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Why is Africa left out in the cold when it comes to food and wine? The continent has so much to show in this regard.
We have diverse cuisine along the length and breadth of the continent. Our wine industry, and even our soil, is older than that of Europe. Winemaking was perfected by the ancient Egyptians while the rest of the world was still living in caves. Africans and Asians have more tastebuds than the rest of the world, hence our affinity for spicy foods, sweet wines and cider. The Afrikaans people of South Africa also reflect this through a love of brandy with Coke. In fact, Afrikaans rapper Jack Parrow says Afrikaners were born to drink brandy and Coke.
Yet we hold Europe up as the pinnacle when it comes to wine and the appreciation thereof. Being a Master of Wine and part of the Institute of Masters of Wine is the highest accolade any wine professional can aspire to. It takes a lot to earn such an esteemed designation.
The Americans, may the gods of pleasure bless them, have taken a bold anti-establishment stance against this mystique that seems to dictate wine appreciation in polite society. They love their wines, like the Texans love their big cars, to be very rich and heavy with a long, satisfying aftertaste. So big is their influence that even French winemakers are making their classical wine in this style to gain approval in what is fast becoming the world’s biggest and most influential market.
<div id="attachment_103" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-103" class="size-large wp-image-103" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/KIETH_023-683x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="711" />Keith Dudula</div>
Tim Hanni, an American Master of Wine and a sought- after wine consultant who admits to being a Francophile, has also made a big u-turn when it comes to wine appreciation. He wants the wine industry and the greater wine-drinking community to look at the subject in a fun and approachable manner. Hanni’s wine appreciation system focuses on the individual; just as we all have different shoe sizes, so we have different palates and no two people have the same tastebuds. We simply need to discover what kind of tasters we are. There is the tolerant taster who loves big, heavy- bodied wines; the sensitive taster who loves a smoother, more palatable wine; land like milk and honey. Morocco, to the north, is home to the tagine—a round clay cooking pot designed to simmer while more ingredients are added.
The tagine is a stew and can be made with meat or poultry. Moroccans then add lots of fruit like pears, apricots, raisins, prunes, dates and preserved lemons. A dish of this size would not sit well with a heavy, full-bodied dry red wine. A good choice would be a light red wine like a pinot noir or a fruity white number with some acidity like a pinot grigio, or an unwooded chardonnay, as the dishes also have dairy ingredients like milk and yoghurt. Couscous is the main starch served with a tagine and sensitive wine tasters would be at home with this pairing.
Over in West Africa, Nigerians favor spices, scented leaves and palm oil to flavor their dishes. Like in Morocco, meat and stews are slowly simmered so the meat is soft and tender, but unlike the Moroccans, dishes here are added with ground fish to add flavor. Egusi stew or soup, made from seeds rich in fat and protein, is one such dish, with beef and fish as the main ingredients. Egusi is quite spicy and pairing it with a wine is not that difficult. Heavy, rich flavored red wines would work well here, as would sweet wines. Food and wine pairing may seem like a science, but it is actually quite easy once you follow and break some of the rules to suit your specific taste and needs. How the food is prepared, and what is added to the final mix, usually dictates the right wine for the table. African food is diverse, incorporating as it does fresh fish, fruit, grain and starch. In food and wine, pairing is everything. It is all about balance and food should never overpower the wine or vice versa. So get in touch with your African palate and enjoy.
Happy tasting
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African Tastebuds Rule

The international art world in which he finds himself is complicated, like the artist himself. South African artist William Kentridge strides confidently in this tough and demanding world, whether he is showing his work in a gallery in Sydney or Paris; featuring in a retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York or the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto; or premiering an unusual opera at the New York Metropolitan Opera or at the Festival d’ Aix en Provence.
<div id="attachment_99" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-99" class="size-large wp-image-99" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/kentridge68_1-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Artist William Kentridge at his &#8216;Arts on Main&#8217; studio, Johannesburg; 11 August 2011 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
The art world requires excellence in execution, but most of all, it requires a unique spark of creativity, of individual expression that sustains itself. Kentridge has been blessed with this. One cannot describe him by any glib epithet. He is South African, yet he is internationally recognised as one of the world’s greatest contemporary artists. In 2009 he was on Time’s 100 list of people who most affected the world. His exhibition, 5 Themes, was second on Time’s Top 10 list of exhibitions in 2009. He has won several international accolades, including the 2011 Kyoto Prize for outstanding contributions to society. Kentridge may frequent the art capitals of the world, but he is firmly rooted in South Africa, in Johannesburg specifically, where he has two studios. One at home in a leafy suburb, where the bulk of his solitary work is done, the other in downtown Johannesburg, in the Arts on Main complex. The latter is a large space, ideal for the expansive drawings used in theatrical performances, and for rehearsals for performance pieces.
At the time of writing this, Kentridge and his team were working on Refuse the Hour a series of live collaborative performances to be staged at the Market Theatre in Newtown, Johannesburg in September. Among them is the lecture performance I am not me, the horse is not mine, which incorporates eight short films, and which is being staged for the first time in Johannesburg. It was inspired by the short story The Nose, written in 1837 by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. Gogol’s story inspired Dmitri Shostakovich to write his opera The Nose in 1928. The main character’s nose takes on a life of its own, and thus opens the discourse around matters of social hierarchy and division of the self. In turn, I am not me, the horse is not mine formed the basis for Kentridge’s interpretation of the Shostakovich opera, which premiered at the New York MetropolitanOpera, and garnered him his “best reviews yet” at its
European premiere at the Festival d’Aix en Provence. So good, in fact that several international opera houses have expressed interest in staging the production, with its massive painted canvasses and video projections. Several large mechanical contraptions are ranged around the studio. Kentridge steps up to one, turns a lever, and the wooden machine which sprouts metal megaphones at its tips, moves. These structures are larger than life, curious. Looking at them in this space makes one aware, in Kentridge’s words, of the process of looking and seeing and making sense of the world.
Against one expansive white wall a film image is projected. It is of Kentridge walking. Behind him walks dancer Dada Masilo. He throws a book from a stack on his head back towards her. She catches it and tosses a book back at him. They continue walking in a timeless loop. It is fascinating to watch. This too will be part of the September performances. While preparations for these performances will take up the next few weeks at the downtown studio, Kentridge spends most of his time working on his own in his studio at home. For the past 18 months, he has been working on a new film and exhibition that will show at the Goodman Gallery in Rosebank, Johannesburg in November.
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Other Faces is the 10th in a series of animated films that he started working on 23 years ago. The films feature the same characters, and primarily use the same technique. He makes drawings with charcoal on paper. A drawing is done, then filmed with an old 35mm animation camera. The same drawing undergoes “many, many” erasures. Through the animation of these drawings, the artist leads the observer to understand the world as process rather than as fact. Kentridge continues to work on one drawing until the sequence in the film is finished.
He doesn’t work on the series constantly, but comes back to it every few years. The films are invariably about Johannesburg. The themes in this one are about xenophobia and the changing look of streets of downtown Johannesburg. It has to do with the further erasure of the mine dumps and Johannesburg memory. It’s about “one’s relationship to one’s younger self”, Kentridge says. Other Faces brings back the character of Soho Eckstein, who along with the character Felix Teitlebaum, is a constant in Kentridge’s films. It took a while for him to understand that they each represented an alter ego, a “self-portrait in the third person”. Kentridge talks about our collective amnesia as South Africans about the apartheid years. It is always easier to forget about the uncomfortable things. Yet when I look at Kentridge’s work (I was lucky enough to get a preview of Other Faces), I am jolted back into the past.
As lyrical music sometimes juxtaposes with his stark images, deep passions rip around my interior. I am struck by the horror, the poignancy, and the irony of his themes and the beauty of his art He strives to evoke or recreate the strength of a passionwhen first experienced, whether it is anger or distress. He does this so successfully that the viewer cannot remain distant from his work. It engages one on a deep, even subconscious level. The Goodman Gallery will show the film as well as about 30 or 40 drawings that were made in the process of the film. These will be for sale, but the artist won’t talk about value. This is where one of the grey areas of the art world comes in. Artists create art for the sake of creation. They are not motivated by money in the same way as investors and stock market traders are. And yet, there is an art market. And there is always a local art market and an international art market.
So I ask Lisa Essers, the owner of Goodman Gallery, for an estimated comparison of the investment value of a Kentridge work. If, in the late eighties one had bought a Kentridge drawing for around R40 000 ($5 600), today it could fetch somewhere between R1.6 million and R2 million ($235,000-$280,000). Kentridge is one of only a handful of contemporary African artists who are part of international art history, and therefore part of the international art market. Essers says the South African art market is quite far behind the curve as far as other art markets in the world are concerned.
The top international curators handpick the talent that is brought to the art markets, and it’s the collectors who put a price on the work. Often, it is on auction that works bring in the largest amounts, and more often than not it is the collector who benefits, rather than the artist. In brief, there is one essential difference between investing in art and investing in stocks. Stocks are more liquid and offer dividends, whereas an art investment takes a number of years to mature. The joy of investing in art in the short term is about aesthetic pleasure and status. In the long term, the value of a work is determined by a number of variables, one of them being the name and reputation of the artist. That, Kentridge undoubtedly has.

Art For Art’s Sake

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS have long imagined a future in which facial recognition technology makes anonymity in public obsolete.  A research study at Carnegie Mellon University suggests that this Minority Report future has already arrived, thanks to facial recognition products now commercially available, combined with the 750-million-person identity database called Facebook.
<div id="attachment_86" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-86" class="size-large wp-image-86" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_066-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="267" />Carnegie Mellon prof Alessandro Acquisti—the real guy, with his biometric face print—worries technology may expose everyone to constant scrutiny</div>
A CMU research team led by associate professor Alessandro Acquisti took candid photos of 93 random students on campus using a $35 webcam. Within seconds the researchers were able to determine the identities of a third of their photogenic guinea pigs, using of fthe- shelf facial recognition software from PittPatt, a software company recently acquired by Google, and publicly available profile photos from Facebook. The researchers had an even higher rate of success using the same technology to identify more than 100,000 Pittsburgh singles with otherwise pseudonymous accounts on a dating site, adding yet more complexity to the world of online dating. “We’ve been thinking about privacy in cyberspace, but we need to start thinking about it in the real world, with augmented reality,” says Acquisti. He was also able to determine the first five digits of some of the identified students’ Social Security numbers based on previous research he has done showing that those numbers are predictable if you know a person’s birth date and birthplace. That information is usually available on a person’s Face- book profile page.
It seems that Aldous Huxley was right and George Orwell was wrong. Ubiquitous surveillance isn’t being orchestrated by the governmental- Big Brother of 1984 but by advances in technology designed for convenience’s sake adopted eagerly by private citizens. Acquisti calls it the “democratization of surveillance”. And it’s coming fast. Soon after the riots broke out in London at the beginning of August, a technophile band of vigilantes formed a Google Group to discuss applying the methods pioneered by Acquisti’s research team to online photos and videos of rioters, in order to help identify looters for prosecution by law enforcement. Facial recognition tools identify a person by analyzing dozens of features, such as the length of a forehead and the distance between the eyes and the nose. Google, Facebook and Apple have already made them freely available for people to tag their friends and family in photo albums. But at what point will you have the option to snap a photo of a stranger and then pull up his or her name and whatever information the Internet offers up about them? The capability is there, but the willingness to unleash it isn’t. Yet. Google has said that its image search tool, Goggles—which uses a photo instead of text as a search term, letting you snap a photo of a painting, for example, and find out who its creator is—has the capability to find people’s identities based on a photo. But the search giant had chosen not to enable the feature because it was deemed too creepy.
When Facebook recently rolled out an internal facial recognition tool allowing friends to automatically tag other friends in photos, it inflamed some privacy advocates (whose combustion levels tend to be high around anything new that Facebook does). Those advocates seemed to overlook the fact that the very existence of Facebook’s extensive database of photos linked to people’s names creates the possibility for third parties to build a facial biometric print. While Facebook’s terms of service prohibit the scraping of information from its site, there are no technological tools in place to prevent it. And, even if there were, scraping is certainly not limited to Facebook.
“For most of us there are already identified photos of us somewhere on the Internet, and this trend will only increase,” says Acquisti. (Face.com did the doctoring on the photo on page 58.) The CMU researchers wrote a facial recognition iPhone app but decided not to release it to the public. “We developed the app to make a point,” says Acquisti. “A future in which we infer sensitive information from faces is already here, and we better start thinking whether we really want to live in that future.” Their tool, though, would be valuable only for those seeking to identify the 25,000 CMU students whose photos the researchers grabbed from Facebook. We’re still a few years away from an app that would work on a national or global scale. The two main hurdles, Acquisti says, are finding a large and reliable source of facial images (hello, DMV!) and securing enough computing power. Comparing a photo to a database of, say, 300 million photos would take many hours, whereas a functional app would need to do it in ten seconds. “If I had to guess, I would say that we are less than five years away,” says Acquisti.
Specialized facial recognition products are already on the market. BI2 Technologies has developed a $3,000 iPhone add-on called MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System) that dozens of police departments across the country started adopting this year. Police officers can use MORIS to take photos of suspects, and the app, using iris scans and facial recognition, will identify anyone who already has a photo in a criminal database. Microsoft and Intel have worked together to create digital billboards with face-detecting cameras that pick up on the gender and age of passersby to show them relevant ads. A startup named SceneTap installed similar cameras in bars in Chicago earlier this year, so that Windy City nightlife lovers can use their smartphones to check the crowdedness, gender ratio and average age of patrons at a given bar before deciding where to go. So far law enforcement officials are tentative about using the technology to identify people not already in criminal databases.
Though a Canadian insurance corporation graciously volunteered the use of its driver’s license photo database to Vancouver police after the devastating post-Stanley Cup hockey riot there in July, authorities declined the offer after privacy advocates expressed concerns about violation of Canadians’ civil liberties. In London, Scotland Yard is using facial recognition tools along with tips from the community to identify rioters. As good as the technology has become, it still has accuracy problems that can cause significant harm. A Massachusetts driver sued his state DMV after his license was wrongfully revoked because he looked too much like another driver, leading to ten days of administrative wrangling to get it reinstated. “We are not the beautiful and unique snowflakes we think we are.
There are many people who look likeus,” says Acquisti. More than 30 state DMVs already apply facial recognition algorithms to driver’s license photos to prevent identity fraud. If you’re worried about your privacy, now might be a good time to change your Facebook profile photo to one in which you’re wearing ridiculously oversize sunglasses.
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Hello, Stranger

BERNARD JOHNSON IS a trucker and a math problem. From his home in Columbia, S.C. the 49-year-old drives for Schneider National, one of the country’s largest freight haulers. Johnson pulls trailers filled with everything from TVs to toilet paper on as many as 25 trips a month for stretches of up to 500 miles.
The Green Bay, Wis. Company has to design the most efficient routes for Johnson and 13,000 other drivers. With diesel at $4 a gallon, this is not an equation it can afford to get wrong. “It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle,” says Ted Gifford, an operations research scientist at Schneider. At any given time the company has 10,000 trucks on the road, with another 33,000 trailers available and waiting to be picked up. Drivers are on the road between four days and three weeks at a time— alone and in pairs—and Schneider must get them back to their homes by a certain date. Drivers have to take breaks according to government regulations.
<div id="attachment_83" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-83" class="size-large wp-image-83" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_002-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="315" />Schneider’s Ted Gifford helped design a computer model that simulates operations.</div>
Their customers are only open during certain hours. “We want to avoid the situation where a driver may live in Alabama, and it’s time for him to go home, and he’s in Minnesota,” says Gifford. “And we don’t have any freight for him to get home, so he has to drive empty.” For most of its 76-year history Schneider, which grossed $3.1 billion last year, has relied on pilot projects to answer these key logistical questions. Whichever department was considering a policy change would carve out a group of 20 to 200 drivers, make them function as a separate business and test the results. The pilot projects cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” but results were often ambiguous. All too often a system that worked well for a sample of 20 drivers wouldn’t work when scaled up to the whole company. “You could spend more on the pilot than what you’d save making the policy change,” says John Nienow, a senior logistics engineer. To test another variable the only choice was to rerun the entire pilot and therefore double the cost.
In 2003 Schneider decided to invest in a fleet-wide “tactical planning simulator” that would use software algorithms to mimic the decision making of human dispatchers on an inhumanly large scale. Schneider looked to one of the leading practitioners of logistics simulation, Warren Powell, a professor of operations research and financial engineering at Princeton University. The algorithms that came out of Powell’s lab in the 1980s had changed the industry’s “less-than-truckload” segment (consisting of parcels and smaller freight) by mapping out a more efficient way to plan routes and using terminals that break down shipments.
One model, called SuperSPIN, had been embraced by Yellow and Ryder to survive the recessionary late 1980s. Powell’s software was also behind the launch of Roadway Package Systems, which later became FedEx Ground. What interested Schneider, a full-truckload carrier, was Powell’s work in the field of approximate dynamic programming, which is a way to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty. Schneider needed a model that could take into account the nonobvious and sometimes random variables that affect the efficiency of thousands of drivers over weeks of time and at a high level of detail. “Warren gave us a really nice hammer, and we had to take our problems and make them look like nails,” says Nienow.
A team of Schneider and Princeton engineers spent two years and “between $2 million and $5 million” developing software for the simulator, which lives on an eight-processor server in Green Bay. The simulator, which Schneider launched in mid-2005, pretends that it’s assigning freight and gathering orders based on a scenario posed to it by Schneider’s analysts. That could be something such as adding more drivers in Chicago, adding an hour in mandated break time for drivers or having a big customer change the location of its distribution center. The simulation runs forward in time for three weeks in order to approximate the value of having a truck and driver at a certain location at a certain time, and gets a first result. Then it runs backward in time to the “present”, reconciling the results with those that happened in the simulated future. Then it runs forward three weeks again and then backward, continuing to improve its estimate. It does that until it “converges” and starts to make only minor changes. For each three-week run, it makes hundreds of thousands of decisions. Gifford estimates that the simulator has helped Schnei- der save tens of millions of dollars. The simulator has, for example, allowed Schneider to justify price hikes to customers.
In 2008 a customer wanted to restrict the number of hours that Schneider could drop off goods. Schneider ran the simulator. “We showed that we could limit the hours but that doing so would cost us $600,000 more,” says Gifford. “We went back to them and said, ‘This is the impact of restricting your hours.’” The customer ultimately decided not to limit its hours. One of Schneider’s biggest challenges is maintaining its fleet size, since drivers often burn out and leave the company. Schneider regularly uses the simulator to determine how many jobs to offer and where it’s best to hire drivers. The model can determine the marginal value of hiring ten new drivers who live in central Illinois, say, based on the number of times that freight departs from the Midwest. In the future Schneider wants to use the simulator to decide which new business to pursue. The company currently employs three different fleets of drivers: long-haul truckers who live in one city but can travel all over the country, regional drivers who drive within a 500-mile radius of their homes, and dedicated fleets for specific customers.
A decisionto increase one of those fleets can affect the others: When Schneider creates a regional business, for example, it cannibalizes some work that the long-haul fleet is doing. “The thing that’s so powerful is that when someone presses us on the impact of different policy changes, we have the facts, we have the data. We can produce reports and analysis so that if someone else brought in their scientists, they would have to agree,” says Gifford. “The value is to be able to take these complex business opportunities and give them a good, solid analysis.”

Calculus For Truckers

Three years ago, as the construction industry cratered, Bill Haney and Maura McCarthy made the curious—maybe crazy— decision to launch a prefabricated home business. Their vision: architect designed, factory-built, single-family dwellings with green accents (including energy-efficient appliances and airtight construction) that appeal to higher-income, eco-conscious buyers. “Yes, the housing market has been decimated,” says Haney, 49. “But if you have the moxie to get going during a recession, you can build something sustainable and significant.” So-called modern prefab had become a staple of home-design magazines during the housing boom. But the economics of mass-producing green homes like Priuses didn’t work.
<div id="attachment_73" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-73" class="size-large wp-image-73" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_008-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Blu Homes Construction &#8211; Founders Bill Haney &amp; Maura McCarthy at their East Longmeadow, MA manufactory.</div>
For one thing, building houses narrow enough to fit on a truck while still wide enough to live in is no mean engineering feat. Then there was all that custom work. “The options package just grew and grew, and economies of scale were never reached,” says Allison Arieff, former editor-in-chief of Dwell, who wrote the book on prefab in 2002 (Prefab, Gibbs Smith). “The homes ended up being all one-offs.” When overall housing demand tanked, some prefab firms shut their doors. With Blu Homes, headquartered in Waltham, Mass., Haney and Mc- Carthy are building a different model. Their solution: steel and software. Using recycled-steel frames with large hinges, Blu homes fold up to fit on a standard tractor-trailer that handle cargo up to 8.5 feet wide. Fancy software automates design, manufacturing and purchasing. The extra efficiency allows Blu to offer more options and still make a living; doing it all in-house also eliminates confusion among a slew of subcontractors. “You have to control the manufacturing, design, shipping and the finishing,” says McCarthy, 31. “The guys who pack up the thing in the factory have to be the same guys who set it up on-site.” That recipe sounded plausible enough to attract $25 million in funding from investors like Abby Disney, Walt’s grandniece. (Haney keeps a 40% stake.) Blu used some of the proceeds to buy mkDesigns, a high-profile prefab firm founded by San Francisco architect Michelle Kaufmann, giving the company green cachet and some award-winning designs.
Since 2008 Blu has built 28 homes, which sell for between $125,000 and $500,000 (land not included), and has orders for 42 more. McCarthy estimates that Blu’s East Coast operation will be in the black at an annual production of 50 homes, a goal she expects to hit in 2013. Blu is set to open a factory just north of San Francisco this year. And if the housing market nose-dives again? “The general notion that we want to be greener, we want to conserve, we want to be healthier— that’s a cultural trend that has not been thwarted by the economic downturn,” says Haney. Clad often in jeans, sports jacket and a baseball hat, Haney dabbles in documentary films when he’s not cranking out houses. (His latest flick, The Last Mountain, chronicles mountaintop coal mining and stars Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
<div id="attachment_74" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-74" class="size-large wp-image-74" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_009-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Blu Homes Construction &#8211; Founders Bill Haney &amp; Maura McCarthy at their East Longmeadow, MA manufactory. Tom Skala, Carpenter, installs kitchen cabinet units on a house nearing completion.</div>
Haney met McCarthy, a venture capitalist who invested in prefab builders, in 2005 at World Connect, a non-profit organization focused on solving health care issues in developing countries. At Blu’s 120,000-square-foot factory outside Springfield, Mass. A 1,650-square-foot model called the Glidehouse (ordered by a retired Boeing engineering executive in Seattle) is under construction. Build time is about six weeks. When finished, the floors and walls will fold up like a corrugated box, and the entire house—from the low-flow toilets to the kitchen sink— will fit on an 8.5-foot-wide trailer. (Unfolded, each of the structure’s two wings measures 18 feet wide by 48 feet long.) Joining the sections and bolting them to a foundation takes a day; spot-painting and other finishing work about a week. (For a diagram of the setup process, see page 52.) Blu architects draw the folding domiciles on a system called CATIA made by Dassault Systèmes. Boeing uses the same program to design and stress-test airliners. When changes are made the algorithms make engineering adjustments, calculate the cost and send a bill of materials to the factory floor.
Blu is rolling out a new interface that allows customers to view models in three dimensions and to preview thousands of options, from the location of the kitchen to the flanges in the Anderson windows. Replacing wood framing with recycled steel allows Blu to build foldable houses that can withstand high winds and heavy snow. Steel also adds flexibility: The absence of load-bearing walls means windows and doors can be placed just about anywhere. Says McCarthy: “It feels much more like building a car than building a stick-built house.”
Indeed the Blu factory resembles a gargantuan assembly line rather than a construction site. The structural steel rolls in from a loading bay, and machines fabricate it into parts that are welded together to form the frame. After the exterior walls are hung the house slides on rollers to another station where workers add interior walls, insulation and the roof. Next comes the drywall, cabinets and bathrooms. The entire house is constructed in the factory; the only work done at the owner’s address is minor painting and woodwork near the folding joints. For two-story models a crane drops the upper floor in place.
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Blu’s customers are clustered on the coasts. To expand, Haney and McCarthy will need to reach more people like Sandra Beer, a fundraiser for a PBS station in Albany, N.Y. and a single mother. Beer bought a 1,008-square-foot Blu Element model last year. A big draw for Beer: never having to deal with an army of contractors. “They gave me a price, and that is something I can control,” she says. Haney and McCarthy have the luxury of patient investors. “The timing is horrible right now,” says Abby Disney, who has put in $3 million. “If you buy Bill’s thesis you might have to wait a while, but things will turn around.
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Bold Construction

From a distance, Kariuki Gathitu looks like just another kid you would pass on the street without blinking. He wears jeans, sneakers and a backpack; he sips milkshake and hangs with his friends. But in Gathitu’s backpack are big dreams and a business plan aimed at making him one of Kenya’s first tech billionaires within five years.
Gathitu, a 28-year-old systems architect, is one of East Africa’s new breed of technopreneurs—the hip ones with big ideas who make their fathers’ generation sit up and take notice. They are the whiz kids who command respect. Never before has it been this cool to be a geek. After the international success of Safaricom’s M-PESA, more and more technologists under 35 are mushrooming in Kenya’s large cities. Backed by government-sponsored training, these computer geeks are emerging by the score to build a sunrise industry in what is being called the Silicon Savannah.
<div id="attachment_68" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-68" class="size-large wp-image-68" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Kariuki-Gathitu-683x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="711" />Kariuki Gathitu</div>
“The world has changed and so has technology. These youngsters see the world from a different perspective and they are constantly seeking ways to make life easier,” says Soud Hyder, an independent technologist based in Nairobi. The recent Pivot 25 conference saw the cream of the IT crop from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania come together for two days in Nairobi. Few delegates were over 30. Gathitu’s company, Zege Technologies (Zege Tech), was among them with its M-PAYER application. On the company’s first anniversary in July, it was raking in tens of thousands of Kenyan shillings and aims to increase its annual turnover to $2 million in the next five years. The company has prospered through a gap in the mobile money system. Often you have to wait up to 72 hours for money to reflect—a major cause of frustration when paying bills. M-PAYER, however, pays in real time. It took Zege Tech three months to come up with the application and another eight months to tailor it for the business market.
In a highly competitive market, Safaricom and Airtel, Kenya’s largest mobile networks, were quick to buy in. Zege Tech won Best Product in the Young Innovators category at the AITEC banking and technology conference in Nairobi in March and visits to the company’s website increased 400%. Gathitu is one of the few young geeks around the world to turn down a job at Google. “In June, I received a call from their office in Switzerland and was flattered as it has been my dream job for a long time. They said I could choose at which office in the world I would want to work. Unfortunately, I had to turn down the offer as there are still a few projects I am working on that will enable many young people to have an easier chance at doing business,” he says. Gathitu is as humble as he is influential. He has just returned from a trip to Malabo in Equatorial Guinea, where he addressed the heads of state at an African Union summit on youth leadership. “It was a great moment when I could speak to Africa’s big leaders. I wanted to give the older generation goose bumps through what the youth is doing. I hope I succeeded with that.
Afterwards I received many invitations to speak at conferences in Angola and Zambia and Mozambique… I’m starting to wonder when I will find time to work,” he laughs. Gathitu hoped to study aeronautical engineering in Britain, but ended up with a degree in Computer Science from the Kenyatta University in Nairobi. He has been fiddling with computers since he was seven. “It became my default career, but now it feels like a fit.” The mobile money transfer system, M-PESA, has put Kenya on the technology map. It allows the user to over come the headaches of sending money internationally, as well as pay bills and purchase goods and airtime through a mobile phone. It is made for Kenya, a country where fewer than 10 million people out of a population of 39 million have a bank account. According to Q2 2011 data released by the Communications Commission of Kenya, there are more than twice as many mobile subscribers—nearly 25 million— as there are bank account holders.
With the support of the government’s ICT Board andinnovation hubs in Nairobi like iHub, young innovators have a chance. It is part of Vision 2030, the Kenyan government’s plan to transform into a middle income country. Paul Kakubo, CEO of the Kenya ICT Board, calls the young techno warriors the Tandaa Generation (‘Tandaa’ is a Swahili word for ‘spread’). In one of his blogs Kakubo writes: “…the Tandaa Generation is what will deliver a lot of the goodies we are looking for as a country. They can create, they are intellectually curious, they are driven, very exposed thanks to technologically delivered media, they are non-tribal, they are good thinkers; they like to be independent. Technology provides them with the tools. What they now need is capital.” Gathitu is riding the wave. He is sharp and ambitious. His company is eyeing South Africa, Nigeria and French speaking West Africa. It hasn’t always been easy.
“One mistake I have made is to over-value a product based on its technological superiority as opposed to market traction. I now believe that a business needs customers more than cash flow,” he says. The time is ripe and the demand is high. Gathitu believes he is well on his way to becoming a tech billionaire before the age of 35. Like many, he trained hard in the years since the first M-PESA transaction in March 2007, and like the rest of the Tandaa Generation, he is ready to rumble.

Silicon Savannah Swagger

In an increasingly on-demand world, how do you get people to tune in and stay tuned? Take a cue from Ian Sander and Kim Moses. Six years ago the husband-and-wife duo produced a television show called Ghost Whisperer, about a 25-year-old girl (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt) who can talk to ghosts. CBS picked it up and scheduled it to run on Fridays at 8 p.m., a ratings dead zone. Survival meant generating some serious buzz—and not waiting for the network’s help.
The pair organized a conference where paranormal-fanatic bloggers could meet the stars of the show before it aired. They also created a crystal ball game for ghost-fan forums online. Expenses ran short of $100,000, cheap by TV standards. Result: Ghost Whisperer averaged 10 million viewers during its first season—the highest-rated Friday night show that year. Over the next few years (it ran for five) Sander and Moses made a Web series from a ghost’s point of view, called The Other Side. When Comic-Con, a film and TV convention, came around they produced a Ghost Whisperer graphic novel. In some cases sponsors like General Motors covered most of the costs.
Sander and Moses got so good at building buzz they decided to make a business out of it. Today the couple runs two outfits headquartered in the old Animation Building on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif.: Sander Moses, their production arm, and Slam, a marketing agency that helps TV and movie producers use the Web to snare viewers. According to SNL Kagan, a media research firm, even if a show makes it through its first season, it has only a 30% chance of being renewed the next year. “We have to create an interactive playground,” says Moses, 50.
Sander, 56, and Moses started flirting with online marketing in 1996 while working on the show Profiler. Their lead character, FBI agent Samantha Waters, was tracking down a serial killer who called himself “Jack of All Trades.” One episode took place in Jack’s lair, where the killer typed on his computer. The camera peeked over his shoulder to reveal the URL he was looking at—JackOTrades.com. Viewers who went to that website could chat with the creep and tour his loft. The site was such a hit that NBC executives, worried about the message they were sending, asked to have it taken down.
These days Sander and Moses never make a show without a marketing plan. Last year they pitched a reality show, Psychic in Suburbia (about psychic Maureen Hancock and her family), to the Style Network. The attack included a mobile application that allows users to shake their phones like a magic eight ball and get Hancock’s answer to any question. The show premiered as a onehour documentary in July; Style will decide whether to pick it up as a series in October.
In another project, meant to highlight the show Ugly Betty as it went into syndication earlier this year, Slam created an app that lets viewers “Be Bettyer” by decorating a photo of themselves with Betty traits like thick eyebrows and braces. For Regis and Kelly they created an app allowing fans to run a virtual race in high heels, winning coupons along the way.
“We love what they’re doing,” says Eric Berger, head of Sony Pictures’ Crackle, which hired the couple to create a Web series called Monster Heist, about monsters planning to steal jewels. “They think about the 360-degree experience.”
<div id="attachment_65" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-65" class="wp-image-65 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_021-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Husban and wife Ian Sander and Kim Moses</div>

Buzz Builders

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-62" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/iStock_000013696758Large-1024x680.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="315" />
Sometime in 1987 on the streets of the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, Joe Kusaga had his two feet planted firmly on the ground, but his head was as much in the clouds as Mount Kilimanjaro. The 21-year-old barely had two shillings to rub together, but dreamed of making a vast fortune by getting his fellow Tanzanians dancing to his beat.
More than 20 years later, Kusaga has the ear of East Africans; a multi-million dollar turnover; three radio stations; a magazine; two music ventures; and a promotion company which employs 170 people. His company, Clouds Media Group, turns over $3 million annually and plans to expand beyond East Africa. In a recent national survey, KPMG ranked the company 17th in the top 100 best-performing mid-sized companies in Tanzania.
“In a few years, this turnover should read double digits,” says Kusaga.
Kusaga made his fortune from the liberalization of the Tanzanian airwaves, in step with the freeing up of the economy after decades of socialism, in the 1990s. He decided Tanzanian radio was far too conservative and started to recruit young, funky broadcasters at his tiny
studio in Dar es Salaam in a bid to take the airwaves by storm.
“It was not easy at first. It’s a risky business, and sometimes we had to invest our little funds at the time to make things happen without any sponsorship,” he says.
In 1998, Kusaga took a deep breath and borrowed just over Tsh40 million ($24,660) to start his company with a business plan aimed at reaping the advertising dollars that came with the growing young and affluent middle-class. He founded Clouds FM in the same year and in 2002 added Choice FM, an easy-listening English radio station, and Coconut FM, Zanzibar’s first commercial radio station which is dedicated to Zanzibari music and culture, to his repertoire.
“We offered a platform for our young people to create employment for themselves. It was a take-off for many things musical in this country,” he says.
It was the bend in a long road that began in 1987. “I had just finished school and I began by managing some nightclubs, organizing theme nights,” says Kusaga.
He graduated to promoting shows as far as the Democratic Republic of Congo in a risky business that took timing, perseverance and passion—a perfect grounding for his foray into the tough radio business.
As the new century dawned, there came Clouds TV, which is projected to have coverage across the entire country by the end of this year.
Since then, Kusaga has founded the first digital music recording studio in the country, from where he manages the Smooth Vibes record label in Dar es Salaam and is responsible for authorizing music from Tanzanian artistes for iTunes.
You could say this media group has shaped how Tanzanian youths look and listen to the world. In the last few years, he has brought names like Eve, Fat Joe, P Square, Shaggy,  50 Cent, Kevin Lyttle, Koffi, Jay Z with MTV Base, Ja Rule, Hugh Masekela, Mya, Miriam Makeba and Youssou N’Dour to the East African country.
A little stardust from an entrepreneur with his head firmly in the clouds can go a long way.
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Ear For Profits

Once upon a time in Africa, dreadlocks were frowned upon; if you sported them, you were obviously a rough, subversive smoker of something strange. Now dreadlocks are high fashion and big business. Just ask Jabu Stone—a man who amassed a fortune from the fact that many in African society no longer dread dreads.
<div id="attachment_55" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-55" class="size-large wp-image-55" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/stone183_1-680x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="714" />&#8216;Dreadlock Entrepreneur&#8217; Jabu Stone, Johannesburg CBD; 4 August 2011 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
On a sunny winter’s afternoon, Stone glides through the din of chatter and radios at his hair salon in downtown Johannesburg, like a man on a mission. He has every right to: in the years since democracy in South Africa, in 1994, Stone has seen his dreadlock business expand to Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, the United States and Britain, with a turnover of R25 million ($3,489,378.3) from hair products and a dozen salons employing 70 workers.
The black haircare market is large and growing. Its biggest customers: black women. The myth for many black girls growing up was that straight hair made you look pretty and professional. This is why chemical products that straighten—so-called relaxers—account for about 75% of sales in the industry. Now there is a move towards keeping it more natural and Stone is at the forefront.
“Your hair is a unique act of creation; you don’t need to change the structure of your hair,” says Stone.
“Jabu Stone is one of the pioneers of the natural look. He started a trend in South Africa and showed that dreads weren’t for Rastafarians only,” says Pontsho Mokoena, the president of the Afro Hairdressing and Beauty Employers Association of South Africa (AHBEASA).
Stone, a trained electrical engineer, learned the hair trade almost as soon as he could walk.  He grew up watching the nimble fingers of his mother, a school teacher, braiding hair at home.
In later life, he saw a gap in the market. Stone found someone to help him develop a product that worked with the natural structure of black hair at a time when everyone else was looking for ways to straighten it. It was a very modest start, selling merely six units of product a month and renting a chair at a salon.
Stone hit on the idea of getting celebrities, like Nelson Mandela’s daughter, Zenani, to wear his dreadlocks and of allowing word-of-mouth to do the rest, making the unfashionable fashionable.
Research into the black haircare market is scarce, but all agree it is huge. The US black haircare market was claimed to be worth $9 billion in 2009, according to a recent documentary by stand-up comedian Chris Rock. The South African market, according to research company Diagonal Reports, was worth $1.35 billion in 2009. The hot African markets for black hair care are Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.
In South Africa, Stone is on the move. He has a mobile salon that tours the country and sells people the idea of flaunting their own natural, flowing dreadlocks—at a price. It’s still all about the image, he says, and there are even a dozen taxis driving around Johannesburg with a beaming picture of dreadlocked Afro-soul singer Judith Sephuma advertising his wares.  On top of this, there is diversification; you can open a bank account, get a debit card or medical treatment through Stone’s company and there are plans to expand from eight to 24 countries.
“You can only go as far as your eye can see; when you get there you can see even further,” says Stone.
The market is large and wide open with millions of heads waiting for dreads. For a quick, streetwise entrepreneur like Stone, there is a fortune to be made—one head at a time.
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No Business Like Hair Business

Aspirant young leaders are often given the following exhortation: “It’s the attitude, not the aptitude, that determines the altitude.” Aptitude here may be somewhat underrated, but attitude is pitch-perfect. As for the altitude, it needs an exemplar to give the exhortation schtick. Suresh Kana, CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Southern Africa, springs to mind. He’s proved as adept at climbing the corporate ladder as he is at scaling some of the world’s highest mountains.
<div id="attachment_51" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-51" class="size-large wp-image-51" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/kana53_1-680x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="714" />CEO of PriceWaterhouseCoopers Southern Africa, Suresh Kana, Johannesburg; 3 August 2011 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
If you think he’s an adrenaline junkie, you’d be wrong. A lifelong vegetarian and adherent to Gandhi’s principles, Kana exudes a quiet confidence. “In my personal time, I enjoy a good challenge,” he says. “Climbing and trekking are a passion and a hobby.”
In his 35 years at PwC, he has risen through the ranks from being the first black professional to join the firm in 1976 and its first black partner in 1986, to being the only South African appointed to the board of the International Audit and Assurance Standards in 1995, serving for nine years. He currently serves on the King Committee on Corporate Governance and other regulatory boards.
Yet despite reaching the pinnacle of success, for Kana there are always mountains to climb, professionally as well as recreationally.
Like his career, there’s been an interesting trajectory to his outdoor adventures. In August 2000, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro; in December that year, he walked 400km in 10 days across India to commemorate Gandhi’s Salt March, which was undertaken in the 1930s to protest the colonial Salt Tax. Kana has subsequently led two groups—22 people in December 2004 and 15 in December 2009—to Everest base camp. Both groups comprised mainly young adults under the age of 23 with some school kids.
“It’s a huge responsibility,” he admits, “but these expeditions are my way of mentoring young people and setting them on track towards developing into the leaders of tomorrow. They are taken out of their comfort zones and encouraged to think differently and innovatively, and to learn about themselves.”
Their trainer is Kana himself. “We train for about four months. The kids have to be at my door at 5am and show they’re disciplined and committed (do they know that their trainer is up at 3:08am precisely, six days a week, doing yoga and meditation?). You can’t simulate high-altitude conditions – it takes a lot of physical and mental preparation to enable you to face what’s there. By the time the kids write their exams in October and November, their parents tell me how focused and fit they are.
“We start the trek in Lukla, and once we’ve reached our destination at Kala Pattar, we’re 5,600m above sea level—that’s three times South Africa’s highest altitude and at freezing temperatures of about minus 20 degrees. We walk for about eight hours a day.”
All four of Kana’s children have joined these expeditions; two of them have gone both times.
So what happens on the trek? “Organization is key. The children are divided into groups of four and we operate according to certain acronyms. There’s the WAR (Watch and Review) Committee, whereby the sherpas ensure that the children are hydrated, are eating their meals and generally coping. ICU refers to any problems that arise—if so, steps are quickly taken to resolve the problem. For example, a weaker child is placed at the front and stronger climbers behind.”
What about the risks? “There are always risks, but we measure them in relation to the circumstances. This does not stop me as I believe there’s enough in place to assist when I need it.”
And measured against the rewards, “it’s a hugely satisfying experience—with a stunning view. On a deeper level, it centers me. Unlike the boardroom, mountains are vast areas of peace where all is still and nothing matters. It’s about pushing one’s limits.”
Yet he also draws distinct parallels between climbing and corporate life. “Both demand teamwork, risk and knowledge management, excellence, leadership and resilience. Both require you to master your emotions and focus on the task at hand. You have to determine how you are going to react to people and circumstances.”
How does this define his managerial role at PwC? “People rank high on my list of priorities and I have an empowering management style.” He’s not paying lip service; he has, at different intervals, headed up the HR, transformation and corporate social responsibility arms of PwC. “The firm invests heavily in skills development programs, and it shows: our students consistently rank among the country’s top 10 achievers.”
<div id="attachment_52" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-52" class="size-large wp-image-52" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/kana12_1-680x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="714" />CEO of PriceWaterhouseCoopers Southern Africa, Suresh Kana, Johannesburg; 3 August 2011 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
Kana’s other enduring passion is promoting good governance. The double dips of corruption and unemployment are of great concern. “Our credibility is at stake at a time when we desperately need foreign direct investment for growth and jobs. Corruption is nothing but a burdensome tax on the poor; it’s unacceptable.”
Nevertheless, he remains upbeat. “I believe that wisdom and truth will always prevail. It’s incumbent on a leader to be optimistic while recognizing what challenges you face. You become an authentic leader when you’re accessible and engage with people, aligning them to a common vision.
“At the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, South Africa came out tops for having the best accounting, auditing and corporate governance standards, as well as the best stock exchange regulations.
“We need to have this mindset of excellence all the time. This means planning for crises and having structures in place for disaster recovery—not unlike the WAR Committee and ICU processes that occur on our mountaineering expeditions.”
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What would he say to other CEOs who merely play golf? “Whether it’s chasing a little white golf ball or a little white tip of a mountain, it’s what makes you wake up in the morning and look forward to your day.”
He’s looking forward to going to the South Pole next: any takers?

The Attitude And The Altitude

Gabon has a population of about 1.5 million people and is an upper middle-income country with a $13.1 billion economy. It may be one of the wealthiest nations on the continent, but it suffers from gaping inequality. The richest 20% of the population accounts for 90% of income; a third live in poverty.
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According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), growth in 2010 was 5.7%, following a contraction of 1.4% in 2009 due to the global recession. The IMF expects growth to remain relatively flat in 2011 at 5.6%. It also expects public investment and a rebound in mining to underpin growth this year.  On the other hand, the IMF sees a slowing global economy and the associated downward pressure on commodity prices as a downside risk to growth.
Gabon’s wealth relies on oil, which makes up over 70% of exports, with estimated proven oil reserves of two billion barrels at the beginning of 2010. With faltering oil prices and production constraints, Gabonese authorities are set on diversifying the economy away from this reliance on oil. The government plans to transform by creating a business-friendly environment. To achieve this goal, it is embarking on a public investment drive.
Manganese mining and logging are the economy’s other two key sectors. Gabon also has the world’s largest iron ore deposit, which is likely to attract further investment in the mining sector. Agriculture and tourism remain small sectors in the economy due to a lack of infrastructure.
Industry makes up nearly two-thirds of the economy, while services make up nearly a third. Agriculture is a mere 4.5% of the economy.
Gabon has a benign political environment. The incumbent president is Ali-Ben Bongo Ondimba from the long-ruling Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG). He was elected in 2009 following the death of his father, Omar Bongo Ondimba. Despite the opposition crying foul that the vote was flawed, Gabon has remained stable.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-48" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/iStock_000004501460Large-1024x768.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="356" />
The country is due to hold legislative elections in November. The current legislature’s mandate ends in January.  In May, the president asked the country’s constitutional court to delay the election for a year so that the country can focus on hosting the African Cup of Nations in January. Gabon is a co-host with Equatorial Guinea. The delay is also to allow for the introduction of a biometric voter system to avoid election fraud. With both the ruling party and opposition essentially in agreement for a postponement, the constitutional court is likely to grant the request.

Iron Ore Galore

FORBES AFRICA’s publisher, Rakesh Wahi, is also the co-founder and vice chairman of Africa Business News (ABN), which also owns CNBC Africa.
<div id="attachment_43" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-43" class="size-large wp-image-43" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FORBES_MAG_027-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Deal of a lifetime: Rakesh Wahi signs the FORBES AFRICA franchise agreement with Gary Alfonso, editor-in-chief; Roberta Naidoo, general manager; and Sid Wahi, project manager in attendance.</div>
<h3>As an entrepreneur in the media space in Africa, why did you choose FORBES AFRICA as your next venture?</h3>
Our vision for ABN from the beginning was to create a business media conglomerate that would have a point of presence in all African countries. The intent is to have a mechanism to aggregate real-time information from across the continent and roll it out in different media, namely television, print and online. Both aggregation and exhibition have to be carried out in tandem to make the business model viable.
The television business was set up in June 2007 with CNBC as our partner. CNBC is a global leader in business television. For the print business we evaluated several options, but the FORBES brand is the one that my partner, Zafar Siddiqi, and I pursued as it is, to our minds, the most inspirational business magazine in the world.
<h3>How did it come about?</h3>
My interaction started with the management of FORBES in June 2008. They had tried to enter the African market earlier but were not able to find the right partnership model, and hence were also waiting for the right opportunity.
As in any business relationship, there was a lot of due diligence requirements and submissions of business plans, etcetera. Our vision and our presence in the business media genre were clearly key factors, which went in our favor.
<h3>What did the process entail? Was it complicated or simple?</h3>
The process, by our own requirements, needed us to carry out an in-depth analysis of the print industry in Africa and the gaps that we wanted to fill in a market that was cluttered with a lot of other good quality products. We had to first convince ourselves that there was a demand and secondly, we were well placed to meet that demand. I allocated sufficient resources to making this initial determination.
Our initial findings were positive, with several cautions. We had to work through these red flags to make sure that we had the right answers—firstly, from the perspective of the market, and more importantly, viable commercially, keeping in mind the expectations of FORBES.
I think that in any venture, it’s important to spend a lot of time on getting the fundamentals right. The process, therefore, is not complicated or simple, but is mainly focused on being very thorough. The legal agreements were cumbersome and I had a good team, led by Gary Alfonso and Roberta Naidoo, working with me on the transaction.
While the recession delayed our plans, the real challenges started once we took a decision to launch. My son Sidharth stepped up as the project manager for the business and has worked tirelessly with the team to set the ball in motion. We now have a full team on board, with Chris Bishop leading the charge as managing editor.
<h3>Why did you see FORBES AFRICA particularly as an opportunity? Isn’t print journalism a dying breed in the world of publishing?</h3>
I would not have ventured into this business without having the synergies with our existing business. We have operating synergies in the business news genre and this was the primary consideration. Zafar and I spent a lot of time with our shareholders and management team to analyze issues and came up with a plan that we thought would work.
<div id="attachment_42" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-42" class="size-large wp-image-42" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_5509-2-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Co-founder and Chairman Zafar Siddiqi with publisher and co-founder Rakesh Wahi</div>
Keeping in mind media consumption habits of the future and recognizing that the future lies in hand-held devices, we have a strategy on building the subscription model via the internet. The shape of the final product will be revealed in the not-so-distant future and is being worked on together with our partners in New York.
<h3>What’s your vision for a media group that now owns the Africa distribution rights of two of the most powerful business news brands in the world?</h3>
Our vision remains unchanged on our ambition to be Africa’s most powerful business media conglomerate. We are expanding our geographic network and will have a physical presence in 10 African countries by 2012 and 18 countries by 2014.
We see ourselves looking at distribution as a means to achieve our goals for viewership and will be seeking partnerships on terrestrial networks across Africa, and where possible, acquire networks.
On the print side, we are interested in adding to our stable and will seek other titles that we can bolt into our business to achieve efficiencies and additional economies of scale.
On the internet side, we are building great momentum on ABN Digital (www.abndigital.com) and via YouTube, where more than one million views of our content have been downloaded. Evolution of the telecoms sector will bring about a lot of changes in the delivery of content and we are making all the necessary arrangements to be there when that happens.
<h3>What’s your view on Africa as a marketplace? And the future of the media industry on the African continent?</h3>
Zafar and I are both great believers in the African story. We have been here for seven years now and think that this has been the most incredible learning experience of our lives.
If you analyze Africa without South Africa, you will see the opportunity in every area of economic development. Media is very immature on the continent, from both a reporting and consumption perspective. The revenue drivers are tough; skills are lacking and costs are high. Consequently, there has been limited interest for media companies to push ahead on a pan-African model.
<div id="attachment_44" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-44" class="size-large wp-image-44" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FORBES_MAG_049-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />The FORBES AFRICA team</div>
Our shareholders, like the IDC, share our vision to build the African marketplace. It is my belief that the industry needs to rally behind some common objectives of sharing and building capacity on the continent. Governments have to be active participants in the process of deregulation and being active catalysts to growth, and not become impediments to the free flow of information. Transparency is an inevitable part of economic growth and media will play an important role in shaping the opinion of constituents.
I do believe that we are already adding value to this process and hope that we can achieve all our near-term goals on the continent.
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Forbes Africa — The Journey

Every household has a dirty carpet and that’s where I literally made my first buck as a businessman,” says Base Sebonego, beaming at the memory. 
That first buck came in 1995 with a one-man carpet cleaning company. Sixteen years later, Sebonego is a multimillionaire through turning ideas into money. 
In a highly educated and developing country, where the private sector has relied heavily on government patronage for its survival, Sebonego is the exception. In fact he shatters the historical mould of a successful Motswana businessman in a country where you find well-schooled university graduates in the most menial of jobs. He failed high school; has never been to a business school; started his business with no bank loan or help from government empowerment schemes. Yet, at the age of 37, he has rubbed shoulders with Botswana’s movers and shakers and amassed a fortune. 
Sebonego’s investment portfolio straddles property, insurance broking, textile manufacturing, road construction and he has recently added mining to his repertoire. 
Sebonego’s life is the quintessential rags to riches story. Standing at just over 5’4”, his unpolished English vocabulary belies the medley of ideas his brain is constantly digesting. Doing this interview was not easy either. With several appointment cancellations, more than a couple of double bookings that resulted in postponements, the piecemeal interview suffered the interruptions of a mobile phone that rang incessantly and streamed a barrage of SMSes. 
“I have so many things happening at the same time, but nowadays I have come to accept that I do need a personal assistant,” he says rather apologetically. As disorganized as he is, that is his modus operandi, and it seems to have worked well for him. 
Sebonego was destined to be a businessman. Despite being one of the best students doing pure sciences at high school in Maun in the late 1980s, he often skipped school and spent much of his time at the “driving school of a family friend, fascinated by the number of clients he had and the money this guy was making”. 
“I was&#8230; (he counts with his fingers) &#8230;just 15 years old. What else was I supposed to do with my father away on trips half the time?” 
In 1994, after obtaining a certificate in Animal Health and Production at a technical college, Sebonego worked for the government for six months before absconding to sell insurance. This helped him buy his first car, a brand new Toyota Tazz, a far cry from the Range Rover Sport and CLK 63 AMG he currently drives. 
The following year, armed with a bucket, brush and a car wash pressure machine, he headed for Francistown, Botswana’s northern city. He did his insurance work alongside washing carpets. 
“I targeted schools where government housed teachers in a village set-up. I would literally knock at any of the front doors and offer to clean their carpet for free. The neighbor would see the carpet hanging on the fence to dry, and by the end of the week all the carpets in that neighborhood would be clean and my pocket would be full.” 
But charging 20 pula ($2.95) to clean a carpet was not enough. He moved to a bigger client, Supreme Furnishers, a furniture company where he charged an unbelievable P9,000 ($1,330). This job, he says, was a watershed that showed him he could actually make a lot of money. 
It was at this time that Sebonego met a woman who operated a cash loan business from Palapye, 160 kilometers away. The two of them talked, she liked his entrepreneurial intuitiveness and determination; the following week, Sebonego was in Palapye working as a partner in the business. In 2001, cash loaning by non-commercial banks was a relatively new business system in Botswana. Sebonego’s contribution to the business was the introduction of a commission-based sales team, a concept he borrowed from his three-year stint in the insurance industry. He targeted people like teachers, unions, bank employees and even parastatal institutions. The pair opened up outlets in four other towns because, like Sebonego observes, “people will always need money, and how far it comes from, they don’t care”. 
The money and power bug bit him and he wanted more. He wanted to be in control, so he parted ways with his partner and took over the Palapye operation. 
I ask him if he is a greedy businessman. The man, who never fails to extol God and his eternal belief in Him, jumps out of his chair before settling back down. 
“Let me tell you something, I am a seriously, seriously, seriously spiritual guy. When I see someone struggling I feel really bad. I once pounced on the property of a client of mine who worked for a local bank. She was dodgy because she had evaded me several times instead of renegotiating her repayment plan. I took possession of her TV and radio set. I remember feeling terrible about it, but I was going to sell them off if she hadn’t come to pay me, which she did that evening.” 
Even though the cash loan business gave him more than a healthy bank balance, it was to be his next business that would catapult him into the multi-millionaire league. It began with a chat over a barbeque with some lawyer friends and gave rise to his next big idea. His friends complained of having trouble with their clients, many of whom were unable to settle their legal bills. Sebonego’s brains were already in overdrive. 
After a year of research and product development, Sebonego launched Mosele Legal Services in 2004. The idea was simple; a legal aid subscription-based business that would outsource clients’ cases to other law firms. He approached the Citizen Empowerment Development Agency (CEDA) for a P100,000 ($14,730) loan but was turned down. “They said it was not a viable project even though I had no competitor, it was a tried and tested model in South Africa and if they had the capacity to give millions of pula worth of loans, what was the problem?” 
Once again drawing on his past experience as an insurance consultant, he carried on with the concept of sales reps. He offered shares to an attorney, whose responsibility was to interact with fellow lawyers. The company soared to dizzying heights, reaching around 20,000 subscribers in a couple of years. 
“A very productive and ambitious young fellow who always aimed for greater heights,” says Paul Chitate, Sebonego’s former boss at Botswana Life Insurance. Chitate now owns First Sun Alliance, a successful insurance broking firm. “I am proud of him as a person I trained who went on to use his experience as an insurance consultant to develop his own products.” 
Booze flowed, women were plentiful and entertainment was endless until everything came down like a pack of cards. In 2008, the company was dragged before the high court by its underwriter, the Botswana Insurance Company (BIC). BIC sought an audit of Mosele Legal Services after reports of illegal insurance practices, fraud and money laundering. BIC flexed their muscle. Comprising a consortium of political, business and legal heavy-weights, including former president Festus Mogae, it was a given that battling with a giant like BIC was going to be messy. It was. It was also a public relations nightmare for Mosele. 
“They just wanted to rattle my business from under me,” says Sebonego. He spreads his hands on the table as if distracted. “I saw it as a hostile takeover. These guys are the titans of the economy and I don’t have a big surname or the money on my side, but the truth set me free.” The high court threw out the claims as unsubstantiated rumors. 
Sebonego claims Mosele now has 34,000 subscribers. But with such an extensive investment portfolio, how much is Sebonego really worth? Getting such information as the net worth of any businessman is a tough business in Botswana. A culture of secrecy tantamount to the culture of Swiss banks prevails amongst businessmen who refuse to divulge their investment interests. Even a bill that seeks to compel politicians to declare their assets has been floating around parliament for over a decade. But for Sebonego, divulging details about his worth is a particularly sensitive subject which borders on paranoia. 
“There is a serious problem of the ‘pull-him-down’ syndrome in this country. When people see you climb the ladder or when they know how much you are worth, they want to see you down—down—down,” he jabs the air with his index finger pointing downwards. “We don’t band together like the Chinese or Indians or Zimbabweans to help each other. This country is dirty,” he continues. “You survive best when people don’t know anything about you.” Sebonego says this kills entrepreneurship which survives on role-modeling for upcoming entrepreneurs. This reference to the ‘pull-him-down’ syndrome is such a common thread throughout the interview it is hard to imagine it as anything but the truth. 
Seasoned Sunday Standard journalist Prof Malema admits to the difficulty of finding information on the assets of businessmen in Botswana. This is compounded by the fact that many of these businesses are not floated on the Botswana Stock Exchange. He concurs that Sebonego may be a multi-millionaire, but he says the Mosele Legal Services court case dealt a huge blow to his net worth. “His construction business is not so big but his new company, Home Assist, the one modeled on Mosele, has the potential to become big.” 
Home Assist is one of Sebonego’s latest pet projects. It is a home maintenance guarantee scheme for subscribers. Another is the setting up of a weekly newspaper to report “the real stories”.
Preparations are at an advanced stage and the weekly is expected to hit the streets within the next two months. 
“Five years from now, I want to be the biggest small-stock producer in Botswana or the region and have my own commercial bank,” he giggles and rubs his hands together as if he can’t wait. 
For a man claiming to be the cleanest businessman in the land and to win business without political connections, it sure would be a giant leap from the carpet cleaner of 1995.
<h3>Sunrise Economy?</h3>
Sebonego’s rags-to-riches story mirrors that of his country. At independence in 1966, Botswana was one of the poorest countries in the world with a largely illiterate rural population. The country has since observed the highest average growth rate in the world, thanks to huge diamond deposits and a government that exercised prudent fiscal management. 
The economy is slowly recovering from the hard knocks of the 2009 global recession. 
But the International Monetary Fund says the economy is staging an impressive recovery with the help of rapidly rising prices for rough diamonds. The IMF says since the second quarter of 2010, Botswana’s pace of economic growth has been one of the strongest among middle income countries. 
The government of Botswana expects the country’s 2011-2012 GDP to surpass the P101.5 billion ($15 billion) mark in current prices. The country continues to enjoy good credit ratings internationally. Unemployment stands at 17.5% with more than 30% of the population living below the poverty line. The government has embarked on a privatization drive and outsourcing of non-core services, albeit at a slow pace.
<div id="attachment_39" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-39" class="wp-image-39 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/iStock_000003898766Medium-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Okavango Delta</div>
Foreign exchange reserves stood at P54.9 billion ($8.1 billion), enough to cover 18 months of imported goods and services. The average year-on-year inflation was 6.9% in 2010 according to the country’s Ministry of Finance.

From Cleaning Carpets To Cleaning Up

The gray concrete slabs dominating a construction site, a stone’s throw from Kotoka International Airport, don’t look like much right now. By June, they’ll be the foundation of the first Marriott Hotel in sub-Saharan Africa—a symbol of the progress of Ghana’s economy. A brand like Marriott “will put Ghana on the map”, says Nii Ampa-Soware, chief of research at Databank in Accra, who says he “would not be surprised” if other luxury global hotel brands like Sheraton are already planning their own entrance, seeing Marriott as an example of the success to be had in Ghana. “It cements the country’s position within a certain class. Having those international brands gives the country a sense of credibility that it has ‘arrived’.” 
It’s the baby of 62-year-old entrepreneur Eissame Halabi-Ahma, who was raised in Damascus and educated in Scotland. He owns half of African Hospitality Ltd (AHL) and has spent 11 years on the Marriott project. 
The half-Ghanaian, half-Syrian son of a textile factory owner, he lives near the site in a home overflowing with expensive Persian rugs. 
Speeding through the streets of the capital in a sleek BMW, clad in a flowing Arab robe, Halabi-Ahma describes Ghana—the continent’s fastest-growing economy, with government predictions of a 14.5% GDP growth in 2011—as the “Wild Wild West”, a place where any businessman with vision and capital can make a fast return. 
While South Africa’s hotel industry suffers from oversupply in the wake of the 2010 World Cup, an influx of business travelers into Ghana has created the opposite. More than 800,000 visitors came to Ghana in 2010 and this year, that number is expected to rise. 
Halabi-Ahma estimates a shortfall of 10,000 hotel rooms. 
“There’s been a tremendous growth in the hospitality sector in Ghana in recent years,” says George Ayittey, a Ghanaian economist and author. “Oil and gas discovery, a daily non-stop flight service from North America and turmoil in neighboring countries have contributed to the tourism boom. So has Ghana’s political stability, especially as compared with government dysfunction and poor social services in the rest of West Africa.” 
The Marriott, which will have cost $120 million to develop by its opening day, is the first major project under African Ventures, a subsidiary of AHL, and its equity value is put at nearly $200 million. 
Halabi-Ahma says he’s looking for the Marriott to turn a profit of $200 million within 10 years through 221 rooms and a casino. 
A self-made entrepreneur who came to real estate and hospitality development late in the game, Halabi-Ahma is a risk-taker who forewent a university education to follow his father into the textile business. 
At one point, he tried his hand at rice farming and lost his entire $2 million investment. In 1981, he was left bankrupt in the aftermath of a military coup and sought a new venture. 
“I was always looking at Howard Hughes, how he had to fight to succeed,” he says. “If I’d had the knowledge I have today, 40 years ago, I’d be the richest person in the world.” 
He focused on real estate development, scooping up cheap land and watching it appreciate. Then there was a fortuitous meeting with a friend, who suggested he try his hand at hotels. As foreign investment swelled, business—and businessmen—poured into Ghana. But those who landed at Kotoka faced a dreary landscape of guesthouses and supposedly brand-name accommodation luxurious for Accra but considered budget-class in the West, ill-run and in need of facelifts. 
“I would never have believed Ghana would be what it is today,” Halabi-Ahma says. “People are waking up. Chinese, Koreans, Lebanese, Americans. Ghana has opened up, the whole place has become a magnet. 
When you go to Johannesburg, you see 10 people standing by the side of the road doing nothing. You come here, you see everyone running and selling by the side of the road. People want to work.” 
On a rainy August morning, not far from his home, Halabi-Ahma strolls the warren that is the Marriott building site, currently at 80% completion. More than two weeks into the Ramadan fast, he’s weak but climbs five flights of stairs with ease to a hall of rooms with glass-walled showers and bold red-orange finishes designed by Cape Town designer Les Harbottle. 
Standing near the lip of the building, he admires the view. As the urban sprawl below continues to grow and stretch, his business—bolstered by his crown jewel—will look to keep up. Halabi-Ahma is looking to put a substantial amount of his return-on-investment from the Marriott into developing other hotels in the city, along with Radisson projects in Benin and Guinea. With his showman’s flair” and the casino site below us, it’s not hard to imagine him as West Africa’s Donald Trump. 
He’s interrupted by a plane roaring overhead on its way out of the nearby airport. Accra is the rare city where proximity to the airport signals prestige—and safety for travelers more accustomed to European boardrooms than West African highways. Down the street, a dwarfed Holiday Inn—which stands to lose a healthy chunk of its business to the Marriott—seemed to shudder.
<h3>Too Much Room At The Inn</h3>
The boom days of the World Cup are over and across South Africa the hotel industry is facing closures and reality. The Grace Hotel, in the smart Johannesburg suburb of Rosebank, is the latest of many to close. 
The average occupancy rate of South Africa’s hotels is hovering around 48%, leaving a massive oversupply. Other hotels that have had to shut their doors in Johannesburg and Cape Town: the Alphen Hotel, Hotel Le Vendome and the Green Dolphin. The Southern Sun Grayston and the Lakes Hotel are to close by the end of the year. 
There are just too many hotels in Africa’s biggest economy. The reasons: ambition and pride. When FIFA named South Africa as the host of the 2010 World Cup, the wheels started turning. There was money to be made. Millions of visitors needed a place to stay and hotels mushroomed. 
The signs were good. According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), overall spending in the hospitality industry grew by 16.7% to $1.9 billion in 2010. The number of overnight foreign visitors grew by 15.1%, while domestic visitor numbers grew 14.3%, giving a total of 15.33 million visitors in 2010. 
A year later, most of these visitors have gone and revenue has collapsed. 
African Sun Limited has blamed the closure of The Grace Hotel on fewer travelers, escalating costs and the recession. The company declared a $1 million loss in the first half of this year and blames the surplus of rooms. 
The strength of the Rand hasn’t helped, making South Africa more expensive for foreign visitors. 
The future looks a little brighter, with numbers expected to improve. 
“The market will definitely pull through; it’s just a question of how long it will take. It’s going to be a tough two years, but the following three will be very interesting,” says Brett Dungan, CEO of the Federated Hospitality Association.

West Africa’s  Donald Trump?

The African Bank’s problems could have tied the best manager in the world in knots. 
For three years the bank had been struggling to recover from the biggest ever foreign exchange scandal in South African history; most of the management were still in prison; it was short of money; the board was divided; on top of that the bank had gone through a massive recapitalization. 
On a leather chair, in the middle of it all, sat the CEO, Gaby Magomola, who was about to go through the worst day of his life in business and suffer the prolonged pain of its aftermath. 
Magomola was the man leading the turnaround, who had a past as complex as the problems of the bank. He was a high school drop-out, who spent six years as a convict on Robben Island, who had somehow transformed himself into a family man and Wall Street banker.
<div id="attachment_17" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-17" class="wp-image-17 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Gaby-Magomola-1024x683.jpg" alt="Gaby Magomola ponders on his worst day" width="474" height="316" />Gaby Magomola ponders on his worst day</div>
In the depths of a cold winter, Magomola was feeling increasingly uneasy in his oak-paneled office and double-breasted suits. 
The problem was the board and management of the African Bank were divided and the cracks were showing in the polished veneer of South Africa’s first and biggest wholly black-owned financial institution. 
At this time, Magomola’s determination and desperation to hang onto the top job at the African Bank ran deeper than any desire for the social trappings. His vulnerability and pain stemmed from his passionate belief that the bank was more than just a money lender. To Magomola, the African Bank was a potent symbol of the economic emancipation of the oppressed: the people he had grown up with. 
In many ways, Magomola embodied the dream. The Magomolas became the first black family to move into the affluent and lily white Wendywood suburb in Johannesburg in 1986, in firm defiance of the apartheid laws. 
In fact, most events in Magomola’s 44-year existence had been the calculated moves of a man who believes he deserves more than circumstances offer. 
He was born in a township near Johannesburg—an average African kid with an above average mind. His home was Bekkersdal, his mother was a casual worker in a nearby town and his dad a store clerk. Despite early academic promise, Magomola dropped out of high school one year before matric and submerged himself in the anti-apartheid struggle. This landed him on Robben Island in 1963 aged 19, where he spent years in the company of political leaders like former South African president Nelson Mandela. 
Magomola completed matric in prison and later, a Bachelor of Commerce degree through long-distance learning university, UNISA. The dream was to qualify as a Chartered Accountant. The setback was merely the lack of segregated toilets in South Africa’s big accounting firms. 
In 1976, Magomola, his wife, Nana, and children left for the United States. Magomola had won a Fulbright scholarship to study towards a Master’s degree in Business Administration at Ball State University in the American Midwest. 
Magomola graduated and found work in Citibank in New York, where he says he “learnt the art of business and the beauty of living with people of different races”. The call of Africa became too loud to ignore in 1982 and Magomola transferred to Citibank’s Johannesburg branch. It closed shortly after President PW Botha’s now infamous Rubicon Speech—which quashed any hopes of political reform in the country. 
In 1986, Magomola’s world was at his feet. A stint at First National Bank (FNB) was followed by an offer from the bank of his dreams. The African Bank was a lender under Reserve Bank watch, with almost no capital, big losses and no leadership on account of the majority of management residing in prison following the fraudulent forex dealing. Mildly put, it was a Herculean job. 
Magomola pursued a private recapitalisation of the bank’s balance sheet and the target was African communities. The dream was economic grass-roots activism. “Political struggle was not enough. People had to own their own institutions,” he says. 
It all boiled down to a conflict over strategy. The Magomola camp wanted the African Bank’s expansion to be a gradual process, a five-year plan around funding informal, small and medium enterprises in the burgeoning township economies. 
The other, much more powerful camp held a vision of fast growth based on a model successful among the big boys like FNB. 
“There was no realization of the complexity that the amount of business a bank can do depends on the capital it has,” says Magomola. 
The job of a CEO, with a board divided, was not an easy one and the moment of truth for Magomola came just before lunch on a cold winter’s day by the hand of an old friend. 
There had been a tense board meeting. Magomola was back in his office wondering what to do. All of a sudden, there was a knock on the door. On the threshold stood founder and chairman Dr Sam Motsuenyane—the very man who had enticed him to the African Bank from his cushy position at FNB just three years earlier. Magomola calls it a classic “et tu, Brute?”. Without saying a word, Motsuenyane handed over a letter demanding his resignation. 
“I thought we had a warm relationship; he was not the kind of chairman that interfered in the day to day running of the business,” says Magomola. 
Worse was to come. Letters from management said Magomola’s crimes ranged from favoritism to an attempt to bring American standards into an African business—taboo in the late 1980s, when African nationalism was on the crest of a wave. 
In the depths of his worst day, Magomola staggered from disbelief to quiet desperation. He tried to rally his troops only to find they had all deserted him. 
Magomola’s head was on the chopping block and he could do nothing about it—he was gone. 
Grief followed denial and Magomola descended into a deep depression and alcohol. The banks repossessed the house in leafy Wendywood and the luxury car. 
More than 20 years later, Magomola says that the real pain from his dismissal was rooted in the deep-seated belief that he was helping build a new economy. 
“I received a lot of offers but none were attractive in the way I had aspired to make a difference when I was on Robben Island,” he says. 
Redemption came a year later when the Foundation for African Business and Consumers Services approached Magomola to create another African lender and he became the pioneer of black economic empowerment. Now he helps his son, Thabo, run an investment holding company.
<h3>Looking back, what would you have done differently?</h3>
I may, in the circumstances, have breached the basics of the changed environment I was operating under. The concept of a corporate strategy and its implementation would have been better grasped at the level of my colleagues at the larger banks where I was trained and worked. However, operating under a board of directors who had not had a similar re-orientation such as the one I received through my exposure abroad, was in itself an obstacle. Walking too far ahead of those whom you lead can be counterproductive.

Tag: October 2011

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