Thabo Molefe, famously known as ‘Tbo Touch’ in entertainment circles, is not your typical, hunky, media personality. In all frankness, mention of his name rarely inspires dreamy emotional reactions from adoring fans. And even though he does his fair share of kissing babies and dishing out top-notch prizes on his many media platforms; the lion’s share of the coverage is about his “annoying” American accent, tabloid titbits of his personal life and how he is supposedly the world’s biggest name-dropper; hell-bent on importing American culture to Africa.
As someone who is no stranger to his drive-time show on South African Metro FM, and the many television shows he has hosted; I was not surprised or put off by the strong American influence which marks his speech and content. With Touch, it is definitely all about hip hop, basketball and “swag”.
“What a lot of people do not know is that my family has a very strong exile background,” he says. “My connection to the US is enforced by the fact that I was raised there, schooled there and I even lost blood there,” he continues, explaining that his father, Vernon Molefe, was assassinated there because of his political activism.
“My father had a project which saw him working with South African struggle icons. Through the Nelson Mandela Education Fund, he facilitated troubled South African kids to be taken to the States to be educated , away from the horrors of the apartheid uprisings. So one can say that I feel indebted to his cause,” Touch elaborates. He says his father was shot seven times in 1992, and that his murder remains unsolved to this day.
“I was taken in by Bishop Noel Jones who became my guardian, as a way of paying homage to my late father,” he says.
The month of July is of significance to Touch. This month brings to a climax his plans of returning to permanently live in the United States, and as he puts it—this time he’s going there to make huge investments, and not to look for hand-outs, like before.
“I feel that I have come full circle as Tbo Touch. In as much as I am grateful for the opportunities that I have been given by the national broadcaster (SABC) since my return to the country seven years ago; I feel it is time to take my radio show, The Touch Down 3-to-6, to New York, where it will be broadcast live on a daily basis for the next three years. This has never been done on African radio before, and what it basically means is that instead of calling up big name artists like Jay Z or Mary J. Blige and speaking to them telephonically, I will have them live in studio interacting with our South African listeners,” he says with palpable excitement.
“This has taken many months to set up. My team and I have been at pains to get the national broadcaster’s buy-in, but now I can announce that it is all systems go. We have set up our own studios in New York, and we have engineers on-site working around the clock to make sure that the show runs seamlessly. The radio show will also feed content to other programs as well. Top American broadcaster Ryan Seacrest has been doing it for years; I feel it is now my turn to do it for South Africa.
“No one can debate the fact that New York is the hub of the entertainment, and more specifically, music industry, so really one has not achieved global recognition until you have a New York footprint.”
While this is clearly great news for him as a broadcaster, Touch says he won’t be the only one benefitting from this new arrangement.
“One of the main reasons I am this excited about the venture is because the show, even though broadcast from New York daily, will continue to play African music.” For many decades, Africans have been flooded with American music and culture, so it is about time someone takes ours to them.
“I am hoping this will give local artists another avenue to be exposed and “picked up” by the real captains of the music industry—the kind of artists that practically live on the Forbes’ richest lists. And I am hoping this will be an opportunity where collaborations and meaningful partnerships between those artists and African artists can be fostered,” he says.
Music and radio are not the only elements central to Touch’s relocation; television station SABC1 has also commissioned him as an NBA Basketball sport correspondent, which means he will be courtside every week, linking fans to the game and its icons.
“The culture of basketball and the NBA has been continually growing around the continent since the late 90s, sadly though we could only watch re-runs and old games, but now we will stream it to the continent with no serious delays. As a game that I personally love as well, I am also very excited that I will be experiencing it up close and sharing that experience with the sport’s many African fans,” says Touch.
Not only does Touch seem to have the entertainment side of things well-covered. He is also gearing up to become a businessman in the hospitality industry, which may come as a surprise to many.
“My relocation will also coincide with the launch of a restaurant franchise I am opening up in Manhattan with my business partner Jeff Christie. The restaurant will have a special twist—its main commodity will be trading in wine from South Africa, and we will also have a live-streaming camera linked-up to another franchise in Cape Town, so that patrons on either side can have a kind of shared experience,” he explains.
“The restaurant’s music catalogue will also consist entirely of South African and African music. So I am working very closely with the South African Department of Tourism on this project, as I believe that the restaurant will have an impact on more people wanting the actual South African experience,” Touch says. He needed to raise $450,000 to get the business on its legs, which he did subsequent to getting many doors slammed in his face.
Asking him whether he will consider living in South Africa again, seems a bit foolhardy at this stage for a man with his kind of plans, but alas it has to be asked. “My concert production company, called Touch Lives, will continue to be based in Johannesburg. Touch Lives hosts four major concerts every year, and I will be here for each one. I also have a two-year-old son who will continue to be based here, even though his mother and I have come to an agreement that he will spend some time with me in New York. In many ways South Africa is still my home,” he concludes.

Touching African Lives From The Big Apple

The sun was unusually hot as guests enjoyed a sumptuous lunch in Diani, the sprawling coastal town in Mombasa, known for its beaches and coral reefs. Lunch time in Diani in February could almost be a scene from paradise—the wide blue Indian Ocean lapping against a pristine beach; European tourists, escaping freezing temperatures back home, sunbathing lazily.
The guests from Nairobi clearly knew their way around. Dressed in smart casuals and resisting the urge to pull off their shirts to catch a welcome breeze, they sighed with relief as they walked into the air-conditioned five-star hotel.
Among them was Atul Shah, the managing director of Nakumatt Holdings, the family-owned company that runs Kenya’s largest retail chain. With a number of his managers, he was on a mission: to supervise construction of a new Nakumatt store in Diani. They talked politics and did the sums for the new investment.
When his phone rang Atul Shah, like businessmen do, excused himself and stepped a few yards away. From a distance, witnesses say, you could see his face turn ashen and panic set in on what was to be his worst day. The caller with bad news was the manager of the downtown branch in the heart of Nairobi.
“It sounded like a dream,” says Shah. “Then I saw it on TV.”
<div id="attachment_524" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-524" class="size-large wp-image-524" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/RTR242EP-1024x608.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="281" />Kenya&#8217;s President Mwai Kibaki (C) and Police Commissioner Hussein Ali walk past the burnt-down Nakumatt supermarket in downtown Nairobi, January 30, 2009. At least 22 people died and more than two dozen more were missing after a fire destroyed a supermarket in downtown Nairobi two days ago. REUTERS/Stringer (KENYA)</div>
It was a day that would haunt the owner of Nakumatt for the rest of his life. With 36 stores spread across the region, Nakumatt is the big brother of retail in East Africa. The majority of its stores, 30, are in Kenya, three are in Uganda, two in Rwanda and one in Tanzania, giving it a 15% market share of a crowded retail market where the big five supermarkets control over 80%. In the world of retail where numbers count for much, big is beautiful. Nakumatt has taken this maxim seriously and dotted the big towns with its elephant symbols. Nairobi is Nakumatt’s hub, with more than 10 stores tapping billions of shillings in disposable income from the rising middle class.
On this day, January 28, 2009, as workers broke for lunch, one of its city center branches went up in flames, turning stock and assets, worth Ksh250 million, to ashes. Eighteen shoppers and staff, perished in the inferno.
Shah went into crisis mode. He cancelled his three-day tour of Mombasa to fly back to Nairobi to handle the disaster, but all planes were fully booked that day. He had to manage the situation on the phone, with eyes glued to a TV, until the following day.
“We had lots of communication with my managers in Nairobi. We were all confused and focus was on rescue efforts to save lives. We knew we would overcome the fire but the loss of human lives is what broke us down. We had to do whatever it takes to minimize deaths.”
The blaze took fire fighters from the Nairobi City Council four days to contain. The flames were fed by exploding gas tanks.
“The first day was total confusion. On the second day we established a disaster team to manage the situation. The government also created its own team. We worked together well to make sure the families of those people who perished were taken care of. I was part of the team and was on the ground for four days,” says Shah.
The loss was even more painful as it came just a month after the retail chain’s other branch was flattened by bulldozers to clear the way for the construction of the Thika super highway through Nairobi. In the process, the company was caught unaware and lost most of its stock to looters.
Shah sets his loss from the fire at Ksh400-250 million in stock and Ksh150 million in furniture and other assets. To make matters worse, the supermarket management was accused of locking shoppers in the supermarket in the shop when the fire alarm went off to prevent them from running away with unpaid goods, but Atul denies this charge.
“There were all manner of accusations from sabotage to arson. But it emerged it was Kenya Power to blame because it had had power outages. It’s unfortunate that it’s us who were affected,” Shah said.
What most of the accusers did not know is that Nakumatt had three fire marshals at the branch, one of whom sadly died in the fire as he tried to rescue customers. When the fire broke out, the man in his thirties swung into action to do what he was trained to do. He lunged into the smoke to rescue one person; a second time to save another soul; the third time the brave fire marshal did not return.
“It surprised us because the fire happened just two weeks after we had undergone a thorough fire audit by the Nairobi City Council. The company has since then enhanced its fire safety by training staff on emergency response and employing experts to beef up its compliance above the industry benchmarks. The quick-spreading fire was blamed on the presence of LPG gas cylinders and now the government has decreed all supermarkets not to stock cooking gas on their premises.”
Shah says Nakumatt spent Ksh40-50 million in managing the situation, including financing forensic tests to identify those who died in the fire and compensating those who lost their loved ones.
To make a bad situation worse, Kenyans looking to make a quick buck faked the deaths of their relatives in the fire. Nakumatt’s forensic analysis has already discovered three fake claims and has flagged two more for investigation.
“Some people claimed they lost relatives who had come to shop but produced death certificates of people who died a long time ago. Only 18 have been found to be genuine.”
The disaster did not end with the clearing of the ashes. The fire scared many shoppers and it took them months to come back to Nakumatt.
These were sad days for the company founded in 1978 by Shah’s father in the Rift Valley town of Nakuru. From a single shop dealing in mattresses; Nakumatt, short for Nakuru Mattresses, now has an annual turnover of $500 million. The first supermarket opened in 1982 and the company employs 5,100 workers.
Despite the setbacks, Shah is still betting on finding new markets.
“The retail market has opportunities. Organized retail is growing and especially with government recognition, the market space is expanding.”
In his office, on the wall facing him is a quote by Haku Shah, his father, which says: “In a day when you don’t come across any problem, you can be sure that you are traveling on the wrong path.”
These words sustained Shah through his worst day—January 28, 2009—a tragic day that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Trial By Fire

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

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

Tag: Business Man

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Touching African Lives From The Big Apple

Trial By Fire

No Discipline, No Money

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