites such as the DroneZone.co.za; www.SMac.co.za (SMart Automotive Components) or even Amazon and Kalahari where you can buy small drones like the Parrot that is operated off an iPhone. The smallest drones available are called MAVs (Micro Air Vehicles) and their designs are inspired by bird and insect wings. In the last month, the British military announced that it was providing its forces in Afghanistan with a 16g Norwegian-designed Black Hornet Nano drone, the size of a weaver bird.
Criminals and killers can all buy these drones and the components to upgrade them for more ominous uses. A recent piece in the Spectator described how in the near future the software will exist for drones to fly autonomously and to make their own ‘kill’ decision based entirely on computer algorithms with no element of human choice involved.
Drones are going to change everything. Soon. Society will have to struggle constantly with their dark, and potentially deadly, aspects but they also represent the next frontier for entrepreneurs. Their potential is enormous. They can be used to courier parcels, monitor flocks of sheep, check the fences on game farms, film aerial shots for movies, find natural disaster victims, monitor schools of fish in the oceans and the illegal trawlers that go after them, survey pirates, rescue yachtsmen in distress, provide live traffic updates, check the quality of soils on wine estates. Their uses are endless.
As Twala says: “UAVs are the future. In the next five years, UAVs will change our lives as much as cellphones did. The list is limited only by one’s imagination”.

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