I consider it an opportunity of a lifetime, having met and taken pictures of our very first democratic South African president, Nelson Mandela. He has always left me with a sense of wonder; at the same time, he inspired me to believe that it is up to us to choose what we do with our circumstances.
The first time I came into close contact with Tata was in 1990—the day after he was released from Victor Verster Prison, near Cape Town. My colleagues and I rented a house in Vilakazi Street, Soweto, to keep watch as Mandela was expected to tour his former neighborhood for the first time in more than 27 years.
It was amazing; he was so much at ease and he spoke to people as though he had last seen them yesterday. He visited some families in their homes and asked about their health; how were the children? Were they doing well at school? He would stop and make time to talk to small children. I was in awe of this man, thinking that someone with his kind of history, would display arrogance and pride.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-842" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Juda-Nelson-Mandela-1-1024x760.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="352" />
The highlight of the day for us was that he even let the journalists take pictures with him! Did he really notice us? Journalists are so used to being pushed around and today here was a man, who was the talk of the whole world, letting us into his world—what a man! I will forever cherish that picture. I enlarged it, framed it and hung it in our living room.
Mandela is a brave man. He had few reasons to want to pay a courtesy call on the family of Hendrik Verwoerd—the architect of apartheid whose government vilified and locked Mandela away—but he did. Mandela went to in Orania, the Afrikaner-only community in South Africa, to sip tea with Betsie Verwoerd, the late prime minister’s widow.
Ahmed Kathrada—one of the men who faced the death penalty with Mandela—said everyone talks of reconciliation, Mandela gave it content. This is a man who went to the conservative Free State to address farmers. He even went to the steel-making blue-collar community of Vanderbijlpark, near Johannesburg, to address a group of right-wingers; each time, leaving me with a sense of wonder.
In 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections. Mandela was to cast his vote in Ohlange High School, Durban. I was all set to capture this historic moment.
I had 10 packets of film and I started loading my two cameras. Having done that, some silly thought crossed my mind; what if the films have a factory fault? I took them out and loaded new ones. I went to take a shower, coming out of the shower I wondered what if someone tampered with my camera while I was in the shower. Eish! The door was not locked, then surely someone must have tampered with my cameras. I had better be safe than sorry; I discarded the films and loaded my cameras again. Now I was panicking, I was nervous, I tried to sleep, but my mind was racing thinking about the worst that could happen the next day.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-844" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/RZ8F1314cc.jpg" alt="" width="951" height="768" />
I do not know when I went to sleep, but I woke up in the middle of the night thinking what if the room service guy had come in while I was sleeping and exposed my films. I took them out and replaced them, again. Suddenly I was left with only four packets of film. Now my worry was that the four packets would not last; where would I buy film at this time? Maybe I should try in the morning? No, that would be too risky, I thought. I would definitely miss the story.
Needless to say the long awaited moment arrived. When I clicked my camera non-stop as Mandela cast his vote, it was the most beautiful feeling I have ever had in my life of taking pictures. It was a glorious moment and I was filled with peace and hope. This was no picture of violence, this was no picture of gruesome murder, this was no picture of strife, this was a picture of triumph and jubilation.
The ensuing presidential life never changed him. Protocol was never an issue, his bodyguards needed to be on the lookout at all times, because he would stop anywhere to chat to people—a true people’s president.
In 1996, Mandela received his Honorary Doctorate from Oxford University. The crowds were waiting eagerly for his arrival and as he came out of the car, he waved to the crowds in Madiba style. I was taking pictures when I noticed that he was coming towards me. I followed him with my eyes preparing to take a shot at any moment, he stopped right in front of me, extended his hand and greeted me and said: “How are you? Are you fine? Good to see you again.” My knees went weak. I do not know what I said, I mumbled something, I was just nodding my head, I was stiff, I tried to smile at the same time, I was close to tears.
I did not want to share this with anyone, after some thought I was convinced that, no, the old man must be mistaking me for someone else. I could not believe he had singled me out of the whole crowd. Phew! This man had the memory of an elephant.
<div id="attachment_841" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-841" class="size-large wp-image-841" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/mandela-mbeki-de-klerk-33-1024x757.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="350" />Former President Nelson Mandela, (C) waves next South African President Thabo Mbeki (L),Former South Africa President F.W de Klerk ,(R) behind Johana Rupert Chairman of Sunshine golf circurt of South Africa and Dr Hasso Plattner (R-T) founder of Hasso Plattner Foundation at the opening ceremony of The Presidents Cup Tournament held at Fancourt in George South Africa November 20,2003.REUTERS/ Juda Ngwenya.</div>
In 1997, Mandela was on a state visit to Libya and as he was escorted to the hall where they were going to have dinner he saw me and a colleague who worked for SABC, he greeted us and asked if we were being are taken care of in Tripoli, furthermore, were our families fine at home. He even suggested that we sit with him at the table, but as soon as he stopped and greeted some dignitaries, we disappeared in the crowd.
I met him again in Lusaka when I was covering a SADC meeting. Mandela personally introduced me to the president of Burundi. I also noticed that before I took any pictures he would always greet and chat—I think it is his way of making people feel at ease and comfortable with him. He has a way with people, while you feel honored to know him; he honors you and has a way of making you feel important.
Mandela is a man of integrity; as I look back from the time he was released, his pre-election campaign, his time of office, his retirement, through it all it, he did not change.
One other thing I love about Mandela is that he makes for good pictures, easy and comfortable pictures. Reuters presented him with the picture I took of him casting his vote in 1994. He was pleased and appreciated the gesture. I have nothing else but the deepest respect and honor for him.
Today I am one of the best known South African photojournalists and I attribute the best years of my career to this man who directly and indirectly encouraged me to be the best that I can be.
I thank God for his life.

“He Left Me With  A Sense Of Wonder”

Sixty years ago South Africa was no country for budding black entrepreneurs, but Richard Maponya managed to defy the odds and opened a backstreet store that grew into a massive retail empire on the back of which he became a legendary black businessman.
<div id="attachment_277" style="width: 209px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-277" class="size-medium wp-image-277" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CTX7445-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" />Richard Maponya at the Maponya Mall, Soweto</div>
That grocery shop in the township of Soweto, opened in the early 1950s, led to several in the years that followed. From there he ventured into car dealerships, petrol stations, butcheries, supermarkets, bus services and funeral parlors. He later joined a consortium that acquired Coca-Cola’s bottling plant, when the soft drink giant decided to disinvest in apartheid South Africa. He also became a cell phone provider and his name was linked to many deals and ventures.
To be big, Maponya had to risk big, but his achievements were many, not least his own economic freedom, which he had won long before political freedom came in 1994.
Canny and shrewd, he continued to move with the times and pushed his pile of chips into property development and four years ago unveiled his biggest lifetime achievement: the Maponya Mall in Soweto.
“I wanted the people of the township to be able to spend their money in the township and create employment for themselves.”
This year he opened Maponya Motor City not far away from Maponya Mall. And there’s more to follow. The 90-year-old still has a few more ventures up his sleeve.
You have to admire Maponya. If it was a desire to make a go of his life that drove him all these years, he could have chosen an easier option than betting on business in an all-white, male world. Easier still would have been to stick to what he had been trained to do—high school teaching. But Maponya has no regrets and if he could roll back the clock he would do it the same all over again.
“The only thing that would be different this time is that I would be an even bigger entrepreneur,” he says without a hint of humility in his voice. “The playing field is leveled now and things are so much easier today than they were when I started out.”
He was born in 1920 in the small village of Lenyene, in Limpopo, and later moved to Polokwane, where missionaries trained him as a teacher. With his qualification under his belt, he headed to Johannesburg in 1948 in search of his first teaching post. But as fate would have it, the dapper-looking 28-year-old was snapped up by a drapery store in the city center before he had a chance to sit the other side of a school desk.
Maponya hadn’t envisaged a working life in retail.
“But they were offering me five times more than the teaching post would have paid. And I said to myself, ‘these may be the greener pastures I was looking for after all.’”
Little did he know how green those pastures were to be.
Yet those were dreadful times for black South Africans. That year—1948—also marked the dawn of apartheid that would result in a half a century of inhumanity for non-whites. Maponya ought not have been an exception. He was living in the township of Alexandria, renting some space in the home of members of his extended family and subjected to the same harsh reality that every other black person endured.
“We were like foreigners in our own country,” he remembers. “The native was treated in the worst possible way.”
But Maponya had struck lucky though he didn’t realize it at the time. At the drapery store he reported to a man by the name of Mr Bolton—“we did not call the white man by his first name then”—and the pair worked well together.
Bolton was hard-working and enterprising. Maponya was equally so. Bolton was also a good businessman and he coached his employee in the trade.
He taught him about fabrics, quality and design. He mentored him in customer care. He encouraged him to select clothing and designs that would appeal “to my people” as Maponya put it.
Before long, he began to recognize the budding businessman in himself.
The pair worked hand-in-hand for three years, during which time Bolton was scaling the corporate ladder until he was promoted to CEO of the company in 1951. But before he closed his executive door on the drapery floor, he asked to meet with Maponya.
“Son, I am being promoted because of our joint efforts and I don’t know how to thank you,” Bolton told his junior.
Maponya nodded his head and muttered a courteous response, expecting little else to follow, but Bolton continued speaking.
“You have a ceiling over your head because you are black so there is nothing I can do,” he said, stating a glaring fact. “All I can offer you is a job as a foreman.”
“But I would like to give you the chance to buy samples and soiled clothing that you can sell after work or on the weekends to make some extra money for yourself,” the new CEO told him.
“And that is what gave me my start in life,” Maponya remembers, all these years later. “Without it, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
He started selling the garments on a ‘pay while you wear’ basis. Folks had little cash to spare then so he indulged them with credit. Trust went a long way in the early 1950s.
“‘Take it and wear it’ I would tell them and I would collect the money at the end of the week. They never let me down. I never lost a penny in those days.”
And it was from those humble beginnings that the empire began to emerge.
At this hour of his life, Maponya has a lot to be proud of, yet he refuses to step down. To this day he still works a five-day week, six if his children allow him. On the eve of his 91st birthday, I tell him he is a poor advertisement for a pension plan.
“I don’t even know what the word retirement means,” he chuckles in response.
These days his time is taken with his latest project, the Richard Maponya Institute for Skills Training and Entrepreneurship.
“This is the big one,” he says. “This is my legacy project. This is what I want to leave behind, a place where young people are not only given a skill but the know-how to go out and create work for themselves.”
The legacy idea began to take shape a couple of years ago as Maponya began to take stock of the challenges facing South Africa. Idle youth stared him in the face.
“If only I could tell you that it is thousands and thousands of youth that are unemployed, it might not be so bad. But it is not. We are talking about millions and millions of our young people who have no jobs. That’s a lot of people and I don’t think we fully realize how awful it is for them or how dangerous it is for society to have so many idle youth falling into the trap of poverty. They deserve more and so does South Africa.”
For guidance, he turned to Brazil, a country that made some clever moves many years ago when it began to train its youth to become the kind of entrepreneurs that would start the small and medium-sized enterprises that now form the backbone of the South American country’s economy.
“South Africa is no different. We need young men and women who will go out and create their own jobs and not depend on the economy to create work for them. It will never happen that way. This is a society that is becoming too dependent on the state. The state can only do so much and it certainly cannot solve the challenge of unemployment.”
Maponya’s plan is a commendable one, but how difficult is it to become an entrepreneur? Is it something that everyone can do? Or is it a character-driven thing?
“If you have discipline you can become an entrepreneur,” he tells me. “That’s the core requirement: discipline. I wasn’t born an entrepreneur. No one is. You learn to become on. But you learn it through discipline.”
What about a vision, or a plan?
“You might have the best plan in the world, but if you don’t have the discipline to pull it off, it will never happen. Discipline is everything.”
Can discipline be taught?
“It’s not only about teaching it, but learning it. The will has to come from the person, not the teacher. What can be taught is how to develop discipline. The rest is over to you.”
As simple as that?
“It can be,” he says. “If not, we have to decide to live in poverty and with poverty. But if we want to change it, then we must join hands as South Africans and begin to turn this ship around. We need strong, social leaders. We need mentors. We need willing youth. If we have all of those, and I believe we have, then many things are possible.”
The training institute—on Brazilian lines—is still work in progress, but he hopes he can open its doors to the youth of Soweto at some stage next year.
“And if it works, and I know it will, then I would like to see it replicated all over South Africa. But I just want to get this one right. This is my legacy. My way of giving back. This really is my big one.”
And will he then hang up his boots?
“No,” he says, without a flicker of hesitation. “For as long as the Lord gives me my health, I think I will work until the last day. I think I will die with my boots on. That is how I think it is going to happen.”
&nbsp;
&nbsp;

No Discipline, No Money

Words like ‘cocky’, ‘arrogant” and ‘aloof’ come up a lot these days where Trevor Noah is concerned. But that said, any individual with a sense of impartiality would also agree that adjectives like ‘successful’, ‘funny’ and ‘charming’ do define him.
Born on February 20, 1984 in the most famous township in Africa—Soweto, he was the first-born son of a black African Xhosa woman and a father of Swiss origin. He will not be drawn too much into speaking about his father, but describes himself as having been a sheltered child who spent a lot of time indoors—his mother, who was to later remarry and have two more sons, gave him the freedom to decide what to do with his own life.
<div id="attachment_288" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-288" class="size-medium wp-image-288" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/294-182_1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Comedian Trevor Noah, Johannesburg; 14 October 2011 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff</div>
“I never went to college, and I was never nagged about it like one would expect a Xhosa mother to,” he quips. “I believe university and all tertiary institutions are there to help people decide what career to go into, and I happened to be fortunate enough to have gone straight into work after I discovered that I really liked stand-up comedy and saw that as something I would definitely want to spend my life doing. It is such a cool form of expression,” he continues.
Earlier in 2011, Noah packed up and relocated to Los Angeles in a bid to conquer the world’s biggest comedy scene. So naturally, I asked him if, with this move to tinsel town in the United States, he was trying to be South Africa’s next Charlize Theron.
“Not at all,” he answers. “When I went over there, it was like working for the same company but moving to a different branch in a different city, just like taking a work transfer. I knew even before I booked my plane ticket that I already had gigs booked; I had an apartment waiting for me&#8230; so I was certainly not going there to try my luck. And I really wouldn’t recommend that anyone go to a new country to just see what happens,” he asserts.
By now my pop-culture comparison with Charlize Theron is starting to feel rather loose—anybody who has been in and around the entertainment industry of South Africa, and followed this young man’s career, knows that Noah has been steadily and successfully building his “brand”, and by the looks of things, making good money.
Noah isn’t keen on calling himself a “comedy businessman” or any kind of businessman, for that matter. In as much as he agrees that the business of comedy has boomed on the continent, especially during the last decade, he still insists that he wouldn’t go as far as honoring himself with that businessman tag.
“Entertainment and comedy have been around for as long as language has existed. People have been telling stories and making others laugh for centuries, long before someone decided to add the financial aspect to it. Business requires an awful lot of work, whereas entertaining people is probably the most organic, most natural thing out there,” explains the former actor and radio DJ.
Noah’s reluctance to align his craft too much with business is rather refreshing, seeing as there are few comics in South Africa who have enjoyed the success that he has. Noah has hosted numerous television shows; hosted and produced his own self-titled late-night show; acted as MC at the biggest award-events; and filled 3,000-seater venues for his one-man comedy tours. So does he feel he’s reached the ceiling here at home?
“I definitely don’t feel like I’ve done everything that can be done in comedy here at home; that’s why I still come back from time to time, because I still have projects here. I feel the comedy industry on this continent is actually only in its fetal stage. We as comedians still need to find our own identity. We need to move past the stage where American comics still have a huge influence on our material and stage acts,” he says.
So now that we are on the topic of material and where material is derived from, we cannot ignore the rumors emanating from other South African top comics like David Kau, accusing him of using some of their jokes without their authorisation.
“I choose not to respond to people who accuse me of such. I think my work IS my response. It speaks for itself. I wouldn’t have reached the heights that I have reached if all I did was chop other comics’ material,” he says.
So as I continue to probe these accusations and the rumours that he was actually pushed out of the country, Noah tells me his theory regarding this problem: “I find that with us Africans, we like to bring each other down and not celebrate each other’s success. We insist on finding fault within someone’s success when it suits us. I remember at some point in (American hip-hop phenomenon) Jay-Z’s career, all these other rappers came out of the woodwork and accused him of stealing their rhymes. Look where he is now! I am at that point where I don’t even let it get to me,” he declares.
It’s pretty understandable that Noah would think there are envious forces out there. His career is illustrious. His DVDs sell in numbers unheard of in these parts. A representative at NuMetro Distribution, Billy Dundee, revealed that Noah’s first DVD, titled Day Walker, sold in excess of 50,000 copies, giving Noah multi-platinum selling status. “His second DVD, called Crazy Normal, was released at the end of July and has already reached 20,000 units sold,” says Dundee.
Then there’s every performing artist’s dream: endorsing a major company, which Noah has also bagged. Cell C brought Noah on board as a CEO, although in his case the acronym stands for “chief experience officer”. An entire marketing campaign was designed around him to publicize that Cell C were upgrading their systems and call centres and creating a 4G network.
He is—as expected—very evasive about the amount he gets out of this deal, but a source at Cell C, who insisted on not being named, reveals that Noah could be getting around
R10 million ($1.2 million) a year for an endorsement like this.
So with this major endorsement deal, huge performance venues where each person attending forks out anything between R120 ($15) to R200 ($25) for a single ticket, TV shows and MC work, why is it that Noah doesn’t even want to consider listing his company, Ark Angel Entertainment?
“I am where I am today because I focused on my craft. I don’t see the people who come to my shows as numbers. I have chosen instead to surround myself with business-minded people who will worry about the numbers while I continue to worry about perfecting my craft,” says the man who insists that his only real wealth lies in ideas and jokes that are guaranteed to make you laugh.
“I’m not big on property or cars. What’s the point of owning a fleet of cars when you can only drive one at a time? I’m actually very ‘liquid’ when it comes to my investments, mainly because I am a nomad who believes that things like property tie one to a particular place.”
Well, with over 180,000 fans on social network Twitter, it seems Trevor Noah’s enthusiasts will be following him wherever his work takes him. It was Soweto yesterday and LA today, but it’s definitely going be somewhere else tomorrow.

Prince Of Comedy Wants The Last Laugh

It was a Friday afternoon, June 4 2010, just a few days before one of the biggest days in African history. Flags were on the streets and the mood was festive in the countdown to the 2010 World Cup—the first time the greatest tournament on earth had kicked off on Africa’s red soil.
Mandla Sibeko strolled, in a mellow mood, towards Green Point Stadium in Cape Town, happy in the knowledge that by the opening ceremony on June 11 his job would be done—the end of years of struggle with the rigorous rules of the soccer governing body, FIFA. An angry phone call shattered this mellow mood and ushered in Sibeko’s worst day.
<div id="attachment_235" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-235" class="size-medium wp-image-235" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/282-18_1-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" />Mandla Sibeko thinking about his worst day</div>
Sibeko was used to struggle. He was born in Johannesburg, the youngest of six children, and grew up in poverty near Nelspruit in South Africa’s north-eastern Mpumalanga province; his first school lesson was held under a tree in the village of Kwaggafontein and the floors of the classrooms were made of cow dung, for want of concrete.
“Whenever I smell cattle dung, I think of those early school days,” says Sibeko.
Luckily for Sibeko, his mother was a domestic worker for a wealthy white family in Johannesburg and they offered to pay for his education.
“They have moved to Australia and I sent them an email the other day saying that decision changed my life. They wrote back to say they were proud to do so. It is amazing how one decision can change your life,” says Sibeko with a smile.
From the age of eight, Sibeko went to the elite St Martin’s School in Johannesburg, followed by a degree in law at Wits University. By the age of 24 he had set up his own business, making TV programs for the SABC. In  2007, he became the first person to open a Pick n Pay supermarket—once a preserve of the suburbs—in Soweto.
“In all these businesses I fell and got up many times. Soweto business is the hardest money you will ever earn, the customers are so demanding. I was working from 5am to midnight every day. We wanted to prove you could do business in the townships and we doubled our turnover in the first year.”
Sibeko became a shareholder in Identity and Tone Digital signage companies and then, while still in his late 20s, came the offer of a key job in the staging of the first ever World Cup in Africa. In 2008, British company Icon, which had helped to stage three World Cups, made Sibeko the CEO, along with a 40% stake, of their South African subsidiary. The job was to oversee the signage for the entire tournament. It was a huge job and Sibeko also saw it as a way to strike a blow for Africa.
“In my work I wanted to tackle this Afro pessimism—we dealt with people who doubted us. People were asking us: “do you really know what you are doing?”
The job entailed making sure all was correct on the flags, buses, hotels, signposts and banners at the country’s 10 World Cup stadiums.
“It was painful because you have to think for people. Everyone has an opinion, the Local Organizing Committee has an opinion, FIFA has an opinion; no one is right or wrong. Signage alone is a problem. Sometimes it arrives and is the wrong size and you have to send it back to Bloemfontien on a truck. Print quality can be poor, colors wrong and the position of the logo can be wrong. FIFA is very fussy—it’s their way or no way. They want it to be done better than the last World Cup.”
So Sibeko oversaw a rigorous system of checks. There was a long list of checks before the signs got to the printers; at the printers there was another check; then the signs were checked again before they were loaded onto trucks and yet again at their destination.
All this counted for nothing at 2pm on June 4 2010 when a top FIFA official screamed down the phone at Sibeko, just hours before an inspection team was due to tour Green Point Stadium.
“She was furious. There was no kindness about it, it was: ‘you guys have messed it up!’
The terrible truth was the misspelt word: “Welcme” hanging over the main entrance to the stadium. It wasn’t a welcoming sight for Sibeko.
“I don’t know what happened. It was 20 to 30 meters tall. This was a huge mistake. The A team of the World Cup was coming to inspect and what we had promised was not ready. We freaked out. I felt cold. We all expected this day. This was our do or die moment, we had worked for nearly four years and now we were going to mess it up because of a missing ‘o’.”
The crisis could have been costly. From this moment on, in the balance was a multimillion-dollar contract. Sibeko had to act fast.
“I called all the stadiums to check out if they had the same problem. It was difficult to find people quickly. At that point I was very anxious, I wanted to know whether we had made more mistakes along the way. I started to think about whether flags were facing the right way up when Sepp Blatter drives past. I froze, I didn’t know what to do. I am normally a very calm person, but on that day my staff said they had never seen me like that.”
The next step was to call a printer in Cape Town to make a new sign. It wasn’t easy as many World Cup service providers had lots of work, so it was easy for them to say no. Otherwise, Sibeko would have had to rope in a Johannesburg printer to get a new bulky banner flown down to Cape Town. For the first time in the day, lady luck smiled on Sibeko and a Cape Town printer agreed.
Then there was the problem of getting the huge banner up at the stadium before the inspectors arrived on the following day. It was already dark when the truck pulled up with the banner. So, by poor light, a team of 10 workers scaled ladders.
“They had problems because it was dark. They started at 8pm and
finished at midnight. We had another 10 people on the ground from my company and many of them were ready to walk because they were overstretched and felt they were not appreciated. Not everyone felt the importance of the biggest sporting event in the world. I said to them that I understood they were all under pressure. I talked about patriotism; this was their country, I told them, they had to keep going because they were doing this for their country. Maybe Mandela would have been proud of me!”
Crisis averted, thanks to elbow grease and a friendly Cape Town printer, but for Sibeko, his worst day put a damper on the greatest show on earth.
“That was the end of my torture, but then it became a difficult process because you had let down the client in the closing stages. When everyone was celebrating we were suffering. The opening I didn’t enjoy because I was wondering what else is going to go wrong. As much as the nation was celebrating, I was suffering, I was just wondering when it was all going to come to an end!”
Sibeko went to Brazil earlier this year to see how the country was preparing for the next World Cup.
“I just thought South Africans undervalue themselves. Brazil is so well marketed and yet it doesn’t deliver as much as South Africa does. I have to say we are too hard on ourselves. Stadiums are not going up at all and secondly, there was no sign of commitment from people, there was just a lot of talk. It will be interesting to see how fast they get up to speed.”
Mandla Sibeko offers his World Cup experience to the Brazilians. He hopes, by contrast to 2010, his experience will be as beautiful as the game itself. That would be welcme; sorry, welcome!

Tag: Soweto

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

“He Left Me With A Sense Of Wonder”

No Discipline, No Money

Prince Of Comedy Wants The Last Laugh

Welcme? To Err Is Human, To Leave Out An “O” Is A Disaster