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Africa's greatest entrepreneurs

Stop looking for local heroes. They've arrived on a bookshelf near you.

Mandy de Waal
By Mandy de Waal, ITWeb contributor
Johannesburg, 06 Feb 2009

In this story:

* Discover who Africa's greatest entrepreneurs are
* Win one of three free books from Penguin
* Success secrets from African business legends
* They took risks, innovated, worked hard
* It all started with a big dream

We all know Richard Branson, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But who are the African business heroes who have created hugely successful industries in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Botswana or Zambia?

This was a question that troubled local media personality and author Moky Makura when she walked into exclusive books wanting to read a business biography and realised that there weren't any stories of African business legends on local bookshop shelves. “I went into the book shop and saw yet another book on Richard Branson, who incidentally wrote the forward for my book, and wondered why there are no books on African entrepreneurs. It's not that I have anything against Branson, of course not, just that I wondered why we didn't know more about people who had created huge success on our own continent.”

“As Africans, we don't celebrate our own heroes or tell our own stories, but rather seem to look to developing markets for role models,” says Makura, adding: “There is a cultural aspect to this. As Africans we don't want to be seen to be showing off. Culturally most Africans come from families where you would get one incredibly successful person and another sibling that is literally not working. I come from a background like that. You don't go and shout about what you are doing. One successful entrepreneur I interviewed was looking after his entire family - and when that's the situation, boasting can grate a bit.”

Do it yourself

Makura thought that rather than lamenting the fact that there weren't any books on African business legends, she'd write her own. “What I looked for was the people who where at the top of the tree, the Bransons of Africa.” The result is Africa's Greatest Entrepreneurs, a unique and compelling collection of stories about 16 of the continent's top power brokers and business visionaries.

Steeped with personal insight each chapter, it tells the gritty 'rags to riches' story of people like Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese-born telecoms millionaire; Kagiso Mmusi, the Motswana transport millionaire; Richard Maponya, the South African retail giant behind Soweto's Maponya Mall; and Ndaba Ntsele, the South African king of high finance.

What can you learn from Africa's top entrepreneurs? Makura outlines the key characteristics common among all these business greats.

They were all risk takers. “Strive Masiyiwa risked everything to take the Zimbabwean government to court in order to become the country's first cellular operator. It cost him an engineering business that employed 2 000 people and forced him to move to South Africa. But after a four-year battle he launched Econet Wireless, which in three months became the market leader.

Find the gap

They're incredibly opportunistic. Reginald Mengi's rise to greatness came at a time when Tanzania was in a state of collapse. The company he was working for couldn't even give out pens and the shops didn't stock any when Mengi realised there must be a million and one people who had the same experience. He started manufacturing plastic pens from his home, making his wife and domestic employee his first staff. He made one million US dollars from that business before getting into manufacturing and then going on to become the Ted Turner of Tanzania.

The result is Africa's Greatest Entrepreneurs, a unique and compelling collection of stories about 16 of the continent's top power brokers and business visionaries.

Mandy de Waal, ITWeb contributor

Great entrepreneurs are innovative. They may not have invented the wheel but just made it quicker, better or faster. Zimbabwean Nigel Chamakira started Kingdom Financial Services, a financial services group, because he didn't have the money to launch a proper bank. He approached Meikles to run financial services in their stores, which became extremely popular because everyone knew the Kingdom brand, which was a successful stock trading firm. Eventually queues at the supermarkets were so long that Chamakira was forced to open branches.

African business greats are visionaries. All the stories in Makura's book have one thing in common; the successful entrepreneurs all had great dreams. Says Makura: “Herman Mashaba was so clear that he was not going to be a garden 'boy' in a white suburb that he refused to go off and work in gardens and he started gambling instead. He had a huge vision for himself and realised that if he stayed with his gambling friends they may bring him down.” This saw Mashaba move from gambling to menial jobs to becoming a salesman flogging products from the boot of his car to inventing “Black Like Me”. Today “Black Like Me” is one of the most successful beauty products in South Africa and Mashaba is an icon whose story inspires people to never give up in the hope of triumphing against adversity. Says Makura: “Meshaba told me, 'I had a dream, I was going to be some body.' This is a theme common to all the great entrepreneurs in the book. They weren't following; they were creating their own destinies.”

They are all hard workers. When you read “Africa's Greatest Entrepreneurs” you quickly realise that success is the result of hard work. Half the people interviewed for the book had jobs or multiple businesses on their path to greatness. “Nigerian Wale Tinubu told me 'work is play'. That is what he does, and that is what fun is for him,” says Makura. “Africa's greatest entrepreneurs enjoy the making of money or the pursuit of making money. Money is not always the goal, but is an outcome. For most of them it was all about building or creating something. But they were all workaholics.”

Africa's Greatest Entrepreneurs
EAN: 9780143024309
Publisher: Penguin Books

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Send your name, telephone number and postal address to mandyldewaal@gmail.com.

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