With his overdeveloped social conscience pricking him mercilessly, Simon White is a pushover for worthy causes.
"I suppose it`s one of my biggest weaknesses, my social conscience. I love this country immensely and I`ve always had a problem saying no when there`s an opportunity to contribute. I get extremely angry when people say SA is a violent country and I`ve made it a personal crusade to prove the whingers and whiners wrong."
His crusading spirit was ignited at the age of 14, when Soweto-born White began running the family shebeen - illegal, of course, at that time. "My mother (a single parent) was arrested so many times but I benefited from being under-age. The cops who used to raid us got fed up, put me in a kwela-kwela, told me I was going to jail, and drove me around for hours. They terrified me. Ever since, one of my driving philosophies has been to get involved with transformation and capacity-building. If you don`t make an impact positively on society, what is life worth living for?"
Aided and abetted by seemingly endless reserves of physical energy - "I`m hyperactive, I can`t sit still, I have to be doing something all the time" - White admits he has tended to spread himself too thin for the transformation cause. "For me to be sane, I have to manage my life better, to be more reserved about getting involved."
On this score, he passed one major personal test recently by deciding not to stand for election to the Black Information Technology Forum, which Forge Ahead BMI-T helped incubate. "I was torn but I withdrew," he says. "I told myself that there are other people who can make a contribution."
Not that he`s a rebel without a cause right now. His current crusade is to make a success of government plans to license telecoms operators in underserviced areas. "This is an incredible opportunity for local communities and entrepreneurs," says White, who has personally visited all 10 districts earmarked for the licences, drumming up support and mobilising local communities to form bidding consortia.
White, who has a BA in Economics and a teacher`s diploma from the University of the Western Cape, says entrepreneurship would have been his first career choice in an ideal world.
"I have a natural instinct for sniffing out business opportunities, but the social conscience always pulls my entrepreneurial spirit back. One tends to do things you see as a calling; in a certain sense, I have been married too much to that one aspect. Hopefully, at the right time, one can break the umbilical cord and do what`s in my nature."
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