Zoli Kunene, a towering man, and a larger-than-life lawyer has passed away after a long life furthering the cause of human rights and black entrepreneurship in South Africa. He was one-fifth of the legendary Kunene brothers who spent years building up black ownership in business, long before legislation lent a helping hand. 



Zoli, Keith, Dudu, Zanosi, and Menzi Kunene all ended up in business together with a wide portfolio of companies carrying out everything from canning Coca-Cola to selling Daimler-Chrysler cars. 



Zoli Kunene trained as a lawyer in the days when it was rare for a man of his background to do so. He fought many human rights cases in the dim days of apartheid, in South Africa, and had unrivalled knowledge of the names of all the black lawyers working in and around Johannesburg in his era, no matter how small.



&#8220;There were so few of us, in those days, that you knew every black lawyer in a 100-hundred- mile radius!&#8221; he used to laugh.



The Kunene brothers&#8217; business empire began way back in 1978 when Keith acquired a sub-lease to sell fresh milk in Vosloorus east of Johannesburg. Kunene Bros. Holdings took over a nearby liquor licence from the government, in 1983, and also began wholesaling Coca Cola. The latter business was to lead to the creation of Coca-Cola Fortune the second largest bottling and distribution company in South Africa.



As the brothers worked hard, in concord,  they built up a robust stable of companies to include a financial services company and defence and security outfit. 



Zoli Kunene,  was also active in public and corporate life. He was an honorary colonel in the South African National Defence Force and chairman of the South African Aerospace Maritime and Defence Industries Association. He was also past president of the Defence Industries Interest Group of South Africa and served as Chairman of Denel.In the corporate world he was chairman of Grintek Ewation and a director of Cell C.



&#8220;Zoli was a keen golfer and a larger than life figure at the annual father &amp; son golf day; he will be missed by all. A great man, dynamic leader, family man, friend, and above all a human being who cared for all those around him. He will be missed,&#8221; says Rakesh Wahi the  Chairman CMA Investment Holdings and a close friend of Zoli Kunene.

Mr. Zoli Kunene

Zoli Kunene – Larger Than Life Champion Of Black Business Passes Away

One of the most influential fathers of electricity generation in Africa died in the early hours of July 12 aged 90.



Ian McRae, a consummate public servant was born in Germiston, Johannesburg, on September 24 1929 . He joined Eskom, South Africa’s national power generator and the biggest generator of electricity in Africa, as an apprentice fitter and turner in 1947.



McRae qualified with a degree in mechanical engineering and worked his way up to the top of the company in nearly half a century of service laying down the bedrock of the power supply that South African business took for granted for decades. He oversaw the construction of the country’s big six coal-fired power stations, in the 1970s: Kriel, Matla, Duvha, Tutuka, Lethabo, Mathimba, Kendal and Majuba; as well as the country’s three hydro-electric stations: Gariep, Vanderkloof and Cahora Bassa, plus South Africa’s nuclear plant at Koeberg, near Cape Town. McRae was head of operations from 1977 to 1980, head of engineering from 1980 to 1984 and chief executive from 1985 until his retirement in 1994.



Sadly, McRae, a gregarious man-of-the-people, spent his last four months isolated in a home in Edenvale in Johannesburg because of the COVID-19 lockdown. McRae’s remarkable courage came through in his meetings with the ANC in 1988, his promotion of equal opportunity during the height of the apartheid era, and his legendary “electricity-for-all” electrification campaign. These initiatives helped Eskom pre-empt and adapt to the social changes of the 1990s and on retirement McRae left the power generator in good order producing a plentiful supply of some of the cheapest electricity in the world; power that gave birth to a large smelting industry in South Africa. He was also an energetic member of the World Energy Council and the World Association of Nuclear Operators.



“There is no doubt that his integrity, credibility, drive, inherent humility and care for people, also profoundly helped to motivate Eskom staff during many difficult times. In addition, his tenacity of purpose and commitment as a team player enabled Eskom to achieve its strategic goals in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and to survive unscathed through the political transition period of South Africa,” says writer Peter Adams, a former Eskom spokesman, who ghost-wrote a biography of the man.



“A key theme of the book is leadership, and in particular the kind of leadership McRae practiced at Eskom during its phases of both growth and then downsizing. This was essentially one of empowering people within a framework of a clear and inspiring vision. The book is also about McRae the man – his strength and weaknesses, his sense of serving others and Eskom. This is thus the story of a person who has served his fellow man, his company and his country with distinction and humility, using his God-given skills of leadership. In several places in the book, Dr. McRae mentions how being a good mentor is one of the attributes of the outstanding leader. Having benefited himself from good mentorship, Dr. McRae helped to establish the strong culture of mentorship that exists in Eskom today.”



McRae’s wife Jess predeceased him last year, his daughter Heather, died in 2018. His son, Donald, who has written books on boxing and South African rugby, survives him and is a journalist living in London.

Ian McRae

One Of The Influential Fathers Of Power In Africa Dies Aged 90

Farewell one of Mandela’s last survivors of his band of brothers.



I once asked Denis Goldberg what he thought of one of his high-ranking former comrades taking R500,000 in bribes from a crook.



“What a cheapskate!” came back the reply faster than a gunslinger’s bullet. I expected more pious reply, not with Denis.



“He has sold out his job, his country, his beliefs, his politics and his morals – for half a million bucks?”



Denis said it with that deadpan look on his face. Believe me, he was dead serious and angry, but his expression dissolved into that famous smile of his that made you think we frail human beings all make mistakes.



That was Denis and his attitude in a nutshell – he was principled and far from enamoured, in later years, with all that was going on in the government that he fought to put in power and was never afraid to say so; and yet, he never forgot that we are all human and vulnerable, something that fueled his tireless charity work.



I first met Denis at his home near the crashing waves of Hout Bay, near Cape Town, the city where he was born and should have lived out his days as a comfortable engineer in the suburbs. Instead, he spent years training revolutionaries in the art of warfare and making bombs.



We got to know each other during the making of a three-hour documentary, Liliesleaf – The Untold Story, for CNBC Africa on the Rivonia trial, in 1963, where he faced the death penalty with Nelson Mandela. We kept in touch down the years with lunch, a phone call and the odd laugh about the absurdity of politics.



I shall never forget the warm, human story he told on that summer day back in 2009 about how he sneaked small squares of chocolate to a chained and emaciated Mandela, in short trousers, who police had dragged from prison to face sabotage charges.



“You don’t get sweeteners in prison,” said Goldberg with a smile.



Alongside Mandela, on that day, were the leading lights of the liberation movement: Walter Sisulu; Govan Mbeki; Ray Mhlaba; Andrew Mlangeni and Ahmed Kathrada. Only Mlangeni, who will be 95 in June, survives. &nbsp;



The authorities hoped they would put them away forever. They nearly succeeded and certainly set back the liberation of South Africa by decades by incarcerating the leaders of the movement for life.



“’There was Mandela standing in the dock defiantly and forcing the judge to look him in the eye,” Goldberg said as if the hearing were yesterday at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria.



For some reason, Denis and I got on like a house on fire. He reminded me of my grandfathers – a hard man ready to fight for what was right, yet humane and compassionate with it.



The tough side of him came out in that interview. He told how the special branch officers used to taunt him across the courtroom, as the evidence was presented, by running their forefingers across their throats with a grin of death.



“I had to think about how to respond and in the end I did this back…” says Denis giving it the middle finger. Anyone who can give the finger to their captors in the shadow of death is tough enough.



Then, when he was relating the harrowing tale of his fractured relationship with his daughter, Hilary, came out the old soldier hide of granite.



It was a sorrowful tale. Denis’s daughter worshipped him from afar as a latter day Robin Hood in the 20 years he was in prison. When he was released in 1984, they were reunited in Israel. A few months later, the two fell out. It started when Hilary filtered the pile of hate mail from his daily post.



“I told her, Hilary, Hilly, you are trying to control me like they did in prison,” he said.&nbsp;



It all blew up. An angry Hilary told her father he had never been around and was always away fighting the struggle, you could see the pain on Denis’s face.



“It took five years and a lot of counseling, but we reconciled. Unfortunately, shortly after that, she died.”



By this time, both the young cameraman and myself, I am not ashamed to say this, had cast off our professional masks and had tears rolling down our cheeks.



“What’s the matter with you guys?” shot back Goldberg in mock outrage.



“I thought journalists were supposed to be tough. I don’t know, the journalists of today!”



Then we all laughed, once again Denis had made people feel they would see the sun tomorrow.



His humour was legendary, as was his compassion. He once told me that he was handed three life sentences but was given a bulk discount and only served one. On the other side of the coin, he told me of the horror of lying in his cell listening to condemned men screaming as warders dragged them to the gallows. It was pure Denis that he learned the guitar so he could play a heartfelt musical tribute to the condemned.



Only Denis could have led the laughter in court when he and his comrades slipped the noose.



“Life and life is wonderful,” he called out when someone asked the verdict of the dock.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Amid all the laughter, sound and fury of the life of Denis Goldberg, there is one cool winter’s afternoon that I will always remember him by. It was at Liliesleaf , in 2013, at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the raid on Rivonia that led him to spending 20 years in prison.



It was a draining day for an 80-year-old. There were journalists asking questions and taking pictures everywhere. Denis was patient and explained his story to those too young and green to know, but as the day wore on, I could see he was getting tired. It was a Rivonia reunion with lawyers Joel Joffe, who became an insurance tycoon in Britain, and George Bizos, still fighting the good fight, there to reminisce with the men they saved from the noose.



On top of that, Denis had to settle a 50-year-old grudge with the late Bob Hepple, a former comrade who was up to his neck in the sabotage trial. He had negotiated his way out of police cells with a decision to turn state witness that led to him skipping the country to a knighthood and a comfortable life as a professor at Cambridge University.



“At the time, I told him you do this and people will cross the street to avoid you,” Denis told me.



To rub salt in the wound, Hepple sent Denis, insensitively, a Christmas card in prison in his first year of incarceration. Fifty years later, Denis shook hands with Hepple and buried the grudge with good humour.



My abiding memory of Denis came later on that day as the sunlight dimmed along with his fading energy. A young schoolgirl, in uniform, who must have been about 13, approached him as he was heading for the car to take him to the hotel.



“Excuse me, Mr Goldberg, I am doing my school project on the Rivonia trial, can I talk to you?” she says. Even I thought an exhausted Denis was going to decline politely, but he sat down and smiled.



More than an hour later I saw Denis sitting at the table telling patiently his story to the school girl making copious notes. Maybe she will fight for freedom one day too.



I smiled and walked away. That was Denis and I was proud to have known him.

Denis Goldberg 918

Denis Goldberg – The Gentle Lion Of The Struggle

He was one of the big names in business in Africa; as gentlemanly. as he was shrewd. He fought the odds and apartheid to stake his place in business and inspire millions of his countrymen to do the same.



Richard Maponya – the doyen of black business in South
Africa – passed away in the early hours of January 6, after a short illness.
Maponya turned 99 on Christmas Eve near the end of a long and fruitful life
that saw him dine with the Queen, laugh with Bill Clinton and chauffer his old
friend Nelson Mandela. Mandela asked Maponya, who owned a car dealership, to
pick him up at the airport in Johannesburg after his release from prison in
1990. 



Ï picked him up at the airport and that was the most
frightening time of my life. We were chased by people on foot, helicopters,
motorbikes and cars. Everyone just wanted to touch Mandela. They could kill him
just trying to touch him,” Maponya recalled to Forbes Africa in a cover story
in March 2017.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 



Mandela was a close friend of Maponya since the 1950s. The
future president, then a young lawyer&nbsp;&nbsp;
helped Maponya set up his first business against the restrictive
apartheid laws that shackled black business. 



Maponya wanted to open a clothing store in Soweto,
Johannesburg; the authorities said no. Mandela lost the fight for the clothing
store, but did manage to secure him a license to trade daily necessities. This
opened the way for Maponya to start out with a milk delivery business that was
to prove the foundation of his fortune.



More than half a century on, Mandela, then a former president
of South Africa, beamed with pride, in 2007, as he opened the first shopping
mall in Soweto. 



Maponya Mall had taken the canny businessman a good deal of
patience to put together. He acquired the land in 1979 – the first black man to
secure a 100-year lease for land in Soweto – and spent many more years building
up the mall.



“Ï fought for 27 years for that mall and was many times denied;
they actually thought I was dreaming. When Nelson Mandela cut the ribbon to
open the mall, that was the highlight of my life,” Maponya said years later. 



It was a mile on a road less travelled by Maponya in a long
journey from the tiny township of Lenyenye in Limpopo in northern South Africa
where he was born. He moved across the province to Polokwane to train as a
teacher and then, like many young men of his generation, moved south to
Johannesburg in search of his fortune.



In those days, the gold mining city was booming, but only the few saw the fruits. Maponya was blocked at every turn as he tried to make his way in business; he won through making a fortune from property, horse racing, retail, cars and liquor. 



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Maponya mentored many black entrepreneurs and inspired many
millions more he had never met. One of them was Herman Mashaba, the former
mayor of Johannesburg, who made his own fortune with hair care products.



“To myself and the people I grew up with he was an
inspiration to all of us to get into business…If he had started out in business
in a normal world there is no doubt he would have been even bigger than he
was,” Mashaba told CNBC Africa.



Maponya will be mourned by the millions who were inspired to
follow him and by a business world that is richer, in more ways than one, for his
nearly a century of hard work in which retirement was never an option.



“People who retire are lazy people. You retire and do what?
Bask in the sun?&nbsp; I am not that type of
man,” he said in 2017 at the age of 96.



He could never be.



&#8211; By Chris Bishop

Richard 128

The Life And Wisdom Of Richard Maponya

British Prime Minister Teresa May – just under three years into the job – says she will step down on June 7.



This follows a hammering, from both sides of the house, over her clumsy handling of the Brexit process. She has lost countless votes in Parliament over a Brexit deal and was seen by many in politics as weak and dithering. It is ironic that May herself voted to keep Britain in Europe, only to see her career expire as she struggled to make the opposite happen.



READ MORE | <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Chilling Words From The Man Who Broke The Bank Of England (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/economy/2019/03/12/chilling-words-from-the-man-who-broke-the-bank-of-england/" target="_blank">Chilling Words From The Man Who Broke The Bank Of England</a>



Her heartfelt farewell speech on the steps of Number 10
Downing Street concluded that she had done her best to make Britain a better
place not merely for the privileged few, but also for the whole population.



The supreme irony is that her shuffling off of the Prime
Minister’s job will see the shuffling in one of Britain’s best known members of
the privileged few. Eton and Oxford educated Boris Johnson is likely to step in
as leader of May’s Conservative party ahead of what surely is going to be a
snap election. &nbsp;&nbsp;

gettyimages-1151368907-594×594

May Will Be Gone In June Ending Months Of Political Battering And Speculation

A month before South Africa’s elections, one of the country’s leading political figures exposed a number of his former comrades for corruption with evidence to the Zondo Commission on State Capture. It was box office material, yet just another eventful period in the turbulent life of Robert McBride – guerrilla fighter, policeman and death row prisoner. 



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Robert McBride has one of those faces full of character that looks like it has endured life as much as lived it. A glance through his tough years of struggle yields a list of reasons why: five years on death row to screams and tears of the condemned; scores of beatings over decades; shooting his way out of hospital; years of the shadowy and violent life of an underground guerrilla fighter.



McBride
was born in Wentworth, just outside Durban, in 1963, and grew up amid racist
insults and violence. It swiftly politicised him and he was taken into the
military wing of the African National Congress where he carried out sabotage
with explosives.



Even
by the standards of the desperate days of the gun in South Africa, McBride’s
political activity is remarkable. In 1986, McBride fought his way out of an
intensive care ward in a bizarre rescue of his childhood friend and fellow
fighter Gordon Webster. It happened at Edendale Hospital in Durban where
Webster lay, with tubes in his body, under police guard.



McBride
posed as a doctor, with an AK47 hidden in his white coat; his father, Derrick,
was dressed as a priest with a Makarov pistol under his cassock. The Truth and
Reconciliation Commission heard, in 1999, that hospital staff cheered them on
and held back an armed policeman as the McBrides shot their way out, pushing
the wounded Webster to freedom on a trolley.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 



Thirty-three-years on, McBride went into battle again for his beliefs, this time with words and documents, against a more insidious and formidable foe than armed police – corruption. He gave evidence before the Zondo Commission, in Johannesburg, springing from his days as head of IPID, the independent police investigators. 



He spent more than four days on the stand – longer than most cricket matches last these days. He told of missing police evidence, claims of sinister moves to remove corruption busters and the misappropriation of money, under a cloak of secrecy, by the crime intelligence agencies.     



“People
don’t like me because of my anti-corruption stance, their dislike of me I wear
as a badge of honour. Those who dislike me for other reasons, it is a free
country and you are entitled to your likes and dislikes. I have no problem with
you. But wherever I am, I will do my work and will always be against
corruption. I understand how corruption affects the ordinary man and means
there is so much less to go around,” he says.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;




To
give a little more context, McBride’s erstwhile job went with unpopularity. The
head of IPID is a post that politicians, plus probably more than a few
disgruntled policemen, wanted him out of. They ended his contract and he
assures me he is going to court to get his job back. His stance may give clues
as to why some wanted to see the back of him.



“I
have spoken loudly every time I have seen something wrong and raised unpopular
issues. Some of the issues we picked up early on was police involvement in
cash-in-transit robberies… The looting of police funds, the corruption, the
wastage and the leverage, we then began to understand it; the leverage that
some policeman have over politicians… Any criminal syndicate that is operating
requires police to help them otherwise they will be found out in the normal
course of events,” says McBride, the month before the hearing. 



“Rogue
activity by certain elements in the prosecuting authority, the willingness to
prosecute people for non-criminal acts and unwillingness to prosecute when
there is a pile of evidence…We will also speak about the abuse of state funds,
the abuse of power by the police by negating investigations. Most of our
evidence is backed up by court papers, evidence and affidavits,” he says.



Many
activists who saw the nasty, ugly, side of the struggle often are the first to
come down, hard, when they feel freedoms they fought for are being abused. You
could argue McBride, an intelligent thinker, is very much one of them.



You
could also argue that McBride has been cut adrift by many former comrades and
demonized as the Magoo’s Bar bomber – the 1986 car bomb on the Durban
beachfront that killed three and wounded scores. Others, on both sides of the
South African struggle, who issued orders, or did worse, are undisturbed and
anonymous by their swimming pools. Any regrets? I ask. 



“It’s
like asking me ‘do I regret living in a free and democratic country’, the
answer can’t be yes… We would have preferred that things went differently. If
you are in an armed struggle, you are the cause of hurt to other people and as
a political activist, as a revolutionary you can defend that and justify it. 



“But
as a human being, you know that when it concerns other people, it is not the
right thing to do to cause the hurt of other people. I have expressed myself as
a human being on this, not because I was trying to elicit any sympathy or
anything; I have never asked for redemption, I have never asked for
forgiveness. Those who know me know what I am about and those who understand
the circumstances in the early 1980s when we became active; those who are old
enough to remember that was what the circumstances were.” 



Those
circumstances recede further into the darkness of memory of democratic South
Africa every year, yet, in the minds of those who suffered, it stays pin sharp.
McBride spent five years on death row, in Pretoria, after being sentenced to
the gallows for the Durban bombings. 



He
reckons the prison hanged more than 300 prisoners in this time. Through the
cell door, he heard the condemned screaming and crying as warders dragged the
condemned along the passages to their fate. The hanging warders used to bring
back the bloody hoods from the gallows and force the next batch of condemned
men to wash them.



In
May 1990, the sun shone as hope visited death row in Pretoria. The prison
management summoned McBride and a group of fellow condemned activists, to the
main office at the maximum security prison. Each were given green prison
jackets – the garb of special occasions. Warders drove them, in a van, to a
distant part of the prison and all feared they were either going to be executed
or allowed to escape and shot in the back. 



“We
were told not to talk and then we were put in this big room with a steel of
security around the room and after about 45 minutes the former president
(Mandela) walked in and it was the most beautiful sight on earth; the greatest
feeling ever and when he walks in, he says: ‘Ah, Robert! How are you!’ As if he
knew me forever. It was the most important meeting I had in my life. It was
like a God-like environment. He gave us a rundown of negotiations and what can
be expected and that we must not worry, we must be patient and sit tight, he
knows all of our backgrounds and will do his utmost to get us released and we
will never be forgotten.”



It
took more than two more years, in the shadow of the noose… until a fateful
Friday. September 25, 1992. McBride will never forget the date.



“Round
about half past four in the afternoon, I got a call to come to the office, I
didn’t know what it was about, and when I came there, the head of the prison
said: ‘You have a phone call’. It was my first phone call in prison. On the
other end of the line was comrade Cyril Ramaphosa and he says: ‘Hi chief’. I keep
quiet and then he says: ‘Monday’. I say: ‘What’s happening Monday chief?’ He
keeps quiet, then he says: ‘You are going home!’ There was a bit of a smile you
could feel in his voice,” says McBride with a huge smile on his face.



Long
after Mandela had completed his long walk to freedom for his country, McBride
was to yet again hear the click of a prison key and feel the pain from a
warder’s boot. 



It
was the summer of 1998 and in Maputo, the sea was warm and the prawns were hot.
The police in Mozambique picked up McBride, then a high-ranking official in
foreign affairs, on alleged gun running charges that appeared to be trumped up
to us journalists. We scoured the streets of the capital, for weeks, in search
of witnesses. 



McBride
argued that he was on an undercover operation for the National Intelligence
Agency trying to uncover gun runners who were flooding neighbouring South
Africa with illegal weapons and fuelling crime; a counter that eventually set
him free. 



Despite
this, McBride spent six months in the capital’s notorious, grim, Machava
maximum security prison, where he told me violence was meted out.



I
covered that story for many months and came within a split ace of interviewing
McBride in his cell. We spent hours plying the Portuguese-speaking warders with
beer and the story, through an interpreter, that we were friends visiting from
South Africa and we just wanted to say hello. We told them our friend was a big
man in South Africa.



“He
is a small man now,” smiled back one of the warders icily. 



We
convinced the guards and as they moved towards the prison doors, keys in hand,
our cover was blown. One of the not too bright colleagues from our TV station
strolled into the prison waving his press card.



“Hello
Chris!” says he. The none-too-pleased prison guards threw us out. 



I
had to wait more than 20 years for my interview with McBride.



A
phrase I always remembered from those many hot, crazy, days in Maputo was a
quote we got from the late presidential spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa when
McBride went behind bars yet again.



“He
is a tough guy who can look after himself,” said Mamoepa.



The Zondo
Commission and scores of corrupt policemen last month found out how tough.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Robert-McBride

A Tale Of Two Presidents And One Phone Call To Freedom

The Tanzanian tycoon who started life barefoot and bedding down with the farm animals in a tiny hut has died aged 75. Reginald Mengi who once appeared on the cover of Forbes Africa – with $550 million to his name – never made a secret of his humble roots and in later life poured millions into helping the less fortunate.



Mengi made his way out of poverty in Tanzania, where his family had a smallholding, by winning a scholarship to an accounting &nbsp;college in Glasgow, Scotland. He dropped out of his first course, took night classes, and worked as a bus conductor and cleaner to pay his way. He end up as an accountant with PwC and was posted back to Africa, to Nairobi, before securing another job with the company back home in Dar es Salaam.



It was the want of a pen that sparked Mengi’s mind on the way to a fortune. The socialist days of Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania there were often shortages of mundane items like pens and pencils.



Mengi had been searching the streets of Dar es Salaam for one for an entire day when he ran into a friend who knew someone, who knew someone else, who could export pen parts to Tanzania. 



He assembled them on his bedroom floor.“That little business gave me my first million dollars,” Mengi told Forbes Africa in 2014. Mengi went on to trade in everything from shoe polish and toilet paper to soap, detergent and natural skin exfoliator – he said the latter was merely bottled mud from the sea bed. 



He once boasted that no one could spend a day in Tanzania without touching one of his products. Mengi used this money to buy up a string of radio stations, TV channels and newspapers that put him on the way to his fortune.

mengi

What You Need To Know About Mogul Reginald Mengi Who Has Died At 75

The multimillion-dollar circus called Davos rolled into the Swiss ski-resort yet again, in January, in all its big deal bombast and bean counting glory. This year, African debate was scant: the man who broke the Bank of England foretold of a broken world laden with fear and doom; there was scary talk of cyber terrorism; just another day, another Davos, for the World Economic Forum.



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If you want an example of how the dash of Davos can descend into self-parody, you should have taken a look at the huge banner draped across the posh Belvedere Hotel throughout the World Economic Forum in the mountain ski-resort. 



It was on the main street through Davos where thousands of delegates slip and slide to scores of functions – with at least one or two slipping over every day – along a line of shops taken over by big money corporate sponsors. 



Much more money is being made elsewhere in this ski-resort: the people who live here go away for the week and let out their homes for a king’s ransom; $30,000 for the week is nothing unusual.&nbsp;&nbsp; 



READ MORE |<a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/economy/2018/12/31/world-will-improve-where-it-matters-most-in-2019/">World Will Improve Where It Matters Most In 2019</a>



Most people saw an irony in the banner, yet clearly the
people who spent a fortune on putting it up there couldn’t have. 



“Free trade is great,” says the banner on behalf of
Brexit-bound Great Britain. 



“Didn’t someone tell them they were about to leave one of
the greatest free trade zones in the world?” says one passer-by with a cynical
chuckle.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 



The crack summed up some of the irony that swirls around when cohorts of bean counters, highly-paid administrators and bosses gather in an Alpine icebox to solve the problems of the world.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">The bigwigs weren’t there and this year, there was less buzz and fewer queues outside the briefing rooms. </blockquote>



Donald Trump, who made a big splash at Davos last year,
stayed at home trying to figure out his government shutdown. The four ‘Ms’ –
May, Modi, Macron and Mnangagwa weren’t there either; at least two of them tied
up with fighting fires, from Brexit to economic meltdown, in their own
backyards.



&nbsp;Empty hot seats, at
Davos, at a time when the world is crying out for the wisdom of sage leaders. 



Instead, it was left to business leaders, like the
Australian-born CEO of billion-dollar turnover infrastructure giant Arup, Greg
Hodkinson, to cut to the chase.



“We need clear political leadership in this fractured world… otherwise we are going to get easy political leadership preying on people’s fears,” says Hodkinson at one of the first panels of WEF 2019, on infrastructure.



READ MORE | <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2017/03/01/richest-powerful-go-davos/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Why The Richest And Most Powerful Go To Davos (opens in a new tab)">Why The Richest And Most Powerful Go To Davos</a>



Hodkinson, who has worked in infrastructure for 40 years,
also said investment in infrastructure could no longer ignore the future, or
the deteriorating environment.



&nbsp;“Carbon should be
priced into infrastructure projects and that will act as an economic trigger
for private money to come in because not only will it mean more revenue, it
will help us put more money into saving the environment,” says Hodkinson.



According to the WEF Global Risks Report for 2018, some of
the top risks by impact are posed by the elements: floods and storms; water
crisis, plus earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanos and electric storms. 



“By 2040, the investment gap in global infrastructure is
forecast to reach $18 trillion against a projected requirement of $97 trillion.
Against this backdrop, we strongly recommend that businesses develop a climate
resilience adaptation strategy and act on it now,” warns Alison Martin, Group
Chief Risk Officer, Zurich Insurance Group, in the report.



The money is there, according to Hodkinson, but needs to be
channeled with foresight.



“Even if someone is building a car parking garage, I ask
what else can they do with it because they won’t need it one day,” says
Hodkinson.



“The money is there. Investors sank six trillion dollars
into United States junk bonds last year; if investors are prepared to roll the
dice on junk bonds, what about infrastructure investment?”



Investors, on this day at Davos, heard that 65% of world infrastructure projects are unbankable without government guarantees. Private money is needed to fill the gaping infrastructure gap, yet negotiations between investor and government officials can prove difficult.



READ MORE | <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/economy/2019/01/09/world-bank-sees-global-growth-slowing-in-2019/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="World Bank Sees Global Growth Slowing In 2019 (opens in a new tab)">World Bank Sees Global Growth Slowing In 2019</a>



Just ask Heng Swee Keat, the Cambridge-educated finance
minister of Singapore, the former Parliamentary Private Secretary to the father
of infrastructure on the industrious little island who harnessed private money
for public good – the legendary late premier Lee Kuan Yew. 



The finance minister warned relationships between public and
private sectors could be “lumpy”. 



“I remember a man coming to me and saying he was never going
to invest in infrastructure in your country again, I asked him ‘why’ and he
said, because the last time we invested and made money the government came back
to us and asked ‘why are you making so much money’,’’ chuckled Swee Keat.







Another major issue in Davos was Artificial Intelligence.
This promises not only the development of new technology to take the backbreak
and tedium out of life, but also to replace workers with robots. Exciting times
for many, yet maybe worrying times for us all if one of the many briefings was
anything to go by – one man’s bank account can be another radical’s cash cow.
Experts painted a bleak picture of threats and radicalism lurking on the dark
web.



&nbsp;“I wouldn’t put my credit card into a machine today. This is happening right now,” exclaimed retired US Marine Corps’ four-star general, John Allen, a former commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force. I had asked him about how far away we were from cyber-terrorism cleaning out bank accounts.



“A cyber terrorist can open a bank account on a Monday,
start cleaning people’s accounts out on a Tuesday and start supplying money to
their cause on a Wednesday. I saw a case of a bank in Bangladesh that was
cleaned out of $80 million in one day. We have to develop strong systems to
defend our financial systems.”



READ MORE | <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/technology/2017/09/27/big-four-accounting-firm-deloitte-confirms-cyber-attack/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Big Four Accounting Firm Deloitte Confirms Cyber Attack (opens in a new tab)">Big Four Accounting Firm Deloitte Confirms Cyber Attack</a>



Cyber- terrorists are becoming ever more clever and
ubiquitous, warns Karin von Hippel, a former senior advisor to the US
Department of State, who worked on security for the United Nations and European
Union in Somalia and Kosovo. The Islamic Isis movement, in Syria, attracted
40,000 volunteers from 120 countries and many used internet to further their
cause, she says.



“They are all out there in the cloud and the dark web doing
their work. They move so fast that it is very hard to keep up with,” says Von
Hippel.



“If we spent half as much money on easing the causes of this
terrorism, as we do fighting it, we would not drive so many youths into the
arms of the radicals,” says Allen.



Don’t panic, too much, cautions Von Hippel.



“Despite all of this, you’ve still got a bigger chance of
dying in the bathtub than you do in a terrorist attack,” she quips to ease the
tension at the end of a worrying, yet eye-opening, session.



If you listened to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa
at Davos, on a cold Wednesday night, you would have bathed with abandon and
slept soundly in the snow afterwards. 



“We are casting our nets here and finding big fish,” says Ramaphosa,
the master of the metaphor, at the press briefing earlier in the day.



In Davos, Ramaphosa would have faced awkward questions from
investors over why his government is propping up loss-making state enterprises,
taking time to cut back government expenditure and the civil service, plus the
thorny issue of expropriation of land without compensation.



That night, at the customary presidential dinner, in Davos,
Ramaphosa, with microphone in hand, was as optimistic as a leader should be in
an election year.



“When we see people here, they ask us how we manage to get business, government and unions working together for the economy of our country,” says Ramaphosa.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“They say tell us what magic you have. What I tell them is that there is a renewal and determination to make South Africa work. ” </blockquote>



The most chilling view of the future was yet to come. It
came from the lips of grey-haired global investor George Soros, the man who
broke the Bank of England, who invited us to the plush Seehof Hotel, one icy
Thursday night, for an icier speech. 



The 88-year-old hedge fund tycoon, worth $8.3 billion
according to FORBES, reportedly made $1 billion in one day, in Britain’s
sterling crisis of 1992, by shorting the British pound.



&nbsp; “I want to use my
time tonight to warn the world about an unprecedented danger that’s threatening
the very survival of open societies,” were the dramatic opening words. 



Soros delivered a potted history of his early life in the shadow of oppression. When he was 13, in 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary and deported Jews to concentration camps. His father, a lawyer, understood the system and arranged false papers and hiding places for the family. 



When the Soviets moved into post-war Bucharest, Soros took refuge in England where he put himself through the London School of Economics by working as a waiter and railway porter. He became a leading hedge fund manager by analysing the weaknesses of prevailing theories guiding investors.



&nbsp;“Running a hedge fund
was very stressful. When I had made more money than I needed for myself or my
family, I underwent a kind of midlife crisis. Why should I kill myself to make
more money?” he says.



Then, Soros began his philanthropic work, in 1979, by
supporting scholarships for black students at Cape Town University. To this day,
his Open Society Foundations aims to protect the human rights and freedom he
fears are under attack.



“An alliance is emerging between authoritarian states and
the large data-rich IT monopolies that bring together nascent systems of
corporate surveillance with an already developing system of state-sponsored
surveillance. This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes
of which not even George Orwell could have imagined. Tonight, I want to call
attention to the mortal danger facing open societies from the instruments of
control that machine-learning and artificial intelligence can put in the hands
of repressive regimes,” says Soros.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="700" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-1087968182-1024x700.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-39625" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-1087968182-1024x700.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-1087968182-300x205.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-1087968182-600x410.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-1087968182-768x525.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-1087968182.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption>George Soros, billionaire and founder of Soros Fund Management LLC, speaks at an event on day three of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019. World leaders, influential executives, bankers and policy makers attend the 49th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos from Jan. 22 &#8211; 25. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images</figcaption></figure>



“China isn’t the only authoritarian regime in the world, but
it’s undoubtedly the wealthiest, strongest and most developed in machine
learning and Artificial Intelligence. This makes Xi Jinping the most dangerous
opponent of those who believe in the concept of open society. But Xi isn’t
alone. Authoritarian regimes are proliferating all over the world and if they
succeed, they will become totalitarian.”



Soros also criticized US foreign policy on China. “My present view is that instead of waging a trade war with practically the whole world, the US should focus on China. Instead of letting ZTE and Huawei off lightly, it needs to crack down on them. 



If these companies came to dominate the 5G market, they would present an unacceptable security risk for the rest of the world. Regrettably, President Trump seems to be following a different course: make concessions to China and declare victory while renewing his attacks on US allies. This is liable to undermine the US policy objective of curbing China’s abuses and excesses.”



The final chilling words for anyone who loves freedom: “My
key point is that the combination of repressive regimes with IT monopolies
endows those regimes with a built-in advantage over open societies. The
instruments of control are useful tools in the hands of authoritarian regimes,
but they pose a mortal threat to open societies.”



Journalists at least closed a heavy night with a lighter
moment. They asked Soros whose side Facebook and Google were on.



“I think Facebook and the others are on the side of their
own profits,” says Soros to a gale of laughter.



All the time we were listening to these predictions of AI surveillance doom at Davos, in a warm lounge at the Seehof Hotel, we were surrounded by armed police, airport security, surveillance cameras and cell phones that tell the world where you are, who you are and what you are doing, or saying, maybe doomsday is already here.

Day Three Of World Economic Forum 2019

Chilling Words From The Man Who Broke The Bank Of England

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and head of the African Union speaks to CNBC Africa’s Chris Bishop on continental trade, business and China’s influence. Excerpts of the interview.

Q. Philosophers and poets have been talking about a united Africa for decades. It seems on the business front, it is on the cards. We are talking about an African Continental Free Trade Area. As Chairperson of the African Union, how are you going to make this happen? 
A. Africa coming together and being united is a very important task and responsibility for all of us. It’s never going to be a task of the Chairperson of the African Union alone. What the Chairperson does is to govern the understanding and support and everyone together so we do what needs to be done for our continent to be unified. We have already started with the Continental Free Trade Area; before that, we have been talking about regional integration. Regions with a lot commonalities can come together to do business, to invest in each other or deal with the rest of the world as one entity.
Q. How difficult is this going to be? 
A. It is going to be difficult bringing change even when it is very necessary… As Chairperson of the African Union or even as a president of my country, I know it is the task of other leaders to not only talk about nice things that should happen, but also do the hard work to lead all of us to the results of the effort we have to put in. So we have to keep raising our voices first of all, reminding people, assuming that they have forgotten, because some of them do not know what they are supposed to do. So you have to keep raising your voice, keep reminding people and we do it collectively. It is always going to be useful if we do it together and understand that together is when we are going to succeed.
Q. A lot of countries have not yet signed up to the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement. What can you do about this? 
A. The best way is to start from somewhere and demonstrate the good that can come out of such a thing as a free trade area and having an agreement over that and what needs to happen. Once you demonstrate the benefits, I think people will quickly move towards doing things that benefit them. And in actual fact, we also need to look at what happens elsewhere in the world. We know the stories of different parts of the world where people have come from and the paths they have taken and where they are today. And from Africa, we look at what has happened in Asia, the long history of Europe, Latin America, United States, Canada and so on. So we need to relate to where they are with a number of things that have happened or they have done to be there… But we can’t be there by just admiring what other people have done and not doing exactly what you need to do for yourself and get moving with the situation and improving it&#8230;
Q: What do you think a leader should be doing to keep talented young people on the continent? 
A: It is governance; we need to govern our people properly. But governance alone does not provide anything; what you do within those structures, and that comes to the investments we make that are responsive to people’s needs, aspirations and desires. It’s around the creation of a business environment, whether small or big businesses can make money, can do whatever they can and do that freely, because people know how to do some of these things, but until there is a conducive environment for them to play that part, that won’t happen. So leaders must make sure that this is the case and allow people to participate in all that. Once there is participation, there is benefiting, there is the feeling that what they have is what they wanted; at least they have hope, they are sure that things are moving in the right direction even if they do not have what they wanted now, they can have it tomorrow.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/life/2016/04/01/tribute-remarkable-rwandan-women/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: ‘A Tribute To Remarkable Rwandan Women’</a>
Q: To your role as Chairperson of the African Union, I mean if you can argue that this is Africa’s time, but still there is that lingering fear and concern sometimes about stability, even in your own region in East Africa. How are you planning to tackle this in your job? 
A. It is just to keep bringing out these discrepancies. The complaints people have are real. You need to listen to them and you need to get to the bottom of why there are these contradictions, of course the major problem being we have many of us who say the right things but the next day, we are doing the complete opposite. So until we exercise some conscientious discipline to an extent really, if we understand that this is what we need to do and it’s good for everybody, it’s good for you, it’s good for me and in fact if there is something that is good for both of us, we shouldn’t tamper with that, we need to only take it forward and make sure we benefit more but together. This is something we have seen over many years because even when we are talking about regional integration, which has made good progress over the years, we still have people who will talk about integration and will talk about all the good things and how everybody should do this and that and then you find the same people are the ones undermining integration. It has happened. We see it every day. So we need to keep shouting out to these people and say ‘please, you know this is affecting me and maybe at the end, it will affect you’.
Q: How do you think Africa is doing right now in persuading the businessmen of the world to put their money into this continent? 
A: Well, let me start with my own country Rwanda. On the continent of Africa alone, Rwanda is the second best place when it comes to the ease-of-doing-business index. I am saying every country on our continent is trying to fix different problems that create obstacles for business in Africa. Every country is making an effort, Rwanda is one of them. The whole of East Africa is involved in that. So on people’s minds, they know how important it is for countries to create a good environment for investors to invest in, for people doing business to do business or for the business people of one country to do business in another country or with the citizens of another country. This is now a very common discussion. People are always searching for better ways to allow that to happen, so I think things are on the upward trend, things are in the right direction but it’s never enough and I think Africa is still lagging behind many other parts of the world. Even if we look at intra-Africa trade, it is still very low, when it comes to other regions, it’s much higher, so we need to improve, we need to do better and we need to move faster.
Q: A lot of countries have run into a lot of soured private-public investments. How do you approach it as a leader when trying to negotiate private-public partnerships? 
A. You see, the starting point is, let’s say both sides, are we prepared? Do we know what we want? Do we know how to get it while we allow the partner to also get what they want? You see, there are two parties here. Why things have gone wrong is some people have gone into partnerships and this is mostly with governments; a lot of things happen that prove that either government did not know what they wanted or they knew but the people who were involved on behalf of the government ended up trying to benefit themselves instead of looking at the country’s interest, and the other partner who is the private partner. This has always been the case but if governments are prepared and governments have expertise, if they do not have it in-house, they can hire expertise to act on their behalf. There is so much out there that once you ask people to stand in for you as expertise, they will do that. So it is not the formula of private-partnership that is problematic, it is those who are involved in the transactions that become problematic.
Q: So you are talking about corruption here? 
A. Absolutely! Corruption comes in, there is no question about it. Corruption is part of it or just bad governance of the whole process.
<div id="attachment_37491" style="width: 750px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37491" class="wp-image-37491 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/GettyImages-825575448-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="740" height="494" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/GettyImages-825575448-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/GettyImages-825575448-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/GettyImages-825575448-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/GettyImages-825575448-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/GettyImages-825575448.jpg 1654w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" />Incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame greets the crowd after addressing supporters at the closing rally of the presidential campaign in Kigali, on August 2, 2017. </div>
Q: I know it is something you have tried to fight for a decade. How close do you think you are to actually getting it out of the system here? 
A. You will never kill corruption completely, but you can reduce it to the bare minimum and what has happened is to create an environment of accountability and transparency, where things will be done and without fear or favor, justice will be exercised. It does not matter whether it is a big person or an ordinary person. Once they are caught up in this, the law should apply.
Q: From all the corners of the continent, a lot of people are still saying China smacks of neo-colonialism – the influence they are exerting in Africa right now. What do you say? 
A. Well, tell me about neo-colonialism or the old one? The new or the old I don’t know, but they are all bad things, but again it comes to the whole point… There are Chinese investments in Africa; you do not make investments for nothing, and it is not charity, right? Africa needs investments and again, it goes back to the other point I raised – does Africa know what it wants in working with other people from other parts of the world? If China offers an opportunity, that’s the way I prefer to see it. What does Rwanda want from China or what can we ably get from China, where we will benefit and China will benefit because again it is not a charity relationship. So if we know that and have discussions about it, then we should have a fair deal. Do I want the Chinese to build a power plant for me, for Rwandans to have sufficient electricity? How much is China able to lend to us or how much actually do we owe, or different groups that have been lending us money, so we make sure that we don’t end up owing too much or more than we can actually absorb from China and if you did it with any other country anywhere, it would be the same problem so we have to be conscious of that but if they are able to give us resources or money or lend us and say ‘we build for you power plants because that’s what we want’, and we say ‘okay, we are going to have this much invested in it and this is how we are going to repay the debt’ and so on and so forth… why should that be a problem? Because I don’t know of any place where China has walked into and started grabbing things, and if it happened, then it is not a problem of China, it is a problem of where it is happening I think. For the country to just surrender everything and be grabbed, then there is a problem.
Q. Where do you think you would have been if you hadn’t gone into politics and become a president? What would you want to do with your life? 
A: Well, when I was in my youth, I used to like to do things, to make things. Maybe I would have pursued certain careers and professions. You would have seen me as an engineer, or somebody doing an innovation or creating things.
Q: So you would have been quite happy as a carpenter or… 
A: Absolutely! A mechanic or…
Q: And if you were, what would you be saying to your president of Rwanda today? 
A: I would say try to do the best, to provide us with an environment that does not stand in the way of people’s ability to realize their potential or do whatever they want to do, meaning, get the government out of the way of people trying to thrive and do things they wish to do. And this goes back to the same story, it’s like what we are always trying to say – what is it that we can get out of the way of business, investments or people who have benefitted from education to base on the knowledge and skills they have to do what they want to do and improve their standards of living. This would be my request to my president. If that was the situation, I would say make sure government does not stand in the way of the freedoms of people to realize their potential and do what they wish to do.
For the full interview, visit cnbcafrica.com

Rwanda President Paul Kagame At Harvard

Paul Kagame: ‘Together Is When We Are Going To Succeed’

It is a century since Nelson Mandela came kicking and screaming into a world that he would change.
In one hundred years, his name has been spoken with pride from the paddy fields of Vietnam, through the savannahs of Africa to the smoky steak houses of New York. His legacy appears more contested with every passing year.
I was fortunate to have a front row seat in the Mandela years and saw the power, humour and anger of the man. I used to feel 10 feet tall at press conferences when he used to greet my questions with: “Mr Bishop, how are you?” Once I was walking to a TV interview with him, at an African Union summit in Harare, the day after I had ruptured my knee playing football, he noticed I was hobbling far behind – something he was not used to. He turned and inquired of the cause of my pain.
“May I suggest you take up boxing, it’s safer!” says the old man with that million dollar smile. I shall take the warmth of that smile to my grave.
Make it clear, I am no Mandela worshipper. He was no saint and certainly didn’t want to be one: he could be angry and petulant with the best of them; his past was chequered by domestic troubles; a man of the people, yet distant from his own family, according to many close to him. A man who promoted press freedom, yet like many of the lesser politicians who followed him, wanted his picture on every page of the morning newspaper. Mandela drew the line at the sports page – he joked that he didn’t want to risk being associated with losers.
The greatest fear Mandela had was that his ideals – not his name – would be forgotten after his death. Not for Mandela the greed of rule, nor the trappings of power.
Yet it is very fashionable these days to run Mandela down as something akin to a sell-out. Those who claim, erroneously, that Mandela sold out his people. They say he didn’t stop poverty overnight nor right the wrongs of the past with the wave of his wand. They need to talk to those who were there in the negotiations for a new free South Africa.
“People say we gave up too much in negotiations yet we had nothing to start with,” Denis Goldberg, a man who faced death with Mandela at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, once told me.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2018/07/11/mandela-through-their-eyes/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Mandela Through Their Eyes</a>
The negotiations with an entrenched elite – that held most of the cards and only grudgingly acknowledged Mandela and his comrades – were difficult to say the least. Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) could not even threaten to go back to war because the depleting arms of its military wing posed little or no threat to the state.
Even so, a deal was hammered together somehow. In the next two years, in the run-up to the 1994 elections, Mandela won his leadership spurs as he steered South Africa away from the civil war that many feared was inevitable. He flew to Durban and told bloody-thirsty faction fighters to throw their weapons into the sea and they listened. When revered freedom fighter Chris Hani was gunned down on his front drive, in 1993, many were ready to take the law into their own hands.
Mandela barged into the SABC studios in Johannesburg that night and made a broadcast to the nation to calm down and put its weapons away. He wasn’t even in Parliament then and I wonder to this day how many lives that broadcast saved with this canny display of leadership.
Then, when into power with a virtually bankrupt Treasury, Mandela steered the National Development Programme that built millions of homes and schools; electrified the homes of legions of poor people and rolled out roads to connect the nation. Yet, the money was never going to stretch far enough and millions still have no roof over their heads and too many schoolchildren attend classes under trees.
It is fashionable these days to say the majority of South Africa must rise in a civil war in which the nation will be cleansed of its past, restored of its land on the path to righteousness. It probably sounds even better after a few drinks.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2018/07/09/celebrating-mandela-from-where-it-all-began-soweto/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Celebrating Mandela From Where It All Began; Soweto</a>
I say this is bunkum and anyone who has ever seen or smelt a civil war will agree with me. How a vile, stinking trail of dead fathers, raped women and children, destruction and disorder, can lead a country to the light beats me. Those who scream for war have clearly never seen it.
The first time I clapped eyes on the great man, at the Harare Agricultural Show, on his first foreign visit to Zimbabwe in August 1994, he walked alone, without a security man in sight. I didn’t ask for a selfie – they didn’t exist then, anyway – I was tongue-tied. We merely smiled at each other in passing.
So when people in political circles told me that South Africa’s new president Cyril Ramaphosa didn’t care for wealth and power – he merely wanted to put his name up there with Mandela – I smiled like I did on that August day in Harare.
This does seem feasible as President Ramaphosa – a millionaire in his own right – was the man who stood next to Mandela, holding the microphone, on the town hall steps in Cape Town, on February 11 1990, during his famous address on release from 27 years in prison.
<blockquote>“I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people,” said Mandela to deafening cheers on that bright summer’s day.</blockquote>
Clearly this humility and willingness to serve rubbed off on President Ramaphosa on that fateful day in 1990. In his first 100 days, he has made manful attempts to stop the rot in South Africa by merely enforcing the rule of law. A course of action he made no secret of even before he took power on February 15.
“There are no holy cows. Anyone who is caught doing wrong things will end up behind the bars of a jail,” says Ramaphosa, with microphone in hand and humble service in mind at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.
True to his word, Ramaphosa cut swathes through the corruption of the past. Former president Jacob Zuma ended up in the dock on corruption charges something that many – including me – thought they would never see in their lifetime. He removed the rookie finance minister Malusi Gigaba and replaced him with the people’s choice Nhanlha Nene who has staved off more downgrades of the economy. A clean-up of the state-owned enterprises and the institutions is underway and many who thought they were invincible six months ago have been cut down to size.
I am sure the old man, who must have been spinning in his grave over the last few years, would approve.
“Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another,” says Mandela at his inauguration at the Union Buildings in Pretoria.
As we mark 100 years since his birth, it is time for cool heads and clear thinking to make sure this utopian ideal of liberty and tolerance lives on after his death. Our grandchildren will judge us harshly if we don’t.

Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk in Moria

The Power, Humour And Anger Of Mandela

His face contorts slightly as he, slowly, but painfully, returns through the murky mist of 42 years. His hands tremble with emotion as he relives horrific images lodged in the corners of his mind. The birds singing in the blue sky over the idyllic garden of his family home in Roodepoort, Johannesburg, contrasting with the moody, mean, streets of Soweto of yore.
Eightythree-year-old Enoch Duma lived the slaughter of scores of schoolchildren on that fateful winter’s day in Soweto in 1976. It was his job to be there as a reporter for a Johannesburg newspaper and he had his own car. He knew serious trouble was building. Many of the schoolchildren involved used to call him “Bra E” and held him in high esteem.
“I just knew the previous night the people were uneasy as if something was going to happen, some people didn’t go to work. You had people like Tsietsi Mashinini, Seth Mazibuko and other student leaders coming to your house. I was always ahead of what was happening,” recalls Duma.
On the morning of June 16, Duma was out driving through the tense streets of Soweto and saw a big crowd approaching.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2013/12/01/rose-soweto-rose/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: How The Rose Of Soweto Rose</a>
“They ran to my car. Tsietse said ‘hey! Soweto is burning – it is bad, it is very bad, just stay ahead of things. Hide if you can hide because there is going to be trouble tonight. If the police shoot we are going to answer with petrol bombs’. This was something new in Soweto.”
The mood turned ugly when news filtered through the crowd in Orlando that police had shot dead a young student, Hector Pieterson – a bloody killing captured for eternity by the famous photograph by Sam Nzima that he smuggled out through police lines to make the front pages everywhere from New York to Sydney the next day.
“When people heard it was Hector they were very angry. They armed themselves with Molotov Cocktails and started throwing these petrol bombs recklessly. They were just mad,” says Duma.
The birds outside tweet, incongruously, as Duma’s face darkens with the deepening story.
“I can still see the madness in their faces and their anger. They didn’t know what to do,” he says.
“I saw a burning body thrown into a dustbin. I couldn’t stand it I had to drive through. There were moments when I thought I wasn’t going to make it. It was difficult to see where the students were coming from. They were coming out of buildings with Molotov Cocktails and some carried dustbin lids as shields. Among the leaders were very young people. The real fighters were the little girls – they were ready to die.”
Among them, Susan Shabangu who spent months on the run in the clampdown that followed; like many of the survivors, she escaped into exile to fight the struggle and ended up as her country’s mining and social development minister.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2016/06/01/walking-day-horror/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Walking Into A Day Of Horror</a>
It was a horrific chapter of a rich career that saw Duma, the son of a Baptist minister, born in Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, work his way from reporting the courts in his hometown to working on a national newspaper. He joined The Post in Durban through a friend, who was a reporter on the paper, called Duke Ncobo.
“The newspaper wanted a young cub reporter and suggested I should write two stories for the editor. He read them and looked at me and read them and looked at me and said ‘did you write this or did someone write this for you?’ I said ‘no’. He said ‘go to Mr Ncobo’, who said ‘I think the editor likes you’!”
His first arrest came in bizarre fashion. Ncobo invited the young Duma to a party in a block of flats in downtown Durban belonging to the leading lights of the African National Congress including Fatima Meer and journalist GR Naidoo.
An elderly woman living below called the police complaining of the noise; the police, who suspected the party was a front for a political meeting among people of color, encouraged her to press charge. They arrested 27 partygoers including Duma and threw them in the cells.
The court case turned into farce. The elderly lady, in her 70s, complained that the partygoers had banged the floor above her as they danced. In court, the judge asked the lady to demonstrate the dance. There were titters in court as ushers cleared the chairs away and the lady did a high-stepping dance. The judge ruled she hadn’t made sufficient noise to convince him, yet Duma and his colleagues were held to have been a public nuisance.
Duma secured a job on the City Post, amid the bright lights and jazz of 1950s Johannesburg and arrived at Park Station with nothing but a suitcase. A van from the newspaper picked him up to take him to the newsroom buzzing with young journalists.
“You must pretend to be one of them, otherwise they will give you a hard time,” chirped the driver.
These were colorful and chaotic times for young black journalists at the City Post. A regular caller with stories was a young and vivacious social worker called Winnie Mandela.
“Winnie Mandela, she was very young used to come to the office and was very friendly with reporters. The gangsters respected Winnie,” says Duma.
Gangsters and guns were another part of newsroom life at the City Post. Gangs ruled many of the Johannesburg streets in the 1950s – the Spoilers, the Americans and the Msomi gang.
Their leaders used to waltz in off the street with wide-brimmed hats and long fine coats looking more Chicago than sub-Saharan Africa. Often, they carried small “baby brown” pistols, sometimes concealed in a bandage, to intimidate journalists for a number of sins. 
It could be to force them to stay away from their girlfriends or stop writing about them or start writing about them. Often a gun up the nose proved mightier than the pen, until one day.
“One day, they came and they found the deputy editor having a meeting with the reporters. The gangsters introduced themselves and the deputy editor Henk Margolis, an American brought in to work on the paper, says: ‘Gentlemen, can I help you?’
“They pointed a gun at him, Henk noticed this and was not scared. ‘If you think you can intimidate me you are wrong, I was born in Chicago, so I have not time for small fry’. That day we thought there was going to be a showdown. Henk grabbed hold of the leader and pushed him outside. That was the last time the gangs came to the office,” says Duma with a smile.
It turned out that gangsters with police uniforms on proved to be Duma’s downfall. He was arrested numerous times and ended up spending nine months in prison. He went into exile in the United States (US) and with his wife of 56 years, Kitty, he was a prime mover in the divestment campaign – encouraging US firms to pull out of South Africa – that helped usher in the end of apartheid.
A system that stoked the fiery horror of June 16 that people who were there will never forget.

Enoch-Duma-306

Soweto Burning: June 16 Remembered

The High Court case, in Pretoria on March 27, saw the full gamut of human emotions: anger; frustration and folly, followed by joy.
The latter emotion came from the long-suffering 27 independent power producers who won the case against an interdict to pave the way for the signing of the Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with the Department of Energy – the 20-year agreements that give them a chance to claw back $3.8 billion in investment.
The deal will add 2,300MW of green power to the estimated 40,000MW in installed capacity. Despite this, green power will make up 5% of South Africa’s power.
Outside the court, the thwarted National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) members and pressure group Transform SA weighed in with the anger and frustration coupled with a threat to block the streets in protest. As the union licked its wounds, the court poured on salt by ordering it to pay costs as it stuck the application from the roll.
“We got it from Eskom that if they introduce these renewables, they’ve done calculations on power station by power station on how many jobs will be lost. When we did this study last year it was found that 30,000 to 40,000 jobs are likely to be lost and there seems to be no interest about that,” says Numsa Secretary Irvin Jim.
“We are prepared to block the streets to achieve this.”
This claim despite the fact that Eskom will have to close down a number of its ageing and crumbling coal-fired power stations.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/technology/2017/10/30/road-green-future/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: On The Road To A Green Future</a>
“The South African population is being taken for a ride. Our fiscus is being looted because these companies, IPPs are only producing 5% power and taking 30% of Eskom’s profits,” says Transform SA’s Adil Chabeleng outside the court.
The mighty National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) – the biggest union in Africa with more than 300,000 members – agrees with Numsa that the unions don’t want private money generating the people’s electricity. They also feel that capitalists have benefited from public money ploughed into kick-starting green energy with preferential tariffs.
“We view this capitalist IPPs deal as a backdoor privatization of Eskom. The plan is to privatize 42% of Eskom by 2030 masquerading as the implementation of clean energy,” the NUM said in an angry statement.
“We are going to mobilize all our members and society to revolt against this planned madness called IPPs.”
Days after this fire and fury, Energy Minister Jeff Radebe shocked many by putting pen-to-paper for the PPAs to end the years of waiting.
The big problem now is to revive the dormant green power industry in South Africa.
“We have to resuscitate the industry to generate this power. Supply chains have to be rebuilt and manufacturing restarted. The whole supply chain has lain dormant for nearly three years,” says Brenda Martin, a board member of the South African Renewable Energy Council that represents most of the 27 IPPS.
Martin also refutes one of the claims of the unions that green power will see billions leaving South Africa and into the pockets of foreign investors. Numsa&#8217;s legal counsel Advocate Nazeer Cassim had argued in court that the signing of the IPPs could be viewed as a form of economic looting.
“Only 25% of this deal is owned by foreign investors and the rules of the game is that most of the money must stay in the country.”
Whatever the fall-out over the signing of the PPAs, just weeks before, this unsteady progress was a pipe dream after many months of dithering and a court case.
Picture this: multi-millionaire, suited and booted, investors leave air-conditioned airport lounges to fly thousands of miles to Africa to accept a government invitation to finally sign up for a return on their investment; only to arrive to, amid confusion, a court case, disappointment and a union that they’d never heard of, threatening to block the streets in protest against the deal. Confused? Most of them were.
“Excuse me,” a fresh-off-the-plane Italian investor, who looked like a clown lost in a circus, at the Department of Energy, asked one of the many young journalists at the press briefing, in Pretoria, on March 13.
“What is happening?”
The confused man from Milan was one of a number of foreign investors, from Spain to the United States, who flew in to sign PPA contracts. Investors expect it will take them a decade to claw back their money.
There was chaos before the investors landed that morning. Overnight, the militant Numsa – a union that appears to have forgotten that the Berlin wall came down – claimed it had won a late-night court interdict against the signing.
When it came to the signing later that day, in Pretoria, Energy Minister Radebe told investors that the courts had in fact not issued an interdict, as Numsa had claimed; it rather postponed the next hearing until March 27. You can understand the confusion of the man from Milan.
“It’s a banana republic,” chirped one of the South African investors in the wake of a day to forget in the course of renewable energy.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2014/02/01/shedding-light-renewable-energy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Shedding Light On Renewable Energy</a>
More inexplicable for investors was how these IPP contracts raised the ire of the unions almost overnight; there was hardly a peep from them in the years of government foot-dragging over signing them that has left many of the green power producers; at least 14 of the 27, according to industry, sources – on the brink of bankruptcy.
The coal-fired power stations of South Africa, built in the 1970s, are ramshackle and inefficient. Last year, the government said it was going to shut down the 3,000MW Kriel, 1,000MW Komati, 2,000MW Hendrina and the 1,600MW Camden power stations, all in Mpumalanga, anyway.
In any case, renewable energy generates a mere 5% of South Africa’s total power so the chances of green energy elbowing out coal, which produces nearly 80%, are unlikely in the extreme. It is more likely that South Africa’s coal-fired power stations will perish under the weight of repair bills and the cost of compliance with environmental regulations on account of the vast amount of acrid black smoke they belch into the African sky every year.
Other energy experts put down the government lethargy over signing the PPAs to ill-advised complacency. Low growth leading to low demand for electricity, plus a 500% increase in cost since 2007, has seen a cessation of power cuts in South Africa, for the time being.
Under the current energy scenario, South Africa will have more than 60GW of capacity by 2022, against a flagging demand of below 30GW, Ted Blom, a partner at Mining &amp; Energy Advisory, said. 
All in all, South Africa, which once dreamed of building the continent’s leading green power industry, creating thousands of jobs, has done quite a lot to destroy that dream. As well as the near three-year delay over signing the IPP contracts – the government has been penny-pinching, that is, trying to negotiate down tariffs with the argument that the country doesn’t really need energy right now.
What it means is that South African renewable energy producers are now looking across the continent for projects in favour of trusting the backed-up process in their own country. One of the unintended consequences of this whole controversy is likely to be that a score of African nations – who once lagged behind in renewable energy – could find themselves at the cutting edge of the industry thanks to South African technology and knowhow fostered by South African tax money and exported thanks to foot-dragging over contracts in Pretoria. Now, for hard-pressed South African taxpayers, that is an issue worth blocking the streets over.

Solar panels and windmills

Save Jobs Or Save Energy? The Dilemma Of Going Green

The new amended Mining Charter – the agreement that governs black ownership in the mines – has been a festering sore for more than four years. The employers and unions have disputed it, lawyers have argued over it and yet no one seems to be able to agree on one of the most important documents in Africa’s most lucrative industry.
Love it or loathe it, the mining industry in South Africa employed more than 450,000 people, with a trickle down that supports an estimated 4.5 million people, contributing  7.1% to GDP, in 2016. In the same year, it racked up sales of more than $30 billion. It may be a far cry from the industry’s heyday in the 1980s, when it employed a million people, but it is still too big to ignore.
Cars run on South African-mined platinum, in their catalytic convertors, from New York to Paris; around half of all the gold on the fingers and locked in the bank vaults across the world was unearthed and refined in and around Johannesburg in more than a century of mining.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2012/03/01/trouble-mining-africa/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The Trouble With Mining In Africa</a>
This treasure trove of wealth is the main reason why the fight over the Mining Charter has been so intense and emotive. It is an agreement, not legislation, agreed by employers and government to foster black empowerment.
It came into force in in 2004 amid a blaze of publicity claiming the industry was going to be swiftly transformed, towards more black ownership, in a decade. Instead, when 2014 came around there was uncertainty, a lack of direction, and questions in the corridors of power whether the Mining Charter had achieved anything at all.
The mining employers fear the Mining Charter has scared off foreign investors and is part of a severe decline in this industry. In 2016, according to Statistics South Africa, the South African mining industry’s real GDP was 2.6% smaller than in 1994. The thriving financial services sector grew by 168% over the same period.
The Chamber of Mines – that represents 90% of South African mining companies – called the amendments the last nail in the coffin when they came out last year. The former mining minister Mosebenzi Zwane called the amended Mining Charter the key to changes in the industry that will benefit the black majority – for so many decades seen as mere cheap labor in the mines.
The zealots in the government – who were pushing the amendments – want radical change in mining. They see it as a pillar of the establishment in apartheid days where black sweated labor was used to create the wealth to keep the status quo.
When the amendments were released they were dramatic and controversial. An increase in black ownership from 26% to 30% with a rider that this be maintained at all times. The mining employers bridled at this clause because they argue for a “once empowered, always empowered” rule that stipulates that once they have borne the cost of transferring ownership to new black owners they are deemed to have done their job. One of the bugbears of the black empowerment game is dilution.
That is, after the lock-in period, black shareholders often cash in their stakes, which dilutes the overall black owned percentage, leaving the employers with the arduous task of starting again. If the “once empowered, always empowered” principle was upheld by the courts it would mean most of the major mining companies could claim they had done their job.
On top of this were a raft of amendments that the Chamber of Mines objected to and one or two the lawyers called illegal. Among them, a stipulation that 1% of the revenue be paid to black shareholders before any others are considered. Mining lawyers consider this to be an illegal flaw – in contravention of the Companies Act – in a Mining Charter that was rushed and poorly written.
“It is open to discretion, with very unclear rules that make it very difficult to invest with that level of uncertainty and that is the long and short of it,” says Peter Leon, mining law expert with Herbert Smith Freehills in Johannesburg. He also considers another clause about the writing off of dividends, to be repaid by black shareholders in fees for shares, to be tantamount to expropriation.
The Chamber of Mines claims the Mining Charter is unconstitutional and written without proper consultation. Its lawyers were ready to argue this in a three-day judicial review of the Mining Charter by a powerful bench of three judges, at the High Court in Pretoria, on February 9, 10 and 11.
At the eleventh hour, South Africa’s new president Cyril Ramaphosa – a mining man to his boots – made good on a promise in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos to intervene. His officials persuaded the Chamber of Mines to hold off with its legal challenge to give negotiation another chance.
It means the regulation of the industry will fall back on the previous charter, with its 26% black ownership target, that most companies had priced in and come to terms with.
Outside the court on the day was a throng of singing and dancing protestors who could prove a fly in the ointment. These were the people who live with the mines and their dust and disruption.
They had traveled for hundreds of kilometers, with their lawyers in tow, from tiny villages across South Africa to make their point in Pretoria. They wanted a seat at the negotiating table and the court ruled that they should get one.
The mining communities making their debut in the Mining Charter talks, alongside government, unions and mining employers, could add more time and dimensions to what is already likely to be a complex debate.
The Chamber of Mines has flagged this as a difficulty in negotiations. Mining companies often struggle to deal with power shifts and conflicting leadership claims in communities around mining – especially when the money starts flowing.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2018/03/12/new-kids-mining-block/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: New Kids On The Mining Block</a>
This puts the prediction of wrapping it all up by June, made by the new mining minister Gwede Mantashe, in severe doubt.
“We will finish it within three months, I am putting that timeframe for myself,” says Mantashe.
&#8220;A new Mining Charter that is well designed and reached through an inclusive negotiation process needs to be finalized as soon as possible,&#8221; says the Chamber of Mines in response.
In many ways, a crumb of comfort for the employers is that the new man Mantashe is also a mining man down to his boots and a world away from his disliked predecessor Zwane. Mantashe, the former leader of the biggest union in Africa, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), is known in the industry as an honest broker and skilled negotiator.
“You could say Gwede has mining in his blood,” says Elize Strydom, a former legal head and chief negotiator at the Chamber of Mines, who sat across the table from Mantashe in wage talks for nearly a decade.
“The good thing always was when Gwede said you had a deal, you had a deal, and you could go home and sleep soundly.”
Mantashe, who is also the chairman of the ruling African National Congress, will have his work cut out for him over the next three months to make good on his promise and sort out what is probably the most tricky and crucial set of regulations in one of Africa’s biggest economies. It is not going to be easy reconciling the wishes of a multi-million-dollar investor and a poor villager living in the shadow and dust of a mine.
Any foreign investor or any African business connected to mining will hope Mantashe does so.

Aerial view of a quarry, Johannesburg, South Africa

Mining Charter Back To Square 26

Many of the thousands of delegates at Davos, Switzerland, wonder how long this gathering of the world’s elite can go on in its present form, in what must be one of the world’s strangest locations for an economic conference. It must have looked a great venue, albeit from left field, when it was planned here back in 1971, but then again gas guzzling cars and Richard Nixon also seemed a good idea at the time. The face of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos is changing. In the last decade, the number of delegates from countries like Germany and Britain has fallen, while those from China have increased by 283% and Russia by 57%.
One of the big hitters at this year’s Davos was Narendra Modi, who became the first Indian prime minister to attend in 20 years. He made a stentorian speech defending globalization, criticizing protectionism and urging swift action over climate change. Surely, it is only a matter of time before WEF will be hosted by emerging markets like India, Russia and China.
Davos, a small village in the Alps of eastern Switzerland, is perfect for skiing and even better for taking photographs for a Christmas card – the snow-topped forests cascading down the steep mountainsides are a wonder to behold; the crisp air is as refreshing as a cool drink on a hot day. It is a place where you can clear your head, in seconds, with a lung full of Alpine air.
Yet, as the years wear on, it looks ill-suited for the gathering of the clans of globalization. Thousands of delegates and heads of state from 70 countries, plus more billionaires and business owners than you can poke a stick at, packed out the village this year. Throughout the day, you could see European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and his cohorts picking through the snow, or highly-paid executives slipping on the ice, or Bill Gates sliding through the sludge as the long, cold Alpine night gripped the streets.
Most of the people who live in Davos threw their hands up years ago in the face of the annual invasion by the suited elite. They rent out their homes and flee to better climes. It is a good job that they do because in WEF week Davos is bursting at the seams. This year the traffic jammed around the conference; security was as high as the mountains, with soldiers and police everywhere; there were more snipers on the roof than there were golf carts on the ground transporting delegates over the packed snow the like of which many people in Davos said they hadn’t seen for years. The heavy snow was a reminder that extreme weather and natural disasters were the top concern among delegates this year, according to a WEF survey, followed by cyberattacks and data theft.
One of the reasons for the tight security, in this crowded village, was the visit of the controversial leader of the free world Donald Trump. It was a surprise visit to say the least; for years Trump derided the intellectual globalists of WEF. Now he wanted to come and sell his “America First” policy as the first US president to set foot in Davos since Bill Clinton in 2000. Along with an 827-strong US delegation – out of 3,000 delegates – he came to laud his tax cuts and reforms that delivered growth, forecast at 2.7%, this year, a fillip for the world economy after a decade of torpid growth.
It is a bright spot, on a brighter horizon, unveiled by the great and the good at Davos. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts global growth of 3.9% this year and next; 0.2% higher than expected thanks to US tax cuts and a sterling performance from emerging economies like Russia and Brazil. Better, but no time for complacency says IMF head Christine Lagarde, who wants to push growth harder by cracking down on tax evasion and corruption.
“When the sun is shining it is time to fix the roof,” says Lagarde. “Or when the snow stops it is time to clear the road. That is how it seems to work in Davos.”
Despite this glimmer of hope you get the feeling optimism is running out at WEF. For a start, you could argue that Trump’s strident one-nation populism – that appears to have spread to a score of other countries – is one reason why the liberal WEF ethos of working together to ease investment and fix the world is struggling to stay afloat.
“It is America First meets We are the World,” quipped the Wall Street Journal on the eve of the visit.
<div id="attachment_35580" style="width: 391px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35580" class=" wp-image-35580" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Donald-Trump-WEF-e1520928622889-300x194.jpg" alt="" width="381" height="246" />US President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (Photo by Getty Images)</div>
Before Trump set foot in Davos, he ruffled feathers with disparaging remarks about Africa. Many of the African delegates told me they were going to boycott his speech in protest.
“There has never been a better time to hire, to build, to invest and to grow in the United States,” says Trump in his speech that this time took a swipe at the press instead of Africa.
“It wasn’t until I became a politician, that I realized how nasty, how mean, how vicious and how fake the press can be.”
If you want to get an idea of how far Africa is under the US radar right now, you should have been at the press briefing held by the urbane US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. I asked about the future of Power Africa under the Trump administration; a fair question given the America First policy and the power plan’s origins. It is a legacy of Barack Obama and aims to blend US aid with private investment to create 30,000MW of electricity, enough to power an industrialized nation like South Africa. The fast-talking US lobby correspondents whipped around to look at me as if I had asked the source of the Zambezi.
“It is still going. We have created about 400MW in Ghana, which it not even 1%. But we are going to visit in the second quarter,” says the Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross without much interest.
I was encouraged by Nigerian multi-millionaire Tony Elumelu who later assured me African investors would see Power Africa through.
Contrast that with the fire and enthusiasm of one of Africa’s future leaders who saw WEF as a stage to launch his campaign to clean up his country and bring back investors. Cyril Ramaphosa, the man set to be the next president of South Africa if the African National Congress wins the 2019 elections, is already behaving with that statesmanlike assurance of power. In many ways he was Africa’s man of the moment at Davos.
It was not always so. For more than a quarter of a century the lawyer-activist, who founded the biggest union in Africa, the National Union of Mineworkers, was the nearly man of South African politics. He nearly became deputy to Nelson Mandela in 1994 and went off to business instead. Now he is on the cusp of real political power and appears to respect this.
With a ready, beaming smile that could melt the Davos snow, Ramaphosa has a deft common touch. On the cold night we sat for dinner in Davos, Ramaphosa staged a charm offensive for the gathering of millionaires and a number of South Africa’s most powerful CEOs. These are among the people he needs to win over if the country’s economy is to slip back into gear. The sad story of the last year has been downgrades to junk status by the ratings agencies and minuscule growth from the once cooking, commodity-rich South African economy.
Avuncular and cracking jokes, the future president changed seats over and over again until he had spoken to everyone on the long table. It was more like a South African wedding than a formal dinner at which he hammered home his anti-corruption message.
“There are no holy cows. Anyone who is caught doing wrong things will end up behind the bars of a jail,” says Ramaphosa.
Most of the business types agreed that this was what they wanted to hear after years of economic struggle and a host of corruption scandals. Ramaphosa has been busy since his ascent, prompting corruption investigations and the freezing of assets. It was enough to send the rand soaring above 12 to the dollar, which warmed many South African delegates in the snow.
Ramaphosa helped the rand further by telling the world that the nuclear power deal – that the present incumbent is pushing – is off the table for now because it is too expensive. He also promised to sort out the disputed Mining Charter – the document that guides efforts to increase black ownership of the mines; uncertainty and court challenges over rushed amendments to the document have choked investment.
<div id="attachment_35581" style="width: 392px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35581" class=" wp-image-35581" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Cyril-Ramaphosa-WEF-e1520928824721-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="382" height="254" />South Africa&#8217;s President Cyril Ramaphosa at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland (Photo by Getty Images)</div>
In all, according to Ramaphosa and finance minister Malusi Gigaba, their utterances at Davos had unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars from investors in South Africa who were holding back because of concern about corruption and political uncertainty. Ramaphosa believes the ratings agencies are likely to give South Africa a better score when he meets with them.
“We are going home happy with bags full of millions of dollars of promises from investors,” says Ramaphosa with a smile before he flew home.
Most around the dinner table in Davos agreed that Ramaphosa’s words were fine as a starter, but wanted to see the main course.
Elsewhere in Africa, Nigerian entrepreneur and former FORBES AFRICA cover Tonye Cole, the co-founder of the Sahara Group, was as optimistic as ever.
“Africa will play a role. The world has to look at Africa as the last place to make a difference and they will do that,” says Cole.
Rwanda was in fine fettle, according to its finance minister Claver Gatete in Davos, with 8% growth expected this year on the back of increasing exports – a rate that most countries in the world would do anything for right now.
“We are trying to remain an open and attractive economy,” says Gatete.
Nigeria, after years of suffering under falling oil prices and the decline of the naira, is looking up at long last. Growth is expected to be 1.4% this year, according to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. Also expected is a 40% increase in exports, and better revenues from oil.
“It is a bullish period for us in terms of attracting business and we are excited,” says Osinbajo.
The words of hope that said it all for Africa on one cold Swiss afternoon came from South Africa’s Reserve Bank Governor, the tall and enthusiastic Lesetja Kganyago.
“This time last year I was pleading with investors to keep confidence in South Africa and keep their money in the country. This year I do not have enough time in the day to meet people who want to put their money into the country,” says a smiling Kganyago.
Bring on the main course – we’re hungry.

Africa Left In The Cold

There can’t be many people who can say a rough day at work was worrying about a crazed gunman jumping from behind a bush and shooting you off your horse. That was how I felt on the trail of a crack-shot and would-be assassin who wanted to shoot, stone dead, the Head of the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth.
That white-knuckle ride through the wild, dense bush of New Zealand’s West Coast, fording rivers and struggling up rocky hills, proved the genesis of a story that I bashed out on a rickety old typewriter. It  won me an award and made world headlines for weeks.
We were looking for a 22-year-old armed robber called Christopher John Lewis who was on the run after knocking over a bank and post office. He claimed to be a ninja warrior as well as a right-wing extremist and gun fanatic. In his first slip through police fingers he dived into a river to escape – apparently a ninja-style way of evading capture.
My editors on the Dominion Post, in the capital Wellington, despatched me to the West Coast to report on the hunt. The photographer and I asked around and tracked down the four-man police sniper squad to a hotel bar and persuaded them to let us go with them on the manhunt the next morning.
So I came to grips with a horse – that I had no idea how to ride – from dawn until dusk for a couple of days. Every half an hour, the police raised their telescopic sights, we dismounted and lay flat on the ground waiting for a bullet that, luckily, never came. I was 24 years old and living every minute as if it were my last.
In the end, Lewis got away by hanging onto the floor of a passing train, before jumping on the ferry to Wellington and getting another train to Auckland at the other end of the country. Police arrested him &#8211; believe it or not &#8211; when he gave a credit reference to buy a car. A woman vouched for him and then tipped off police and Lewis, strangely enough, for a man of violence, went like a lamb.
Back in the bush my journalist antenna was working overtime. We had been led to believe Lewis was a mere felon; yet the police sniper squad talked of him as if he were Rambo and the Terminator rolled into one. I spoke to each of the snipers in their off-guard moments in the bush to glean what I could – it&#8217;s surprising how people will tell you stories face-to-face that they won’t do over email.
It led me, with the help of the news desk, back to retired Detective Tom Lewis (no relation) who spat out the whole story from his new home in Australia. He had arrested Lewis, back in 1981, and drawn him out by flattering his ego, telling him how he had given the police the run around, which led to the confession about attempting to blow the Queen’s head off as she walked the streets of Dunedin on the royal visit a few months before. Lewis had used the helpful map of the Queen’s route, published in the Otago Daily Times, to draw  his field of fire and how many seconds he had to get in a head shot. His first shot was clear as day, the detective told me, from a roof  overlooking the street. It was only a couple of policeman who climbed onto that roof, to get a better view of the Queen, who messed up Lewis’ clear shot.
“There is no doubt he could have plugged her from there,” the detective told me. To this day, I wonder whether those policemen know their vantage point could have saved the Queen and averted a change in the course of history.
Detective Lewis recommended that the gunman be charged for treason that would have brought the whole story out. Police chiefs in Wellington were horrified – the revelation would have made them look like idiots and could have ended royal tours to New Zealand – and opted to sweep it under the carpet.
That is, until I came along six years later with my dogged reporting, poor horse riding and rickety typewriting. It is immensely satisfying to see, 31 years later, in this age of fake news and sloppy reporting, that every word I wrote was verified by newly released intelligence documents; even more so because the police at the time tried hard to pour cold water on my story.
If it had been possible to Google Christopher John Lewis in 1987 it would have been a lot easier and, undoubtedly, I would have got more information – but I probably wouldn’t have got the story.

Chris Bishop

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA