Last year, South Africa’s aviation sector contributed R74 billion ($6.6 billion) to the country’s annual GDP and sustained around 230,000 jobs across the entire value chain, making it the largest on the continent.
However, the safety of the industry was questioned when allegations of death threats and illegal aircrafts operating without airworthiness certificates were made against the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in October.
These claims were sparked when a parliament reply revealed that only 42% of the aircraft in the CAA register have been issued with airworthiness certificates.
This certificate verifies that an aircraft is safe to fly and without such documentation, an aircraft should not be able to operate. Aviation in the country is divided into many subsections, including the South African Civil Aviation Authority (SA CAA), the Commercial Aviation Association of Southern Africa (CAASA) and the Recreation Aviation Administration of South Africa (RAASA).
When asked by a member of the opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), the minister of transport, Dipuo Peters, revealed that there are 12,500 registered aircraft in the CAA but only 5,300 have been issued with airworthiness certificates.
Negative headlines swarmed the media and the CAA quickly released a statement denying the allegations. They claim that the information from parliament was taken out of context.
According to Leon Dillman, the CEO of CAASA, the details that were provided to Peters and her shadow minister were incomplete. Peters was, however, correct in saying that 42% of aircrafts registered with the CAA have airworthiness certificates. That 42% consists of all commercial planes and airlines. However, what the minister failed to mention was that aircraft used for different purposes qualify for different types of certificates.
The remaining 52% of the aircraft on the register have authority to fly certificates and are typically used for personal or recreational purposes or are vintage or ex-military aircraft. Dillman added that there are fewer than a handful of aircraft that might not be accounted for after being sold, exported or written off and this is something that just needs to updated on the system.
Dillman believes that the biggest problem in the CAA is their inability to process airworthiness certificates efficiently.
“If you do a modification on an aircraft, the process at the CAA, in my books, takes too long. They need to streamline this process as it’s causing issues within the industry,” he says.
One of the biggest allegations the CAA is facing is the whereabouts of the general manager of safety operations, Anton Richman. He disappeared when he received death threats, after reportedly running investigations within CAA. After asking about Richman’s employment status, and who is currently fulfilling his role, the DA received no feedback. The political party declined to comment on the matter as they are continuing with investigations.
Richman says he has resigned but denies running any investigation within the CAA.
“I wanted to pursue a career change, which I have done, following five and a half years as the general manager of air safety operations and two years before that as advisor to the CEO. The director of civil aviation and the board of the CAA were fully supportive of eradicating fraud in the organization and it was in that context that I was taking disciplinary action against an employee in the division I was responsible for,” he says.
“It was during my notice period, that I received threats against me and my family. The matter was referred to the relevant authorities for investigation. The CAA was highly supportive of me and the wellbeing of my family during that difficult time. As a result of the threats, it was agreed that I serve the remainder of my notice period working from home. I left on good terms with the CAA and I support the action that the leadership of the organization has taken to ensure good governance and legal compliance by its employees.”
Colin Jordaan was asked to stand as CEO of the CAA, after their first major audit by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) at the end of 2007, to get the organization up to standard and pass the re-audit.
“We spent a lot of time making sure that the team that was there for the re-audit understood the bigger picture,” says Jordaan.
During his time as CEO, the CAA passed their second audit and retained their Category 1 status.
Jordaan says that safety within the aviation industry in South Africa is not in question and that if there was something to worry about it would be dealt with immediately by the various governing organizations.
He, however, does share Dillman’s views on improving the process of obtaining and renewing certificates. Jordaan says many pilots have become frustrated with the gruelling process of taking care of their certificates. Some are even opting to register and renew in other countries where the process is less complicated and faster.
Jordaan also mentions problems within the CAA regarding its board members and management.
“You need people that have respect in the aviation industry. Somebody that is doing oversight on SAA needs to have experience flying an Airbus A340 rather than just a simulator and doing a course in Talos. You need to have credibility, that’s the bottom line.”
All questions surrounding the issues of safety in the aviation industry have been put to rest and all numbers were accounted for. The CAA scored very high on its most recent audit by the ICAO and there do not seem to be any concerns around safety at this stage. However, one thing that would be appreciated by some in the industry is  the improvement of the certification process.

Flying Through A Storm

Sam Jonah has broken rocks miles underground and brokered deals over the boardroom table. He’s advised world leaders and discovered a passion for parrots. He is probably one of the few men in the world to be knighted in London nearly 30 years after sweating as a miner in the searing heat, miles beneath the country of his birth.
It all began in 1949, Jonah was born in a military camp in Kibi, Ghana; his father—a sergeant major and World War II veteran, served in the Royal West African Frontier Force. Soon after, Jonah Senior left the army and set up a construction company. The family moved to Obuasi where Jonah went to school. It was after high school that Jonah made the surprising decision to work underground at Ashanti Goldfields Corporation’s (Ashanti) Obuasi mine, the only mine in Ghana. Jonah’s classmates were going into law and medicine, while he was going to work shoulder-to-shoulder with men who had barely gone to school.
“My business was breaking rock,” he says.
Jonah saw that mining was run by whites and wanted to change it. There were tough days underground. Jonah calls it his most humbling experience and with merely a high school certificate and no experience, he had to sink to the bottom of the barrel to learn to survive.
“You learn quickly how to get what you want from people who are better equipped, who are better skilled, who are better experienced, who are much older than you are,” he says.
In his quest for more, Jonah won a scholarship to study mining engineering at the Cambridge School of Mines, in England, which later awarded him an honorary doctorate. He returned to Ashanti and moved up the ranks. Then he returned briefly to London to study business at Imperial College, now the University of London.
It was during these exciting days at Ashanti that tragedy struck. One day, Jonah was underground when the chamber’s ceiling fell in, trapping and killing miners. It was time for quick thinking. Jonah saw a man trapped under rubble who showed signs of life by muttering softly. Under Jonah’s guidance, a team worked to pull the man free and carry him to the lift. The miner, whose legs were crushed, drew Jonah close and thanked him. Four hours later the miner was dead. This was the life Jonah chose as a young man; a life he likens to that of a soldier.
Jonah’s life was moving apace. In 1979, air force officer Jerry Rawlings, then 32, led a coup in Ghana and nominated Jonah, who was the same age, to be Ashanti’s vice president. In 1986, the late Tiny Rowland, the founder of Lonrho, which owned Ashanti, appointed Jonah as managing director. This was at a time when production at the company’s single mine had deteriorated and the industry had yet to see a black man at the helm.
Jonah’s father had once said that the day Ashanti was run by a black man, would be the day he left town. Jonah had the pleasure of telling his father that the day for him to pack his bags had come.
In his new position, Jonah introduced his ‘Africanization Policy’. He wanted to change an industry that was run by whites. He wanted to attract his countrymen to the industry to prosper like he had, by forcing expatriates to fulfill their contractual obligations to impart skills. Moreover, Jonah wanted to cut the expense of expatriates. Why pay a foreigner four times what you would pay a Ghanaian to do the same job?
This policy was unpopular among expatriates but it was all about the big picture in a growing company.
“Glass ceilings were punched through,” says Jonah.
Jonah considers business to be all about people. He feels that it is a leader’s responsibility to identify talent and harness it, to set aside one’s ego and surround oneself with the very best, to make one look good.
“Wisdom does not reside in the head of only one person,” warns Jonah.
Jonah says his parents taught him all he knows about leadership. They encouraged humility, told him that good days are not forever and that he should never give up.
In 1999, Jonah needed all these skills when Ashanti faced a liquidity squeeze. It came at a bad time for the company as it was trying to raise $125 million to build a mine in Tanzania.
The root of the problem was hedging done by the company when the gold price was low. This was viewed as a risk management tool and a price protection mechanism. Unfortunately for Ashanti, a decision taken by global central banks saw a sharp increase in the gold price. The market price was greater than the hedged price and the company did not have enough cash for margin calls because it had pumped a lot of money into new mines. Jonah says this was a bruising time for the company and the most difficult of his career. The company’s share price fell to the point that the New York Stock Exchange was considering delisting it. It took eight months to recover and years to prosper.
Jonah, the driving force behind Ashanti’s growth, sees opportunities where others don’t. In his time, Ashanti grew from a single mine in Ghana to the second largest gold producer in the world.
The company was public until the Ghanaian military government under General Acheampong, took 55% share in 1972—making it a partnership between the government and Lonrho. In the quest for growth, Jonah and his team convinced the partners that better days were ahead if the company went public again. Once Ashanti listed in both Ghana and London, the government held 17% of the company and Lonrho 27%. Between 1994 and 2004, Ashanti went on the acquisition hunt in an attempt to be both an entrepreneurial as well as a conservative company. It extended its operations in Ghana, Australia, Zimbabwe, Guinea and Tanzania. In 1996, Ashanti became the first African-based company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
There is a saying that goes: “No good deed goes unpunished.” As Ashanti grew, the hunter became the hunted. Success attracted the interest of numerous companies.
Jonah felt the choice was to grow from within, or agree to be part of a bigger outfit. It proved difficult trying to convince partners that issuing shares, thus diluting power, was best. The government was faced with a competitive demand for its money, while Lonrho wanted to focus more on platinum. With no other defense, a merger was the only option.
The $1.48 billion merger between Ashanti and AngloGold, then the seventh and second largest gold producers respectively, was far from a merger of equals.
“We were punching beyond our weight,” says Jonah.
Despite this, Ashanti’s management secured key positions within AngloGold Ashanti, with Jonah becoming the executive president of the merged entity.
After his time at AngloGold Ashanti, Jonah became a serial director. Some junior mining companies approached him to guide them to success, as he had done for Ashanti. Equinox Minerals, a mining exploration company based in Zambia, was at the feasibility stage when it approached Jonah. Years later, in 2011, the company that had a market capitalization of $63.1 million in 2006, was sold to the Barrick Gold Corporation for $7.4 billion. Moto Goldmines, in Ghana, grew from a $50 million market capitalization company and was sold to Randgold Resources and AngloGold Ashanti in October 2009.
Since AngloGold Ashanti, Jonah has sat on at least 18 boards of companies.
Jonah currently sits on the boards of a few companies, including Vodafone Plc. He is also the founder and chairman of Jonah Capital, a private investment holding company, based in South Africa, with interests in mineral resources, real estate, agriculture, construction materials, financial services and oil and gas services.
His counsel has extended beyond the business world. When former South African President Thabo Mbeki set up the International Investment Advisory Council in 2000, Jonah was the first and only African to sit on it. He has also been an advisor to Nigerian Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, his successor Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan. He was a founding member of Ghanaian President John Kufuor’s investment advisory council and advised the late president of Zambia, Levy Mwanawasa, on investment promotion. Jonah was also on Kofi Annan’s UN Global Compact Advisory Council. Three years ago he helped the president of Togo put together a team that would formulate strategy for the country.
According to his biography, Sam Jonah and the Remaking of Ashanti by Ayowa A. Taylor, Jonah turned down the position of Ghanaian vice president twice.
On June 25, 2003, Jonah received an Honorary Knighthood in recognition of his achievement as an African businessman at St. James’ Palace, in London. Knighthoods conferred to foreign citizens are done so on the advice of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. They are bestowed on those who have made an important contribution to relations between their country and Britain.
It came from the blue. Jonah took a call from the British high commissioner in Ghana who, after making sure that he had sat down, told him that he had received a call from the British prime minister’s office informing him that Jonah’s name had been put forward for a knighthood. The high commissioner asked Jonah if he would accept the honor, should the Queen approve. The final word came two weeks later, while Jonah was in Guinea. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin was on a state visit on the day of the ceremony, the knighthood was conferred by Prince Charles.
In 2006, Jonah received the Order of the Star of Ghana, the nation’s highest award, and the Commonwealth Business Council Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
More recently, Jonah has been appointed—along with 12 other internationally recognized business, academic and public policy leaders—to sit on the newly formed Bank of America Global Advisory Council.
A lifetime away from his days of breaking rock underground, Jonah says: “I saw no barriers. I was determined to get to the highest [level] in anything that I did.”
This sentiment is echoed in his biography where Taylor writes: “Jonah was determined to build a ‘First’ World company, to dispel the unspoken belief that coming from the ‘Third’ World implied that he would be a third-rate businessman.”
Jonah acknowledges the big part that mentorship played in his success and feels that it is important that those that have found success pass down their knowledge and not have the arrogance to think that they did it all on their own. Jonah has, through the years, been approached by those seeking guidance and says that there is nothing more fulfilling.
“You must be humble enough to know what you know and to appreciate what skills you don’t have, and to have a plan.”
Jonah says it’s sad that young people are no longer as keen to serve apprenticeships.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for Jonah. In 2008, a conflict of interest arose when Jonah became a non-executive director at Metropolitan Holdings Ltd while on the board of the Standard Bank Group’s Liberty Life. He stepped down after holding the position for a month. Jonah refers to this as the shortest directorship in South Africa and says he failed to see the conflict from the onset as Liberty Life had a separate board to Standard Bank.
Also making it into the news that year were claims of insider trading and the resignation of senior staff in a company chaired by Jonah. Sentula Mining was accused of misdeeds worth R242 million ($29.7 million).
Jonah says he was approached by the family with the controlling interest in a company called Scharrighuisen to become the chairman and shareholder, buying in on concessionary terms, at around R2 ($0.25) a share. Jonah went to distressed shareholders, and some potential ones, and sold them his vision to rebrand Scharrighuisen as a new mining services company to be called Sentula Mining. Jonah Capital and Coronation Capital were the two largest shareholders when they sold some of their shares, at around R21 ($2.60). The combined sales were reported to amount to R680 million ($85.4 million). The share price subsequently fell to around R1 ($0.12) before recovering slightly.
The parties were thought to have had knowledge that the market did not. The Financial Services Board opened up an investigation into the possible insider trading and trading was suspended for a few months. During this time Jonah resigned as chairman of the company but maintains that there was no wrong doing and that they were cleared.
With his focus on the many possibilities the future holds Jonah’s Iron Mineral Beneficiation Services (IMBS) is using industry changing technology for processing super scrap, metallic iron, from the waste dump at Phalaborwa Mining Company, in South Africa’s Limpopo Province. The super scrap replaces traditional scrap in steel making.
Jonah says that when he told Lakshmi Mittal, of ArcelorMittal—the world’s largest steel making company—the chairman and CEO asked: “Sam, what do you mean? I have 77 PhDs in Chicago and New York looking for this technology, and you’re telling me that two South Africans have found the technology?”
Jonah is proud of the fact that while big companies around the world were writing off lots of money in search of this technology, two South Africans beat them to it. Jonah Capital has the largest stake in the company, with South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and Russian company, OAO Severstal, as partners. The R120 million ($15 million) pilot plant will be up and running by May.
Despite all this success Jonah maintains that he is not a wealthy man and that he is merely comfortable. He has been reported, by African journalists and bloggers, as having a net worth of between $500 and $600 million and has been celebrated as the richest man in Ghana. His worth remains a mystery but Jonah says that he is appalled by the speculation, adding that his father would be upset by people saying such things about him.
“We were not brought up that way,” says Jonah.
Evidence of this is the inscription by Jonah’s father placed on the house he built for his family in 1950. It read: Wobisa wo din enye wo sika, which translates to: They ask about your name, not your money.
“I’d like to be defined more by what I have done, than what I have…” he says.
Jonah says that having earned a monthly salary from the age of 19 until his retirement from AngloGold Ashanti, at 58, and sitting on boards and owning shares, means that he has done well for himself but he denies being the richest man in Ghana.
Jonah may not be pleased by some of the reporting about him, but what pleases him is the way business is going on the continent.
“Africa is all about entrepreneurship,” he says.
Jonah feels that people are now being given the space to grow, that businessmen like Aliko Dangote, Mike Adenuga and Patrice Motsepe, are world-class.
Jonah is also adamant that the world’s attitude towards Africa has changed. He feels that Africa’s potential is now being appreciated and harnessed, which, he says, is coming on the back of political and social change.
The world’s eyes and markets were on South Africa when the Lonmin mine workers’ strike in Marikana turned violent. As the longest serving director of Lonrho, Jonah doesn’t want to weigh in too heavily on the matter but points out that there are philosophical differences in the style of management and his own, influenced by his time underground.
“I came to appreciate the roles of these people [miners], how backbreaking the job was, how hardworking they were, how committed they were,” says Jonah.
He believes there will always be a future in mining as long as there’s a demand but that miners’ living conditions are shocking and that South Africa needs to focus more on the social aspect of the business.
Jonah has enough thoughts to fill a book but jokes about not being literate enough to write it.
Jonah does, however, have a more relaxed side. The jet-setting entrepreneur enjoys fishing. His eyes light up as he talks about it. He took up golf once again, four years ago. It brought back memories of a battle around the golf course nearly 40 years earlier. Jonah challenged the exclusively white Obuasi Golf Club, where he was not welcome. He was determined to learn the game and when none of the other members would teach him he went to the caddies. After 10 lessons, no-one wanted to play with him. Jonah used to go early to the golf course and play slowly, deliberately, to irk the white golfers backed up behind him. It worked and eventually the invitations to play grudgingly arrived. On the other side of the coin, some of his fellow Ghanaians couldn’t see the victory and sneered that Jonah now thought he was white.
It is no surprise that decades later his children tease him about becoming obsessive about his hobbies. When Jonah discovered squash, playing twice a day was not enough so he built a court at his home. When he took to the gym, he was there every morning at 5AM and then built himself one.
You could have guessed that buying a parrot in Guinea would lead to an aviary being built back home. It is now filled with a collection of parrots from South Africa, Ghana and Brazil.
An avid reader and big fan of Rudyard Kipling, Jonah recommends the poem If.
In a speech to inspire leadership Jonah closed with an extract from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life: “Lives of great men remind us that we can make our own lives sublime and departing we can leave our footprints in the sands of time.”
At the very least, Jonah proves that if you can keep your head while others are losing theirs and blaming it on you… you can be a man, my son.

THE MAN  WITH THE  GOLDEN TOUCH

The last time Nigeria’s football team won the Africa Cup of Nations in 1994, the infamous General Sani Abacha was president; South Africa had yet to hold its first democratic elections and Google didn’t exist.
Nineteen years on, the Super Eagles were transformed from outsiders to champions in just 21 days. This unexpected triumph sparked frenzied celebrations across the football-loving nation. As fate would have it, both teams featured Stephen Keshi, who captained the 1994 team and is the current coach of the freshly-crowned champions.
Like most fairy tales, Nigeria’s 1-0 victory over Burkina Faso came against the odds. It followed uninspiring performances leading up to the tournament, including a drab one all draw in their first match against eventual finalists, Burkina Faso. Most Nigerians lost faith when the team scraped into the quarter final against tournament favorites—Côte d’Ivoire. But a masterful display of skill and spirit saw Nigeria record a 2-1 victory.
<div id="attachment_1637" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1637" class="size-medium wp-image-1637" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/161388585_10-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA &#8211; FEBRUARY 10: Joseph Yobo and team mates celebrate with the trophy after winning the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations Final match between Nigeria and Burkina at FNB Stadium on February 10, 2013 in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by Ian Walton/Getty Images)</div>
Belief restored, the Super Eagles soared even higher, comfortably dispatching Mali in the semi-finals, before defeating Burkina Faso by that lone goal scored by Sunday Mba, who plays for Warri Wolves F.C. As the final whistle blew, social media sites ignited with elation. Tweets rolled out by the second.
“Burkina Faso boasted that they would deal with us but we said ‘Mba’ [which translates to ‘No’ in Igbo], not on a Sunday.”
The billionaires went mad too. Aliko Dangote and Mike Adenuga put up cash rewards of $820,000 and $1 million respectively, to the victorious team.
As the celebrations continued late into the night, the memories of previous disappointments were expunged in the excitement. The Super Eagles and their fans now look forward to the FIFA Confederations Cup, to be held this summer in Brazil, where Nigeria will fly ‘Africa’s’ flag.
The fans demand nothing less than a top notch performance at the Confederations Cup and qualification for the World Cup in Brazil next year. It is a huge task for the country’s football administrators. Nigerian football is notorious for squabbles and infighting among its administrators, many of whom are political appointees. Indeed, barely 24 hours after the victory, controversy raged as the coach, Keshi, resigned in an apparent attempt to spite the Football Federation for threatening his position over poor performances. Keshi subsequently rescinded his decision after the Nigerian presidency stepped in to mediate.
It is now hoped that the drama that played out following the victory, will gather a new wave of commitment to put the Federations’ house in order. For Keshi, and his gallant men, the euphoria of securing their place in the history books is a tonic that they will surely savor before worrying about anything else.

Mba! On A Sunday  Of Madness And Gladness

In the high-rise office overlooking one of the largest man-made urban forests, against the silhouette of Johannesburg’s central business district in the distance, sits Nicky Newton-King. The unassuming chief executive looks relaxed in handling one of the biggest jobs in finance.
It’s just over a year since Newton-King took over the helm of Africa’s biggest bourse and it hasn’t been easy running an exchange voted the best regulated in the world for three consecutive years. The JSE beat 141 exchanges rated by the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report.
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“It’s not the nature of the award per se, it’s the fact that we’re keeping the standards up and that builds confidence. It’s important for South Africa’s financial markets, banking system, corporate governance and accounting standards to be all rated in the top five in the world alongside the best regulated exchange recognition,” she says.
Aside from the award, the bourse has broken numerous records in the last year and recorded its best annual returns at 22%, for the first time in three years, despite a difficult, challenging and unpredictable year.
But this year will not be easy for the exchange, in Africa’s biggest economy, as the mining sector is likely to be hurt by another wave of wildcat strikes, especially if Anglo American Platinum goes ahead with its plans to lay-off 14,000 employees and mothball shafts. This could damage investor interest in the country and may persuade them to invest their money elsewhere.
Amid a struggling world economy and labor unrest, two of the biggest issues for the exchange are to address the failure of the African Board and to secure the lion’s share of primary listings. The Africa Board—an attempt to have a separate listing platform for certain countries on the continent outside South Africa—was scrapped last year after three years of struggle. It was met with lackluster demand from African firms who were more interested in listing in London. Newton-King admits many were confused as to what the board was about.
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“We didn’t hit the mark on what we wanted to do, because we ended up confusing people. Is the Africa Board something less than the main board? And clearly once you realize that you are not hitting the mark, it’s better to address that right up front,” says Newton-King.
The plan for 2013 is to work closely with 24 exchanges in Africa, without buying strategic stakes.
“If we can find a way to partner with African exchanges, so that we use what we do well and what they do well. What we do well is deep markets, lots of capital, lots of clients committed to us. What they do well is access to the clients in their home market etc. If we can partner together to provide investors through us, access to capital and that would be a win. That’s what we want to do.”
On the primary listing front, Newton-King says the JSE expects to close deals for a number of good listings this year, even though she admits the listing environment is quite slow.
Currently the exchange has 12 listed companies from elsewhere on the continent, as well as the Namibian government bond issue listed in November, which is traded in South African rands. It is the first time a sovereign bond outside South Africa is raising money on the exchange and Newton-King says she expects more from it this year.
The commodities market was recently granted approval to trade contracts on Zambian grain in dollars on the JSE. This is the first time the exchange has traded a product in US dollars.
“We can see the opportunity that opens up for us, the opportunity to potentially trade a whole lot of our other products in foreign currency. This is interesting because our clients are looking for diversification, it’s a new asset class,” added Newton-King.
With a weakening rand against the dollar and labor unrest, it’s certainly going to be a challenging year for the JSE.

The Power Behind  Africa’s Biggest Stock Exchange

It’s not easy to be a photographer, not when your father is a high court judge and there are four lawyers and two doctors in the family. Photographer Kelechi Amadi-Obi has made peace with the fact that he’s a bit of a black sheep in the family. And looking back, his family should have known all along that he was going to be an artist.
Growing up in the eastern region of Nigeria, in the city of Umuahia, he quickly developed a passion for drawing.
“It all started with reading comics and drawing Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk. I realized that I had talent with visual arts and I started to draw. My drawings earned me respect among my peers,” says Amadi-Obi.
With the encouragement of those around him, he was spurred on to improve his skills. Unfortunately in the neighborhood where he grew up, there were no museums, art schools or galleries where he could hone his skills.
“I would go to the local library to do research on drawing. The more I read and practised, the better I got and the quicker I improved,” he says.
<div id="attachment_1623" style="width: 235px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1623" class="size-medium wp-image-1623" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/supplied-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" />Amadi -Obi dressed as a barrister</div>
Even with his passion for drawing and the visual arts, his family put his career choices down to law or medicine. Amadi-Obi chose law and duly enrolled at university. Ironically though university exposed him to art in a way he had never encountered before.
“When I got to university I realized there was an active art scene there. I naturally gravitated towards artists,” he says.
The law student became the talk of his campus as his artwork surpassed that of the art students. Yet he kept hitting the law books and graduated to take up a job as barrister. He only wore his gown and wig for one year after being called to the bar.
“After my one year of service I started working at an art studio, where I exhibited my art and became a successful exhibiting artist. Photography came gradually. I used to make photos as a reference material for my paintings. I started making paintings of human forms and took photos of models in my studio with light coming from my window,” says the painter-cum-photographer.
“I learnt to use a camera and learnt to capture light in a very intricate and delicate way to achieve my purpose. The photographs themselves became artworks. I started associating with other photographers too. Once I finished taking images I would go to the darkroom to print my photos. I looked at the darkroom process and it looked very similar to my painting process, only it had quicker results,” he says.
His decision to settle in Lagos shaped his career forever. The city has not attracted many photographers but it has certainly attracted those with an eye for drama. The city exposed him to spectacular sites including the picturesque lagoons of the region, which span over 635 kilometers and cut across the southern part of the metropolis, linking the Atlantic Ocean and Lekki lagoon. But it wasn’t just the beauty of the lagoons, which attract so many artists that inspired Amadi-Obi. He also saw inspiration in the sprawling fishing slums that draw together the huge influx of people migrating to the region.
His photographic career took off in 2001, when a German friend invited him to exhibit at the Rencontres De Bamako or “African Photography Biennale”. Since the exhibition’s inception in 1994, it has caught the attention of jet-setting curators, critics and dealers. It has also popularized African photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé.
Soon after he was invited to Milan to showcase the collection he exhibited at the Biennale. But while Rencontres De Bamako has opened doors for many African photographers, it has also been a source of controversy.
“Some of the reasons for this controversy are familiar and echo long-standing issues in the presentation of African art to Euro-American audiences,” write Jennifer Bajorek and Erin Haney, who are independent curators.
They claim that such exhibitions perpetuate asymmetries of power and leave young artists and organizers feeling alienated from their work. To overcome these challenges artists are forming new alliances and building their own networks, which are not remote-controlled by the West.
Amadi-Obi is no exception. After his exhibition in Milan he established a career in Nigeria in collaboration with other upcoming photographers. Depth of Field, set up in 2001, is the brainchild of Amadi-Obi and five other photographers: Uchechukwu James Iroha, Toyosi Odunsi, Amaize Ojeikere, Emeka Okereke and Toyin Sokefun. This artist collective was formed to deepen the conversation among the photographers and aims to attract local audiences to their work. They critique each other’s work and share resources including a library, publicity platforms and web visibility.
The ace photographer’s online portfolio is stacked with fashion photos he took before he was commissioned to such a shoot.
“I wanted to shoot fashion but there were no fashion magazines. Still I would call models and take pictures of them like the ones I would see in Vogue Magazine. So I was making a portfolio with no clients.
“When someone in Nigeria bought the South African franchise of True Love magazine [to the country], they needed a photographer and someone recommended me,” says Amadi-Obi.
His work with True Love earned him recognition among mushrooming corporates looking to improve their image with slick photographs in company brochures, annual reports and on their websites. With commissions from companies such as Guinness, MTN, British American Tobacco, the Ford Foundation, Prima Garnet Ogilvy, Insight Grey, Flour Mills of Nigeria and Orange Drugs, his career is on the up.
His passion for photography has made Amadi-Obi a household name in Lagos. To be a successful photographer does not require extraordinary equipment, he believes. When he started his career he used a Mamiya RB67 film camera. Today, most of his images are taken with several professional lenses but he’s hooked on the Canon EOS 5D Mark II body.
“I am not particular with equipment. There was a time when I used to be crazy about cameras but I got tired because they keep changing… To get a good image you just need to have a good eye,” says Amadi-Obi.

No Law Against Chasing Light

The invention of the automobile has gone hand-in-hand with an unfortunate counterpart: accidents. This has been, mainly, due to driver error, rather than mechanical failure, so the objective for some time has been to eliminate this factor and make the daily commute less stressful. Popular culture brought us examples of cars that were capable of driving themselves, Knight Rider’s Knight Industries Three Thousand (KITT) for example, and it seems these once fairy tale visions will soon be realized.
The development of autonomous cars—and we’ll get to why this term is specifically used, rather than “driverless” vehicles—has been built on advances in safety that really started with seemingly innocuous features such as ABS. Here, an on-board computer senses heavy braking and intervenes before the wheels lock up. It’s therefore trying to circumvent human error, which is what autonomous cars do—just on a grander scale.
Volvo introduced its City Safety feature on their XC60 range some years back, which made use of lasers that could sense an impending accident. The technology assisted drivers by applying the brakes, up to 100% if required. The goal has been to use autonomous driving technology for those tedious commutes to work and back where frustration, tiredness, traffic jams and all those other aggravating factors come into play. This led to the development of FROG (Free Ranging On Grid technology); a car with an on-board computer loaded with maps. The vehicle knows where its starting location is and it checks its progress along the way by counting wheel revolutions, and its proximity to electronic beacons.
FROG is already being used for loading cargo as well as in factories, and the intention is to use it for public transportation. In this scenario, passengers go to a stop point and press a button; essentially calling the car as one would an elevator. You’d then get on and disembark at whichever location you’d selected as you would on a bus or train. Naturally, the downfall of the system is that the vehicles only go to predetermined places.
The autonomous cars of our future will make use of a range of technologies including radar, GPS, computer vision and would necessitate that the various systems of the car communicate with each other. Like the human brain, the aim is to take sensory information, interpret it and react in an appropriate manner. Some systems even allow for their maps to be updated as a result of changes to the environment. Once the technology is widespread enough, we could imagine a scenario where cars could “talk” to one another by sending warnings, to those further behind, of forthcoming obstacles.
Numerous car manufacturers have jumped on the autonomous vehicle bandwagon, but perhaps the most innovative leader in the field is not a maker of transportation, but search engine giant Google. The company has made use of retrofitted cars—usually a Toyota Prius or Lexus RX450H—loaded with LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), rangefinders, cameras and GPS sensors. Each car’s equipment costs in the region of $150,000 and there are usually 10 vehicles on the road at any given time, testing the systems thoroughly. The current expense of such technology is certainly a deterring factor for any prospective users, as polls have already indicated.
With time prices will decrease; in the future drivers may get some form of rebate or financial assistance from insurance companies. Offsetting the initial outlay are numerous benefits such as increased safety, fewer collisions, less congestion therefore increased road capacity, higher speed limits for autonomous cars, alleviation of parking problems—cars could drop us off and find parking far away and come collect us when required—and an increase in fuel efficiency.
Engineer Sebastian Thrun, the co-inventor of Google’s Street View and a director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, started the Google autonomous car project. Extensive testing has taken place and the cars have driven on roads notorious for their choking traffic or dangerous bends, such as San Francisco’s Lombard Street.
Each car is accompanied by a driver, with an unblemished record, and a Google engineer in the passenger seat. In case of emergencies, the cars have an override system in place, which is very similar to those we find on modern cars with cruise control. Only two minor accidents have been recorded during the more than 482,000 kilometers of testing. Google claims that in both instances a person was driving, not the autonomous system and that the last instance was a bumper-bashing where the Google car got rear-ended.
The above begs consideration for two important points, firstly legislature concerning driverless cars and secondly, who is liable in the case of litigation. In all countries, the law presumes that a human adult is driving their vehicle. On March 1, 2012, the state of Nevada was the first to pass a law allowing for the operation of autonomous cars. In September, California and Florida followed suit.
Unsurprisingly, Nevada requires a person to be behind the wheel at all times to take over in emergency situations. License plates for future driverless cars in Nevada will be red and have an infinity symbol on the left-hand side. This of course limits the benefits of such vehicles as intoxicated drivers, minors or the unlicensed still couldn’t operate them.
In terms of the legal repercussions governing autonomous cars involved in accidents, some creative solutions have been put forward. One idea makes use of an example we’d never normally associate with driving: vaccines. The idea is that autonomous cars will be extremely safe but like a vaccine, where there is a tiny chance it could harm the patient, these vehicles could too. When a fatal accident occurs, according to this theory, the family would be compensated by a fund set up for this purpose.
Another school of thought is that the purchasers, not the manufacturers, of such cars take upon themselves the responsibility. This sounds reasonable until we consider that a software bug or mechanical failure could result in jail time or the driver being sued when in essence, he had no control over the situation. The more likely option is that the manufacturer would carry the blame, and costs incurred, should their product be found wanting. That’s a bitter pill to swallow as even if the percentage of defects is 1, this could still translate into extremely expensive lawsuits.
The last option is to spread the responsibility across all driverless car owners. They’d take out a special insurance package and the insurers would be responsible for determining whether the system, manufacturer or driver was at fault. This is still a complicated approach and difficult to implement but it would necessitate that car manufacturers would have to up their game which, in the long run, benefits everyone.
Jim Pisz, head of Toyota’s business strategy in North America, sums it up: “We feel that with autonomous driving, the driver should always be in control. It’s a critical element to our philosophy: autonomous does not mean driverless.”
Guess we won’t be calling KITT on our watch phone to save us from a sticky situation any time soon.

The Car That Chauffeurs You

Accra has a lot to offer. From the warm Akwaaba that greets you at the capital city’s Kotoka International Airport, to the great service extended to visitors; hospitality is at the heart of Ghana. This realization didn’t escape Paul Ansah when he returned home a few years ago to expand the Marriott Hotel Group’s African presence.
After weeks of traveling across the continent and a few brief telephonic conversations, the well-spoken, Ivy league graduate welcomed me to his offices overlooking the city.
Paul Ansah is vice president in charge of international hotel development for the prestigious Marriott brand in Africa. The title carries more emphasis on delivery than his business card suggests. He afforded me clarity on how this came to be.
Born and bred in Accra, Ansah isn’t any less Ghanaian than he was before he left. He reminisces fondly about his formative years in Ghana, with a hint of an American accent. He moved to the States to pursue a qualification in civil engineering at the University of Maryland College Park. The innate business acumen within Ansah led him to pursue a Master’s in business administration, finance and real estate at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
His career began in Washington D.C., where he spent a few years building mixed-use commercial real estate. He moved into hospitality when he joined Marriott as a senior financial analyst on development and asset management deals around the world, and subsequently rose through the company. This gained him a global perspective on the financial side of the business and on the company’s developmental efforts. After an extensive stay in the States, which he considers his second home, Ansah returned to Africa in 2010.
“The decision came naturally to me as I simply followed two of my passions—real estate and African development. I was determined to be physically located within my region in order to fully experience and understand its nuances. In order to provide successful business solutions to the abundant opportunities in Africa, it is essential to personally experience the attending challenges presented by living and working in today’s African environment.”
Upon his return, Ansah opened Marriott’s first development office in Africa and became in charge of the development of all Marriott Hotels in Africa.
Speaking on the regional growth of the industry, Ansah says: “The West African hotel landscape is in its nascent stages and is brimming with opportunity. The nature of each opportunity varies widely, depending on the country and city under consideration. The unifying theme across the region is the stark imbalance between demand and supply of quality international-standard hotel accommodations. Now is the time to be developing hotels in West Africa.”
With the recent emergence of finer hospitality institutions in West Africa and a growing demand for relative affordability, it is important to question whether or not international-standard hotel accommodation meets the demands of local clientele and if there is indeed room for prosperity in this industry. Whether the industry is lucrative, one can draw a conclusion by considering the challenges or ease of establishing and running hotels on the continent.
“Business development yields [in Sub-Saharan Africa] are particularly low and the gestation period on ultimately successful projects tends to be extraordinarily long. This translates to higher development costs that further aggravate the key problem of financing. It takes a well-resourced and skilled team to avoid the many pitfalls,” he says.
Despite the prevailing challenges, the Marriott team has recorded some great achievements.
“We most recently announced the signing of a multi-billion naira deal with Quantum Luxury Properties Limited, led by Jim Ovia, for the development of a 150-room, five-star Marriot hotel to be located in Lagos, Nigeria.”
While Ansah is responsible for the development of the brand on the continent, he is particularly focused on West, Central and Southern Africa.
“My goal is to make an indelible mark in the African built environment&#8230; African cities are experiencing a renaissance and in 10 years, our built environment will be leagues ahead of the status quo. I’m determined to be at the forefront of Africa’s development.”
The Marriott Hotel in Accra promises to be a pivotal impetus for increasing hospitality standards in Ghana.
Just like any hotel, Ansah isn’t about all work and no play. He describes himself as an “all-in” type of guy.
“I live my life with passion and I try to make every minute count.”
This is the kind of passion that, coupled with his first-hand experience of the region, will drive success and growth for Marriott.

Go West!

How did you become Africa’s 18th richest person?
Our group has invested steadily and has been very consistent, which has had a compound effect on our investments and the kind of assets we have. And also by the sheer nature that FORBES showed interest in Uganda, or has done more research in Africa and has taken more interest.
Tell us your story.
One of the first businesses we started dealing in was salt and the other was in beer—a rare and very fast-moving commodity—followed by other commodities… very soon we became one of the largest beer dealers in the country and this went on until about 1989. That is when the breweries refurbished themselves and started the production of beer. When they started production, they lobbied to the government to stop importation to protect the local industry and jobs. The government obliged… we had built up a huge clientele&#8230; all the hotels in town would buy beer from us;  we would have expatriates buying beer from us. At the time, foreign exchange was not allowed for luxury items like beer. So what would happen is that people would rent their houses in foreign currency. When they received their rent they would come and change it with us. In the meantime, the expatriate community needed to buy local provisions for their daily requirement. They would buy beer and other things from our store, they would also come and exchange foreign currency. We needed this foreign currency to pay for the importation of beer…
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After the closure of the beer business there were lots of people who wanted to change money with us. We started buying this currency and would actually deal with a trader who would need foreign currency to buy certain types of goods, we would swap this with local currency. Come 1990, Uganda liberalized the formal market, it was the second country in Africa to do so—Ghana was the first. We opened the first foreign exchange bureau called Crane Forex Bureau. Within six months we were doing more business than the banks’ foreign exchange departments. What transpired in the next two or three years was that the banks worked together and formed a cartel that would hit the forex bureaus by levying high charges and restraints. I realized that in order to sustain us we needed to go into the banking business so we eventually opened the first branch of Crane Bank on August 21, 1995. We had accumulated a lot of funds, so we were buying a lot of real estate. We bought our first property in 1991… The government nationalized all real estate, then the NRM [National Resistance Movement] government decided to return the Asian properties to its former owners but a lot of these people had settled in the West. They were doing well and had their families there, not all of them had intentions to come back. At that time there was an excess supply of real estate. The Asians who had property here never dreamed that this property would be returned to them so they came and cashed their money in. In the beginning, a lot of people were very skeptical about buying into the property: they were not sure about what would happen in the future. Now, we have a surplus of real estate in the country and people did not want the risk. I was one of the very few people at that time, who had faith in myself and I started investing at that time. Ever since then, we [Ruparelia Group] never looked back.
What is your view on the current state of the economy?
At the moment we are going through a restructuring. I guess this is always a good thing to do—a time to relook at all your businesses, trim them and flush out any inefficiencies. The problem here at the moment is that the politics are delaying the passing of a law, which will regulate the oil industry. Uganda desperately needs to pass these oil laws so when the oil comes, it is regulated and there is a transparent process it goes through. They don’t realize that every day they delay it, it costs the country a lot in lost revenue. So the government needs to clear that up.
What is the biggest weakness of the Ugandan economy now?
The left doesn’t know what the right is doing, unfortunately. The decision-making process of this country has gone very bad. Although there are a lot of processes, unfortunately these checks and balances have been misused, thereby the people have been scared into making decisions. The only way people feel they will survive in the job is by not making decisions and that’s very bad.
Recently donors have cut back on aid. Will this hurt the economy?
We don’t have only the issue of donors cutting aid; we have the issue of interest rates and of exchange controls – the foreign exchange rates. Now, Uganda cannot afford to have low interest rates at the moment because there will be capital flight out of the country. At the same time, it will have an effect on the foreign exchange rate. The currency depreciated by 8% at the end of last year. When you have further bad news by donor countries holding onto aid, it will have a negative effect on the country. I think Uganda gets about $800 million in aid and that is quite substantial as far as the budget support is concerned.
What should the Ugandan government do to promote entrepreneurs like yourself?
I think it’s always nice to have a government which has departments that make decisions. I think the decision-making process has deteriorated, that’s number one. Number two: the government needs to seriously finish all the regulatory bodies that are needed for the oil to take off. That’s the savior of this country. And if they can’t make decisions on how to solve oil regulation within the ministry then we are not going to go anywhere.
And the entrepreneurs? What can government do to promote businessmen such as yourself?
The only way any country can come out of unemployment is to support private industries, private entrepreneurs, who will then create jobs. They can’t solve all the problems of the nation but it will reduce unemployment and the other issues that go with it. Government went through one phase in 1990 when they first came in to support the industries and private enterprises. They brought in a lot of incentives, which has helped this country to get to where it is now. All it needs now are proper policies and if its oil is sorted out then industries will come here. Government does not need to do much more, just clean up its oil industry. If the oil is controlled and regulated and being produced you will see people queuing up to invest in this country.
What are your plans for 2013?
We have a lot of investments in real estate and we will continue [to invest]. We have projects of more than $150 million in the pipeline and we will fulfill those within the next 18 to 20 months. And hopefully, target a lot of service industries, which will service the oil industry; accommodation, education.
Do you think you will grow in the ranks in 2013?
Definitely. We have a lot of oil in this country and you can imagine that we have not even had one drop of oil come out, and the kind of resources that we have mobilized within the group.
Do you think you’ll be in the top 10 next year?
I am not sure but I am very happy to be at number 18 this year. The next few years will definitely have some kind of an impact. Crane Bank is expanding rapidly, it has 27 branches. By the end of this year, it will have 40 branches and then the year after, another 10, and it will continue to grow by at least 10 branches a year.

A Word With  Africa’s Next Billionaire

He’s nearly 60; a university dropout who moves like a cat through business. Ian Fuhr is probably the unlikeliest owner of a beauty chain you will ever find. He finds his constant change of career exciting, others may think him confused.
It all began on July 1, 1976, two weeks before the Soweto student uprising. Fuhr, then 22, and his brother, Rodney, opened the doors to the predominantly black-staffed retail store Kmart. After five years in retail, Fuhr was lured away by the sweet sounds of the music industry. His record company, Munjale Productions, signed artists like Letta Mbulu and Hugh Masekela.
Fuhr and fellow South African Clive Calder from Jive Records, an American label, bought a mobile recording studio, which they drove to Gaborone, Botswana. This was in 1983, when the two would camp out at the Woodpecker Inn to record exiled artists. Five years later, Fuhr left the music industry and rejoined his brother at Kmart.
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The store name was changed in 1988 to Super Mart, after a lawsuit by the American chain that owned the trademark for Kmart.
“They came into one of our stores, all in suits and stuff and started taking photographs. So the manager of the store took one look at this and said: ‘No ways, you can’t take photographs’. The guy started panicking and tried to run out the door and they locked him in the store,” says Fuhr.
The Americans added a lawsuit for wrongful arrest.
Fuhr left again in 1991 to start a new career as a race relations consultant for seven years.
It was in 2004 that Super Mart was sold to the Edcon Group—a leading clothing, footwear and textile retail group in southern Africa—for R112 million ($16,034,400). After the sale, Fuhr worked directly under the Edcon CEO, Steve Ross, for 18 months.
When you ask Fuhr if he’d ever imagined, when he first started out, that his company would be worth millions, he laughs and says: “No ways”. He says the key to his success has been to sort out the employees first. He says treating and paying them well, coupled with getting the culture right, lead to unimagined levels of productivity.
With another career in his rear view mirror, Fuhr was far from finished.
“I looked for my final shot into the entrepreneurial world,” Fuhr says beaming.
And what a shot that was. An innocent suggestion by his massage therapist, Liz Goldberg, turned Fuhr into a gap in the salon market. With only one existing visible brand at the time, Fuhr asked himself questions like: “Why hadn’t people done this before?”
“I thought there was an opportunity. There was a gap in that business and the only problem was to make sure there was enough business in the gap,” says Fuhr.
In 2004, with some money from the Edcon sale, Fuhr and his two partners, Goldberg and Johnny Marks, bought the first of five pre-owned salons and ran them under their original names while they got a feel for the business.
Branding consultants gave Fuhr and his partners a list with possible names for the business. Halfway down the list was “Sorbet”. Funnily enough when Fuhr called Goldberg to find out what she thought of the list, they realized they had both fallen in love with the same name. It was a done deal. The logo was a different story and it took four months to finalize. The business was launched in August 2005.
If the beauty industry was so lucrative, why not create a spa? Fuhr felt the salon market was small and fragmented, while the competition with spas was too great. The difference between Sorbet and other salons is that it focuses on the retail to create the bulk of its revenue, with treatments being a secondary source of income. This is proven by the retail styling of the salons, which Fuhr refers to as stores. According to him, the industry norm is to earn 65% from treatments.
With retail being such a large component of the company, the trick was to find products that were big enough to piggy back. The answers were the imported up-market skin care brand Dermalogica, South African produced Environ and the nail care brand Essie.
The first few years were hard for Sorbet as it tried to create a three-phase concept that not everyone found easy to buy into. Fuhr’s “You come to work to serve and not to make money” philosophy meant a mindset change among the staff. With around 56 stores, 15 of which are company-owned and 450 employees, Fuhr still does all the induction training for the entire group’s staff.
The company-owned stores were to develop the model and build the brand before franchising it in 2009. Due to the nature of the business, franchising was always the plan. A salon franchise costs between R850,000 and R950,000 ($95,455-106,694), while a nail bar is between R550,000 and R650,000 ($61,773-73,000).
In September 2011, Sorbet gained access to the 3.66 million club card members of Clicks—South Africa’s large pharmacy, health, home and beauty retailer. It began when three, female Clicks senior executives, who were Sorbet clients, telephoned Fuhr. It has now blossomed into product development: Clicks has developed a range of 17 Sorbet bath and beauty products, with further plans to diversify.
“We had been thinking about doing our own range, but we had been dabbling a little bit with it and it wasn’t anything exciting,” says Fuhr.
With the hope of someday getting into hair, Sorbet was, again, not looking to compete with the big hair salons in the country. The American concept of dry bars was a new moneymaker in South Africa.
Great, but what’s a dry bar? Judging from the pilot store, it’s a hair salon that only washes and blow dries your hair into one of 8 styles. No cuts or color. It still keeps with the look and feel of all the other Sorbet establishments, complete with nail treatments and the front-of-store retail side.
Continuing to do things its way, Sorbet became a franchisee of the Beauty Therapy Institute last year. The school offers training to aspiring beauty therapists and nail technicians and is a finishing school for the company’s staff. Students are guaranteed a job interview for any opportunities at Sorbet outlets.
The nationwide Sorbet stores perform around 40,000 treatments a month, with waxing accounting for 40%.
“There is a hell of a lot of hair that comes out of Sorbet, I can tell you that,” Fuhr laughs.
How well is the business doing? With the average store turnover at R3 million ($336,809) a year, the projections for the year ended February 2013 are R150 million ($16.8 million). Store-for-store growth is at 19% and overall growth for the company is at 40%, in the last year.
With 15-20 new stores planned for South Africa, Fuhr says the country still has a lot of potential and there has been some interest from other countries on the continent as well. As much as expanding beyond South Africa is on the agenda for the next three to five years, Fuhr feels this is too big a venture for his company to go at alone and that a strong financial partner is needed.
So for Fuhr, 60 could be the new 30. It’s never too late to start over.

No Nail  Left Unpolished

Robert Friedland was ranked 347 on last year’s FORBES’ ‘400 Richest Americans’ list with his net worth of $1.3 billion. What’s more, Friedland is looking at developing a platinum group metals (pgm) project on the northern limb of the Bushveld Complex—the geological formation, which hosts the world’s greatest known pgm resources.
This investment may be good news for South Africa but some industry watchers may wonder what Friedland has been smoking. Not only are the platinum mines the battleground for the on-going industrial relations confrontations in the mining industry but platinum market and business fundamentals have been hammered.
Further, the platinum-bearing Platreef of the northern limb is geologically very different to those of the western and eastern limbs of the Bushveld Complex, where nearly all the operating platinum mines are situated.
So far, only one mine has been successfully established on the northern limb and that’s Anglo American Platinum’s (Amplats) Mogalakwena open-cast operation. That mine is situated on the highest grade section of the Platreef, on ground that Anglo acquired back in the 1920s.
Friedland’s new company, Ivanplats, which was listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in October through an initial public offering (IPO) was valued at around C$2.5 billion.
The IPO prospectus noted that: “Two large urban communities and additional smaller communities inhabit portions of the Platreef project… a significant relocation of communities would be required at the company’s expense to enable open-pit mining of the ATS and AMK deposits, which could be prohibitively expensive.”
The prospectus added that certain members of these communities have in the past and may in the future unlawfully and illegally disrupt prospecting or mining operations, as Amplats discovered last year. Further, on instruction from the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR), Ivanplats has agreed to stop making payments under the agreements effective November 1. Ivanplats is currently in negotiations with the community leaders to amend these agreements in accordance with recommendations made by the DMR.
There is a risk of further disruptions from the communities and, while any such disruption would likely be unlawful and entitle the company to seek legal remedies, it may cause delays, which could have a material adverse effect on Ivanplats business, financial condition, results of operations or prospects. Replying to emailed questions, an Ivanplats spokesman tells FORBES AFRICA that the company is now planning an underground mining development and the area of the deposit, that is to be mined, is largely free of development.
“The planned mine would be a highly-mechanized, underground operation accessed through shafts in open ground, designed to have minimal impact on nearby communities.
“Although the Platreef Project still is in the pre-feasibility stage, Ivanplats already has established a presence in communities in the vicinity of its Platreef project through the establishment of community liason offices.”
The Platreef project is one of two big possible developments Ivanplats is considering. The other being the Kamoa Copper Project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Both are at the resource delineation and upgrading stage and there’s no decision yet on which could get the go-ahead first, although the spokesman says that each is being advanced independent of the other.
Regarding the Platreef, the spokesman says Ivanplats plans to apply for a mining right, conduct additional drilling and, subject to approvals, sink an exploration shaft into the deposit this year.
Asked why Ivanplats was investing in South Africa at this point, despite the overwhelmingly negative news flow, the spokesman replied: “The company is very confident of South Africa’s future as one of the continent’s internationally recognized economic leaders… All proposed major new mine developments, by their very nature, must include assessments of longer term outlooks on investment climates and host-nation environments. Ivanplats is not pre-occupied by present views and events, as you term them, for any single nation. There are other, positive, views on opportunities for projected economic and social advances in the future.”
Friedland has made controversial decisions very successfully before, such as with his last venture, Ivanhoe Mines, which developed the huge Oyu Tolgoi Copper Project in Mongolia. That is now controlled by Rio Tinto.
The media shy man is an enigma of sorts. According to his FORBES profile, he attended Reed College in Oregon and studied Sanskrit and Buddhism in India, after graduating with a degree in political science.
This probably accounts for the strange “No comment,” he gave me when I first tried to question him on Ivanplats five years ago at the Cape Town Mining Indaba conference. He inclined his head, made the Indian “Namaste” spiritual greeting sign with his hands and said: “Forgive me but I do not want to talk about it,” before diving into his waiting limousine.
I have heard him speak on several occasions at the Diggers and Dealers Mining conferences in Western Australia as well as at the Mining Indaba.
At his best—such as addressing Diggers and Dealers in the early days of Oyu Tolgoi—he is a spellbinding speaker combining a comprehensive grasp of his subject, with the oratory of a master politician and the conviction of an evangelical preacher.
At his worst—such as the keynote presentation he gave to the Mining Indaba in 2011—he comes across as patronizing, delivering a minimum of information with a maximum of hype and arrogance.
When, on that occasion, I asked him from the floor, why he had given out so little real information his reply was: “I do it to irritate people like you”.
He can also be highly amusing, such as in 2005 when he told Diggers delegates that Ivanhoe faced the ‘Princess Leia’ and ‘Darth Vader’ options in finding a JV partner.
‘Princess Leia’ involved linking up with one of the “better-looking” copper-end users such as Mitsui. While going the ‘Darth Vader’ route meant bringing in a major mining group such as “One of those companies that use letters for their names and want to control the world’s supply”.
He did not have to name Rio Tinto (RTZ); we all got it. But it was at that same conference that another story about Friedland did the rounds, which also drew on a Star Wars analogy.
According to an industry insider, you knew the crucial moment in any negotiation with Friedland had arrived when, “He fixes you with his Jedi mind-$%@* stare”.
Irrespective of how it all works out in the end on the Platreef, this one is going to be interesting and South Africans have a ringside seat for Friedland’s latest venture.

The Spiritual Tycoon  Spies The Prize

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu—this age-old Zulu proverb explains the spirit of ubuntu; translated it reads “A person is a person through others” but many paraphrase it to “I am because we are”.
You’ll find Ubuntu in any close-knit community where neighbors help each other with anything from sharing sugar and bread to babysitting and mourning. Ubuntu in business is called philanthropy. The Latin origins of the word means the love of humankind; the desire to promote the welfare of others, mostly, through the generous donation of money to good causes.
In a historic press event in a plush Sandton hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa’s richest black man, Patrice Motsepe announced that he and his wife, Precious, would donate half of their family fortune to philanthropic causes during their lifetime and beyond.
The room was full, from clergymen and traditional leaders to South African businesses’ top brass as well as ministers and union leaders. Among them were Pamodzi CEO, Ndaba Ntsele; Jessica Motaung, daughter of Kaizer Chiefs FC owner Kaizer Motaung; chairman of Shell SA, Bonang Mohale; Zulu nation Monarch, King Goodwill Zwelithini; basic education minister, Angie Motshekga and Archbishop Tutu’s daughters to name a few.
<div id="attachment_7" style="width: 209px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-7" class="size-medium wp-image-7" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/280-261_1-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" />Patrice Motsepe, Johannesburg; 19 August 2011 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff</div>
“We want to build a track record where ordinary South Africans feel we’re making a humble contribution,” says the 8th richest African.
He assured the audience that he would make sure his children continued the tradition.
The move put the Motsepes on a list of elites who have pledged to give a majority of their wealth to philanthropy. They are the first Africans to join the Giving Pledge, founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in 2010. Today, it has nearly 100 members including New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg; world-famous designer, Diane von Furstenberg; Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg and PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk.
Is this pledge a new trend in business or just an age-old tradition of ubuntu under a new light?
This is not the Motsepes’ first contribution, in 1999 they started the Motsepe Foundation, which to date has donated around R40-R50 million ($4.5-5.6 million) to business development. Last year alone they gave R20 million ($2.3 million) to major churches in South Africa. They say this move is just an acceleration of what they’ve established.
While the Motsepes have had a lucky turn of fortune, it wasn’t always that way.
“There were times when we had nothing… When I came back from America we had so many loans that we couldn’t pay our children’s school fees [and] we had to send them to good schools. But there was always belief because we come from parents who succeeded during the years when there was no black economic empowerment,” says Motsepe.
But many ask themselves whether other African entrepreneurs and companies will follow in Motsepe’s footsteps.
Philip Fauré, head of Citadel Philanthropy Advisors, says there are many wealthy entrepreneurs who are philanthropists but prefer to remain under the radar.
“Africans are more private than Americans,” says Fauré.
He also says that they avoid requests for money and security risks by doing things privately. However, he is quick to emphasize the difference between philanthropy and charity by using a fishing analogy—philanthropy is teaching one how to fish.
“Charity is never going to go away; aid is not the solution,” says Fauré.
He also says that philanthropy is a major industry worldwide, mostly in the States. He hopes that more prominent South African families will give publically.
There are a number of other African billionaires who are active philanthropists.
In 2012 alone, Johann Rupert, the third richest African and CEO of luxury goods group Richemont, gave his R3.6 million ($406,700) annual salary to charity. The Oppenheimers—the second richest family in Africa—donated R1 billion ($112.9 million) to support education in South Africa. In Nigeria, Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, gave away around $35 million and Zenith Bank founder, Jim Ovia, gave away an estimated $6.6 million. And Zimbabwe’s richest man, Strive Masiyiwa, gave away around $6.4 million.
According to wealth management company Galileo Capital, if Motsepe plans to give away half of his wealth—bearing in mind his current net worth of $2.65 billion, interest and inflation—he will give away around $40 million annually to his philanthropic missions.

To Earn Is Human;  To Give Divine

On January 1, 1914, British colonial administrator Lord Frederick Lugard proclaimed the union of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria, a single entity known as the colony and protectorate of Nigeria. Until then, both protectorates had separate capitals and budgets. The merger was, in the words of Lord Lugard, for the moral and material advancement of Nigeria as a whole. A century later the Nigerian government is preparing to celebrate the anniversary. On February 4, at the presidential Villa in Abuja, a year of commemorative events was launched. It was a gathering of the powerful men: all but two of Nigeria’s living, former heads of state were there; along with state governors and senior government officials.
An army band played as President Goodluck Jonathan lit the centenary torch. Then a documentary took the audience on a journey through Nigerian history. It told the story of the ancient civilizations that lived in what is today known as Nigeria: the 8,000-year-old Dufuna canoe, which was discovered in Borno State in 1987; the Igbo-Ukwu and Bini civilizations; the heroic exploits of icons like Queen Amina, King Jaja of Opobo, Nana Olomu, Ekumeku, and Oba Ovonramwen of Benin.
The documentary also spoke of key players in the colonial enterprise, the likes of Lord Lugard, businessman Sir George Taubman Goldie—after whom the conquered land was almost named—journalist Flora Shaw, who first suggested the name ‘Nigeria’ and married Lord Lugard. At no point did the documentary shy away from presenting the cruel and sobering reality of colonialism and the slave trade. There were stories of other Nigerian heroes onscreen: Olaudah Equiano, the former Igbo slave, who was captured as a child and transported to the West Indies. He bought his freedom and settled in Britain where he campaigned against the slave trade; Sarah Forbes Bonetta, also a former Yoruba slave who became Queen Victoria’s goddaughter; Nathaniel King, Nigeria’s first medical doctor; Christopher Sapara Williams, the first Nigerian lawyer; Oreoluwa Green, the first female Nigerian pharmacist; Herbert Macaulay, newspaper publisher and nationalist and Candido da Rocha, one of Nigeria’s first home-grown millionaires. Abubakar Abdullahi is the winner of a national contest to design the centenary logo. The theme song, This Land, written by Onyeka Onwenu, one of Nigeria’s best-known and most accomplished female musicians, was performed by her and a line-up of some of Nigeria’s finest, including Omawumi, Tosin Martins, Zaaki Azzay and J’odie. “Here we are, standing tall, through adversity, we are one, 100 years of unity, Nigeria will stand,” declares the chorus. For Nigeria’s citizens there’s much debate over whether the unification is deserving of celebration, or public funds, as many see it as merely an ill-advised experiment of an imperialist administrator.
On the night, the government pointed out that no public funds will be spent. The ceremony was paid for by a number of Nigeria’s biggest companies. The government insists that the anniversary, provides an opportunity for deep reflection on Nigerian unity.
“The question we must devote time and effort to is: How do we build the foundation of the Nigeria we seek in the next 100 years?” says President Jonathan.
There were sprinklings of this unity on the night. First was the presence of Muhammadu Buhari, runner-up to President Jonathan in the 2011 elections. Following the elections, Buhari challenged the results in court, and his party has been one of the leading voices of the opposition to the Jonathan government. On this day it appeared both—one a northerner, the other a southerner—had set aside their differences. It wasn’t only political opponents who buried the hatchet. The Dangote Group and Ibeto Group—who has traded words in the newspapers for months in a tussle over the cement market—sponsored the celebration side-by-side. The government is projecting that the celebrations will create up to 15,000 jobs, as well as lots of investment opportunities at a forum to be held in Abuja. The Centenary Project is an ambitious one. It will include a brand new 100,000-resident “Centenary City”—covering more than 1,000 hectares, which is to be built within Abuja—a new Abuja City Gate and ‘Unity Squares’ in all 36 state capitals. Monuments that will prove a legacy for the next celebration in 100 ye

A Hundred Years Of  Heroes And Tears

In the 1800s, Europeans referred to Africa as the “dark continent”, although the Victorian term has fallen from usage, until recently it accurately described the approach of foreign investors to Africa. Risk was thought to be too high, returns too low. A decade ago, the region’s share of FDI was less than one-tenth of the amount flowing into Asia or Latin America. Until a few years ago, a single company, Exxon Mobil, was worth more than all of Africa’s listed companies put together, excluding those of South Africa.
But what a difference a few years can make. Since the financial crisis hit in 2008, there has been a dramatic shift in how investors view Africa. One of the markets that has best epitomized this change is Ghana.
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The West African county was near the top of worldwide tables in 2011 in terms of GDP growth with a rate of more than 14%. 2012 figures were equally robust, coming in at above 8.5% buoyed by strong growth in the non-oil sector of 8%. While the country is largely dependent on commodities for export revenues, increased activity in housing, construction and banking has spurred an expansion of the services sector, which makes up more than half of GDP.
Last year saw a gradual depreciation in the cedi, which fell by around 14% against the dollar, driven by increased demand for imports. While the country’s robust growth also stoked inflationary pressures, at least over the short-term, the CPI fell to 8.8% in December—its thirty-first consecutive month of single-digit inflation.
The country benefited from a statistical rebasing a few years earlier, which dramatically improved data collection and accuracy. As a result, the country was catapulted into middle-income status.
The biggest recent watershed moment for the country is as a result of its newfound oil and gas reserves. The offshore Jubilee field, discovered in 2007, began production in record time, with the first barrel being lifted at the end of 2010. The speed with which Ghana went about capitalizing on its new oil wealth, 42 months from discovery to production, led to a few hiccups. For four months, light, sweet crude flowed without a regulatory framework to determine how the revenue would be channeled and how future production would be handled. Eventually, the Petroleum Revenue Management Bill was put in place. It allocates a proportion of revenue to future generation funds and price stabilization funds and some $444 million worth of oil revenue flowed into government coffers by the end of 2011. The production, in relation to the country’s overall economy, is modest and by some estimates will work out to around $50 per capita annually but the rush of investment into the sector—and ancillary industries, such as construction and services—helped ensure the country was one of the largest FDI destinations in Africa last year.
Associated gas deposits in the field brim with equally promising potential, particularly in terms of domestic industrial and electricity production, although timing has been problematic. Currently, with a ban on flaring and no offtake infrastructure, gas has been re-injected into the deposits but at a certain point this will negatively affect oil production. As a result, the country has been racing over the past year to finalize infrastructure for its gas master plan, which will see the construction of more than $750 million worth of new processing and pipeline infrastructure by China’s SINOPEC. Gas is due to begin flowing to the newly-built Aboadze power plant over the next month or two—and none too soon, given the blackouts last year when the country’s alternative gas supply, the West African Gas Pipeline, experienced supply shortages.
While hydrocarbons dominate the headlines, Ghana’s traditional commodities have provided the bulk of revenues in recent years. Cocoa, which indirectly supports more than one-sixth of the population, had a successful year with an estimated production figure of 860,000 tons, down slightly from the previous year but enough to make it the world’s second largest producer. The distribution of more than 20,000 new hybrid seedlings and efforts to improve the ability of small farmers to tend and replace their crops, looks set to strengthen output over the medium-term.
Similarly, gold, which accounts for roughly 40% of exports, grew by double-digit figures over 2012. Although production fell slightly, higher prices on international markets helped keep prices afloat and fund new exploration in marginal deposits. Ghana has revamped its regulatory scheme, introducing a new bidding system and increasing the fiscal burden for operators, including a windfall tax and higher royalties.
Of course, with all this laudable growth comes a note of caution. This rapid change must be managed carefully, for the downside risks facing the country are sizable. Ghana was the third-largest recipient of FDI in Africa last year, but it remains worryingly dependent on commodities. Gold, cocoa and oil dominate exports and while Ghana is not as sensitive to price fluctuations as it was in the 1980s, when the economy seesawed according to international prices, volatility still impacts overall performance. Furthermore, labor-intensive activities such as manufacturing remain marginalized, exacerbating unemployment and weakening the balance of payments. The benefits of the economic boom have been disproportionately concentrated in the south and development in the north lags significantly.
However, Ghana has the ideal foundation for future growth. It has natural resources, policy stability and reasonable infrastructure and it has benefited accordingly. But exporting raw materials, by sending gold and cocoa elsewhere for processing, is a short-term solution. The country has begun aggressively encouraging increased value-added production in the secondary and tertiary sectors, to improve the sustainability and inclusiveness of growth and to ensure that the country’s current performance is not a temporary blip.

Gas And Cocoa Oils Ghana Growth

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or as they are more commonly known drones, are the latest technology boom that is growing exponentially across the globe and African skies are seeing an increasing number of them too.
What are drones? And how do they work?  Briefly, they are aircraft without a human pilot flying inside. They are flown either by operators sitting in control rooms hundreds, or even thousands of kilometers away, using satellite feeds or radio signals, or increasingly, many drones are flown entirely by computer.
Most people have a vague idea that the Americans have been flying strange unmanned vehicles, called Predators and Reapers over the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan to spy on and often kill suspected Taliban or other militants. What is startling is the growth of drones in the military. A decade ago, according to a recent article in Time Magazine, there were only 50 drones in the Pentagon fleet, now there are some 7,500 and more than a third of the US Air Force fleet is unmanned.
<div id="attachment_1594" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1594" class="size-medium wp-image-1594" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Tsepo-Monaheng-pic2-300x217.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="217" />Tsepo Monaheng, CEO, Denel Dynamics</div>
The military use of drones, particularly by the States, is troubling but it is a reality that is not going away. And one which has changed the nature of warfare. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that there have been some 360 drone strikes in Pakistan, killing up to 3,500 people—over 300 of the strikes have been ordered by the Obama administration—while there have been multiple strikes in Yemen and Somalia. The US confirmed, as far back as 2011, that it had been operating Reaper drones alongside Ethiopian forces battling al-Shabaab militias in Somalia. They also have secret drone bases in the Horn of Africa, the Seychelles and Burkina Faso.  The government of Niger recently gave the US the green light to operate surveillance drones to help monitor the movement of extremist groups in the Sahara and Sahel. The US and France are certainly sharing intelligence over ongoing events in Mali, although there are no confirmed reports of drone strikes as of going to print.
The largest manufacturer of drones in Africa is Denel Dynamics based outside Pretoria, South Africa. They have been making drones and other Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) since the 1980s. They make four different drones aimed at both the commercial and military markets.
Their flagship product is the Seeker 400; it is the only long range tactical UAV made on the continent. It is an upgrade on the successful Seeker II, which was exported to two other countries, neither of which can be disclosed, but Denel Dynamics has “Clients in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, South America, especially Brazil. We are not considering entering the market in North America but in Europe there might be some possibilities,” says deputy CEO of Denel Dynamics, Tsepo Monaheng.The Seeker 400 is what Monaheng describes as an entry-level long range UAV.  In the industry, it is known as a ‘MALE’ or Medium Altitude Long Endurance drone. It can remain airborne for 16 hours and carries two payloads so that it can operate different cameras on the same flight, say, a high-resolution optical camera and an infrared one. It has a range of 250 kilometers and relies on line-of-sight communications. It has the potential to be upgraded for satellite links but at this stage, “We cannot hand control of the communications to a third party”.
The Seeker 400 is also designed to carry an armed payload if necessary. “None of our drones carry weapons at the moment but the system can be customized for different client requirements,” he says.
So, South Africa is a potential player in the game of international drone warfare.
“We can sell anywhere that is morally okay. Anywhere our country is okay with,” says Monaheng.
At the moment only the States, United Kingdom and Israel are known to have used armed drones. But as the pressure builds on South Africa to become more involved in continental peace-keeping missions, the questions of who to sell drones to will become a foreign policy dilemma that could have political ramifications. South Africa will, in the near future, have to contend with the growing use of drones by other militaries, especially by Western forces, on the continent and decide what the country’s response to this will be.
Johan Potgieter of the Institute for Security Studies explains that  in the recent conflict in the DRC, after the M23 rebels had taken control of parts of the east, there was renewed interest in the United Nation’s (UN) use of at least three drones to get real-time information for their peacekeeping forces.
“The US had trained the Ugandan forces in the utilization of drones because the UN had agreed to it but then the Rwandans complained.”
What most vexed the Rwandans was their national sovereignty being violated by drones—an issue for which, at this stage, international law has few, if any, precedents or guidelines.
“Africa shall not become a laboratory for intelligence devices from overseas,” says Olivier Nduhungirehe, Rwanda’s deputy UN ambassador.
Where South Africa, as the largest drone manufacturer and exporter on the continent, might place itself on this question is anybody’s guess at this stage.
“Africa is very sensitive about other people interfering in their airspace—as they’ve often got something to hide,” says Potgieter.
The questions raised on the matter in international politics are only going to proliferate, and the military drones themselves are going to get more and more sophisticated. In recent years, however, there has been a rapidly growing parallel development of simpler and far less expensive drones for civilian use.
“There has been an evolution in thinking about UAV technology. They can be used to courier information, blood samples, data of all kinds. They used them at Fukushima to monitor radiation levels. You can use them wherever you don’t want humans to be involved,” says Monaheng.
With this in mind, Denel Dynamics has developed a much smaller drone called the Hungwe, which is small enough to be transported in a single commercial 4&#215;4 vehicle.
“The design concept is for it to be used in civilian airspace. The challenge is to work with the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority).”
Civilian drone technology, both local and international, is developing so fast that it is now prompting a rapid review of South Africa’s aviation laws to integrate drones for civilian use into our air space, as currently there are no regulations for the use of UAVs outside of restricted military airspace.
According to Sam Twala, certification engineer for CAA: ‘This is not a unique problem to South Africa, the whole world is still searching for a working solution.  The UAV interim policy of 2009 is under review and we hope to have something out by the end of this year. But we need to find a solution that not only suits the South African market but harmonizes with the international market”.
There is huge economic potential for both military and civilian drones.
“UAVs are a successful business for us. Our turnover is about R200 million ($22.5 million) and we employ about 90 people. But the industry is growing and we want a big chunk of that and we expect to grow 10% year-on-year.”
At the moment the potential for making money in the civilian drone business is still at a sort of Klondike stage; everyone knows that there is gold out there but no one knows exactly where it is or how to get hold of it.
A 2012 market study by defense consultants TEAL group predicts that global UAV spending will almost double in the next decade from $6.6 billion to $11.4 billion bringing it up to $89 billion over the decade. But really, who knows? It could be even bigger if certain conditions are met: appropriate legislation, enough air space being made available and the technology being safe enough to operate successfully.
The second biggest players in the African market, Advanced Technologies and Engineering (ATE), are currently undergoing cash flow problems but they have over 15 years of experience in the industry and are confident that a turnaround is near.
“The applications for non-passenger UAVs are unlimited. The only restriction is legislation. The CAA is key but so is ICASA [Independent Communications Authority of South Africa]—they have to make bandwidth available to the industry. We need regulation urgently for different classes and types of UAVs.  We can create an airspace where only UAVs operate. There are two types of aircraft: unpressurized planes fly beneath 12,000 feet, most pressurized craft fly over 28,000 feet, so there is a whole band of airspace that UAVs could operate in,” says Jan Vermeulen, programs manager at ATE.
Their main UAV products are the Vulture Tactical UAS used to assist long-range artillery with finding targets and correcting both aim and range. The mobile Vulture is launched by catapult off the back of a truck, while the Sentinel-LE UAS uses a similar flight body but takes off and lands on a runway.
“We don’t make armed UAVs. Definitely not,” Vermeulen points out.
Like Denel Dynamics, they won’t reveal the identity of their clients but Africa, the Middle East and Asia are on the list.
Perhaps their most innovative project is one that is stalled for the moment as the company’s financial position is being considered. Using a tiny UAS called a KIWIT weighing less than 4 kilograms, they developed a system in conjunction with the National Health Laboratory Service. The KIWIT, guided by a PC, would fly from a small rural clinic, carrying a blood sample to a laboratory or hospital with laboratory services. The KIWIT is then programed to drop the sample by parachute and return to the clinic for another load.
“We got a 97 out of 100 success rate but the program is now stalled because of [air space] regulations,” says Vermeulen.
When asked about the future of the company Vermeulen is positive.
“The last two years our turnover was on average R100 million ($11.26 million) a year but we had one big overseas contract who didn’t pay and our cash flow was badly affected. Everything depends on the new owners but we have the potential to do amazing things.”
It’s uncertain exactly how big the UAV manufacturing sector is in South Africa but there are successful smaller companies like Tellumat, which specialize in avionics for UAVs and exhibited at last year’s African Aerospace and Defense show in South Africa.
S-Plane Automation is a Cape Town-based UAV manufacturer, which builds the Swift and Nightingale drones.
“They are both still in development phase. The Swift is a tactical class surveillance UAV, not designed for armaments, that can fly at 18,000 feet. The Nightingale is a much smaller unit, with a wingspan of only 1.5 meters,” says technical director Iain Peddle.
The company’s website explains that they were designed, like ATE’s KIWIT, to transport blood samples.
S-Plane is still working on its UAVs.
“At the moment they are not mature products. We prefer, for the time being, not to compete with the Denels. We are staying in the sub-system market, flight computers, simulators, power managements systems.”
The Swift and Nightingale are elegant machines that are potentially extremely versatile. Peddle won’t go on the record about what their turnover is.
“It’s a sensitive industry but let’s say we’re a growing player. We’ve gone from 6 or 7 engineers to about 20 now.”
Small companies, such as S-Plane, are part of an exploding international market.  A 2012 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) on drone proliferation states that the number of countries possessing drones has risen to 76, with over 50 countries developing more than 900 UAV systems.
The South African UAV market faces stiff competition. Potgieter points out that, “Seeker is not necessarily cheap. In an open market it will be relatively easy to find a tested and proven UAV that is much more competitive”.
“China and Israel are our biggest competitors. They put together a whole package where they give a country UAVs and build an airport in exchange for, say, coal. We still operate in a traditional business way, where we have to receive money for our product,” says Monaheng.
Perhaps the most immediately pressing and exciting development for civilian and tactical unarmed UAVs in Africa, is their potential for combatting rhino poaching. Damien Mander, an Australian ex-Special Forces soldier and Iraq veteran, who founded the International Anti-Poaching Foundation has pioneered the use of small drones in tracking elephant poachers in Niassa province, Mozambique. He is developing a scheme to track poachers and watch over rhinos in the Hoedspruit area of Limpopo Province in South Africa.
“There are heaps of drones on the market that have a 20-40 kilometer capability. The drones that conservationists need cost $250,000. The components that go into them cost $100,000 tops. The rest of the price is intellectual property. We don’t have that kind of money so we are developing a UAV that is sold for the cost of its parts,” he says.
Mander has assembled an experienced team that is building the UAVs in Australia.
“You can find the parts on diydrones.com, from all over the place. We want to stay comfortably behind the technology curve. We want them to be affordable, easy to operate in rough remote areas and easy to repair.”
He aims to get five airframes to South Africa by September and pending CAA approval, hopes they will be used against poachers soon.
The unparalleled surveillance capabilities of drones mean that very soon they will become standard equipment for law enforcement. Clearly, they can be used to track criminals, watch borders, guard key installations, help protect VIPs among a number of other uses.
They take us into a 21st century world of Big Brother legal issues. What does their use mean for privacy and entrapment issues? CAA concerns aside, lawyers, legislators and courts are going to have to rewrite a number of laws within the ambit of this new and growing technology. In the very near future, at, say for example, the massacre of miners in Marikana, there will be police drones recording crowd movements; anticipating where they might move next; pinpointing individuals with GPS and face recognition software. Some of them will probably be armed with tear gas or, perhaps, even missiles. At the same time, the mine owners will have their own drones flying overhead, as will the unions and this is not to mention that all the major news companies will most likely have drones too. There will be so many competing streams of information that can be cross-referenced that the whole nature of the investigation will be changed.
The psychological, social and economic effects of this are difficult to predict.  Increasingly, drones will become an indispensable tool of the media. We will expect to watch events across the world in real-time video fed from drones overhead edited in with pictures from cameras and cellphones from journalists and even members of the public on the ground as they are happening. Live broadcasts have been around for decades but drone technology takes it to a new level. Journalists will be able to fly drones over police cordons, prison walls, national borders to be able to bring the events to their audience. Laws might make certain areas or events out of bounds to drones but there will be equally compelling arguments in favor of freedom of expression and the public’s right to know. In purely practical terms, to prevent drones being used, the police might have to shoot them out of the sky or interrupt their flight control signals, which will potentially bring them crashing down. We’ve hardly even begun to imagine what the widespread availability and use of drones will mean for the future.
The unstoppable morphing of drones from the military to civilian worlds and the inevitable growth in their availability and use is not all good news. As Vermeulen points out, “Any guy can buy the components and, with a little bit of technical knowledge, slap them together and then you have a drone.”
The web is filled with sites such as the DroneZone.co.za; www.SMac.co.za (SMart Automotive Components) or even Amazon and Kalahari where you can buy small drones like the Parrot that is operated off an iPhone. The smallest drones available are called MAVs (Micro Air Vehicles) and their designs are inspired by bird and insect wings. In the last month, the British military announced that it was providing its forces in Afghanistan with a 16g Norwegian-designed Black Hornet Nano drone, the size of a weaver bird.
Criminals and killers can all buy these drones and the components to upgrade them for more ominous uses. A recent piece in the Spectator described how in the near future the software will exist for drones to fly autonomously and to make their own ‘kill’ decision based entirely on computer algorithms with no element of human choice involved.
Drones are going to change everything. Soon. Society will have to struggle constantly with their dark, and potentially deadly, aspects but they also represent the next frontier for entrepreneurs. Their potential is enormous. They can be used to courier parcels, monitor flocks of sheep, check the fences on game farms, film aerial shots for movies, find natural disaster victims, monitor schools of fish in the oceans and the illegal trawlers that go after them, survey pirates, rescue yachtsmen in distress, provide live traffic updates, check the quality of soils on wine estates. Their uses are endless.
As Twala says: “UAVs are the future. In the next five years, UAVs will change our lives as much as cellphones did. The list is limited only by one’s imagination”.

There’s One  Flying Near You

Virtually all that stuff has to be dug out of the ground. Mined. Then manufactured, transported, sold and consumed.
First, it has to be found, where it hides, mostly deep underground. So, exploration companies with their massive machines, technology, geologists, agronomists, hydrologists, geophysicists and acoustical engineers flock to the Mining Indaba at Africa’s Southern tip. As do prospectors, who tell exploration companies where to look.
Then come the investigative drillers, reserve definers, junior miners and risk assessors, metals analysers, remote camp builders and computer software writers. Feeding at the edges, as always, are the lawyers.  Next come those who do actual mine construction. Here, the big boys get involved: banks, investors, partners, governments, fund managers, engineers, employment agencies. Lawyers move in. And we still have nothing tangible, nothing yet taken out of the ground to feed metals and minerals to a hungry populace.
<div id="attachment_1586" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1586" class="size-medium wp-image-1586" src="/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Minister_Shabangu-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Minister, Susan Shabangu</div>
Once gold, copper, coal, iron ore, bauxite and a hundred other elements surface from undergound, a new breed of people get involved, until the cars, jewellery, electricity or cellphone gets the stuff into consumer hands.
The extracted total of mining production is worth two trillion dollars, putting the worth of the whole industry and associated ones at about $2,000 trillion.
The Indaba itself? Probably worth $20 million. And its value to Cape Town? Ten times that.
There are 3,000 listed exploration and mining companies, half of them in Canada. The three deepest mines are in South Africa. Coal is easily the most valuable mined commodity, with 7,700 million tons a year worth an annual $693 billion. The next three are iron (2,000 million tons worth $238 billion), gold (257,000 tons worth $132 billion) and copper (16 million tons worth $122 billion). All these numbers from Chris Hinde of IntierraRMG, who ran “A three-hour PhD in Mining” at the 2013 Indaba.
Besides the 7,532 people registered for this year’s event, there were around that number again hanging around, often in suites near the venue, organising meetings with those who are registered.
One top chief executive of a mining company told me: “I don’t bother to go in anymore, otherwise I have to say ‘hi’ to a lot of people instead of just talking to the ones I need to meet. I take a room and get investors to see me privately.”
In the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) itself are hordes of people in black suits and red ties, anxious looking if they need money, urbane if they are investors or lawyers. Milling about, chatting, drinking, eating and of course networking.
Oh, and there are speeches as well. As a fraction of total delegates, the audience for scheduled addresses seldom exceeds half, which is still close to 4,000 listeners in the hall. Yet the talks are fascinating, especially the women this year. South Africa’s minister of mines, Susan Shabangu, tried to allay investors’ fears about real nationalization but failed to convince them that creeping resource nationalization in the form of taxes, labor laws, fees, licences, community demands and union demands were not a threat to investment. One mine owner muttered: “We’ve already been nationalized, we just didn’t notice it…”
Anglo American CEO, Cynthia Carroll, responded by telling the minister and her Cabinet colleagues: “Mining companies need to work in partnership with their employees and trade unions, to move on from conflict and to build positive relationships for the future. Partnership between business and government is also critical, particularly in ensuring that development objectives and initiatives are aligned. Partnership is essential. But it isn’t easy. Partnership is about dialogue—not monologue. It requires listening as well as talking. And above all it requires understanding and acceptance. Companies need to understand that in a vibrant democracy there will always be a lively political debate, in which not all the views expressed will be to the liking of business. In return, governments and political parties need to accept that business has an important role to play and a legitimate voice that deserves to be heard. Business is a partner, not a pariah.”
The third tough woman speaker was Mamphela Ramphele, who told delegates to be patient when asked if she was creating a new political party.
Her substantive address damned the current government by saying, to a ripple of laughter: “For the most, mining tax revenues vanish in the black hole that is the central fiscus and end up funding large rural estates for presidents.”
She took the audience on a tour of the key issues needing frank discussion if a viable and sustainable future for mining is to be forged. How do you build a mine to best share the resource? How do you deal with legacy issues to enable co-ownership of risk and reward? What needs to change to create sustainable economies and socio-political systems?
There were many speakers, each with platinum-plated wisdom to convey. It can get too much, so I took a tour of the 400 stalls in the exhibition center, mostly manned by Australians—who love Cape Town, seem to despise their government and see Africa as the future of mining globally.  Every single one told me they were happy to be at the Indaba ($12,500 per stand), would be back next year, and did not expect to do business but were there to collect leads for future business.
Jonathan Moore, MD of the Mining Indaba, said because it attracted investors and mining chief executives, it should probably not grow to be very much bigger as quality could suffer.
“It was started by a bright female entrepreneur, Sandy Lawrence, who realized when SA came out of apartheid there would be an opportunity. The first one only had about 200 people, but after it grew bigger she sold it to a private equity firm who held it for about five years, and Summit Business Media, based mostly in New York, bought it in 2007. She thought the intent of the event should be to drive foreign dollars into African mining.”
It has certainly done that.
“I bring 15 people from the USA but employ locals for PR, tech, IT, printing, signage, transport, bags, building stands, some 50 to 60 temps, security. We fill hotels, flights, restaurants, the CTICC, taxis, shops.”
“The CTICC is world-class, as are the staff. Everyone is happy to have it in Cape Town, and the city benefits big time. The world is still waking up to what this continent of Africa has to offer. The Indaba has moved in unison with that awakening and in a few decades things will be very different from now. We haven’t come close to tapping Africa’s mining resource.”
Levels of optimism are high, despite Marikana and the platinum recession. New finds everywhere, all bigger, better, richer, higher grade. Only the Australians seem unhappy, probably because they have to return to a depressed economy coupled with boring politicians.
Africa is on the move. Most of the stuff that has to be dug out of the ground, metals and minerals and increasingly oil and the gas, will come from Africa. Those who will reap the rewards of doing that are the people who people the corridors of the Mining Indaba. It is simply one of the world’s most successful conferences.

Tag: March 2013

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