International lawyer Nick Kaufman has represented the Gaddafi children, defended Democratic Republic of Congo leader Jean-Pierre Bemba against war crimes and has Imelda Marcos as a client.
This year, Kaufman takes on one of his most difficult foes—Interpol. The lawyer is petitioning the international criminal police organization, headquartered in Lyon, France, to strike the name of a flamboyant African entrepreneur off its list—an uphill battle, to say the least.
The entrepreneur in question is 33-year-old Zimbabwean financier and money lender, Frank Buyanga, who is trapped in his adopted country of South Africa for as long as his name is on the list.
Buyanga, the son of a former Zimbabwean civil servant who was born in London, owns a Rolls-Royce, two Lamborghinis, an Aston Martin DB9 and a Bentley Continental. He lives in a luxury penthouse at the Michelangelo Towers, in the heart of Sandton, Johannesburg, and rubs shoulders with celebrities such as former Liverpool and England footballer John Barnes.
Interpol issued Buyanga with a so-called “red notice” in February 2012. This is issued to a person subject to an arrest warrant or one who is required to serve a sentence. While the notice is in force, police in most countries in the world can question the person and look into extradition.
“I saw a news article about it while I was in Equatorial Guinea. Someone sent me a link on my e-mail,” says Buyanga.
This year, police stopped Buyanga at O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, on his way to Zambia on business, after the red notice had flashed on the check-in screen. Detectives questioned Buyanga for four hours and sent him home.
According to Interpol’s press office, it does not comment on when or why a notice is released. In Buyanga’s case, they directed FORBES AFRICA to the Zimbabwean government. The office also confirmed the red notice is valid until the requesting country has asked for it to be removed.
“It’s also affecting my business. When I am trading with banks or start trading with people, once they see that I am on Interpol they close the bank accounts and that’s it,” says Buyanga.
At the root of it all is Buyanga’s money lending business in Zimbabwe. He says he graduated with a degree in economics from North London University in 2004 and moved to Zimbabwe in 2005, where he set up a stable of companies, including a licensed lending arm, Hamilton Finance. This was the land where Frank Buyanga senior worked as an assistant secretary in the ministry of trade in the Zimbabwean government. A scandal over missing funds forced Buyanga senior to resign.
“His father, despite his unceremonious exit from the trade ministry, didn’t live as much a controversial life as his son. He was more laid back, and a bit reclusive, but he ran many businesses around the city. He was a businessman through and through, even from his younger days, we certainly knew he would cut his teeth in business. When he returned from London in the 1990s, that is what he exactly did,” says a close relative, who declined to be named.
In a limping economy, short of hard cash, people are drawn to lending like to a cold drink in the desert.
Buyanga’s borrowers secured their loans with their homes. Every now and again, defaulters refused to give up their houses, leading to litigation and growing disgruntlement. To make matters worse, a couple of the defaulters Buyanga took to court were high ranking politicians. The Zimbabwean government called the loans a sham and police investigated.
“They used to arrest me and keep me inside, without recording the arrest, then I would be released. Then someone who is relatives with the police would come and say ‘Frank just sign off the property or the assets and we will let you go,’” says Buyanga.
“Frank is a colorful character. People don’t like success stories, especially from people who show their wealth,” says Kaufman
In October 2010, the Zimbabwean police closed the case, but in 2012 came the litigation against a high profile politician and the police appear to have changed their tune.
“Buyanga has a case to answer. He should report to the Zimbabwe police,” says the Zimbabwean police spokesperson, Charity Charamba.
Kaufman has not ruled out approaching the Zimbabwean government, but has petitioned Interpol to remove Buyanga’s name from the list.
“We have made a petition arguing that the Interpol red notice does not meet the requirements. We are arguing that it offends the Interpol constitution in that it is tainted by political motives. Secondly, it offends the rules of Interpol in that it is essentially designed to coerce a resolution to what is effectively a civil case,” he says.
It can take months for Interpol to rule on the petition. It doesn’t have to give reasons for its decision and there is no appeal.
“It’s a serious defamation of character, when you have somebody who is presumed innocent then his photograph appears with the likes of Osama Bin Laden and his henchmen, then that in itself has an effect on a legitimate businessman who is trying to conduct activities,” says Kaufman.
This case is one of many high profile legal battles taken up by Kaufman, who was born in Liverpool and raised in Birmingham. He studied law at Cambridge and became a barrister. His first case was at Birmingham Crown Court, where he defended a woman accused of stealing £50 ($76) from the handbag of a friend during a hen night. The woman elected a jury trial, Kaufman won and she walked with a conditional discharge. Kaufman also spent two years as a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
More than 20 years after Birmingham Crown Court, Kaufman, who lives in Israel, has traveled the world fighting big-name cases. In the Gaddafi case, he has filed an application by the former Libyan leader’s daughter, Aisha, calling for the ICC to investigate the death of her father.
The Buyanga case may not be as grave, but it promises to be as drawn out and emotional.

The Scourge Of The  Dreaded Red Notice

Almost two decades ago, a group of talented football players became known as the golden generation of South African soccer.  In 2013, Orlando Pirates, one of Africa’s oldest football clubs, is looking to recapture the championship of the continent. The Soweto club is still the only South African team to have ever won the competition. Eighteen years on, the club is making progress. They have just qualified for the group stages of the tournament following a drama-filled encounter against the Democratic Republic of Congo’s TP Mazembe. The first leg of the encounter at Soccer City, Johannesburg, ended with Pirates hammering Mazembe 3-1. The return leg in Kinshasa was a hostile game which Mazembe won by a goal to nil.
Before the match, police detained two South African journalists who ended up missing the game. Mazembe denied any involvement and said the problems with the broadcasting of the match was due to a technical problem at the station.
“It must be stated that we are a law-abiding club that believes in fair play. All the international journalists that traveled for the match, and were duly accredited, were ushered into the press tribune where they covered the match unhampered. The media reports that journalists from the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) were arrested after the match are totally unfounded and false,” says Mazembe team president, Moise Katumbi-Chapwe.
On the pitch, Pirate’s players told a different story upon their arrival in the country. They complained that the calls on the pitch were not going the Buccaneers’ way. On top of this, their captain, Lucky Lekgwathi, was sent off in the first half. Two dubious penalties were awarded to Mazembe. Pirates’ hero on the day was goalkeeper Senzo Meyiwa, who saved the two penalties.
“The treatment in terms of food, accommodation and other things was okay. The only problem was on the field. The refereeing was poor and Lucky Lekgwathi did not deserve the red card. However, a fighting spirit kept us in the game,” Meyiwa told Kick Off magazine.
Their road in this year’s competition has been made even harder following the draw for the group stages. The draw for the 2013 CAF Champions League Group stages was conducted at the CAF headquarters in Cairo, Egypt.
Pirates are in Group A, alongside AC Leopards (DRC), Zamalek (Egypt) and Al-Ahly (Egypt). Group B comprises of Recreativo Libolo (Angola), Esperance (Tunisia), Sewe Sport (Ivory Coast) and Coton Sport (Cameroon).
The group stages consist of eight teams divided into two groups. Each team, in their respective group, will play each other twice, in a home and away leg. The top two sides from each group will then qualify for the semi-finals.
It has been a rough ride for the Pirates’ players following in the footsteps of the golden generation of 1995. It was the year Pirates earned a gold star above their badge. Pirates drew two all at FNB Stadium, now known as Soccer City, in Johannesburg against ASEC Mimosa of Côte d’Ivoire. In the second leg in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, two weeks later, it looked like the Buccaneers—as Orlando Pirates are affectionately known—would lose the title on away goals but then, a moment of brilliance.
Defender Mark Fish cleared from deep in defence to Jerry ‘Legs of Thunder’ Sikhosana, who danced around two defenders before slotting the ball in the net. The goal sparked national celebrations akin to those of the release of former South African president, Nelson Mandela.
The captain of the 1996 Afcon winning team, Neil Tovey, summed it up best in his blog when he said: “I may have captained Chiefs from 1992 to 1999, but I will always give credit where it’s due. I believe triumphs like these bring the country closer together. The 1996 Africa Cup of Nations’ winning squad certainly fed off Pirates’ Champions League success in 1995.”
The Pirates team that made South Africa proud 18 years ago consisted of a number of quality players that were regarded as the best. The likes of goalkeeper Williams Okpara, Edward Motale, Mark Fish, Gavin Lane, John Moeti, Helman Mkhalele and Jerry Sikhosana made the world take notice of the force that was to be South African football.
The ‘sea robbers’ are hoping to add another star to their emblem. The treatment of the 2013 team hasn’t changed much from what the 1995 team received. The Pirates’ conquering team also went through a few hostile situations.
Former player turned football analyst Helman Mkhalele says the troubles against Mazembe brought back memories.
“What the team went through was horrible. It gives football on the continent a negative image, both on the field and administratively. We, as Africans want to win the World Cup one day but with such acts, we can forget it. When we reflect on the hurdles we overcame to win the title, they are similar to what they are going through. The experience taught me, personally, how to be stronger mentally, physically and wiser as a person. It also taught me how to handle tough situations and how to focus as a player to express myself,” says Mkhalele.
Former goalkeeper, Williams Okpara, who signed for Pirates from ACB in Nigeria, in 1994, remembers it as if it were yesterday.
“Looking at the current Pirates team, we have many good players who can do the job for the team. I was very impressed with Pirates’ performance against Djabal and also when we beat Zanaco away from home. The conditions in Zambia were not comforting because the pitch had long grass. It is good that Pirates players went all out showing great character and we won the game,” says Okpara.
Since Pirates’ won the trophy, South African football has suffered a lean spell. No South African team has managed to win the title. Mamelodi Sundowns managed to reach the finals in 2001 but lost to Egypt’s Al-Ahly.
Bafana Bafana has also struggled to make an impact in international competition. They were knocked out of the FIFA 2010 World Cup in the group stages, the worst performance ever by a host country.
Whether or not the future of South African football teams will be a bright one, will depend on how they do on the continent. What better way to do it than with the CAF Champions League. South African players will be used to the tough playing environment and this will in turn benefit the national team.

Come Back, The Golden Days

The demands of modern football lay stress and strain on the bodies of players, much more than in the past.
It has certainly cut short the careers of some top names that may have been able to play longer, had their bodies not taken such a beating.
The legendary Englishman Sir Stanley Matthews, ‘Shuffling Stan’—the wizard of the dribble for Blackpool and Stoke City, played past 50, before he retired in 1965. That would be impossible today.
Certainly, the game has changed since I started playing in the 1980s.
The science that goes into preparing teams is incredible: there are the biokineticists, nutritionists and even psychologists.
Everything is geared towards creating individuals at the very peak of their abilities , both mentally and physically. This has not only made the game more tactical, but quicker and harder on the body, too.
A 2011 study showed that players, on average, ran 10-11 kilometers in a match, compared to just four kilometers in the 1970s.
In a way it is a vicious circle; science makes the game faster, then we need better science to make players faster.
So does this mean that we are seeing players retire earlier than before because they are unable to keep up?
That is a very broad question, but generally this is the case. You get some players who keep going and defy their age—39-year-old Ryan Giggs of Manchester United, who has been playing in the first team since he was 17, is one of the few.
Camerian great, Roger Milla, played in the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the States at 42 and club football for five years after. He was a great striker, but also a freak of nature in many ways. Milla had incredible natural fitness that few players possess. It is not something acquired or learnt, he was born that way. It was his good fortune.
That is the same in most sports though, look at Martina Navratilova who played tennis until she was almost 50. These people are the exception, not the rule, but they were certainly more common in days gone by.
In football, it is also dependent on where you play and in what position.
Take Paolo Maldini, he was 40 when he retired in 2009 and Alessandro Costacurta, who was 41 when he stopped playing in 2007 for A.C. Milan in Italy’s Serie A.
They both played league football at the highest level, well into their fifth decade, but were allowed to do so, in part, by dint of their defensive positions and the slower pace of the game in Italy.
Would they have been able to play for so long in the hurly-burly of the English Premier League, where the game is less technical but faster? I seriously doubt it.
They were, of course, also tremendous athletes and model professionals, who extended their careers by looking after themselves.
That is where the science comes in. If you look at the oldest players ever to have played in Italy’s Serie A, seven of them have played since 2000 and six of those in the last five seasons.
I was fortunate enough to prolong my career past 40 and did so because of my love of the game. My passion was playing; it didn’t matter to me whether it was for my club or for my country. I am very proud of the fact that I scored my last international goal at the age of 41 in a World Cup qualifier against Liberia in Lusaka in 2004. I was coach then and we were 0-0 in the 68th minute, when I substituted midfielder, Dudley Fichite, for myself. As the coach I was registered to play.
I was highly frustrated that we were not winning and went onto the pitch, on that September afternoon, without even warming up. Armed with a will and determination, with three minutes of injury time to go, I scored a free kick from close to the center circle that seemed to zigzag past the defenders into the net. It sent the 30,000-strong crowd at Independence Stadium into a frenzy and proved a dignified full stop to my international career.
It was difficult to give up and I always said that when I was no longer an asset to my team on the field, I would call it quits. It was a sad day when I did. I have managed to create a different life for myself now, where I am still involved in football and helping it develop. For that, I am thankful.
It was a lot of hard work though; it took dedication and sacrifice and not everybody has that in them. That is the mental side of it.
There have been plenty of studies into the optimal age of an athlete in modern football and they all seem to come back with similar findings, no matter what sport you look at.
On average, players aged between 26 and 29 are said to be at the peak of their abilities, with rare exceptions.
This is because they have the right mix of physical attributes and experience to be of most value to their teams. That is a scary thought when you think Barcelona and Argentina star Lionel Messi is only 25.
This peak lasts, in most cases, until the age of 31, when it becomes harder for them to maintain standards week in, week out.
Statistics from 2011 show that 70% of regular players in the world’s leading clubs are between the age of 23 and 31 for attackers, and 25 and 31 for defenders.
It is after the age of 31 that the numbers tend to drop and that sends the analysts into a tailspin. At Arsenal, manager Arsene Wenger is notorious for only handing out one-year contracts only to players over the age of 30.
One of the leading technical directors in European football recently said that before he renews a veteran player’s contract, he’ll study his statistics. For example: is the player playing fewer games; is he sprinting less often; making fewer tackles than last season?
Prior to all this analysis, all was judged by the gut-feeling of the coach and that probably prolonged a lot of careers. In these days of multi million euro contracts and huge wage bills, there is nothing more dangerous for a club than to have older players on long-term contracts because they cannot be sold easily.
In the past this would have been less of a consideration, you would keep older heads around to teach the youngsters a thing or two. That experience is in many ways now lost and has been replaced by an army of coaches and analysts. That is a symptom of this often strange age of professionalism we live in, where loyalty and experience often goes unrewarded in the search for success.
<div id="attachment_1883" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1883" class="size-medium wp-image-1883" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/APP2001030520544-300x196.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="196" />Cameroon&#8217;s forward Roger Milla celebrates after scoring a goal against Russia 28 June 1994 at Stanford stadium in San Francisco during their Soccer World Cup match. At age 42, Roger Milla became the oldest player ever to score a goal in World Cup history, but could not help his team as Russia won 6-1 with forward Oleg Salenko, scoring a record 5 goals. AFP PHOTO/ANTONIO SCORZA</div>

Old Heads 0; Young Legs 1  (After Extra Time)

Just how much is the South African government interfering with the operations of the country’s major mining groups through undue political pressure to save jobs at all costs?
The question has to be asked after the climb down by Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), in May, over its restructuring plans to cut 14,000 jobs. The company bore the brunt of a full-scale political assault and subsequently revised its plans to cut 6,000 jobs. There is also speculation that AngloGold Ashanti (AGA) had been denied permission by government to restructure its South African mines into a separate unit.
The bottom-line is that this level of interference could hurt both business prospects and share prices.
In the case of Amplats—the world’s largest producer of platinum—interference by government risks are not only keeping the group’s working costs higher than they should be, but also prolonging the oversupply in the market.
That is because the South African mines, which account for more than 75% of world platinum production, are being hampered in their actions to chop back on uneconomic output and so reduce the metal surplus, which is holding the platinum price down.
Holding platinum prices lower for longer would affect the entire platinum industry and not just Amplats.
The point was made clearly by GFMS research director, Will Tankard, in the consultancy’s 2013 Platinum and Palladium Survey.
Tankard says the platinum market was in a delicate position with any production recovery in South Africa likely to be very restrained. He expected mine supply to rise by “a small two percent provided restructuring is allowed to take place”. The situation on the gold mines is not as crucial for the gold price because the days when South Africa dominated the gold market, as the world’s largest producer, are long gone.
Investors would dearly love to know if the South African government blocked a proposal by AGA to separate its South African operations from its international ones, after allowing Gold Fields to go ahead with such a restructuring in February.
Newly appointed AGA CEO Venkat Venkatakrishnan is not telling.
“That’s market speculation and we never comment on market speculation,” he says.
That was in reply to questions at the group’s presentation in May, regarding its March quarterly results, which stated that AGA was reviewing its assets and that there might be another asset sale later this year.
Venkatakrishnan also drew attention to the poor response from investors to Gold Fields’ decision to split off its high-cost South African mines into separately listed Sibanye Gold, although he did not mention Gold Fields by name.
Assuming that AGA tried to split off its South African operations there is an immediate question: Why was it blocked but Gold Fields was able to carry out its restructuring with minimal hassle?
There are various reasons for that according to Gold Fields CEO, Nick Holland. He reckons it could have depended on the kind of restructuring AGA was trying to do, although he stressed that he also did not know whether AGA had approached government for permission.
“It all depends on what kind of deal AngloGold might have proposed. With Sibanye, we made sure we left those assets with plenty of financial juice and put them in a position where they could finance their own future growth. We were very sensitive to the issues around ensuring the sustainability of those assets into the future,” says Holland.
Holland added that Gold Fields had one major advantage in that the mines which the group formed into Sibanye—Kloof, Driefontein and Beatrix—were already housed in a separate company within the Gold Fields corporate structure, apart from the group’s foreign operations.
That restructuring was carried out a decade ago when Mvelaphanda Resources became the BEE partner for Gold Fields’ South African operations.
“As a result we did not need to get a whole lot of regulatory permissions to do the deal,” says Holland.
But Holland described undue interference in the mining sector as a hot potato, saying that restructuring of the industry and the way it does business was essential for its survival.
Last year, Holland reckoned the South African gold industry would largely cease to exist within five years, unless major changes were made to improve productivity.
“We are going to go down the slippery slope, that much quicker, if government does not listen to the industry,” he says.

Slithering Down  The Slippery Slope

When Warren Adams danced his way through his first ballet class, he had little idea he would one day perform on the most prestigious stages on earth. Like Billy Elliot, he would pirouette his way through adversity to a professional career in ballet.
Adams grew up in a township in East London, South Africa, and like most boys his age, preferred sport to dancing.
<div id="attachment_1876" style="width: 189px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1876" class="size-medium wp-image-1876" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Warren1-179x300.jpg" alt="" width="179" height="300" />Warren Adams (age 10, 1986) Greenpoint Stadium, Cape Town at the International Highland Festival</div>
“I was six years old attending my first year of primary school. A woman called Gwen-Mary Wells came by and asked us who wanted to do ballet. A pretty girl in the class put up her hand, so my three buddies and I decided to do the same. They gave us these forms to give to our parents for their signatures, but my three friends’ parents declined to give their approval stating that ballet was only for girls. My parents did not object and a few weeks later my dad took me to my first ballet class,” says Adams.
He says that although his parents knew what ballet was, they had no idea how tough the road would be for their son.
“Society perceived it as an effeminate art form, so as a result I faced plenty of verbal abuse. However, for every negative word thrown at me, I received 100 words of encouragement from family, friends and strangers. My school friends would pick me up at ballet, and we would run to the track, tennis court or soccer field. I was a competitor, and they loved that. Dance was just something I happened to do.”
Decades later Adams is traveling the world as a sought-after ballet dancer and choreographer; right now, he is co-choreographing the Broadway production Motown: The Musical. It is the tale of the iconic record label founded by music mogul Berry Gordy Jr. in 1960 that nurtured musical greats, from Diana Ross to Marvin Gaye.
The show has a cast of 40 dancers, singers and actors and grossed more than $1.03 million on Broadway in a mere seven days of previews.
“Normally, when researching such a prolific story, I would have to use Google, YouTube or books. However, every day I can simply turn to Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown and ask him specific questions about Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, The Tops, Smokey Robinson, The Supremes and more,” Adams says.
<div id="attachment_1877" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1877" class="size-medium wp-image-1877" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/166649532_10-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />NEW YORK, NY &#8211; APRIL 14: Warren Adams attends the Broadway opening night for &#8220;Motown: The Musical&#8221; at Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on April 14, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)</div>
He went to great lengths to impress the show’s musical director by insisting on doing a live presentation of one of the songs from the show as part of his audition.
“He liked my idea a lot and suggested I do the iconic ‘Dancing in the Street’. I hired several performers and a week later I did my presentation and the rest, as the saying goes, is history,” says Adams.
The show opened in April.
Glitz and glamor is nothing new to Adams. He has worked on other big productions such as The Lion King and choreographed for several theatre companies, Disney, operas, film and television.
Adams was the first recipient of the Mandela/Sainsbury scholarship to study ballet in London. While ballet led to his current career, he found that it restricted his creativity as an artist.
“By the age of 21, I became frustrated with my situation in the UK. I felt like artists were being boxed into a specific genre without having the ability to explore other art, dance or theater freely. New York City intrigued me because American artists were taking greater risks.New York City allows me to work in dance, theater, opera, film and TV as a director, choreographer and dancer. I am also a Professor at New York University and Princeton University in the Theater Department,” he says.
Adams has not forgotten his roots though and goes back to South Africa, with his younger brother who is also a dancer, to work with up-and-coming students of dance.
“South African dance has always maintained a great standard, particularly the European genres like classical ballet. Post-apartheid was a challenging time, because choreographers wanted to have their own voice, and not just regurgitate works by American and European artists. I believe these artists have been very successful in accomplishing this. The biggest challenge the dance community faces is the lack of funding to arts organizations,” he says.
South Africa and the rest of the continent have a talented pool of dancers, who have, as he puts it, found their own voices. But many more are forced to leave the country to find work, and African stages seldom play host to big productions of the continent’s own tales.
“It’s not because of a lack of creativity on the artists’ part. It has to do with economics. Big productions require big audiences to cover costs and to provide profits for producers. New York City had 51 million visitors in 2012 and that is one of the main reasons why Broadway can produce 20 new multimillion productions each year. Big productions can be done in Africa, but the longevity of a production run can never be guaranteed,” says Adams.

The Billy Elliot Of Africa  Finds His Feet On Broadway

Afrika Mkhize was raised in a small rural village on the east coast of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, protected and far removed. On his long walks to school, he listened to the songs of the sugarcane workers who toiled in the fields surrounding his community. Now, at the age of 32, he has become one of his country’s notable young jazz musicians.
“It was my first experience of music. The music that was sung by these workers has, to this day, never left me,” says Mkhize.
When his parents discovered his love for music, his father, Themba Mkhize—a multi-award winning jazz pianist and producer—gave his six-year-old son a keyboard. Playing around with the black and white keys, the boy soon realized that, like his father, he felt at home in the world of music.
“I immediately fell in love with the instrument. I always knew I was going to be a musician. I don’t remember doing anything else in my life,” he says.
From then on, his life was filled with melody and song. At the age of 11, Mkhize was enrolled to study classical piano at the Funda Centre Music School in Soweto, a township outside of South Africa’s commercial capital Johannesburg. Four years later, he was accepted at the prestigious National School of the Arts to further his musical studies. After graduating, he studied jazz, composition and arranging at the University of Pretoria.
South Africa’s music elite quickly noticed Mkhize’s talent. Straight out of university, when he was in his early 20s, world-renowned singer Miriam Makeba, nicknamed Mama Africa, appointed Mkhize as her pianist and musical director. On Makeba’s request, he also contributed to arrangements for the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra in Italy. Stints as a music producer for well-known musicians including Tlale Makhene, Sibongile Khumalo and Nokukhanya Dlamini followed.
“I like working as a producer because production, like playing music, is creative. The process of bringing different people, different talents together, is a bit like cooking, like mixing the right ingredients together,” says Mkhize.
It wasn’t long before South Africa became too small for him. He wanted to experience musical trends and techniques from other parts of the world and decided to move to France in 2005, where he played in cafés, bars and clubs with numerous European and African musicians.
“I chose to live in Paris because it is one of the cities in the world that has almost all of the African Diaspora, including the Caribbean, in one place. All the different styles of music were mixing here, from Senegal to Guinea and Algeria. I got the chance to be exposed to my continent’s music in a way that I had never heard before,” says Mkhize.
Four years later, Mkhize—now a father—decided to return to South Africa. This was a year after the global financial crisis hit Europe and reverberated in the rest of the world.
“It was a tough time. As a musician, you are affected by a recession, because if people have five bucks, they will rather buy bread than buy a record or go to watch music. Entertainment budgets are the first to be cut and all artists fight for a smaller… pie,” he says.
After struggling for a while to find his feet, Mkhize started to teach, compose music for television series, and do arrangements for the Johannesburg and Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestras. As a pianist with the versatility to play a wide range of music—from Maskandi (Zulu folk music), to hip-hop and classic jazz—Mkhize, who is renowned for his excellent technique, was soon invited to play all over the world.
His career was catapulted further forward when he received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Jazz in 2012. The honor officially recognized him as one of South Africa’s hip, new generation musicians.
“Winning the Standard Bank award gave me a lot of confidence and strength. For the first time in my life, I felt like all the struggles I’ve been going through were worth it; that what I’ve been doing has been recognized. It showed me I’m creatively on the right path,” says Mkhize.
With the prize money, he produced a jazz album that took him back to his childhood by integrating the songs from the sugarcane fields. Mkhize wanted to draw from his experiences and create something unique.
As an independent musician, Mkhize made a conscious decision not to be part of the music industry that he feels is mainly focused on doing business, often to the detriment of creativity. He feels that the industry has too much power over the artists and their product. This is why, he says, he started his own record label.
From here, Mkize wants to take it up a notch and put African jazz back on the international music map.
“My goal is to export the new generation of African music, first to Europe and then also other places, like Japan. I want people overseas to know that there are lots of creative musicians in South Africa and Africa, who do interesting things. We are at risk of losing ourselves, our heritage. I want to prevent that from happening,” says Mkhize.

Cooking with Jazz

It is believed that many centuries ago, revered Christian heroes were granted a measure of favor or grace by God himself. This gift of grace was known as khárisma. The Mercedes-Benz SL has, historically, also been bestowed with favor and now 60 years since the first one was crafted, I have been blessed by Mercedes with the all-new SL500.
The SL is the eldest brother in the range of Mercedes roadsters. It fits in between the big daddy SLS and the younger, smaller SLK range. From some angles, the new SL may appear somewhat awkward compared to its predecessor, and this is largely because of the sheer size of it. It’s bigger in length and width than the previous SL, thanks to the increased interior space to fit golf clubs or luggage.
The new Mercedes-Benz SL500 has a body shell made almost entirely from aluminum, with the exception of the trademark hardtop folding Vario roof, which is made from magnesium. The result is a car that weighs 140kg less than its older counterpart. So Mercedes have added more girth but reduced the weight.
They’ve used the same equation with the engine: The old SL500 used a 5.5l V8 and yet this new car is powered by a 4.7l V8 biturbo unit capable of producing an enormous 700Nm of torque and 320kW of power. This power doesn’t come at the price of efficiency, however, as the SL500 is claimed to do 9.2l/100km on the combined cycle. Hugely impressive, though I can’t claim to have come close to this figure.
The acoustic appointments, courtesy of Bang &amp; Olufsen, are definitely worth mentioning. The surround sound, 12-speaker system transforms the car into a concert hall worthy of a Hans Zimmer orchestra. It’s an astounding option, worth every penny of the system’s R57,350 ($6,350) asking price.
The cutting-edge technology continues with all we’ve come to expect from Mercedes-Benz: fatigue detection systems; intelligent cruise control; active body control; adaptive lights and blind spot assistance systems. These are all available on most other Mercedes, but a first in this SL is an innovative way to clean your windscreen. They call it ‘Magic Vision Control’ and it supplies windscreen washer fluid through the windscreen wipers instead of through the normal spray system. The idea is to distract the driver as little as possible when cleaning the windscreen as well as to prevent the not-very-luxurious experience of water spraying onto the occupants when the roof is down.
Of course, the major talking point of this luxury roadster is the Vario roof that retracts in about 14 seconds.Even the roof down, the cabin remains comfortably quiet—even more so with the electric draught-stop engaged. Driving with the top down is the best way to truly understand the SL500’s character. It is here that you get to understand the flexibility of the engine, drivetrain and gearbox in comfort or sport mode, none of which compromise on ride quality.
This car’s ability to effortlessly cruise in supreme comfort is astounding, as is its agility when you command that power to the road. I loved the mesmerizing midrange grunt of that biturbo as I put the SL through its paces along the many meandering corners leading to Magaliesberg in the North West Province of South Africa. I also loved the touring nature of the car; cruising with effortless comfort and poise, eating up the kilometers.
It’s an astonishing car to drive. While this incredible engine and chassis do their work, you are nestled in place by the active seats that grip you through the corners. The massage functions keep your blood flow balanced and relaxed while the Airscarf whispers warm air into the nape of your neck. Additional symphonic entertainment is provided courtesy of Mercedes-Benz Signature Sound CD that allows you to truly experience the power of music. The experience gave me goose bumps.
The entry-level Mercedes-Benz SL500 retails in South Africa for R1,681,000 ($186,200)—a substantial price tag no matter what you’re in the market for. Your other considerations may be the likes of the Jaguar XKR or the likes of the Maserati GranTurismo Coupe but both these models are older than the SL and don’t offer as much in the way of technology and luxury refinement.
The Mercedes-Benz SL500 is not the purist sports car that its SL nomenclature might suggest. It is certainly light and sporty, but its success is, and will continue to be, the fact that it’s a car you can live with every day. It’s an expensive car that makes complete sense.

The Charisma Of The SL500

Sue Viljoen and Buddy Vaughn make their way down to the fourth floor cabin. It’s early in the morning and the weather is warm, the ocean is crystal clear and just yesterday the couple saw hundreds of red starfish as their ship made its way along the east coast of Africa.
The ship anchors offshore. The two climb down the gangway and jump into a small 24-man orange rubber duck boat. Their destination Portuguese Island, off the Mozambican coast, 562km from their home in Johannesburg.
Viljoen sits down near the end of the rubber duck, by the motor. Vaughn, being slightly heavier, is told to sit at the front. Once everybody is seated the boat master shouts that they are taking off.
A huge swell catches the dingy as it speeds off. Vaughn turns around to Viljoen. She is drenched. Soon, they are all soaked. Here there are no busy harbors, nor busy roads, just untouched white sands.
The couple spends the rest of the morning watching the other passengers disembark.
“The best was watching the ladies getting off, in their dresses, soaked up to their knees with their things held above their heads. And it’s actually really funny,” [&#8230;] “I could go back right now—I would go back tomorrow and do it all again,” says Vaughn.
In Africa, going on a cruise ship offers more than the average holiday, it’s an adventure and this is one of many travelers’ tales of the 20 million people who cruise the world every year, says Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA). This year CLIA expects $36 billion will be spent on cruises.
According to Allan Foggitt, head of marketing and sales for MSC Cruises South Africa and former owner of Starlight Cruises, business is on the up.
“For the last two or three years it has been recognized as the fastest growing sector of the travel industry.
“If one looks at our local cruise line industry, which we [MSC Cruise Liners] hold a monopoly, we expect a revenue of R450 million ($4.8 million) a year. Each vessel can accommodate around 2,150 passengers and over the period of the season we can expect to accommodate 130,000 to 135,000 passengers annually and about 98% to 99% of them would be South African residents,” says Foggitt.
MSC operates out of Durban, South Africa, and travels along the east coast of Southern Africa en route to Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius and Il Santo Marine. Cruise ships also travel from Cape Town up along the coast of Namibia.
Cruises around Africa are still seen as small change when compared to the international cruising industry. George Argyropoulos, who emigrated from Greece to South Africa to set up Cruises International, explains that 30,000 South Africans are willing to leave their shores and spend up to $30 million. This is nothing in comparison to the billions made in the industry overall but African business is competing with the likes of Israel, the Middle East (UAE), Belgium, Holland, and Portugal—a market almost six times that of local African cruises. The key to building the African market is acquiring a draw factor.
“When you compare it with a Mediterranean cruise; you start in Barcelona and then you’re in Monte Carlo, and the day after that you’re in Florence and the day after that you are in Rome. So why must I fly 17 hours to Africa for a cruise? To see what?” says Argyropoulos.
Competition is tough but the strong dollar helps the African cruise industry. It means airfares are cheap along with prices onboard ships.
“The vessels have gotten even more elaborate, so that in many cases the cruise ships themselves are the destination, literally offering what one would expect to find on a land-based resort,” says Foggitt.
Africa looks to Europe for its business. Europeans make up 85% of those who cruise around the west coast of Africa; on short trips around Southern Africa, they are almost entirely South African.
Investment in the cruise industry comes with a number of problems.
Argyropoulos says that Africans earn less money than Europeans and Americans, so the additional costs of flights and VISAs are expensive and time consuming.
There is also a lack of infrastructure in many ports on the continent, restricting the area where large liners can dock.
“If one looks at Europe you can literally be in a recognized famous city every day of your cruise.In the United States and the Caribbean you can be on a different island every day; you can be in Jamaica one day and then zip across to the belt of Mexico. There are so many different destinations, so many exciting well-established ports that have the infrastructure you would need in terms of buses,” says Foggitt.
“The other thing is distance. If one wants to get to Mauritius which [has] the infrastructure and the tourism background or even Réunion, with these destinations you are looking at cruises of a minimum of 10 and as many as 14 days to get to those destinations. That limits a lot of people in terms of leave,” he says.
Cruising can be dangerous too. There’s piracy off the coast of Somalia and cruise ships have been caught up in it. Anthony Sharp, CEO of Typhon, makes a living out of combating piracy by providing private convoy naval protection units. He says that buccaneering costs the global economy between $7-12 billion a year and costs up to $6.9 billion a year in Somalia alone.
Piracy is waning but it’s not going to go away says Timothy Walker, researcher of conflict management and peace-building at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, South Africa.
“The latest figures are that there are five vessels with 77 passengers being held captive. But there has been a reduction in the number of passengers and vessels and many of them would have been captive for a very long time and we are not sure if there will be any resolution. Negotiations are still being done,” says Walker.
“The majority of incidents this year have occurred around the Gulf of Guinea along the west coast of Africa. Generally most people credit private security companies onboard as deterrents they provide, and the rate of adoption of the best management practices recommended by the International Maritime Bureau,” he says.
To avoid the pirates Foggitt says MSC follows routes along the west coast of Africa rather than risk being attacked en route from the Mediterranean.
“Cruising in South African waters never goes far north and in these seas there has never been any pirate activity. With huge international effort the pirate situation is very much under control so if anything the danger area has been controlled,” says Foggitt.
Once the fear of uncharted waters and the lack of provident ports is overcome, Africa has untapped potential for the cruise liner industry. As the industry continues to grow more and more ships are being built, it’s a reality that people need somewhere to escape and they are willing to pay for it.

Riding The Rough Seas  Off Africa

The tall, bulky player muscled onto the Nairobi rugby field, his 118kg figure towering over his teammates. Peter Nduati, a lock, was possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and was a key figure in the defense. As the game kicked off, a little girl’s eyes followed the oval ball at every try, kick and scrum.
At the end, she had an icy comment.
“Dad, but I didn’t see you touch the ball!” she said, catching her father flat-footed.
“She felt ashamed that I never touched the ball, but I explained to her that for those other guys to score, I had to scrum for the ball and defend,” says Nduati.
While embarrassing for a father, that moment remains at the core of Nduati’s management strategy at Resolution Health Group, which he founded a decade ago.
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As the chief executive officer of one of the biggest medical insurance providers in Kenya with operations across East Africa, he believes that teamwork and having each employee do what they do best, is the winning formula.
“The rugby strategy works for me. As a lock number five, you need to defend a lot and you need to trust your teammates holding you up, when you jump for the ball. When crashing into someone, you know the people behind you will protect you. My skill was strength. I was not fast, so I would offload the ball to the faster players. In business you need to know your weaknesses and bring on board people with the strengths you lack. I am not good in finance, and I am not detailed; I am a conceptual guy. So I got finance and operations people who are detailed,” he says.
In just 10 years, he has steered the company from a scrappy startup to a Ksh2.4 billion ($27.7 million) turnover machine, with plans to list the group on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) by 2015 and spread the ownership to more East Africans.
The journey to the top league, Nduati says, has been anything but smooth. When he started off in 2001, after quitting a senior job at a leading Nairobi-based health insurance company, he was armed only with a business plan he had developed in 1997. He took with him a bunch of clients and 17 employees to found First Benefits Ltd, which partnered with South African Metropolitan Health Group. The 40:60 partnership, however, did not last long and soon the restless entrepreneur found himself scouting for investors.
“I had written a business plan to set up an insurance company; not a health insurance company&#8230; When the Metropolitan partnership failed, I decided to actualize the plan,” he says.
Nduati, a chartered insurer and economics graduate, raised Ksh40 million ($461,405) in capital from family and two angel investors. Resolution Health East Africa was launched in November 2003, making it the first registered medical insurance provider in Kenya.
Turnover for the first year was $1 million from 3,000 members and topped $3 million in the second year. Growth averaged 50% annually until 2008, when post-election violence in Kenya pushed the company, like many others, into the red.
In 2009, Nduati acquired the shares of South Africa’s Universal Healthcare, which owned 25% of the company, to get the critical mass to attract cash-flash investors for capital to convert into a general insurance company. In 2010, Nduati eventually won over the African Development Corporation, which acquired 25% of his company for Ksh184 million ($2.1 million).
Then, in 2011, the Kenyan insurance law was amended, requiring health insurers to either convert into general insurance or become brokers. Three companies applied, and so far two, including Resolution, have been approved after raising Ksh300 million ($3.5 million), restructuring management and cutting owner-managers’ shareholding.
“I now hold only 20 percent shares as required by the rules,” Nduati says.
Even as a fully-fledged insurer, Resolution Insurance Company is not underwriting all general insurance products yet.
“We now provide all insurance covers employees require such as group life, group medical insurance, travel insurance, personal accident and employers liability, both group and individual.”
The company has subsidiaries in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and is currently setting up in South Sudan, supported by more than 400 agents and brokers are working on a pan-African strategy to push the group’s presence into more sub-Saharan Africa markets.
Even though he is a relatively new player in the industry, the group has a 20% market share in Kenya and is ranked 12th, by balance sheet size, in an industry of 43 players.
Nduati has been an industry trendsetter. He is credited for revolutionizing health insurance in Kenya. In 2007, he took a bold step that opened up medical coverage for people with HIV.
“We figured that an HIV-positive person complies most with doctors’ instructions and thus lowers the risk. So we designed a product that included HIV cover. Employers loved it, because it covered both those who had the virus and those who did not have it and did not require medical test before employment. This gave confidence to people that if you get it while on our program you are covered,” he says.
At the time, 17% of the Kenyan population was HIV-positive and the company simply spread the risk across the entire population, thus cushioning itself with the 83% who did not have the virus.
But, according to Nduati, that was not Resolution Health’s biggest milestone.
“The defining moment came when we started offering gynecological and maternity products in 2004. They were seen to be pro-feminine and because most budget decisions are made by ladies, it struck a positive chord. We grew by 65 percent that year,” he says.
Before the success, mistakes were made. First, he underestimated public apathy about insurance. Because people had lost money with current operators, few were willing to commit their cash to insurance. It took investments in lobbying and education to crack the market.
Besides winning several industry awards, Nduati finished second in the Entrepreneur of the Year category in the All Africa Business Leadership Awards last year.
As an entrepreneur, Nduati says you must focus on your vision and keep to your lane.
“We are aggressive in innovation and expansion. When we can find an acquisition target, we acquire. You must also employ well. Select right at lower level because these will be the next leaders. We run an internal leadership program to build leadership skills,” says Nduati, who owns four other businesses in security, logistics, music and human resources.
With insurance penetration in Kenya at a mere 3%, Nduati is combining the stealth of a rugby player and speed of a horse to grow his market share. The fact that less than one million people service private health insurance in Kenya has powered a 25% annual growth in the industry, and over 40% growth for Resolution Health.
In East Africa, insurance penetration is just 2%, while economies are growing at an impressive 5%.
“The challenge is not growth of insurance. Its management is,” says Nduati.

Say Yes Make Millions

In his heavy French accent, a six-foot-tall businessman addresses a group of entrepreneurs.
“Do your ideas have conviction? Are they feasible? Eighty to ninety percent of ideas usually aren’t. You need to transform your vision and ideas into conviction for yourself then you can convince customers, financiers and the world,” he says.
It seems like the ordinary talk given by a seasoned executive to young ducklings in the world of entrepreneurship, but encountering Charles Sirois on this warm Nairobi evening is no ordinary experience. With his boisterous personality, this 58-year-old Canadian businessman, best known in the global telecom industry, is on a mission to grow entrepreneurs across the developing world. His first footprints across the African continent were through the Enablis Network, which he founded in 2004.
“I am fascinated by entrepreneurship and technology. Technology without an entrepreneur goes nowhere because it’s just a field of dreams. I have seen so many technologies that sit on the shelves because no entrepreneur ran with them to make them a reality. Entrepreneurs are able to transform an idea, a concept, and technology to an enterprise thereby creating a tremendous amount of wealth,” he says.
Sirois has indeed created wealth he began a paging business, in 1984, in a small, remote town in North Canada with eight employees and $150,000 in revenue annually. By 2001, his business, Teleglobe, had 16,000 employees in 52 countries.
Conviction in his ideas seems to drive his business. In 1990, Sirois had the idea that cellular would be the best communication network in emerging countries because building poles and hoisting cables would be difficult.
“I was sure they would go straight to wireless systems but everyone said I was crazy. As a result, I was the first foreigner to build telecom systems in China, Brazil, India, Czech Republic, Romania and several others. This was before Vodafone’s exploits. Again, I was the first person to adopt the GSM standard for mobile phones in North America, when everyone was on CDMA and quickly got involved in the development of satellites and undersea cables,” he says.
He made a famous $2 billion mistake and when FORBES AFRICA asks him whether this was one of conviction too, he laughs.
“I was so convinced of that idea that I didn’t listen to people around me. I believe in conviction but at times, one needs to take a break. I was wrong and it was painful,” he says.
The mistake was that he bought a company called Excel that had a sales force of one million people. He was interested in the retail business and thought it would be good to use an already existing multilevel marketing force to sell internet services globally.
“The operational risk was too high and I was slow to react. I made the mistake of not understanding that a concept can be right but complex. Managing one million sales people daily is complex. The pack of cards crumbled and we had to do a $2 billion write down. As the largest shareholder of Teleglobe, my balance sheet took a hit, coupled with the internet burst, even though we managed to sell off Teleglobe, including Excel, for $10 billion,” he says.
In 2003, having sold all his telecom businesses, he created a family equity corporation, Telesystems, that backs technology entrepreneurs.
“I firmly believe in technology and entrepreneurship so we have minority and major stakes in 20 enterprises. We hope that many of them will become global enterprises,” he says.
His convictions once again led him to present the idea of Enablis at the 2002 G8 Summit, in Canada. His task had been to find a new way to alleviate poverty in emerging countries. His idea was to have an organization that identifies and develops people with the entrepreneurship drive to increase their contributions. He says that job creation through entrepreneurs rather than governments is the best solution.
“Create a person whose nature is to create jobs first for themselves then for others; then develop the job creator and sustainable wealth comes about,” he says.
The G8 countries supported his theory and because he couldn’t let the idea sit on the shelf, he ran with it.
“I wanted money to build a prototype but the Canadian government said if they gave me money, I had to start in Africa. In 2004, I choose the easiest place, South Africa, and the easiest city, Cape Town. It doesn’t quite reflect the real cities of Africa but I had to start somewhere with the least resistance.”
He says that the Enablis Network develops better entrepreneurs through three pillars of identication, which is why they hold business plan competitions. Enablis develops entrepreneurs through a special recipe of networking, sharing experiences amongst peers, and capacity building through workshops, coaches and mentors. It also assists them with finance by providing endorsements and guarantees to banks so the entrepreneurs can secure loans.
“I strongly believe that a grant should never be given to an entrepreneur. They should build their business in the real world and this doesn’t include getting free money. It’s simply not how you develop a strong entrepreneur. It’s like developing an athlete—you need serious training, not a headache today or skipping training tomorrow. Provide capital by providing access,” he says.
The formula seems to be working as Enablis has grown from the five members in Cape Town to 2,600 in Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, Mozambique, Ghana and, just recently, Argentina.
“My goal now is to develop Enablis across South America, to create one family of entrepreneurs, who can grow and help each other by growing better enterprises thus creating wealth. I don’t get financial rewards from this but giving back my time feels good and exciting. Each time I make a trip through the continent, I get so energized sharing ideas and experiences. They don’t have to make the same mistakes I did and can grow faster,” he says.
Sirois says that entrepreneurship is about shared experiences. He says that it saves a lot of time in business if people simply share the solutions they have found to problems. He notes that Enablis has developed mentors from Canada, who use email and Skype once a month to exchange ideas and share with African entrepreneurs.
“African start-ups face the same challenges to begin as all others in the world with one exception—their access to resources is more difficult. Africans practice extreme entrepreneurship due to the current environment, but they are succeeding. Yes, there is war, poverty, disease but there are also good politicians, talented entrepreneurs and vast opportunities,” he says.
“If I could turn back the clock to do it all over again, I would begin in Africa as an entrepreneur.”

The Entrepreneur Coach, Who Lost $2 Billion

Tea is a global tradition, with countries all around the world having different values attached to the beverage. Tea is the world’s second most popular beverage, with different societies drinking it for pleasure, for healing purposes or to spend time with friends and family.
Yswara, a luxury tea company based in Johannesburg, South Africa, was launched in 2012. Its founder and CEO, Swaady Martin-Leke, a national of Côte d’Ivoire, hand-selects the tea from the various African countries, to incorporate into her company’s collection of 23 varieties of tea.
“I created Yswara out of the frustration of seeing one of Africa’s abundant commodities a victim of the commodity trap, [it’s] an international export with no to limited value-add done in Africa,” she says.
Yswara products aim to embody the spirit of Africa; they are all handcrafted and organically-inspired, with African provenance and cultural cachet.
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According to Martin-Leke, specialty tea is the fastest-growing segment within the industry, with gross margins above 60%. She says that consumers are increasingly looking for diverse origins and flavors of teas, and the niché gourmet tea market has only a few luxury brands. Most tea brands are in the premium and mass-market segments.
The growth of the Africa tea market will be driven primarily by an increasing consumer focus on health and wellness, and the continuing emergence of epicurean preferences in food and beverages.
“The gourmet tea market has been traditionally dominated by old French and English tea brands such as Mariage Frères, Dammann Frères, Fortnum &amp; Mason and Tea Palace. TWG from Singapore is challenging the French dominance over gourmet teas and demonstrated their increased popularity in both emerging and developed markets. TWG recorded $30 million in revenue in its first full year of operation after an investment of $10 million,” says Martin-Leke.
This curator of precious African teas wants to make her offering a prestigious product through educating customers on the quality and benefits of African teas, by creating an experience that includes African tea rituals, African-made tea paraphernalia and elegant packaging.
“I outsourced various suppliers such as Andrew Burke of Pure Publishing to work on the creative concepts thus providing Yswara with a brand identity. I also worked with Raynaldyne Molon, who has contributed to the development of international Nespresso, the redesigning the lobby for Victor Hugo and the restaurant company for L’Oréal Produits de Luxe and other clients. I also have great mentors who are experts in the field and guided me, such as Wilfried Guerrand, the head of Hermes Woman. I want Yswara to be placed next to Hermes soon, in the global markets,” she says.
Martin-Leke sources Yswara’s tea from South Africa, Malawi, Rwanda and Kenya with plans to source from Burundi, Cameroon, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. All her staff are women and the suppliers must be 75% female-owned or managed.
“The gourmet tea market in Africa will disappear if brands like Yswara and government initiatives in Africa, such as in Rwanda, don’t support the promotion of better quality tea. Africa will end up producing low-quality tea for mass consumption. Such teas are lower margins for our farmers,” she says.
The thirst for luxury goods in Africa requires in-depth understanding of the market’s mechanics, which differ from mass market businesses.
While Africa has more millionaires than Russia—the number of African millionaires rose 3.9% last year, faster growth than any region except Latin America—the majority of them shop in Europe for luxury goods because there is a very small market in Africa.
Africa’s rapid growth, booming cities and an aspirational middle-class are prompting luxury brands to enter untapped markets across the continent, although the difficulty of finding suitable sites for luxury stores means progress could be slow.
Building an African luxury brand has its challenges. Yswara hopes to be 100% made-in-Africa, by 2014. The main challenge is that Africa’s industrial setting is not accustomed to producing high-quality goods produced at a competitive cost, compared to China or India.
“We struggled to find suppliers who source or manufacture their products in Africa. Then, when world-class quality is met, the consistency is not guaranteed. For example, our tea tin manufacturer just closed this month and there is no alternative in sub-Saharan Africa,” she says.
Sub-standard quality affects a brand and makes it difficult to compete against international luxury brands.
“The cost of exporting outside of Africa is still too high. This is hampering growth of internet sales as well as opportunities to export out of Africa globally,” says Martin-Leke.
The South African specialty tea market only represents $250 million. With limited competition and an aggressive market entry strategy, based on opinion shapers and intensive education campaigns on tea quality, Yswara could grow revenues up to $8 million, or $12 million by year five of operations.
Yswara is targeting the international tea consumers, who are looking for a new tea experience and discover Africa as a tea region. Yswara will also expand globally from year four of operations [to Europe and the States]. We will start with online penetration and expand into direct and indirect retail.”
Packaging is a crucial element of a luxury brand. The brand stands for authenticity, refinement, timeless elegance and an Afropolitan lifestyle.
“The packaging is a key element of a luxury product; it is what the customer picks up. It is, together with the name, the carrier of the product’s luxury,” says Martin-Leke.
Yswara’s pay-off line is “Made in Africa for the World”, and the distinctive African wax Ankara print recalls the ambiance of West African culture.
Martin-Leke is already shipping her luxury tea around the world via her online store and online partners like africacandy.com.
“When going into the luxury market, push the barriers of excellence in Africa… and participate in making the continent a recognized destination for luxury goods rivaling its international counterparts. Africa is too often viewed as a place of low-quality goods and lack of refinement, while our thousands of years of culture, history, know-how and heritage demonstrate that we can do more than producing crafts and ethnic goods,” says Martin-Leke.

Queen Of The Luxury Leaf

It’s one of those hot, cloudless days that make Cape Town residents smile inwardly at the good fortune that found them living in this particular corner of South Africa. About an hour outside Cape Town lies Stellenbosch, home to some of the country’s oldest vineyards, fruit farms and picturesque Dutch gable houses. Somewhere deep in the heart of this valley, there is a faint buzzing from warehouses filled with millions of flies, hatching, reproducing and dying. Down the corridor from the flies lie giant cement troughs filled with larvae, writhing and eating their way through rotten food, unaware that death is nigh. These larvae are destined to be processed into chicken and fish feed. For chickens diet of dried is lunch.
The man behind all of this at AgriProtein Technologies is Jason Drew. He is hoping to penetrate the South African agricultural processing market.
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“Flies feed on the blood from animal slaughterhouses, the fly larvae is in turn eaten by the chickens farmed for human consumption. Since the industrial revolution, chickens have not been eating fly larvae. In order to make the process sustainable, you have to close the loop,” says Drew.
The loop is focused on nutrient recycling, and Drew argues that it will become commonplace in years to come.
“If humanity is to survive without the starvation that has marked human history, until the last 50 years, it will most likely be a necessity. As we move out of the era of the Industrial Revolution and into the Sustainability Revolution, capitalists and environmentalists will become natural bedfellows, not the adversaries they once were in the old world order,” says Drew.
He is an environmental warrior incarnate. In his previous life, he led one of South Africa’s biggest online service outsourcing companies, Dialogue Group Holdings, to an initial public offering on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and then guided the company around the various perils of the country’s second online boom. Drew served as CEO of the company and presided over its growth to 3,500 staff members and into five countries in Southern Africa. In 2008, a 40-year-old Drew suffered two heart attacks. He ignored the first, but the second made him pay attention.
“My doctor told me ‘You may not believe in stress, but your body does.’ We had owned our farm in the Tulbagh Valley for many years. After my second heart attack, my wife insisted I leave the rat race and we move down there permanently,” he says.
Drew and his wife spent the next three years traveling around Asia, South America, Australia and the Middle East and investigated various ecological principles in agricultural methods. While in Saudi Arabia, he spent time researching the feeding and breeding of cattle in agriculture cooperatives and became fascinated by the flies circling the pools of blood in the animals’ slaughterhouses. The investigation led him closer to home to a chicken farm in the Western Cape.
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“I met the slaughterhouse owner and followed the process through to the lake of blood behind the shed, which was surrounded by millions of flies. It occurred to me that it takes as much water, land and fuel to produce the chicken that we throw away as it does to produce the bits we eat. And we throw away a lot.”
Drew learnt that the chicken farmer had been involved in some field work done by Elsje Pieterse, head of monogastric nutrition in the department of animal science at Stellenbosch University, who was investigating the recycling of animal waste by-products using flies.
“And so began my love affair with flies,” says Drew.
Drew was joined by his brother, David, and the pair joined forces with local entomologists, food nutritionists and the research unit at Stellenbosch University, an endeavor which would result in the establishment of AgriProtein Technologies.
The company is currently in the process of completing production trials and testing system elements, which are intended as input into computer-aided design for full-scale factory producing chicken and fish feed from s fly larvae. The factory will be based in the Western Cape and is due to be commissioned during the third quarter of this year. It is expected to be completed by the end of 2013 at an estimated cost of $6 million. Fifty percent of this capital will come from shareholders at AgriProtein Technologies, while the remainder will be sourced from new ones.
“We are hoping that once our model is proved bankable, we will be able to go into a debt-equity combination. This is a straight forward commercial activity, but one that also looks to repair damage done to the environment,” Drew says.
The dichotomy of capitalism and environmentalism as well as the near-hero status of the humble housefly were first explored by Drew in his 2011 book The Protein Crunch (co-written by David Lorimer). The theme was followed by The Story of the Fly and How it Could Save the World (co-written by Justine Joseph) in 2012. In his latest book, Drew theorizes that the fly could join the ranks of fish, pigs, chickens, sheep and cows as the sixth and most numerously industrially-farmed animal in the world. The Lord of the Flies could end up king.

The Lord Of The Flies

It was a rough existence. He was on the road most of the time, knocking on doors to peddle insurance. At the end of a long day, he slept in his car and freshened up the next morning in the grimy toilet of a petrol station. Today, Fred Robertson’s life couldn’t be more different. As executive chairman of Brimstone Investment Corporation, he manages a company with a market capitalization of more than $432 million.
From early on, Robertson knew that only hard work and persistence would move him up in life. He and his eight brothers and sisters grew up in the infamous District Six of South Africa’s second largest city, Cape Town, from which they were forcibly removed in the 1970s, when the apartheid government crushed the economic power of the country’s black populace.
Robertson’s parents, who were both workers, were struggling to make ends meet.
“Everyone had to pitch in. I always had a job throughout school. I used to sell newspapers and fruit and vegetables. I worked in movie houses and sold ice-cream, chips and chocolates during intervals,” says Robertson.
After he left school, Robertson first worked as an unqualified teacher, then attended a teacher training college and taught for another few years at a township high school. In 1980, Robertson became an insurance salesman for financial services giant Old Mutual. For five years, he sold health and retirement policies from door to door.
“It was the hardest job you could ever imagine,” he says.
Fast-forward to 2013. Robertson is one of South Africa’s finest entrepreneurs and has climbed to the top of the very company where he first started out: he is a director of the Old Mutual Emerging Markets board as well as a shareholder. At Brimstone and its subsidiaries—Lion of Africa Insurance, Sea Harvest fishing company and House of Monatic corporate wear—Robertson employs more than 3,000 people.
“I am chuffed about that. I never could have imagined I would do so well,” he says.
It was a long way to get there. First, Robertson worked his way up from salesman to managing one of Old Mutual’s branches. A few years later, in February 1990, he decided to exchange job security for the thrill of launching his own business, insurance brokerage Commlife, which he later expanded to include financial services.
“I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I wanted to make it by myself,” he explains.
The 1990s was an exciting time in South Africa, when apartheid was finally coming to an end. A day after Robertson started Commlife, the African National Congress (ANC), which had been operating underground, was unbanned. Two weeks later, Mandela was released from prison.
“He actually slept at my house a couple of weeks after his release. I was close to people in the ANC and fortunate enough to be trusted. My proudest moment was when Mandela was holding my baby daughter on his lap,” Robertson remembers.
The incident settled his conviction that the time had come for South Africa’s downtrodden majority.
“I had a sense the world was going to open up,” he says.
Together with his accountant Mustaq Brey, Robertson started to organize breakfast shows to create networking opportunities for business people in Cape Town.
“The shows built up and marketed our firms. We noticed that South Africa was changing on a political and economical level. So we put our heads together,” Robertson says.
Robertson along with Brey, who is now Brimstone’s CEO, each took out a loan of $2,700 and raised money from their client bases, who were mainly ordinary working-class men and women.
“People showed tremendous faith in us with the little money they had. We knew we had to work extra hard. We could not disappoint them,” Robertson says.
They didn’t. The numerous small investments quickly added up to a nice sum. Robertson and Brey launched Brimstone in 1995 as a community-controlled empowerment group with an initial capital outlay of $325,000. Four years later, when they decided to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), the portfolio’s worth had increased exponentially, reaching $54 million.
The occasion of the listing was a day Robertson will never forget. In honor of the hundreds of community investors, who had made Brimstone’s success possible, Robertson decided to arrange a live feed of the listing via a satellite link from the JSE to the Good Hope Centre in District Six, where he grew up. Surrounded by community investors, friends and family, Robertson watched on two big screens how Brimstone’s shares climbed up to $0.13 that day.
“It was a very proud moment. The atmosphere was ecstatic,” he says.
Over the years, investors have been rewarded handsomely for the trust they placed in Robertson and Brey. Brimstone’s share price increased a thousand-fold in the past 14 years, with profits up more than 90% at the end of this financial year and dividend income flow of more than $16 million. Of that, Brimstone paid out $6.5 million to shareholders, reserving the rest to repay debt and for new investments.
Major payouts like these are a key part of Brimstone’s empowerment philosophy, Robertson says: “More than half of the dividends go directly to black Africans. We have 20 non-profit organizations that are shareholders and more than a million beneficiaries. So the money is spread wide. We believe firmly that it’s not just about profit. We also have to contribute to transformation while doing business. Wealth creation is important, but wealth sharing is as important.”

From Salesman To Millionare

It was early morning, the sun was blazing. Tommie van Zyl walks over to Wilson Mashola, one of the drivers at the farm, standing near the entrance of a warehouse, where thousands of tomatoes are being loaded onto a yellow truck. Tommie greets Mashola in his mother tongue, Khelobedu, the language of this part of Limpopo, in northern South Africa. The language is similar to northern-Sotho, seTswana and Tshivenda and it’s not easy to learn. The two hug and share a few jokes. Tommie turns to say that Mashola has been a driver on the family farm for 32 years.
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Tommie inherited this knack of communication from his father. In a country with 11 official languages, Tommie speaks three tongues of the people of Limpopo, as well as his mother tongue Afrikaans, and English. He’s a strange millionaire, dressed in a plain blue shirt, chinos and veldskoene—hardy shoes typically worn by South African farmers. At first glance you wouldn’t think Tommie is chief executive officer of this massive multi million rand tomato farm.
It was his choice, when he returned from studying in the States in 1986, to shun the khakis worn by many a farmer.
“I always ask what we can do to remain relevant. Some of them still wear it, but I felt in order to be one with the people, you need to change stereotypes about Afrikaans farmers,” he says.
Nestled in the valley of Mooketsi around 400km north of Johannesburg, the farm is the home of the ZZ2 brand. It’s famous across the continent for tomatoes—harvesting around 170,000 tons a year from 2,000 hectares (ha).
The name dates back to 1906 after the end of the war when farmers were compelled to get a registered number with which to brand their cattle. The authorities gave each of the van Zyl brothers a number from ZZ1 to ZZ4. ZZ2 was the brand of the second eldest brother Burt, grandfather to Bertie and great grandfather to Tommie—who used it as the trademark for what was to become the biggest tomato farm in the southern hemisphere.
Tommie’s father, Bertie, left school at 16 to take over the farm from his ailing father. In those days, the van Zyl’s had a mixed crop, mainly potatoes, and life was difficult. Bertie realized that his neighbor made more money from tomatoes than potatoes and convinced his father to change. The first crop was harvested four years later.
The climate in the Mooketsi valley was just right. Tomatoes flourished all year round and soon, the farm was rich. Over the years, the van Zyl’s diversified into avocados, onions, stone fruit and beef.
The company also has farms in Musina, Limpopo, near the border with Zimbabwe. They grow apples and pears in Ceres and Riebeek-West in the Western Cape as well as Langkloof in the Eastern Cape. Marketing manager Clive Garret says a new crop, is dates, farmed in Hakiesdoorn in the Karas region of southern Namibia. The company hopes to harvest their first crop of dates within the next year.
Bertus Venter, Production manager and agronomist at ZZ2, says dates are in high demand during the Islamic month of fasting, Ramadan, due to their high energy and nutritional properties. The climate in the southern hemisphere allows for the growing of fresh dates to be available during that holy month.
“As far as business growth is concerned, we’re constantly looking at how we should adapt our business. We benchmark ourselves against the best in the world and we will adapt our system to the well adapted to the environment we’re in. We’re firmly established in South Africa, but also where it makes economic sense in neighboring countries,” says Tommie.
It’s been a long road to the tomato millions for Tommie. While growing up, he started to learn the trade, though he says he didn’t walk into managing the company.
“I didn’t get the job because I was the son of the owner. My father was a very strict man and he didn’t want us to go to school.”
Bertie wanted Tommie to stop going to school after grade eight, but with the help of neighbors and uncles, he persuaded his father to allow him to study.
Tommie completed an undergraduate B.Comm degree in economics and agricultural economics at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape. When he found he couldn’t play any other sport, he opted for boxing, gaining full sports colors while studying.
Following his completion of a postgraduate honors degree, he was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship to learn for a Master of Science in food and resource economics at the University of Florida, in the States. While there, he was also awarded membership to Gamma Sigma Delta, an international honor society dedicated to recognizing accomplishments of leaders in agriculture and the related sciences, at the very least he vindicated his neighbors and uncles.
On completion of his studies in 1986, Tommie returned to the family farm. He started off as a buying clerk in the purchasing office, expanding his responsibilities and started to farm a year later. At the age of 27, in 1992, he cut his teeth and became managing director for operations, property and investments.
“But we had a very interesting managing system. I had the title and the responsibility, but not necessarily at that time, the authority. I grew into authority and probably since 2001, we established proper governing structures that gave me full authority as chief executive officer, reporting to our board of directors, but since 1992, I had the title of chief executive officer,” he says.
The father of four took over the reins of the multi million rand conglomerate in 2005 after his father died. His son, Burtie, is following in the family footsteps, starting off as a junior project manager and coming through the ranks to his current position of general manager for the avocado plantations. One of Tommie’s twin daughters is studying genetics and horticulture and the other geography and environmental science; his eldest daughter is a jewelry designer.
When he is not farming, the 54-year-old enjoys reading books on philosophy, business and economics, and sometimes takes long walks through the countless rows of tomato fields.
The saying, never judge a book by its cover or a tomato by its skin, couldn’t be truer when Tommie suggests a helicopter flight over the farm. He jumps into the pilot seat and starts the rotor blades—a farmer of many talents. He obtained his private pilot’s license with night rating for an airplane and more recently a helicopter license. From the sky, the tomato and avocados look like neatly laid-out football fields.
From here, tomatoes are exported to Reunion, Dubai, Seychelles and Oman, while around 3,000 tons of avocados go to Europe. The rest of the produce is sold through the fresh markets in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Their biggest competitor is Azura in Morroco.
Around 20 trucks are on the road daily, transporting nearly 4,000 tons per week to a warehouse in Johannesburg, where they are divided and dispatched to various stores across the country, and to sellers. Tommie says hawkers are one of their biggest customers. They buy products cheaply in bulk and sell them on streets and small shops.
ZZ2 also has a commercial herd, consisting mainly of Pinzgauers, which roam on non-arable land, for the breeding of weaners on high-valued stud cattle. The farm is also involved in wildlife conservation with fenced conservancies measuring 23,721ha. The game includes white rhino, nyala, gemsbuck, red hartebeest, giraffe, impala, kudu, Burchell’s zebra and eland.
The livestock alone is worth R30 million ($3.3 million) and the game R8.5 million ($940,000).
In a time when many of the country’s mines are being lambasted of raking in huge profits at the expense of the people, ZZ2  built small villages for the workers and their families nearer to the farms.
Tommie says each farm has its own clinic as they are far away from the nearest hospital. They provide bus services for workers’ children to a nearby primary school and also support a farm school and 13 créche’s for around 300.
Each farm has its own vehicle workshop where the school buses and the trucks get serviced by professionals.
ZZ2 employs around 8,000 people in South Africa, of whom around 6,500 are based at the headquarters. The farm also employs people in neighboring countries from Zimbabwe and Mozambique, who carry out seasonal work.
With over 60,000ha—and counting—of farming land, ZZ2 turns over around R900,000 ($98,657) for tomatoes alone and nearly a R1.1 billion ($120 million) for the entire company. But the tomato farmer says this is humbling.
“When you think you’re king, you’re paw-paw, when you think you’re paw-paw, you’re king. I’m very intrigued by value in a broad sense. Money doesn’t really impress us. We’re impressed by the value of the things we produce and the meaning that we’re creating for many people,” says Tommie.
As the autumn sun sets over the farm, the workers pack their tools and dust off their boots, as one shift ends and a new one begins at the entrance of the warehouse. Looking far away over the horizon Tommie would like to employ more of them next year and expand the tomato business. In these recessionary times, there can be few businesses that can look at the sunset and say that.

$120 Million From The Red

In just 18 months, a few modest farms on the plains of the Eastern Cape, South Africa will transform into the third largest wind farm in sub-Saharan Africa. The Dorper Wind Farm will produce 100 megawatts (MW) of energy a year.
For the owners of Rainmaker Energy Projects, it’s hard to imagine what 40 towering wind turbines will look like, but Luke Callcott-Stevens and Gavin James are spending R2.5 billion ($274 million) to find out.
“You build a wind farm in 18 months… after four or five years of hard work,” says Callcott-Stevens.
It was New Year in 2009 when James and Callcott-Stevens—friends since university—decided that they were tired of their jobs and wanted to make it on their own.
At the time Callcott-Stevens was looking for wind farm sites for Australian outfit Macquarie Capital, and James was a lawyer. Shortly after—with a third partner in tow, former Macquarie engineer, Doug Jenman—Rainmaker breezed into the market with government tenders in mind.
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That year, the South African government declared its intentions to buy renewable energy at favorable tariffs through its Renewable Energy Feed-In Tariff (REFIT) program. The program gazetted wind energy, promising R1.24 ($0.14) per kilowatt-hour (kWh).
“When we started this out, we couldn’t tell anyone what we were doing and who we were. We were all competing for sites, if you want to go into wind farms now you would have to go and buy it from someone else. But at that point in time we were in frontier country,” says Callcott-Stevens.
The rush to the wild wind of the west had begun with the force of a Californian gold rush. Many companies were looking for coastal sites near Cape Town in the Western Cape and Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, where wind is strong. Rainmaker went its own way inland into the Eastern Cape.
“I racked up 100,000kms driving in a year, just looking for different sites but we couldn’t find another that was as ideal as Dorper,” Callcott-Stevens says.
The site has 10,000 hectares of flat grassland on top of an escarpment flanked by a mountain range, which channels wind to Dorper.
“The whole escarpment is windy, but this is a particularly windy part of that windy escarpment because of this funnel,” he says.
Along with strong wind—which, coincidentally, is at its strongest in winter, when South Africa demands most of its electricity—a wind farm needs to be close to a distribution line to connect to the national grid, South Africa’s national power generator Eskom.
Unlike other companies, Rainmaker is in the unique position that if it wins more phase bids it does not have to look for new sites. With its space, Dorper Wind Farm simply has to construct more 125-meter-high turbines. It has the planning permission to put enough turbines to generate 560MW
Rainmaker has permission to use a 400kV transmission line, which could revive the Canadian Alcan smelter, in Port Elizabeth, which was abandoned because of the country’s power crisis in 2008.
This means that they have the capacity to feed over 1,000MW of energy into the grid.
All seemed lovely in the wind farm industry. In two years, the company struck a deal with an equity partner, Sumitomo Corporation and secured huge bank loans. The Japanese company, says Callcott-Stevens, is a good partner since it helped build one of the largest onshore wind farms in the world: Shepherd’s Flat Wind Farm in Oregon, in the States.
Then in February 2011, disaster struck when the government scrapped REFIT. It was declared an unfair and uncompetitive tender process. This meant a lot of people who had procured loans and deals with renewable energy companies were left high and dry. Government officials mooted a new tariff of 99c/kWh ($0.11/kWh), which meant for many the cost of building farms was just not feasible.
There was a lull for nine months. Rainmaker carried on acquiring loans and negotiating deals with wind turbine companies. Other companies were throwing in their towel at this point.
“We were committed, we were in, we had put our lives on the line,” says Callcott-Stevens.
In June 2011, the wind picked up. The South African Department of Energy (DoE) announced that R47 billion ($5,17 billion) would be thrown into the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Programme (REIPPP). The six-phase program picked up where REFIT left off. The government announced it was starting a new bidding process for private business investors to apply for tenders. Investors could procure spots to sell electricity back to the government, not at one set rate, but at a bid price of lower than 115c/kWh ($0.13/kWh).
Eight wind energy projects were chosen, Dorper Wind Farm was one of them. After 2015, REIPPP aims to provide 3,625MW of renewable, clean energy for the country. The largest coal plants in South Africa, like the under construction Medupi coal plant in Limpopo, will generate 4,800MW.
“The next round, we could see a further R7 billion ($700 million) in development and going forward you could theoretically have R30 billion ($3,3 billion) going into infrastructure development in this area in the coming future,” says Callcott-Stevens.
Renewable energy could be a game changer. Ninety seven percent of South Africa’s electricity grid, which has capacity to provide 43,000MW, relies on coal. Even then, it is struggling. Eskom has warned that with overdue maintenance this will be at 33,000MW. This winter could see rolling blackouts; during peak demand periods South Africans can use up to 38,000MW.
A coal plant is able to produce 40 times the amount of energy a wind farm can but new coal power plants will produce power at a higher cost than wind, particularly in South Africa.
According to Ayanda Nakedi, Eskom’s general manager in Renewable Energy, the cost of the rollling blackouts of 2008 was R75/kWh ($8/kWh). This is 84 times the cost of wind power today.
But people should be cautious with wind energy, especially when it comes to solving blackouts, according to Chris Yelland, director of EE Publishers.
“Let us just say that you build a 100MW wind farm. So when the wind is blowing flat out, the wind is going to generate its peak of 100MW&#8230;. The reality is it very often generates at an average of 20 to 25 percent. Although it may generate on average 25MW, for a considerable amount of time it’s producing below 25MW. And this makes wind a big problem, so when you may want the power, you may not get it, and when you don’t want the power, you might get it,” Yelland says.
Currently, South Africa lies near the bottom of the global wind power league. In three years according to Nakedi, it will have climbed to fifteenth. A large slice of this could come from the windswept optimists of Dorper Farm.
It may look easy but risk stalks a wind farm. Bids are not guaranteed.
“For every guy constructing a wind farm there are 20 guys who spent a lot of money, who are nowhere, who don’t have a project,” says Callcott-Stevens.
“We could be hit by a strike onsite, or maybe our turbines could sink in the sea, or we miss our dates when we have to be connected to the grid by, and we stand to lose a lot of money. That could significantly affect our returns over the long-term. There have been projects, in America, where blades have cracked on a wind farm. But these risks get less and less once you have been awarded status under the REIPPP up until the point when you have finished construction,” says Callcott-Stevens.
Further costly delays stem from the administration of REIPPP.  According to Yelland, the DoE needs to be cautious when signing 20-year long contracts under the REIPPP.
“Look at long-term supply contracts, like Eskom with BHP Billiton. It now turns out 10 years down the line that Eskom is locked into selling energy that they now regret. If we buy into these energies on a long-term basis the same could happen,” he says.
So far all phase bids have been delayed at sometime or other. But Callcott-Stevens says that the system has been merely ironing out its wrinkles.
“There have been problems and there are still problems but if you look at where we are coming from, South Africa was a totally regulated power market. It takes a long time to deregulate a market. They did this, relatively quickly; we signed our PPAs [Power Purchase Agreements] last November. Effectively power was deregulated in South Africa,” says Callcott-Stevens.
So, if you want to be a wind farmer, all you need is R2.5 billion ($278 million), an open desolate plain to put your mills on, a few years of patience to win over your investors and a bit of luck, from then on, it’s a breeze.

Tag: June 2013

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