It has since dawned on some in the tourism industry that unless they use their stature and influence to lobby their governments to do more to protect the species and by extension, their business, they stand to lose out. Their argument is that if there are no rhinos to see, they cannot sell the Big Five to potential tourists.
The world’s most powerful women should be getting into something that some might say is not exactly their business: the physical, emotional and sexual abuse of women less powerful than themselves.
There are businesswomen’s associations that help to fund halfway stations where women recovering from or fleeing their abusive partners can learn business principles that can help them be independent once they leave their tormentors. Such associations should lobby their governments to improve conditions of girls and women and tighten punitive measures for those who hurt, abuse and marginalize women.
The logic is simple. The more women do not need to depend on men, the less they will tolerate abusive men. The more women there are in business, especially if they are confident in their femininity, the greater the chances of the feminine motif becoming the norm in the business world and in the executive suite.
It is not enough to assume that being a woman means you can understand the plight of a woman in an abusive relationship. Even if you did, unless there are programs in place in your  business that recognize the debilitating effects of patriarchy on productive capacity and therefore the bottom line, you are no better than those who see or hear no evil.
I am not holding my breath that business is ready for such a leap of faith in the interest of abused women and marginalized girls. Far too many still go with the logic that the business of business is business. Everything else is someone else’s business – the preacher, the teacher or the politician.
I continue hearing about how women boast about what they have had to go through, implying that others who want to attain the same status must also grin, bear and get on with it. And still some insist that having a female boss is better for one’s self-worth.
I don’t know if it is just me, but one hardly sees powerful women – except in their capacity as government officials or public representatives – become champions of the anti-woman abuse movement. The rest of the time, it is the less glamorous women in non-governmental organizations, academia or in the arts, who are left to make the big deal of this social scourge and drain to the economy.
It seems to me that powerful women do not want to risk their power reputation by associating themselves with what they might see as being weak or the doormat at home.
I can see why some women would not want to contaminate their reputation as tough task masters who drive a hard bargain by confessing to have been pushed around like British TV personality Nigella Lawson. But it is the recognition that there are many other Nigellas and that businesswomen’s associations can become socially relevant and inspirational to the women who do not yet own a power suit or have not yet been invited for high tea.
There is also the economic impact of women who are prevented from earning a living and being financially independent by abusive partners, or who are forced to divert their earnings into areas that are not as productive as they could have been.
Women should not be forced to buy make-up only if the intention is to hide the marks and scars on their faces if they could be investing that money into areas that grow their wealth and independence.
There is also the denialism in the top echelons of business that makes top businesswomen or executives pretend that abuse is only suffered by others with a less net worth than themselves or who hold mundane jobs.
Some may say that I am blaming the victim by not addressing the patriarchal power that places women in these situations. Perhaps I am. What is clear to me though is that it is those who feel and have known the discomfort of a stone in the shoe, who are best placed to remove the stone. Demanding that whoever placed the stone there remove it, might slow you down.
The stories we hear about women needing to juggle being wives, partners, parents and business executives should not be used as a demand for sympathy or a self-pat on the back. It should be a catalyst for change that is driven by those who understand the pain and unnecessary hurdles it has brought and ensure it does not happen to other women.

Get The Stone Out Of Your Shoe

This generation of young African women is the most ambitious yet. They are eager to build industries, reform societies, save lives, rewrite history, and transform the continent.
Our annual “20 Young Power African Women” list illuminates the brightest stars and Africa’s most outstanding female game changers. We enlisted a group of young, professional African women to help identify the most innovative, courageous, daring and successful young women aged 45 and under. It is a subjective list, no doubt, but it is the closest you will get to a definitive list.
Meet the 2013 class of 20 Young Power Women in Africa: the continent’s emerging power brokers, the Amazons to watch, and the custodians of tomorrow.
<h5>Isabel Dos Santos</h5>
<h5>Angolan. Investor</h5>
The daughter of Angola’s President, Jose Eduardo Dos Santos is Africa’s richest woman. She is also one of the continent’s most powerful businesswomen. Through her various holding companies, she controls a 25% stake in Angolan mobile telecom operator Unitel, a 25% stake in Angola’s Banco BIC, 25% of ZON Optimus, a listed Portuguese cable TV company, and just under 20% of Banco BPI, one of Portugal’s largest publicly traded banks. She is also partnering with Sonae, Portugal’s largest retailer, to launch 5 new food hypermarkets in Angola in 2014.
<h5>Mimi Alemayehou</h5>
<h5>Ethiopian. Executive Vice</h5>
<h5>President of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC)</h5>
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In 2010 U.S. President Barack Obama nominated Ethiopia-born Mimi Alemayehou as the Executive Vice President of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the U.S. government’s development finance institution. She helps manage OPIC’s $16 billion war chest, channeling American capital to fund investment opportunities in emerging markets. Prior to her OPIC appointment, Alemayehou served as the United States Executive Director at the African Development Bank.
<h5>Lupita Nyong’o</h5>
<h5>Kenyan. Actress and Filmmaker</h5>
Nyong’o is a Kenyan actress and filmmaker who made her Hollywood debut in acclaimed film director Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” as Patsey. Nyong’o was born in Mexico, raised in Kenya and educated in the U.S. She is a graduate of Yale University’s School of Drama. In 2009, the breakout actress was also the lead in MTV’s award-winning drama series, Shuga. Nyong’o’s cousin, Isis Nyong’o was named one of Forbes 20 Youngest Power Women in Africa in 2011. Another cousin, Tavia Nyong’o, is a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
<h5>Hadeel Ibrahim</h5>
<h5>Sudanese. Mo Ibrahim Foundation</h5>
Hadeel Ibrahim is the daughter of Sudanese-born British mobile telecoms billionaire Mo Ibrahim. She is the founding Executive Director of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which was established in 2006 to support leadership and good governance in Africa. She also serves on the Boards of the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice and the African Governance Institute (AGI).
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<h5>Minoush Abdel-Meguid</h5>
<h5>Egyptian. Private Equity Investor, Entrepreneur, Investment Banker</h5>
The Egyptian-born investment banker is the cofounder of Union Capital, an Egyptian investment firm primarily focused on small and medium-sized enterprises. Abdel-Meguid is also founding president of the Egyptian Young Bankers Association, an organization that mentors young banking professionals.
<h5>Monica Musonda</h5>
<h5>Zambian. Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Java Foods</h5>
Musonda is the founder of Java Foods, a Zambia-based food processing company that manufactures the eeZee brand of Instant Noodles. Musonda previously worked with Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, as the director of legal and corporate affairs at Dangote Group, where she led a project to build a cement plant in Zambia. She currently serves on the Boards of Dangote Industries Zambia Limited and the Central Bank of Zambia. Musonda is also the Chairperson of Kwacha Pension Trust Fund, Zambia’s largest single employer pension fund. She is an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow and was named a 2013 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
<h5>Lindiwe Mazibuko</h5>
<h5>South African. Politician &amp; Parliamentary Leader for Democratic Alliance (DA)</h5>
Mazibuko, 33, is a Parliamentary Leader for the Democratic Alliance (MP for North Durban) and Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly in South Africa. As the country’s fourth youngest parliamentarian, Mazibuko is already being touted as a future leader of the Democratic Alliance. Mazibuko was named South Africa’s Most Influential Woman in 2012 and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2013.
<h5>Tara Fela-Durotoye</h5>
<h5>Nigerian. Founder, House Of Tara</h5>
The Nigerian-born entrepreneur and lawyer is the founder of House Of Tara, Nigeria’s leading beauty and cosmetics company. House of Tara develops a wide range of African-themed beauty products and perfumes and also operates Nigeria’s foremost beauty academy. In 2013, Fela-Durotoye was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
<h5>Claire Akamanzi</h5>
<h5>Rwandan. Chief Operating Officer, Rwanda Development Board</h5>
Akamanzi, 34, is the Chief Operating Officer of the Rwandan Development Board (RDB), a government institution tasked with accelerating economic growth and development in Rwanda by enabling private sector growth. Akamanzi has had a successful career in public service, serving as Rwanda’s commercial diplomat in London and as a trade negotiator in Geneva for the Rwandan government at the World Trade Organization. She was also previously the Deputy Director-General of the Rwanda Investment and Export Promotion Agency (RIEPA).
<h5>PROSCOVIA Alengot Oromait</h5>
<h5>Ugandan. Member Of Parliament</h5>
Proscovia Oromait, 20, is the youngest parliamentarian in Africa. In 2012 she was elected Member of Parliament for Usuk County, Katakwi District in Uganda. Her father, Michael Oromait, served as the MP for the same Parliamentary seat before his death in July 2012. She is a member of Uganda’s ruling National Resistance Movement party.
<h5>Sibongile Sambo</h5>
<h5>South African. Chief Executive Officer and Founder of SRS Aviation</h5>
Sambo is the founder and Managing Director of SRS (Sibongile Rejoice Sambo) Aviation – the first black female owned aviation company in South Africa. SRS is an integrated provider of private aviation services offering South African and international clients VIP Charter, tourist charter and helicopter services. The company also provides maintenance, sales and fleet management services to private jet owners.
<h5>Vera Songwe</h5>
<h5>Cameroonian. Country Director, World Bank, Senegal</h5>
Vera Songwe, a Cameroonian national, serves as the World Bank’s Country Director for Senegal, Cape Verde, Gambia, Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute with the Global Economy and Development and Africa Growth Initiative.
<h5>Angellah Kariuki</h5>
<h5>Tanzanian. Politician</h5>
Kariuki, 37, is a Special seat Member of Tanzania’s Parliament and the country’s Deputy Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs.
<div id="attachment_5969" style="width: 209px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5969" class="size-medium wp-image-5969" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/83362281-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" />Artist Wangechi Mutu attends the 2008 Whitney Museum of American Art&#8217;s gala</div>
<h5>Wangechi Mutu</h5>
<h5>Kenyan. Artist and Sculptor</h5>
Considered one of the most important contemporary African artists of recent years, Mutu’s first major solo exhibition in the U.S., Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in March 2013. Mutu’s work has achieved much global acclaim with exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Miami Art Museum, Tate Modern in London, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Her first solo exhibition at a major North American museum opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario in March 2010.
<h5>Ola Orekunrin</h5>
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<h5>Nigerian. Medical Doctor &amp; Founder, The Flying Doctors</h5>
Orekunrin, 25, is founder and Managing Director of Flying Doctors Nigeria Ltd., an air ambulance service based in Lagos, Nigeria. Orekunrin’s company is the first air ambulance service in West Africa to provide urgent helicopter, airplane ambulance and evacuation services for critically injured people. She is a 2013 New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute and was named a Young Global Leader in 2013 by the World Economic Forum.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5972" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Shot-02-CF234984-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" />
<h5>Rapelang Rabana</h5>
<h5>South African. Entrepreneur</h5>
One of Africa’s most recognizable young entrepreneurs, Rabana, 29, is the CEO and founder of Cape Town-based Yeigo Communications, which develops software for telecoms-related services including Voice over IP, instant messaging, SMS messaging and push email services. In 2008, Telfree, a Swiss mobile telecommunications firm, acquired a 51% stake in Yeigo. In December 2012 she founded Rekindle Learning, a company that provides adaptive mobile learning solutions.
<h5>Folake Folarin-Coker</h5>
<h5>Nigerian. Fashion Designer</h5>
Coker is the founder of Tiffany Amber, one of Africa’s leading fashion labels. She is the first African-based designer to showcase for two consecutive seasons at New York Fashion Week. In 2009, she won Designer of the Year at African Fashion International in Johannesburg, South Africa followed by Fashion Brand of the Year in 2011 at the Arise Fashion Week in Lagos, Nigeria.
<h5>Valentina da Luz Guebuza</h5>
<h5>Mozambiquan. Investor</h5>
The 33 year-old daughter of Mozambique’s President Armando Guebuza heads Focus 21 Management &amp; Development, a large family-owned investment holding company with interests in banking, telecommunications, fisheries, transport, mining and property. Focus 21 owns significant stakes in Beira Grain Terminal and Chinese Pay TV Company StarTimes’ operations in Mozambique.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5971" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/valentina_guebuza_20120505_32-Edit-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
<h5>NoViolet Bulawayo</h5>
<h5>Zimbabwean. Author</h5>
Zimbabwean-born author NoViolet Bulawayo is the first Black African female and the first Zimbabwean to be shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker prize for her debut novel “We Need New Names”. She is the author of the short story Hitting Budapest (2010), which won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing. NoViolet Bulawayo is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in California.
<h5>Amini Kajunju</h5>
<h5>Democratic Republic of Congo. President &amp; CEO,</h5>
<h5>Africa-America Institute</h5>
<div id="attachment_5967" style="width: 226px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5967" class="size-medium wp-image-5967" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/181837445-216x300.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="300" />Amini Kajunju speaks during the Africa-America Institute 60th Anniversary Awards Gala at New York Hilton on September 25, 2013 in New York City.</div>
A native of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Amini Kajunju is the President &amp; CEO of the Africa-America Institute, and the first African woman to serve at the helm of the oldest non-profit organization of its kind in the United States. Kajunju joined the Africa-America Institute in October 2012 from the New York-based Workshop in Business Opportunities (WIBO) where she had served as Executive Director for 10 years. Under her leadership, Kajunju has bolstered the organization’s programming and served more entrepreneurs than any other institution of a similar size in New York City.
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20 Young Power Women In Africa 2013

Divine Key Anderson, a young Liberian filmmaker, stands under a faded grey palaver hut at the University of Liberia in Monrovia. With wide eyes and animated expression, he speaks passionately about the revolutionary potential of film and the film school he set up with a small grant. The audience, made up of a group of students and civil society advocates, listen attentively before posing questions to the filmmaker about his project. Anderson is followed by a young man who has a proposal for holding Monrovia’s magisterial courts accountable, through allowing the citizens who use them to assess them through a scorecard system—a radical idea in a country where there is little justice.
Welcome to the Accountability Collective, a monthly meeting of Liberians working to develop innovative ideas to hold those in power accountable and create change in a nation where corruption remains public enemy number one.
<div id="attachment_2435" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2435" class="size-medium wp-image-2435" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/131022-wingard-liberia-0255-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Accountapreneurship</div>
The Accountability Collectives are organized by the Accountability Lab, the brainchild of Blair Glencorse, a 34-year-old international relations graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) with a decade of experience in international development. The organization incubates small-scale, low-cost entrepreneurial ideas that encourage accountability, an idea Glencorse terms accountrapreneurship.
While the Lab is still in its infancy and operating in two developing nations, Liberia and Nepal, Glencorse hopes that it will evolve into a movement that challenges the aid industry, an industry that he argues more often breeds corruption and dependence, rather than democracy and development.
In fact, the project emerged out of Glencorse’s experiences working in an aid industry that he argues is more preoccupied with big budgets rather than tangible results. He saw money being wasted, the same schools being built twice because of corruption and mismanagement.
“Despite rhetoric about ownership and alignment, I think many of these larger organizations still are sadly caught up in measuring results through numbers rather than through impact; and managers are promoted on how much they spend rather than how well that money is spent,” Glencorse tells FORBES AFRICA.
<div id="attachment_2436" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2436" class="size-medium wp-image-2436" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/131022-wingard-liberia-0426-300x189.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="189" />Accountability Collective</div>
“The overall effect is that you have often very large projects, which these organizations cannot afford to admit don’t work; and they are also accountable and answerable to taxpayers in the West more than they are to the citizens in the countries where they are actually working.”
With the offer of a small amount of funding from private donors and a crowd-funding campaign online, Glencorse set off on a new path. Unlike his developmental counterparts who ride around in white four-wheel drives, Glencorse zips through the streets of Monrovia dressed in collared shirts and slacks on the back of motorcycle taxis on a different mission.
International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and dollars are ubiquitous in Liberia, the small West African nation that was wracked by a 14-year civil war that left its infrastructure and institutions in tatters and its communities divided and population traumatized. The crossroads of Monrovia’s main thoroughfare, Tubman Boulevard, are punctuated with the dusty signs and slogans of these organizations. It is a route that ascends into a crescendo of blue and white buildings that belong to various UN agencies. Despite this assistance from international donors, Liberia is perceived by its citizens as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International, and graft and predatory behavior was found to be widespread among the police force according to a recent Human Rights Watch report.
Yet despite its ongoing challenges with corruption, Liberia received $765 million in development assistance in 2011 according to figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a remarkable amount for a nation with a population just short of four million. The United Nations Mission in Liberia, one of the longest serving and largest missions in sub-Saharan Africa, has a current troop presence of around 7,500 and costs $500 million annually to sustain. One former senior diplomat referred to Monrovia as the workshop capital of the world, underscoring how overrun the city had become with NGOs.
For Glencorse, the heavy presence of NGOs in post-conflict countries like Liberia often undermines accountability both at a local and governmental level, something he found from working on fragile and conflict-affected states at the World Bank.
<div id="attachment_2438" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2438" class="size-medium wp-image-2438" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/131022-wingard-liberia-0186-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Accountapreneurship</div>
“The amount of money that has flowed into this country [Liberia] since the end of the war 10 years ago has changed incentives so that aid has become a business rather than a process to help people improve their lives. What this means from a Liberian perspective is you can make a lot of money in the non-profit world by telling foreigners what they would like to hear rather than doing work that would actually improve the lives of Liberians,” Glencorse says.
“The government has become a lot more accountable to external actors rather than its own citizens.”
While Liberians remain deeply suspicious of the political establishment and those in power, Glencorse argues that due to Liberia’s long-standing patronage networks, corruption is rife at all levels of society. Thus, his approach starts from the bottom up instead.
“In somewhere like Liberia it needs to begin with this sense of personal responsibility. Accountability, which is synonymous with corruption for many people, is seen as something that happens among big decision makers in government and possibly the private sector and not actually something that individuals see as applicable to themselves. So there is a sense of othering that takes place,” he says.
So what is the solution?
Innovative and creative ideas that encourage accountability and engage the community at a local level, argues Glencorse.
“It’s about collective solutions to shared problems; it’s not about pointing fingers at individuals and saying you are corrupt,” Glencorse says.
The Lab provides small grants of up to $2,000 on the basis that the ideas they support are feasible, scalable and sustainable.
In its early stages, the Lab received proposals for workshops with complementary lunches, awareness raising campaigns that involved printing banners and t-shirts, a reflection of the lack of imagination amongst many NGOs operating in Liberia.
After a while Glencorse and his team took a more targeted approach, and focused on engaging civil society groups, musicians, artists, university students, journalists and young people who have proposed ideas for projects. Among the projects the Lab supports is Anderson’s Accountability Film School that helps ordinary Liberians to create small films that explore issues of corruption and accountability using narrative and role-play.
“Since 1847 we have been writing papers and not much has changed in this country and that is because 70 percent of our population are illiterate (…) But with film even a blind man can see,” says Anderson who believes that film can be instrumental to change in Liberia. Liberia’s adult literacy rate is 61%.
The Lab held its first accountability film festival this year and will hold several more in the coming year.
The Lab also supports an SMS information system called the Tell-it-True project at schools and universities in Monrovia, where students can make inquiries and lodge complaints about everything from sexual harassment by teachers to lack of attendance.
Among other projects are a community mediation project that looks at ways to solve problems between neighbors outside of the justice system; a project where the well-known citizen journalist Alfred Sirleaf informs the public about laws and access to services on a newspaper made out of a chalkboard sitting on the edge of Tubman Boulevard; as well as a radio program called Oil Talk, that is broadcast in counties whose shorelines border areas of ocean that multinational companies are currently exploring for oil.
But the long-term sustainability of these projects poses a major challenge for Glencorse and the Lab.
“Accountability is more difficult than business in that regard,” he says.
“There is no user-fee model that we might be able to use for some of the ideas. Sustainability is a bit more difficult but it is something we are thinking hard about.”
The Lab is planning to raise funds through accountability bus tours and postcards that showcase its work in Liberia and Nepal to tourists and delegations that pass through.
On the future of the organization, Glencorse says he would like to see the Lab and its ideas exported to neighboring countries like Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. But he wants the organization to remain a grassroots one. Glencorse and his team are currently devising a toolkit so that small groups in different countries can create their own Labs.
“We would like to scale the vision. We don’t want to become a big bureaucratic organization because that would begin to take away from what makes what we are trying to do unique,” says Glencorse.

First Shots In A War  On Corruption

The wise, white-haired lawyer who has seen a thousand trials, nodded sagely as he spoke about the shooting that shocked the world. He believes the South African Police Services and government will pay for the deaths of 34 miners at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in Rustenburg, north-west of Johannesburg.
London-based criminal defense lawyer James Nichol traveled 5,600 miles to Johannesburg for a couple of weeks, to give his services for free. Those weeks turned into months of shocking evidence.
<div id="attachment_1590" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1590" class="size-medium wp-image-1590" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/DSC_1167-300x235.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="235" />James Nichol</div>
“There is no question of self-defense here, these are police officers who had gone completely berserk and had fired into these people. And in some cases there’s evidence of a number of strikers who had been shot in the back,” says Nichol.
The hearings are revealing evidence on how the miners died and 78 others were injured. The week before, 10 people—six miners, two police officers and two Lonmin security guards—were killed as thousands went on a wildcat strike, over pay.
When Nichol saw the images of the Marikana massacre in his living room in England, it reminded the 67-year-old of the shock he felt about the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. On that fateful day in the township south of Johannesburg, the police shot into a crowd of around 5,000 unarmed anti-pass protestors, killing 69 people—many shot in the back—and wounding more than 200.
At 15 years of age, he took to the streets, in his hometown of Newcastle, calling to boycott the apartheid regime.
Nichol knows how hard mining is. He started work as a miner at 15, while his father worked at a coal mine from age 14 near Newcastle. Nichol senior died from dust related heart disease when he was just 40. It left Nichol bringing up his siblings—their mother had died earlier from tuberculosis.
Nichol worked his way up to specialize in miscarriages of justice and is a lawyer for the Socialist Workers Party, of which he is a member. He defended miners during the famous miners’ strike in Britain between 1984-1985.
With the help of a legal team from the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), Nichol represents the families at the commission, which is chaired by retired judge Ian Farlam. It is examining whether the police were justified in using lethal force, whether union rivalry triggered the violent strike and whether Lonmin played a role.
Nichol says the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) had abandoned its members. He says the union did not write to the bereaved families or represent them at the commission.
“I can think of no graver betrayal than to do nothing for the family of a dead member of your union.”
The families were wholly ignored by the state until Nichol and Joseph Mathunjwa, the president of rival union the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU),  found them.
“It seemed to me that it was wrong. I knew then that I was here to stay,” says the lawyer.
However, NUM’s general secretary, Frans Baleni, says that it is the responsibility of the company or the owner of the infrastructure where the incident happened, to call or write to the bereaved families. He added that the families would have had to give consent to be represented by the union and its lawyers.
Nichol believes that the killings could have been avoided because stopping the strike was not about public order but more about strike breaking.
The evidence suggests the police set up an operation of 800 officers the night before the massacre, including several machine guns, rifles with stun grenades, gas grenades and water cannons, plus helicopters and razor wire. The operation also organized ambulances and fire brigades.
“The decisive point for me that this was not about public order and more about strike breaking came on the morning of August 16, when two statements were made: one by the police commissioners when she said: ‘This strike stops today’ and one by the head of press for SAPS when he said: ‘Today is D-day.’ Why? Why did it have to be today?”
Many witnesses will appear over the next few months. A ruling by Farlam is expected in May. Nichol will be listening.

“It Seemed To Me That It Was Wrong”

In the last decade, Zimbabwe’s economy has twisted slowly in the wind. It has broken records for all the wrong reasons: the highest inflation the world has ever seen and 80% unemployment.
After a disputed 2008 election, a creaky political agreement ushered in a power sharing government. In this brave new world the task of running treasury was given to a man, who calls himself a poor constitutional lawyer; an Arsenal fan, who thinks Arsene Wenger’s time is up.
Tendai Biti, 47, is a workaholic who without education would be a demon. They called him Bismarck at university—after the iron-fisted military founder of a united Germany—because of his uncompromising approach to debate. Bismarck is bitter about Wenger: “He has been torturing us with poor results. He must do the right thing”. The analogy is irresistible and perhaps Wenger would feel the same way in return.
<div id="attachment_1578" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1578" class="size-medium wp-image-1578" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Tendai-Biti5-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Zimbabwe Minister of Finance and Economic Development Tendai Biti</div>
The main entrance to the seat of power has tinted windows and an intercom. It is possibly the only office at the new government complex offices, in the capital of Harare, with such an electronic device. The voice of the security guard asks politely: “How can I help you?” These security measures are not surprising—a group of war veterans once threatened to throw Biti from his sixth floor office.
Inside, his desk is full of paperwork. Biti wears a blunt face as he speaks to a mystified office aide who is handed back a file.
“He doesn’t want this and that signature. I don’t need to sign this paper. Where is he? He should be doing this and that. I don’t like that. This is nonsense,” says Biti.
Suddenly, I’m told: “Let’s do the interview now, I have no time.” No smile. No greeting. He starts swiping across his iPad and ignores several incoming phone calls.
Biti has been at the helm of the leaky financial ship that is Zimbabwe for years. He took the job in 2009, in the midst of the global financial crisis, with the aim of achieving a tough balancing act for a nation floundering in a dreadful recession. For a country with a power-sharing government and several power centers wanting money, especially state security, Biti is also in the midst of ugly politics. It is a job that needs guts, patience and the gonads of an elephant.
He stormed out of a cabinet meeting, which until then was unheard of in conservative Zimbabwe, stunning both President Robert Mugabe and prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai.
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I ask him how he manages his emotions, after telling him he can be very difficult.
“Yes, I do have mood swings but I’m a very vulnerable person. I hide in a shell of machoism. I’m very emotional, too emotional. I think and act with my heart. I know I can be a disaster. I get so angry and I speak my mind. What affects me are the tiny little things. People who are late; people who are sloppy; typographical errors kill me; bad English; bad grammar,” he says.
But why did he storm out of a cabinet meeting in July 2010?
“The discussions were going nowhere and I knew I was right so I just expressed my right of disassociation. I don’t like people who are dishonest. I also feel that I don’t owe you, so let’s be objective, let’s be impartial,” he says.
This year could make or break it for Zimbabwe. If the elections go ahead, with violence along the way, the country could go off the rails, taking investment hopes with it.
“Zimbabwe has been scuffled so much, suffocated so much by mediocrity, dictatorship and mendacity when other countries are moving. The election in 2013 must make a distinction. It’s a vote between the past and the future; it’s a vote between opportunity and the liquidation of opportunity,” he says, with a stern face.
Investors are apprehensive about elections. Like eagles, they are keeping an eye on the country from a distance. Biti has been wooing European investors but the odds are against him. His boss is a hard sell abroad. And what more can he expect, he doesn’t like him either but is managing him in a fragile coalition government in which the right hand, doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.
So far, the economy is fairly stable but the manufacturing sector is dead and investors are still watching, reluctant to walk through the open door.
Biti says they should get a bit of credit for cutting half a trillion percent inflation to 7% in a matter of months.
“What we did bordered on the miraculous… It has never been done; I don’t think it will ever be done again. You wear and tear, the arrows are thrown at you, pressure is like a tornado, it affects even your marriage and it’s phenomenal,” he says.
The Zimbabwe Accelerated Debt Arrears Clearance Debt and Development Strategy (ZAADDS) has been crafted to deal with the extensive debt. It is just as well as the country has a staggering $10 billion foreign debt, and will be negotiating its arrears with a visiting IMF team this quarter. Biti says they will try to negotiate out the arrears but the debt remains a structural issue dependent on elections.
“The country has two choices: the crocodile scenario and the cheetah scenario. I don’t want to be a crocodile… I want to be a cheetah. I want to sprint,” he says.
African Investment Markets’ Farai Dyirakumunda says Zimbabwe is on the radar.
“A lot of investors gave a wide array of investment opportunities with good upside potential. Some will sit on the fence during the election year due to uncertainties but there will be an eventual influx of foreign capital under the right conditions,” he says.
Hope pales in the face of reality.
The Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) painted a desperate country teetering on the brink, late last year. Several banks have closed, the liquidity crunch is stalling domestic investment and the CZI has called it an economic emergency. Many people, who elbowed out of the formal sector, are selling goods by the roadside, with little or no manufacturing in the heavy industrial sites, which means that fewer taxes flow into the fiscus.
After paying January’s salaries, the government was left with just $217 in its coffers, just about enough for dinner at a posh restaurant. Luckily, $30 million flowed into the fiscus the following day; it highlighted the paucity of government coffers.
“It’s basically a cash economy,” says Biti.
Dyirakumunda says Biti is a practical minister.
“He has done reasonably in controlling government spending so that it is fully funded by tax revenue and government income. There have been funding constraints to what he could do to stimulate the economy through fiscal policy,” he says.
No wonder Biti has been tasked to beg for $200 million for the next referendum and elections.
In the retail sector, the painful reality is that most products in supermarkets are foreign-owned. The country suffers from a huge current account deficient. The imports amount to $7 billion, with exports a mere $3.5 billion, a gap the treasury wants to narrow. Zimbabwe is placed 132nd of 144 countries in the Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013.
“There is still a lot to be done… and some of us we will look the beast in the eye and we will not blink,” he says.
Biti says his wife, Charity, is his rock. She couldn’t understand why someone had thrown a bomb at their house in order to, in her own words, “stress a point” but it was her unruffled demeanor, which helped Biti cope with the trauma.
Economist John Robertson, who has been studying Zimbabwe’s economy for nearly half a century, says that Biti’s opponents in government made promises about civil service salary increases, which they knew Biti could not keep.
“They pilloried him through the press for failing to keep the government’s promise. The intention was to force his resignation but all attempts failed,” says Robertson.
Biti describes his party boss, Tsvangirai, as the most open and humane person he has ever met. He wonders how after having emerged from one of the poorest villages in Zimbabwe, without a university education he has managed to achieve such great heights against the odds.
At home, he reads at lot about economics and philosophy. Perhaps it was this thirst for knowledge, which helped Biti become the youngest partner at a top Harare law firm Honey and Blackenberg at the age of 26.
“I can take the bull by the horns and I’m not afraid of work.”
He is inspired by biblical prophets and is fascinated by the books of Jeremiah, Judges and Solomon—“a fascinating collection of stories about cruelty, blood, murder, love and commitment,” he says. Biti also draws inspiration from American politicians, musicians, footballers and Nelson Mandela. He admires how, “You stay in prison for 27 years and walk out without bitterness”. And Thomas Jefferson amuses him.
“What did he mean by crafting in pursuit of happiness?” he asks with a chuckle.
As he warms up he reveals that he is in awe of how Barcelona’s Lionel Messi weaves his magic on the field. His love-hate relationship with Mugabe has defined his career but he doesn’t mince his words. Take a recent interview with state newspaper, Sunday Mail: “I’m still critical of him. I think if he had resigned many years ago a lot of the problems that are happening in this country would not be happening. I have a problem with people who are not democratic. How can someone sit in one position for 32 years? He belongs to a generation that is history, that is in the archives.”
After years of debate, the draft for the new Zimbabwean constitution was drafted on February 6. Both the ZANU-PF and Movement for Democratic Change put forward their interests. Tsvangirai tried to reduce the power of the presidential office, while Mugabe tried to include clauses that would help him maintain power. Once the draft is passed by Senate, Mugabe will set the date for the 2013 elections, which are tentatively scheduled for late June.
Biti said he has never been trusted by the ruling ZANU-PF because he emerged from a Movement for Democratic Change formation to run treasury.
“Some people don’t read; they are ignorant. They didn’t and some still don’t understand what we were trying to achieve. Some say education is important, I would like to submit that the cost of ignorance is incalculable.”
Zimbabwe can’t afford any more costs.
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<h4>Too Many Worries Spoil The Broth</h4>
Fine words of economic recovery may resound in government offices but they ring hollow in the battered and weary world of Zimbabwean business.
On the streets of Harare you could call supermarket chain Food World a monument to survival. For years, it suffered emptying shelves, job losses and a currency meltdown. The business kept breathing through a decade of economic disasters. Prices were pulled around by speculators and black marketeers. Then, government statutory price controls ate into its profit margins.
“We lost a lot of business in the era,” says Denford Mutashu, Food World manager.
“It’s certainly a period I don’t want to go back to, industry went to its lowest point, local supply dwindled later and we had to rely on imports. You didn’t have a strategy to implement, you could not plan.”
In 2013, Mutashu still feels his company is living on the edge. He fears the temporary stability brought by dollarization of the economy could go up in smoke if the elections turn violent.
His supermarket may be full but Mutashu feels that the finance minister isn’t helping much by imposing punitive duty on imports. Zimbabwe has bought around $7 billion worth of imports, while only exporting $3 billion worth.
“There is little production going on. We have to import 70% of the products you find here, cooking oil, flour and other products. That badly affects our profit margins… The disparity between exports and imports is worrisome; the country is facing serious challenges in terms of liquidity,” says Mutashu.
Food World imports the majority of its commodities from South Africa.
“There is quite a lot of inactivity and industrial capacity utilization has gone down. Other than looking at industry capacity, we then have to concentrate on industrial competitiveness,” he says.
Mutashu believes dollarization, which has seen dollars and rands used as legal tender, has been a salvation, saying that the worthless Zimbabwe dollar was killing business.
“The functional currency system has brought predictable prices, which rarely fluctuate, it has brought some sanity. We used to sell a loaf of bread for millions of dollars. But now there is restocking and prices have stabilized.”
On the other side of the coin, be it a dollar or a rand?
“Since we are using a currency, which we do not own and control, it is still a challenge for us to be able to control the economic pendulum. Whatever happens in South Africa also affects us because we don’t have control over the currency,” says Mutashu.
Zimbabwe used to export cooking oil, now it’s importing. As the recession heat took its toll, many companies went under. National Foods, one of the major cooking oil producers shut its plant. Household name Olivine weathered the storm but failed to cope.
At the very least the struggling supermarkets of Zimbabwe, such as Food World, are cooking but hope that the elections don’t spoil the broth.
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Bismarck Stares The Beast  In The Eye And Dares Not Blink

Ran Neu-Ner was looking forward to the day at his technology start-up company, Wealth Maker. When he arrived he found the doors locked and a sheriff’s note declaring the company investor’s bankruptcy.
Eleven years later, Neu-Ner, 36, is the Group CEO of South Africa’s leading activations agency—The Creative Counsel (TCC). The company makes an annual turnover of R500 million ($57 million) and has 650 permanent employees around the country.
On any given weekend 15,000 promoters can be seen promoting some of TCC’s clients’ products. With a 50% market share of the promotions space, the company is not doing too badly. But the picture was not always so rosy.
<div id="attachment_1569" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1569" class="size-medium wp-image-1569" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/424-37-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Co-founder &amp; joint-CEO of The Creative Counsel, Ran Neu-Ner; Johannesburg, 22 November 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
“We lost everything in an IT venture during the dot com bubble. It was supposed to be South Africa’s first online stock trader website. Our investor went insolvent and we shared the same building. The sheriff came and locked us out. I had invested everything; my business partner, Gil Oved, had invested everything,” Neu-Ner says.
After arriving at the office that fateful day, Neu-Ner summoned his business partner to a coffee shop in nearby Norwood.
“We wrote on a serviette all the things we had. We worked out that we needed to pay everyone who worked for us in the IT business. We paid our staff salaries and then we were jobless and hopeless,” he says.
At the time the two entrepreneurs were 25 years old and everyone around them was making a bit of money as employees in the corporate world. However, neither of the two was willing to look for a job.
Neu-Ner credits his business partner and co-Group CEO, Gil Oved, for sticking it out during those dark days.
“There is nothing worse than not having direction, an income or job. You lose all your confidence and self-worth. When I didn’t believe, he pushed me. When he didn’t believe in himself, I pushed him. That is what is good about having a partner,” he says.
The partners go way back, when they met in grade 10.
“We started our first entrepreneurial business in matric selling make-up kits imported from China to pharmacies and hair salons. Literally, going from door to door. We set up a company called Still Thinking so that when people asked us what the name of our company was we would say, Well, we’re still thinking’. It was a great conversation starter,” says Oved.
After six months of doing nothing, the two came across an opportunity in the promotions space. They had no plans to make it a long-term business. They just wanted something to keep them busy. They needed R100,000 ($11,000) to get started but there was no money lying around. Oved took a job as a computer consultant and the money he made he gave to Neu-Ner to start the promotions company.
“The first six months were the continuation of the worst period of my life,” says Neu-Ner.
The two business partners took to “cold-calling” companies in the yellow pages telephone directory. And then one day, it looked like their luck was about to change for the better.
“I cold-called Danone, by luck the company that did their in-store promotions had closed down.”
The requirements from the dairy and dessert producer’s marketing team were high and included the instruction, “Never break the cold chain and execute with the highest standards of execution and creativity”.
Unfortunately, they were up against more established companies, who also wanted the account.
“I created a PowerPoint presentation and arrived to present it. Once I got there, the agency before me walked out and there were five of them carrying briefcases. In that moment I just decided to ignore the PowerPoint presentation and speak from the heart,” says Neu-Ner.
Neu-Ner’s moving speech won them their first big client. The two had to promote Danone’s products at 12 stores, simultaneously, and came out with flying colors. However, challenges still lay ahead.
“One of the promoters on the first day decided to steal from the stores on my first show piece.”
Luckily, this was only a small glitch. Neu-Ner—who has been an entrepreneur since a young age, when he sold cut-out calendar photos in an Israeli neighborhood before he moved to South Africa with his engineer parents—had arrived. He managed to put things right with his entrepreneurial flair.
“I was always an entrepreneur. I had many ventures when I left matric. I didn’t spend too much time at university. I studied and finished my degree [he has a finance degree] but I was never there. I love business,” he says.
Oved agrees that his partner has always been a driven individual and offers some light-hearted criticism.
“This means he accepts brilliance or nothing from himself and all those around him. People who work with him get swept away and are therefore willing to sacrifice and give their all to him. Sometimes his uncompromising nature is hard. Some people struggle to accept such toughness,” he says.
TCC has been rolling out its expansion program over the last couple of years; they bought 50% of the well-known Mr Delivery franchise, which home delivers food from restaurants and fast-food chains. The delivery business is one of many subsidiaries falling under the TCC umbrella, such as the events companies, Minanawe and PopiMedia, a social media specialist.
While the company has grown beyond what the two could have hoped for in the early days of 2001, the partners want to expand even further.
“We are using South Africa as a springboard for the next step, which is how to get into Africa,” says Neu-Ner.
“We also believe that unlike the days of the past where everything started with a TV ad; in the future concepts will become agnostic of medium. The start would often be in activations where consumers interact with the brand on a personal basis and mediums such as TV, radio and others will be support functions,” adds Oved.
The two have traveled a long road to becoming a major promotions company in South Africa and have picked up a couple of lessons along the way.
“It is important to make mistakes because you learn much, much more from your mistakes than from your successes. If you are a real entrepreneur by blood, don’t give up. What separates the men from the boys is those who carry on even when it is looking bleak,” says Neu-Ner.
And that’s exactly why they made it.

Jobless Hopeless Zero Confidence

Taiwo Otiti and his twin brother had plans of settling and pursuing their careers in Canada, after completing their studies. Their father, a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, had other plans in mind—that his sons would return to Nigeria. Otiti embraced the advice and left his brother behind: a decision he does not regret.
Otiti is now the country general manager of International Business Machines (IBM), in West Africa. He joined the technology and solutions provider in August 2010, four months before the firm’s centennial celebration. It was also the time when the firm was experiencing a decade of slow growth. The firm traces its roots to the 1880s, when a group of inventors who designed and patented breakthrough tabulating machines and punch clocks came together to form IBM. The firm’s success was accelerated by the construction of the legendary Watson Research Center. This marked the start of research labs throughout the globe that churned world-changing products in the technology space. For years IBM became synonymous with innovation. However, the emergence of venture capital backed entrepreneurs, such Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg, in the past two decades, overshadowed the post-World War Two success of IBM.
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However, there is a dramatic shift today. Evidence is increasingly showing the dwindling growth of the venture capital-backed start-ups and the comeback of former technology giants. Scott Anthony, contributor to the Harvard Business Review, wrote, “…Apple’s inventiveness is no anomaly; it indicates a dramatic shift in the world of innovation. The revolution spurred by venture capitalists decades ago has created the conditions in which scale enables big companies to stop shackling innovation and start unleashing it.”
Because of its resources, IBM is able to embark on projects that many venture capital-backed startups cannot afford. Leveraging on past innovations, IBM strategists (or catalysts) are taking over were the blue chip start-ups have left off. IBM’s master inventor, Colin Harrison, is a pioneer strategist who recalibrated the company’s philosophy. He and fellow catalysts in the company conceptualized ‘Smarter Cities’ which is part of IBM’s ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative. The ‘Smarter Cities’ initiative saw IBM providing solutions in Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Beijing, Dublin, Singapore and New York.
“…the company would offer infrastructure and services that will help cities save money and improve lives by managing energy, water, traffic, parking, public transit and other resources,” wrote Scott Anthony.
The Smarter Cities concept has become the hallmark of IBM. In 2011, the company invested $50 million in the three-year Smarter City Challenge, as part of its commitment to its expansion strategy in growth markets. In July, the technology and solutions provider dispatched a team of top employees from around the world to Accra, under its Corporate Citizen Corps program. The team spent a month with the Accra municipality officials consulting on making Accra a smarter city. A white paper report, based on the recommendations of the service core team for a smarter city, will be released in the first quarter of this year. Lagos and Cape Town were the only cities in Africa selected for the 2013 Smarter Cities Challenge grant.
Beyond these initiatives the firm is continuing to invest significantly in growth markets to expand capacity, develop talent and deepen its research and development.
“IBM spends just over $6 billion in R&amp;D every year [excluding other expenditures such as marketing] and there is nobody that spends that kind of money,” says Otiti.
This investment is driven by a strong cash flow, which stood at $16.6 billion in 2011. Part of the research and development expenditure was allocated to Africa and the first IBM research lab was built in Kenya. It is expected that this lab will support the science and technology skills base in Sub-Saharan Africa. This investment is justified by the constant revenue increase from growth markets. Cumulatively, these markets have contributed 22% of IBM’s geographic revenue in 2011, up from 11% in 2000 and company is expecting a further 30% growth by 2015.
In Nigeria, Otiti has expanded IBM’s market share through the diversification of company’s brands, which include services, software, information technology system, and research except finance services.
“Today, we control 70% of the high-end servers that run all the banking hosts in Nigeria, which gives us control of 80% of the transaction volume in banks. We have basically taken out SUN. There is only one bank remaining on SUN and four are running on HP,” says the optimistic IT expert.
The firm also partnered with Bharti Airtel to provide mobile services across 18 Sub-Saharan countries. In this partnership IBM runs the IT system of which Nigeria accounts close to a third.
IBM’s success is being buttressed by the decentralized structure that embodies creative leadership.
“IBM is a matrix organization. Under me, I have the four main brands, which is hardware, system and technology group (STG), software group, global technology services (GTS), which run things like strategic outsourcing and managing services and lastly the consulting group GBS (global business services). They report to me and they also report to verticals. The strength of IBM is the cross brand placement. We can actually provide solutions across board from consultancy down to delivery,” says Otiti.
Otiti is not a newcomer to the IT industry, having plied his trade with many banks in Nigeria. When he returned to Nigeria in the mid ’80s, the banking sector was going through major transformation. Over three decades, he moved from bank to bank. He first worked in the IT department for Citi Group. During his four-year stay, he started the software development work as part of the group’s localization program. He joined Fidelity Bank for three years and later Society General for a brief period.
The highlight of his career came with his appointment at First Bank: the oldest and one of the largest banks in Nigeria. His first task was to put in place a real-time online plan to centralize the bank’s 300 branches operations.
“One of the reasons they recruited me was because I was the first to do the first online ATMs at Society General. I was thus requested to give direction on how to do their channels infrastructure, which included things such as ATMs, Point of Sales (POS) and bankcards,” says Otiti who spent almost a decade at First Bank working on various projects that forever changed the Nigerian banking sector.
The efforts of his team led to the birth of Interswitch, which has enabled organizations and individuals to access their funds across 20 banks in Nigeria and across a variety of payment channels.
In his eight-year stay at First Bank he established an ATM consortium, which licensed Master Card to use its switch, and was also part of the team that negotiated Visa’s 20% acquisition of Valucard (now Unified Payment Services Ltd) and worked with the Central Bank of Nigeria on the vision 2012 payment system. He joined Afribank in 2009 for a short period before the bank’s closure.
Otiti wants the West African region to develop into an independent region like South Africa or Egypt.
“For West Africa to be an independent region, we should be able to generate over $200 million in revenues in the next five year,” says Otiti.

The Return Of The Technocrat

The annual Cartier Women&#8217;s Initiative Awards (CWIA), launched in 2006, grants $20,000, media exposure, networking opportunities and a year of business coaching to six female-run social enterprises—one from each major region.
A highlight of the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society is the CWIA ceremony and the glamorous after party. After a week of interviews and pitches to the jury, the 19 finalists of the 2012 CWIA, chosen from 1,000 applicants across 80 countries, put on their finest for the ceremony. The event was hosted by Women’s Forum president, Véronique Morali, and Cartier’s then-CEO, Bernard Fornas.
The award for the Middle East and North Africa went to Iba Masood, whose online career portal gradberry.com caters to young job seekers in the Gulf Region. The youngest winner celebrated her 23rd birthday the next day. The biggest surprise of the night was saved for last: an extra $20,000 was awarded to finalist Michèle Boisdron-Celle of France. Her company, Onco Drug Personalized, has developed means to guard against the toxicity of chemotherapy treatment. The donation will save 600 cancer patients&#8217; lives.
Following the ceremony, hundreds turned out to fête the winners at Deauville&#8217;s seaside casino. The theme of the evening was growth in Africa, also a major focus of the Women&#8217;s Forum. African belly dancers, drummers and singers took to the stage against a backdrop of jungle animals. Partygoers nibbled on roasted swordfish with green beans from Kenya, couscous from the Maghreb and Ugandan peanut soup. They danced to a mix of African and western sounds until the early hours of the morning.
<h4> Sub-Saharan Africa CWIA Winners</h4>
Elizabeth Scharpf, an American management consultant in biotech and pharmaceuticals, and Julienne Ingabire, a Rwandese businesswoman, were CWIA’s sub-Saharan Africa winners. They founded Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), which addresses women’s health issues in Rwanda.
“A lack of affordable sanitary pads in developing countries, like Rwanda, puts girls at a distinct gender disadvantage,” says Scharpf, CEO of SHE.
International pad brands are expensive in Rwanda, which means that girls and women from low-income brackets miss school or work to avoid embarrassment. SHE produces low-cost pads from local materials, which are sold by local entrepreneurs. Initial pilots yielded positive results. SHE’s pads will be 35% cheaper than locally-made brands and 70% cheaper than international ones. The company has cut distribution costs by 15% and hopes to slice consumer costs further by lobbying parliament to exonerate sanitary pads from Rwanda’s 18% sales tax.
In 2010, Lindsey Stradley partnered with two students at MIT Sloan School of Management to establish Sanergy. Their first product is the Fresh Life toilet: a hygienic and inexpensive ($200 apiece) individual unit. It offers privacy and collects waste through a water-free system, which is transported to Sanergy’s processing plant to generate biogas and organic fertilizer.
Nthabi Sibanda’s project, Puo Educational Products, produces bilingual books to preserve the continent’s languages and cultures. Sibanda develops African learning material to reconnect children to their heritage and further their language skills.
“We differentiate ourselves by opting for a bilingual medium. Children gain great social and cognitive benefits from speaking two languages,” says Sibanda.
Nominations for the 2013 Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards open in March.

How They Help

For two months, his eyes, like big saucers, stared at the ceiling, lost somewhere between the living and the dead. The little boy lay listless in his hospital bed in Nairobi, Kenya. A sheet clung to his tiny frame, but it couldn’t hide the scars from the third-degree burns beneath and traces of the violence wreaked on this young life. Into this shattered existence came a ball of paper and string called Chico.
“He couldn’t talk, but Chico raised his arm and talked to him. He clung to Chico’s hand and for the first time in two months, he smiled,” says puppeteer Daniela Hadasy.
Chico is a larger-than-life puppet dog. In the hands of the puppet master, the dog with the cheeky smile has bounced his way into the hearts of sick and injured children in hospital wards across Ethiopia and Kenya.
“The idea is to draw out the emotion from the children so they can deal with their terrible traumas. When it’s a puppet talking to them and not an adult, they feel more free to talk openly. Yes, I’m sitting there and pulling the strings, but it’s the puppet who’s sharing his problems and telling the children how he feels, especially when things are bad. And because he’s telling his story, the children feel safe to tell theirs.”
The art of puppetry is nothing new. History records puppets in ancient Egypt more than 4,000 years ago. In rural Africa, puppets still flourish, but in the cities they are losing out to books and television. “Children everywhere connect with puppets, but in Africa, the puppets immediately become a part of them. It’s the right tool for children there, especially in the slums where most of them have so much anger inside and don’t even have a toy to play with,” says Hadasy, who comes from Tel Aviv, Israel.
Hadasy was seven when she discovered her talent for mimicking voices without moving her lips.
“I used to talk to myself all the time and although I instinctively understood it was normal for children to do this, it scared me that I could use my voice without moving any part of my body. For many years, I kept it
a secret.”
If you look carefully, you can see Hadasy’s stomach moving. Sometimes, there’s a faint quiver on her lips. But most times, she sits perfectly still and lets the puppet create its magic. She holds a conversation with him, alternating between her voice and the one she’s given him. In a typical session, she starts off chatting about everyday things to build the confidence of the child.
“The puppet talks like a child and thinks like a child and so a friendship grows between them. Then, when the child trusts the puppet, we can begin to chat about really traumatic things. I’ve heard everything. Children confess to being raped, abused, to having terrible things done to them. Some of them are so lost and no one has been able to reach inside them.&#8221;
Puppets create a space of safety through which children can express their deepest fears. Follow-up sessions are done with teachers and nursing staff so the therapy is long-term.
“If, for example, medical examinations were done with puppets, it would be so much easier for children. In many of the hospitals, there’s not enough space for the parents to stay over and so children go through scary oncology treatment alone. Especially in the slums in Africa, children have been taught to hold their emotions inside, not to share them. They’re used to keeping quiet. Through the puppets, I help them express themselves, teaching them that if they have a problem, they need to talk about it because only then can someone hear them and
help them.”
Often, Hadasy gives the children small puppets of their own to keep.
“When a child holds a puppet, they feel it’s the puppet who’s doing the talking and so it’s easier for them to open up. They absolutely love their puppets; I’ve seen children take them with them to the toilet. He’s their friend because they really need him.”
She has traveled the world with her entourage of nine puppets, each with a name and a distinct personality. Taking care to create each puppet’s persona, Hadasy spends hours developing the puppet’s voice, giving it a family, making it a part of her and understanding which puppet is right for which children.
“I work in hospitals in Israel where there are a significant number of immigrant children from Ethiopia. One time a little girl asked me why I hadn’t created a black puppet. I felt so ashamed: How could I not have thought of it myself? So I gave birth to Lucia, a popular Ethiopian name in Israel. When I came back to the hospital, the girl was so excited. She said, ‘Oh, she’s like me, she looks like me. I’m so happy—she’s my friend.’”
The beauty of puppetry is that its language is universal and instinctively understood by children everywhere, even the dying child in Nairobi.
“The children in the hospital ward had gathered around his bed where Chico was hugging him, shouting enthusiastically as the puppet clasped the boy’s frail hand in his huge brown paw. We danced with him and we sang with him. I said to the nurse: ‘See that’s the point of puppetry—not just to talk but to dance and to sing and show that life is still beautiful despite the blackness inside.’”

The Comfort Of Puppets

Perched on a stool with a spotlight sculpting her fine face with light and shadow, Nneka strums her guitar and melancholically sings lyrics with both religious and political undertones.
“Your phrases are highly majestic, I am amazed by your great linguistics, yet your words are placed together, to sell dubious manifestoes,” says Nneka.
The audience sits in silence as the stars shine in the dark sky spanning above the auditorium in the Ghanaian capital of Accra.
Tonight, Nneka casts a fragile form—her signature sprawling afro is pulled back, her diminutive figure is shrouded in layers of grey, and she is awkwardly reticent throughout the performance. But if Nneka’s music has a central theme it is that appearances can often be deceptive. The German-Nigerian singer’s delicate beauty and soft voice belie the anger, the confusion and sense of injustice threaded throughout the lyrics of her songs.
For the past two years Nneka has been touring Europe, East Africa and her motherland to promote her third album Soul is Heavy, which was released last year . Written and recorded over three years in her home city of Lagos, the album is both thematically and stylistically eclectic with reggae, hip-hop, soul and afrobeat influences. Her songs address corruption, neo-colonialism and oppression, as well as more introspective matters of the heart and soul.
Nneka has made her way from being a little-known singer-songwriter to an internationally acclaimed artist who has toured with the likes of American singer Lenny Kravitz and New York rapper Nas. But gaining recognition in her homeland was difficult, at least until her big break in 2010 when she performed her hit single “Heartbeat” on the David Letterman Show and later appeared on CNN.
“Before Letterman, before CNN nobody wanted to hear my stuff in Nigeria. It was quite difficult for people to relate to my music because the topics are quite heavy: I talk about corruption, I talk about hypocrisy and things that I deal with on a daily basis that we Africans and Nigerians deal with on a daily basis. Many people are very scared of facing those issues they would rather you entertain them,” she tells me during an interview at a restaurant in Accra.
Nneka says the popularity she gained in Nigeria, due to her overseas success, was an example of the “colonial mentality”, which is still pervasive throughout Africa.
“It’s an inferiority complex that we are not very aware of. We are really not proud of ourselves.”
But the singer says that while Nigerians are often drawn to the shiny and superficial; “political” music is becoming increasingly popular in Nigeria, as shown during the Occupy Nigeria protest movement last year, which was sparked by the removal of fuel subsidies and inspired by the Arab Spring.
“There are lots of musicians and artists who are becoming more conscious about their surroundings and courageous in speaking out their minds, when it comes to speaking out about our state and our condition and the system,” says Nneka.
While the singer describes her homeland as divided and corrupt, she says the Occupy Movement, at which she performed, gave her hope that things in Nigeria can change.
“A demonstration like that hasn’t been done in my lifetime. It was a peaceful demonstration—people of different tribes gathered, Christians and Muslims were praying together. Seeing so many people in one place having the courage to speak their minds helped connect us amongst ourselves.”
The artist was inspired by the pain and injustices she saw in Warri in the Niger Delta, a city where economic division and ethnic conflict are rife.
“When you grow up in that area, you either become a militant or maybe a musician. There is so much grief and tribal war and so much conflict,” she says.
But Nneka says Nigerians continue to hold on to the hope that their country can change and that some kind of revolution will take place in the future.
“We need proper leadership, selfless politicians who are not in power looking to profit, we need government to be more concerned about the youth and we need more rich people that are concerned about the poor.”
On what inspires her creatively, Nneka is endearingly bumbling and inarticulate. She cites spiritual figures such as Gandhi, Jesus and Saint John the Baptist and iconic African leaders like Thomas Sankara, Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba, as figures who have informed her ideas and lyrics. Like these great men, Nneka sees herself as a spokesperson of the poor and the oppressed.
“Seeing the many people who are sick in the Delta due to the pollution, and the deaths… being from that area alone has made me into who I am. I feel it is my responsibility to be the voice for those who don’t have the courage,” says Nneka.

Nigeria’s Nightingale

Quick! Where is the next investment destination in Africa?
If you follow popular sentiment you’re probably going to say South Africa or Egypt. And if power supply, road networks and telecoms are all you’d go by, you’d probably be right. But consider this  from Beverley Spencer-Obatoyinbo, UK-born head of British American Tobacco (BAT) Nigeria.
<div id="attachment_1532" style="width: 209px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1532" class="size-medium wp-image-1532" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Mrs-Beverley-Spencer-Obatoyinbo-Pix-1-1-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" />Mrs Beverley Spencer-Obatoyinbo</div>
“Here in Nigeria there is such massive opportunity for business. There are so many sectors that are completely untapped. If I was working for a different multi-national and I wasn’t working in Nigeria, I would be telling the board that we should be looking at this country, it has massive growth potential and a huge untapped population as well; it should be the gateway for growth in Africa.”
Nigeria’s investment history is littered with success stories and broken dreams. Like cellphone giant MTN, BAT is one of the success stories taking lead of the domestic tobacco market since November 2000. By 2010, BAT held around 70% of the legitimate market.
Airline operator Virgin by contrast, didn’t fly.
“So, why did Virgin get it wrong? I suppose it’s a different market, the average consumer in Nigeria can afford to make a phone call because you can break it down, it’s like breaking down soap powder in a box to a sachet, you can’t break down getting on a plane, it is expensive.”
Spencer-Obatoyinbo has worked in Africa for 15 years and has made her mark on the continent’s big three—South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria. After three years as general manager of BAT, she left Egypt for Nigeria just before the revolution gripped the North African country. Previously, she worked in marketing as a distributer and brand marketer. To succeed in Africa, you need an afrocentric business outlook and to stick to the rules and your values, according to Spencer-Obatoyinbo.
“One of the challenges that we often face, I suppose I would talk specifically about where I am at the moment and a lot of people talk about it, is corruption. You need to stand by your values and not be swayed. I think that is a very important thing for me personally,” she warns.
It’s not uncommon in emerging markets that companies and government officials meet behind the scenes to unlock regulatory obstacles. In 2009 KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton Co., settled a Nigerian corruption case for $579 million. However the consequences could be dire.
Tobacco regulation is tough because consumption and exposure to tobacco has been proven to have serious health consequences that could lead to death, diseases and disability. Government wants to reduce Nigeria’s smoking rate, which is estimated at 8.6%, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). While the rate might seem low, Nigeria’s population of 162.5 million means that the number of smokers is large. It is estimated that annual cigarette consumption is more than 90 million units.
While the tobacco companies acknowledge that regulation is part of their business, they have advocated for regulation that is balanced and is based on evidence.
“Our main position as BAT Global is that along the way when regulations and laws are made, we would like our voice to be heard because often the laws and regulations are made in isolation of the industry,” says Spencer-Obatoyinbo.
Despite the shortcomings of the tobacco industry, its failure could be a major blow to the fledging Nigerian industrial sector. The industry is a major source of excise duty and employment.
BAT’s business health, buttressed by cost-efficient productivity, is still intact and there are no signs of failure.
“Productivity is a core pillar of the business. Here we have specific challenges because our cost of manufacturing is higher than it would be in other countries so we will be looking for all sorts of ways to be more cost effective. However, there are certain things that we would not compromise on…”
“Our productivity gains is another area. At the factory we are constantly looking for new ways to evolve the way we manufacture, there are also all sorts of productivity gains that we make by reducing our waste. We look at the ways we work with our farmers for example, so that we get better yield on local crops, and there are also little things we do internally with the team, talking about less waste and trying to move slightly towards the green environment, which is difficult when you are running a generator,” she says.
Spencer-Obatoyinbo says there’s more to do. Right now for her it’s about sustaining BAT Nigeria’s success from the last 10 years and to look for new opportunities in West Africa. She admits that it is not going to be easy task considering the insecurity challenges that befell Nigeria and Mali. But Nigeria is where it’s at and she’s pretty sure of that.

Nigeria,  The Place To Be?

Njeri Rionge and Joe Mucheru, her then colleague, traveled around the most remote parts of Kenya in 1999 to research the demand for telecommunications. They found that rural communities, alive to the value of the mobile phone, represented the mass market potential for a technology that was relatively nascent in the region.
They reported back to their employer, Interconnect, that the country had a huge latent demand for information. This was well before the massive undersea cables brought broadband capacity to Africa’s east coast; well before the privatization of the crumbling national telecoms operators injected life into the moribund sector and well before the world had woken up to the potential of Africa’s appetite for technology.
Interconnect did not share their view. The two found an angel investor the following year and created Wananchi Online. It was the region’s first internet service provider to offer ‘triple play’—a new concept that combined internet, television and telephone down a single line.
The process of acquiring licenses became tangled as the company refused to slip brown envelopes into their bids. This culminated in an episode that demonstrated Rionge’s mettle. As they waited for approvals, 17 men arrived at her office with the intention of extorting a bribe. Intimidated, she told them, at length, of the need for Kenyans to do business the right way, to work with integrity. After 15 minutes, one said in Swahili, “She doesn’t get it”. They left empty-handed.
More than a decade later, Rionge and Mucheru stand among the founding members of what may be Africa’s most vibrant technology scene. Today, Nairobi is the center of a thriving community of entrepreneurs, incubators and venture capitalists; driven, first by the massive expansion and innovation in the mobile telecoms sector and then by the arrival of undersea fiber optic cables which deliver international data connectivity. Kenya has exported world-leading technology products—most famously the M-Pesa mobile money transfer system—to the rest of the world. The country has moved fast, but if anything, she says, things have gone too slowly.
“We did have a very big vision for the industry. 2000 to 2004 was an amazing time for us and we were constantly ahead of our time. A lot of the stuff we were talking about then is just now happening,” says Rionge.
Infrastructure, policy and knowledge and “understanding what this internet beast, at the time, was really about” has held back the industry.
“Today things are really different. People get it. People have moved on from thinking about connectivity to thinking about what’s going to be on the bandwidth.”
In August, IBM opened its first African research center in the city, the latest blue chip company to put its weight behind the ‘Silicon Savannah’. As the hype around Nairobi increases, Rionge warns that many entrepreneurs are struggling to take the step from great ideas to commercial businesses. That, she says, will take the community to the next level.
So many “techies” lack the commercial skills and acumen to make their ideas saleable. Rionge and her colleagues turned Wananchi into the region’s largest internet service provider, before she moved on to a senior role at the part-privatizing national phone company, Telkom Kenya. “The likes of Safaricom, the Telkoms, any of the big guys, the CEOs or the strategists need to see that there is a pool of experts or a pool of engineers who can actually develop their back office tools,” she says.
A recurring theme in her discourse is the problem of discerning noise from signal in the hype-fuelled tech space.
“You have to be careful where you’re hearing [the hype] from. If you’re hearing it from Google, they’re definitely doing it. If you’re hearing it from [business accelerator] NaiLab, it’s a different conversation. A lot of the techies I know, they’re still sitting on their grand idea and it hasn’t gone to market successfully. If you sit down, one-on-one, you can actually see it’s going somewhere. But if it’s not picked up by Google or Safaricom or Nokia, it hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still a great idea, but there’s no uptake in the market,” she says.
Today, Rionge works with and sits on the boards of a number of successful enterprises. She has also started an incubator on Ngong Road, the city’s technology cluster, to help those with ideas to take the step to becoming businesspeople. Part of her message is that technology is not an end in itself but rather an enabler of other sectors. The successes in the African technology space have been in areas that plug gaps in the infrastructure or the market—creating solutions for the specific context of the continent. M-Pesa solved the problem of moving money in a cash-based economy with little infrastructure to support it.
Africa, with as many opportunities as it has challenges, needs entrepreneurs who can use technology as an enabler in key sectors, such as agriculture, manufacturing and education, while entrepreneurs need real applications for their grand ideas.
This is sometimes where international investors and observers fail to see the true value in the Kenyan, and wider African, technology opportunity. Measuring existing and potential successes by the experience of Silicon Valley, or other developed world technology hubs, misses the point.
“There will be people who have great ideas and grand ideas on the ground. The difference, in terms of developing them and scaling them, is whether we are creating criteria that have worked in developed markets to identify them, or whether we are going to get on the ground and recreate the criteria, so that the criteria is suitable for the local environment. That’s what’s not there. Because that local idea or local criteria is not structured yet, we continue to completely miss the opportunity. So the reengineering of the mindset in terms of the approach, I think, is what needs to take place for emerging markets or Africa.”
It is for this reason that she is cautiously critical of some of the initiatives in Nairobi, which seem to focus more on attracting international capital to the country than on building the domestic opportunity. The government’s ‘Vision 2030’ lays out an ambitious plan to greatly increase the value and depth of the IT sector. It has spawned ideas such as Konza City, a proposed development backed by Kenya’s ICT Board, which is designed to give a physical home to the country’s technological talent. Rionge is skeptical.
“That’s bricks-and-mortar. The ideas, the technology phase, are not about bricks and mortar. The investments we need are not about bricks and mortar&#8230; The bricks and mortar is really for international investors, that’s all it is. The innovators and entrepreneurs need to scale up pretty much on their own through some genius way.”
For all of her reservations, however, she is optimistic. The government support may be slightly misdirected, but it is not misguided. The city is fast becoming a hub for the entire continent and the heart of a technology revolution that is made in Africa.
“Nairobi happens to be the location but when you’re there, you’re thinking Africa. And Africa is the next economic frontier. If that is the case, you want to be in Africa, you want to be investing with Africans.”

The Rionge Person  To Ask For A Bribe

With a glint in his eye, Nelson Mandela used to introduce Arthur Chaskalson thus.
“This is my lawyer… he managed to get me 27 years in prison!”
Chaskalson used to tell the story, against himself, with a laugh. Like the great man himself, the veteran human rights lawyer was a man of impeccable integrity, who never took himself too seriously. Chaskalson was born in Johannesburg in 1931 and studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand from where he graduated in 1954.
In court, Chaskalson was a serious man, who quit a lucrative practice to stand up for the oppressed. For the best part of half a century, he argued for human rights and freedom.
It was a passion forged at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria in 1964, when Chaskalson was a young member of the team that defended Mandela in the famous Rivonia Trial. It was the trial where Mandela and a number of his comrades were accused of sabotage—an offence that carried the death penalty. It was also the trial where world opinion turned in favor of the accused; overnight, criminals transformed into the freedom-seeking Benjamin Franklins of Africa.
“It was mid-winter and I remember he was wearing prison clothes with short trousers. He was in short trousers and the idea of putting people into short trousers was really to humiliate them. But it was impossible to humiliate Mr Mandela, he had this tremendous dignity, which transcended anything anyone could do to him. And from the very beginning of our very first meeting and discussions with everybody, it was clear that everybody respected him and saw him as a leader. Whereas he in turn respected them and insisted on decisions being taken by discussion and consensus not imposed upon anyone. And throughout the trial there was that collegiality and discussion,” Chaskalson told me in 2010.
Chaskalson was also in court when Mandela made his world famous speech from the dock, which took more than more six hours, in which he vowed to die for his beliefs.
“The court was packed, the people were silent and at the very end when he said that these were ideals for which he had struggled and hoped to live for, but if needs be he was prepared to die, there was a dramatic silence which we could actually hear the silence, in the court, and feel it. And it was absolutely quiet, not a sound, and then the judge said Mr Fisher, you can call your next witness.”
The next time Chaskalson saw Mandela across a court room was in 1994. Then President Mandela had made Chaskalson the first president of the highest court in South Africa, the Constitutional Court, and attended the opening ceremony in Johannesburg.
Among the first business to be considered by the new court was an application to restore the death penalty—a weapon that had been used ruthlessly by the apartheid government and abandoned by the new government.
“He sat next to me on the bench and I remember he started by saying: ‘The last time I was in a court it was to hear whether or not I was going to be sentenced to death.’ That’s how he started his comment but the next day we were going to consider whether or not capital punishment was consistent with the Constitution. So it was quite a dramatic, quite a dramatic opening and if he had been executed what would have happened?”
A rhetorical question made possible by brave lawyers, like Arthur Chaskalson, prepared to swim against the dark swirling tide of oppression.

A Giant Of The Courtroom Who Stood Tall For All

Over the past two years, Egypt has undergone a significant transformation, not only politically but also economically. The protests in Cairo’s downtown Tahrir Square, in January 2011, have had a wide-ranging impact not only on the country’s political composition, but also on its short- and medium-term economic performance. While the ups and downs since the revolution have been palpable, the downs obviously more so; the long-term fundamentals of Egypt remain just as appealing as they were in the years leading up to former President Mubarak’s ousting. Provided investors are willing to ride out the immediate uncertainty, the prospects for growth are encouraging.
In the pre-crisis days of 2007 and 2008, Egypt was racking up GDP growth in excess of 7% and services like telecommunications were growing by double digits annually; tourism jumped up by as much as 21% in one year. The country’s stock market, one of the continent’s largest both in terms of listed firms and capitalization, attracted significant inflows from foreign institutional investors, while the banking sector—leaner and meaner after several years of consolidation and robust regulation—saw a drop in non-performing loans and an increase in profitability.
But the combination of falling global demand, together with revolutionary instability, meant that GDP growth last year fell to 1.8%. Growth in 2012  was only slightly better, at 2%, while forecasts for 2013 are at a solid but lower-than-needed 3%. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) fell by more than $10 billion in 2011 and key sectors, like tourism, have slumped, contracting by nearly 6% over the most recent fiscal year. Industrial action has depressed manufacturing output in labor-intensive sectors even as official unemployment has risen to 12%, not counting the vast ranks of the underemployed.
Egypt faces problems that have been exacerbated by the revolution—including some very pressing long-term political questions, ranging from the creation of a new constitution to improving institutional trust—but among the more urgent challenges is the lack of inclusive growth. The subsidy debate highlights this most acutely. Government grants and social benefits made up roughly one-third of total expenditure in the 2011/12 fiscal year, which runs from June to June, according to the ministry of finance. Reducing the burden is a priority for President Mohamed Morsi’s new government, yet reforming subsidies carries not only significant political risk but also fails to alleviate the pressure on the most vulnerable portions of the population. As a result, steps have been tentative at best. The focus has been primarily on energy subsidies and the most recent version of the 2012/13 budget from May 2012 sought a reduction in fuel subsidies by some 27%, with consumption-intensive industries seeing the most significant increase in costs. Food subsidies have been left untouched.
The country is also grappling with an increasingly hollow labor structure, which exacerbates income inequality. Figures from Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) show that unemployment among university graduates reached 18.9% in 2010 and a similar study in 2012 revealed that demand for high- and low-skilled workers is outstripping that for middle-skilled employees, dampening social mobility and constraining opportunities for the middle class.
However, for a short period there was a steady stream of more encouraging news, which while not exactly pointing to a full-fledged recovery, hinted at a more hopeful outlook. Growth forecasts for 2013 were pegged at 3%, still far lower than what is needed but nonetheless comparatively robust. Headline inflation, which reached as high as 18% in the pre-crisis years, dropped to a far more manageable 5.4% in August. Similarly, yields on a number of Egyptian bonds had eased to some of their lowest levels in nearly a year in September when the country hawked its first floating-rate bonds. Around roughly the same time, Moody’s reaffirmed its B2 rating for Egyptian sovereign bonds, due in part to an improving political outlook, along with a more stable external payments position, stronger macroeconomic conditions and a restart of International Monterary Fund (IMF) negotiations—all of which spelled good news for the government.
By the end of the year, however, things began to look rocky again, with the pound dropping precipitously, from 6.05 to the dollar to 6.30 to the dollar. Deficit estimates from the current     fiscal year, ending in June, may hit up to 10% of GDP. Combined with continuing political instability in the wake of protests over the constitutional referendum, the spate of worsening indicators is far from encouraging for Egypt’s policymakers.
The IMF loan, which could be worth up to $4.8 billion, is particularly important in terms of strengthening investor confidence, which has been hit hard not only by the broader uncertainty but also by regulatory hiccups and governance scandals, particularly in sectors such as real estate and construction. However, with one of the most attractive price-earnings ratios in the region, Egypt’s firms remain extremely attractive on a value basis and the country’s stock market has rebounded by more than 37% in recent months.
There is still potential for a turnaround for the country’s economy, but if this momentum is to be sustained in the years to come, Egypt will need to better leverage its competitive advantages. Crucially, Egypt benefits from both strong export ties and a vast consumer population, which provides firms with access to large domestic and foreign markets. In spite of rising subsidies and wages, the country is nonetheless extremely competitive as a manufacturing destination. Furthermore, significant upstream gas reserves have the ability to provide feedstock not only for Africa’s largest refining sector but also for the rapidly-growing electricity segment, which is racing to keep up with annual demand growth of 7%.
It is difficult to understate the impact of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, given the economic ramifications of the massive political changes the country has undergone. The past two years have been turbulent but if the country can better exploit its healthy long-term fundamentals, a return to robust growth is virtually assured.

Egypt Rising

The re-election of Jacob Zuma to lead the governing party of the most powerful economy on the African continent, South Africa, was never a case of ‘if’, instead it was a case of by how big a margin he would beat his reluctant challenger, Kgalema Motlanthe. What was a puzzling paradox for many opinion makers though, was how Zuma got more than 70% of the vote when the African National Congress (ANC) gathered for its elective conference in Mangaung on December 16-20.
Were those 4,500 voting delegates so dumb and ignorant? Could they have been bought or lulled to ignore the stuff that filled newspaper columns, radio and television programs and social networks? How on earth did they miss the groundswell of indignation towards their supposedly highly unpopular and bungling president? In which South Africa did those delegates live, that they could not see what the political analysts, commentators, journalists and opposition politicians saw?
Part of the problem is the fact that the ANC still follows an archaic system of electing its leaders. No ANC leader gets to openly contest, so that they could tell why they believe they deserve the top position. As a result, s/he who controls the levers of power during party election time gets to have an upper hand and, depending on how skillful or cunning they may or may not be, the ANC leadership race is always for them to lose. This is only a small part of the problem. Those chosen become the country’s leaders by virtue of the party’s domination of the political landscape. The bigger problem has everything to do with what has become of the over 51 million people that constitute the population of South Africa.
Greed, self-centeredness and dishonesty have become only some of the defining characteristics of South Africans as wealth accumulation, getting plum positions or ensuring they keep their jobs becomes more important than anything else. In the process they’ve become meek and timid, in many ways a defeated people, blaming everything and everybody other than themselves for crises they find ourselves in. They tend to let their attitudes and emotions, prejudices and prescriptions, stand in the way of appreciating the best that there is.
Take the media and political analysts’ reaction to the election of Cyril Ramaphosa as ANC deputy president. When it became apparent that the billionaire businessman was to become the ANC’s number two, pages of newspapers and magazines, as well as hours of airtime were dedicated to full-blown ‘analysis’ of what he is going to do.
While there’s nothing wrong with someone wishing to communicate their wishes on how the ANC can best utilize Ramaphosa; the most interesting aspect of ‘Cyrilmania’ has been how glibly many have come to pronounce it, without any due regard to both the history of his re-emergence and the inner workings of the ANC.
Business and the elite media’s warmth to Ramaphosa seems to have everything to do with the fact that he represents that acceptable, affable face of the ANC—the one that fits the stereotypical image of a suave, sophisticated, articulate leader who will not embarrass. He is the welcome opposite to the polygamist country bumpkin they see in Zuma.
Almost without questioning, business and rest of the elite seem to think that finally, there’ll be a clever black at ANC headquarters where the party’s top six officials meet every Monday. Ramaphosa, the thinking seems to go, will tell Zuma what no one has hitherto had the guts to tell the 70-year-old struggle veteran about such things as inspiring investor confidence or catering to the sophisticated voter.
The truth is that not only is Ramaphosa nothing more than a benefactor of Zuma’s generosity, he is also a crowning success of his deft strategy. What is forgotten is that Zuma preferred to keep Motlanthe and that it was only after Motlanthe spurned the effort, choosing to stand against Zuma instead, that Ramaphosa came into the picture.
But simply because Ramaphosa was second choice does not mean that he cannot achieve the things that many now think he will be best-placed to accomplish. That’s not to say that Zuma is now suddenly in a mood, through Ramaphosa, to pacify constituencies he considers disdainful and unreservedly hostile. Correctly in some instances, incorrectly in others, Zuma’s comments often suggest a firm belief that most media are hell bent to destroy or undermine him.
What’s habitually forgotten is that only one man has a final say in the ANC and that’s its president. Given the way the ANC operates, the more firmly that person is in charge, as Zuma is now, the more people like Ramaphosa will have little option but to tow the line. The only time Ramaphosa will get reprieve, is if Zuma decides to anoint him. That’s if Zuma won’t seek a third term as ANC president.
In interviews with both men, Zuma insisted that he “definitely won’t seek a third term”. He did not wait for me to point out that after his election in 2007, he said he would serve only one term. Ramaphosa would not be drawn into whether he was keen on the top position. For now its “outside of my wish and imagination,” he told me. When I asked what he thought about the attitude of business towards the ANC, he replied: “The business community has not stepped up to the plate. It has held back”.
In five years’ time Ramaphosa will have the option to challenge Zuma, in the same way Zuma challenged Mbeki in 2007 and won, and Motlanthe challenged Zuma and lost.
While post-apartheid ANC leaders contested positions, often fiercely; they hardly represented fundamentally distinct visions of the ANC and the country.
One is tempted to conclude that ‘Cyrilmania’ is a clumsy, if not hopelessly inadequate effort, largely by those who disapprove of Zuma’s rule. As history has proven, the problem with that practice is that it almost always guarantees that such a move won’t be taken seriously, for ANC leaders don’t take kindly to being told by the media.
Another problem with ‘the government must do this, must do that’ tendency of South Africans is that it also serves to hide the inefficiencies of others who have the power and resources that can move the nation forward, like the country’s business and worker leadership.
Sick and tired, South Africa’s stubborn and resilient workers showed up the country’s lack of, not only political, but also business and labor leadership. Though rudderless, the workers successfully organized a massive wave of sporadic, unprotected, often violent and suicidal strikes. Although the workers lost wages and many lose jobs in the aftermath, they made their point. The ultimate loser, though, is the country’s economy.
Has organized business and labor taken the responsibility they always demand of government? No.
Hopefully South Africans will learn—and that includes the Ramaphosa fan club, which holds influential positions in the media and business—that it takes a lot more to exert real influence in their political economy and to build a nation that will be the envy of the continent. Creating heroes and villains is not the answer but a sure way to failure and disappointment.
Tempting as it might be for everyone to engage in the sport of exposing every wrong about him and blaming Zuma for all of South Africa’s ills, he is definitely not the root cause and the delegates to the ANC conference knew that. Blameless, yes, but he is at best a symbol of what is manifestly wrong with South Africans as a whole.
If there’s a lesson that history should have taught South Africans in the past 18 years of democracy, it should be that their nation stands to gain a lot more if they put themselves to the very test they put their leaders to. Everybody—including business, civil society, labor, opposition politicians, journalists, commentators and analysts—should wake up to the reality that they need to use their energies and the platforms they each have, a little more wisely and creatively. There’s nothing wrong with engaging, a lot more rigorously, but also truthfully.

Tag: February 2013

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