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ON MY first visit to Ghana more than 15 years ago, I was enchanted by the carved wooden people found all over Accra’s markets. There were roomfuls of brightly painted soldiers, white colonials, bureaucrats, waiters, nurses and myriad other icons of human beings produced by west African craftsmen. Over the years, these figurines appeared in SA’s markets, with new models including golfers, jockeys and, yes, soccer players. So it was a surprise to read that the wooden souvenir soccer players licensed by Fifa for sale in SA’s shopping malls over the World Cup tournament had been made to order in…
IN 1993, Equity Building Society in Kenya was declared technically insolvent; in 2010 it is a fully fledged bank, listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange and claims more than half of Kenya’s banked population as its customers. In 2006 alone, its customer base grew 82,5% and its deposits grow 80% a year. What is the secret of its success? The innovative and efficient provision of financial services to low- and middle- income groups at a good price. While the large local and international banks were doing what banks generally prefer to do — courting wealthy elites and multinationals — Equity ditched…
A MINISTER in an African country that shall remain nameless was relating his experience of joining the government from the private sector at a dinner at a recent African business conference. He said the need to observe official protocol was one of the biggest challenges of transferring from an environment of informality in business to the public service. Simply walking out of his office to speak directly to an official about an issue, rather than working through the chain of command, had thrown his ministry into panic mode, he said — so steeped were they in following procedure. In fact, protocol…
ARE South African companies damaging relationships with other African countries by not playing by the rules? This politically sensitive issue, which has dogged SA-rest of Africa ties for nearly two decades, came to the fore again last week with the release of a report by the Open Society of Southern Africa on the behaviour of South African miners in the region. A survey of selected companies operating in southern Africa found the practices of South African mining companies to be “appalling”. These include lax environmental standards, a failure to keep promises development agreements, wage differentials between locals and expatriates in similar…
THE Nigerian government is busy with legislation which, if passed, will make it mandatory for companies to pay 3,5% of their gross profit to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. The proposed Corporate Social Responsibility Bill allows for a great deal of state meddling in companies’ affairs and suggests onerous punishments for noncompliance, including hefty fines. The move has not been well received by business — unsurprisingly. This is not only because of the potential for such an initiative to become just another graft opportunity, nor because companies do not support better CSR, but because they already operate in one of the…
EMMANUEL Munyukwi, CE of the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (ZSE), has had a stressful time during Zimbabwe’s lost decade — keeping interest alive in a stock market increasingly disconnected from the rest of the world. Hyperinflation, peaking far north of the last official rate of 231-million percent, a government driven by political expedience and a currency in freefall were just some of the other headaches Munyukwi, along with the rest of the country’s business sector, had to cope with over the past 10 years. The ZSE saw foreigners pulling out and local companies using the exchange as a hedge against inflation.…
It is not every day I get cajoled to sing happy birthday to President Robert Mugabe. The old man, guest of honour at an African tourism conference in Harare last week, looked pleased as the praise singers that surrounded him (otherwise known as government officials) cranked out the ‘happy birthday’ tune to mark his 86th birthday, exhorting, with limited success, the delegates to take part. This fawning exercise diverted the otherwise informative event from its business – and annoyed many Zimbabweans who muttered about it after the Ego had swept from the room. Chief among the sycophants was Zimbabwe’s tourism…
REPORT: Emerging Commercial Rivalries in Africa Dianna Games SA Institute of International Affairs, 2010
IN 2008, after months of delays, the Zambian government finally gave in to public pressure to capture a greater share of profits from the commodity boom by introducing a windfall tax on minerals, raising mining royalties and hiking corporate taxes. The measures, which came into effect in the April 2008 national budget, raised the effective tax rate from about 30% to 47%. The move raised a howl of protest from mining companies, which said it violated investment agreements with the government. Months later, the global economic crisis kicked in, commodity prices plunged and Zambia’s foreign currency revenues started drying up…
OFFICIAL discussions about how to manage traffic and people through Africa’s busiest border post — Beitbridge — have been going on for at least a decade. And yet, every major holiday begets horror stories about the experience of trying to move through this border crossing. This past Christmas season was no exception. In fact, with the mass flight of Zimbabweans to SA, the situation has become worse. Delays of several hours for holiday- makers were commonplace. Cars queued for kilometres from the immigration buildings on either side of the border, touts milled through the crowds soliciting bribes, and the sun…
Man Behind The Big Brands’, Profile on Mark Lamberti, Former Executive Chairman of Massmart Holdings, in South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs
Dianna Games
REPORT: Man Behind The Big Brands’, Profile on Mark Lamberti, Former Executive Chairman ofMassmart Holdings, in South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs Dianna Games GIBS and MME Media, 2010
SABMILLER ’s two main competitors in Nigeria, Guinness and Heineken, make nearly as much in that market as SA’s brewing giant makes in 24 other African countries, excluding SA. This startling fact was disclosed by an SABMiller Africa executive at a recent SA-Nigeria Chamber of Commerce event. He maintains that for all the challenges of the Nigerian market, if companies do not have a Nigeria strategy, they do not really have an Africa strategy. SABMiller entered the highly competitive Nigerian beer market last year with the purchase of a small brewery in Rivers State in the Niger Delta. The executive…
October 26, 2009
Poor leadership sows the seeds of African agricultural failure
Dianna Games for Business Day
A GREEN revolution, like any other revolution, takes real leadership; it requires an acknowledgement that food production is a life-and-death matter, a Vietnamese academic told an agricultural conference I attended in Hanoi last week. Feeding a nation was not possible without a clear and decisive strategy, he said. Vietnam has proved that it knows a thing or two about producing food, for not only its people but a good chunk of the globe. Its own green revolution allowed it to move from being a net food importer to one of the world’s biggest exporters in certain crops. Good leadership, high…
October 12, 2009
Guinea’s army-backed regimes show folly of turning a blind eye
Dianna Games for Business Day
Most people would not be able to find Guinea on a map – until the recent slaughter and rape of dozens of people in the streets of the capital, that is. As the horror was splashed across the world’s media, the rulers of this West African nation tried to distance themselves, and the army they command, from the massacre. The regime, which seized power in a coup d’etat last year after the death of dictator Lansana Conte,, is trying to sell the army as the saviour of this blighted nation. The African Union, confronted by these unfortunate events, has been…
RETURNING to his country after an absence of more than a decade, a Nigerian friend said what had caught his eye first was the fact that Lagos had streetlights — and they worked. The streetlight project, which brings some light to a city of 15-million people, is one of the Lagos State governor’s early initiatives to start rolling back the decay of Nigeria’s commercial capital . Street signs have been installed across Lagos, giving some self-respect to even the deepest slums, new public transport systems are running, litter is being removed for the first time in decades, and parts of…
MEDIA reform has been slow in coming to the “new” Zimbabwe. Daily newspaper The Herald, which has acted as President Robert Mugabe’s propaganda mouthpiece over the years, has shown scant sign of support for the unity government and it is sowing the seeds of dissent. Articles in the past fortnight have lambasted the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) for trying to get Zimbabwe onto the agenda of last week’s Southern African Development Community (Sadc) summit in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It then praised Mugabe’s “diplomatic victory” in keeping the issue off the agenda. It also thanked SADC leaders for…
September 7, 2009
Leader’s mission to change the course of Rivers State
Dianna Games for Business Day
CHIBUIKE Rotimi Amaechi is a man in a hurry. The governor of one of Africa’s richest natural resource areas, Rivers State in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta, Amaechi aims to make his four years in power count. “We have a lot to do in Rivers State. Our leaders have abandoned the area for a very long time,” says the outspoken leader, whose bold statements and fearless approach to change have occupied many column inches in Nigeria’s media. Governors in Nigeria are extremely powerful politicians and Amaechi’s importance to the polity is further highlighted by the fact that Rivers State is the…
NIGERIAN society is reeling from the unprecedented corporate drama playing out before it, watching as the country’s blue-chip business elite is hauled before anticorruption officials in the media spotlight. The banking crisis, which has seen the Central Bank of Nigeria firing the CEOs of five banks — Oceanic, Union Bank, Intercontinental, Afribank and Finbank — has rocked the business world. Central bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, in office for just two months, acted on the basis that large loan portfolios and poor governance had left the banks so poorly capitalised they posed a systemic risk. By Friday, 16 bank executives…
When President Mwai Kibaki first came to power in Kenya in 2003 he put out an arrest warrant for the chief justice, among many other public officials, in a bid to stamp out a cancer that had taken hold of the country. One of his first legislative acts was to publish three anti-corruption bills. Just two years later, the media reported that corruption under Kibaki’s rule had cost the country about $1bn, nearly a fifth of the state budget. His anti corruption chief John Githonga left Kenya after receiving death threats. In Nigeria, the fight against corruption has been patchy…
The close relationship between South Africa’s new president, Jacob Zuma, and the country’s powerful trade unions had the private sector and investors worried. Would the payback for union support of his campaign, which helped sweep him to victory in April, be a leap to the left for a carefully charted, investor-friendly economic policy? Would there be rampant state spending to appease poorer sections of the population, for which Zuma’s promise of poverty alleviation was the answer to their prayers? Certainly Zuma has appointed leading members of the trade union federation Cosatu and the South African Communist Party to critical roles…
ZIMBABWE is currently swamped by investor conferences. The perception of rich pickings at rock-bottom prices and the search for new capital by the public and private sectors have raised the business profile of a country no one wanted to visit a year ago. And despite the flaws of the unity government, the economy is starting to turn around. The introduction of hard currency has been the biggest factor in restoring a sense of normality and is allowing companies to gear up for a new era. International companies that were forced to ring- fence their Zimbabwe operations as a result of…
WHY is it so often those with the biggest cars and smartest houses who complain about how iniquitous capitalism is? Smug claims about the death of capitalism in the wake of the global financial crisis have become commonplace in Africa, as elsewhere, and there seems to be real hope that a new world order will emerge that allows the continent half a chance of competing in it. Unfortunately for the Mercedes-Benz socialists among us, any new order is likely to be more about shifting the emphasis of global trade and investment flows, rather than any radical change in economic model.…
THERE was some angry talk last weekend in the Wellington Hotel in Warri, the commercial capital of Delta State in Nigeria. To pass the time while waiting for a meeting with the state governor, who presides over the largest chunk of Nigeria’s oil economy, I wandered into a public meeting of Niger Deltans in the hotel’s convention centre, where a heated discussion was taking place. As the entire gathering turned to look at me in surprise, I decided not to linger — my decision informed by the alarming headlines on the newspapers being sold on the hotel steps: “Army pounds…
REPORT: Mozambique: The Business View Dianna Games Business Leadership SA/ The Brenthurst Foundation, 2007
REPORT: Africa’s Tsunami: Turning The Tide of AIDS Dianna Games and Mercedes Sayagueyes South African Institute of International Affairs, 2006
Download PDF: A Missed Opportunity: A Three-Country Study of African Agriculture Dianna Games Brenthurst Foundation, 2006
REPORT: Zimbabwe: A Pre-election Overview and Recovery ScenariosDianna GamesSouth African Institute of International Affairs, 2005
REPORT: The Role of the Media in NEPAD Dianna Games United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on Africa, 2005
The Experience of South African Firms Doing Business in Africa: A Preliminary Survey and Analysis
Dianna Games
REPORT: The Experience of South African Firms Doing Business in Africa: A Preliminary Survey and Analysis Dianna Games South African Institute of International Affairs, 2004
REPORT: An Oil Giant Reforms: The Experience of South African Companies in Nigeria Dianna Games South African Institute of International Affairs, 2004
REPORT: The Zimbabwe Economy: How Has It Survived and How Will It Recover? Dianna Games South African Institute of International Affairs, 2002