Wealthy and successful South African women are taking their place in the business world, writes Ferial Haffajee
Meet the uptown girls … if you can get an appointment. Everybody’s clamouring to wine and dine Hazel Ralefeta, Wendy Luhabe, Salukazi Dakile-Hlongwane and their friends. If you don’t know the names, get to know them fast.
These are the future Oppenheimers and Ruperts. They’re getting rich quickly, and each one counts at least a fistful of coveted directorships among the many feathers in their caps.
Like capitalists the world over, they are also clubbing together in a slew of women’s investment companies. These are the flavour of the month for companies which want to sell stakes to “empowerment partners”, or those needing partners to tender for lucrative government contracts. Women (and black women in particular) are preferred bidders for the multi-million rands worth of goods and services that the government needs.
Last week saw the launch of another such company: Pontso Investment Holdings. The address: The Michelangelo hotel in Sandton Square. The dress code: DKNY, Christian Dior and Versace. The cars: preferably something bottle green and elegant, like a Merc, 4×4 or an Audi A4. Companies like Pontso are worth many hundreds of millions in investment rands.
Advised and financed by merchant bankers and consultants who see the value of women in general and black women in particular, they have become wily businesswomen. The sectors they have chosen to invest in include high-flying companies in information technology, financial and commercial services. Often they’re well connected.
One of Pontso’s directors is advocate Kgomotso Moraka, who learned her trade from her father, Nthato Motlana. Ursula Skosana, who started a company called Women in Capital Growth, is the wife of SA Express MD Israel Skosana. Many of the women have been trained in foreign business schools. Among them are Nomhle Gcabashe and Loren Braithwaite.
Gcabashe is the executive director of Women’s Investment Portfolio Holdings (Wiphold), the largest and richest women’s investment company. She also worked as a broker on the New York Stock Exchange.
Braithwaite is the MD of Pontso and a former adviser to the government in the privatisation of Telkom.
The consultancy BusinessMap says there are 12 known women’s investment companies. Most are Johannesburg-based, though regional companies are springing up – like Akhona Trade and Investments in KwaZulu- Natal, Yakhani in Port Elizabeth and Phahamang Investments in the Western Cape.
The wealthy and successful women who mastermind these companies often provide some of the start-up capital by taking a large shareholding. Wiphold, for example, is the brainchild of the Wip Four.
This famous four are Wendy Luhabe, Louisa Majola, Gcabashe and Gloria Serobe – who own 14% of the recently listed Wiphold. Pontso and Nozala each have 10 founding directors who own a controlling stake in their companies. Once their investments start bearing fruit and after they have paid off their debts, these individuals will be fabulously wealthy.
But it is precisely this individual enrichment that has raised many an eyebrow. Not many people are prepared to comment on the record, but in private they wonder: “How far-reaching and empowering are these women’s companies?”
Most of the companies cite some sort of grassroots empowerment as a means of spreading the dosh. To that end, some have started trusts in which the female public can get a slice of the action. Women’s Investment Portfolio has the most sophisticated empowerment plan: through a trust and a share scheme (its share price has tripled in a year), individuals and stokvels (savings schemes) have been able to invest.
Gcabashe says the company has 17 000 female shareholders, who live anywhere from rural Qunu in the Transkei to swish Sandton in Johannesburg.
They are also negotiating a package of discounts for the shareholders in the companies in which they own a stake. Nozala will donate 20% of the dividends to a trust which will be used to train women and provide micro-loans to rural women. Most of these benefits are medium term: they’re going to take at least three years to begin filtering down to the rural beneficiaries of these urban companies.
Another question being asked is how often these deals, and the directorships which often come with them, are “rent-a-tannie” transactions to smooth the path of largely white-owned and white-run companies.
Certainly, there have been few changes at companies like Johnnic and the Transnet subsidiary Viamax, where magnates like Irene Charnley and Hazel Ralefeta hold leadership positions. It may have been with an eye on this trend that the Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, said at the Pontso launch: “We must participate effectively in the affairs of the companies in which we are investing and of which we are chairpersons.”
Says Gcabashe: “Once we become shareholders, we develop a relationship that is mutually beneficial. We want to transform companies.”
Pontso’s empowerment mission is to train a cadre of corporate warriors advanced in structuring deals, securing finance and managing who will be filtered into the halls of power. The 10 directors will mentor a layer of “owners, directors and managers”.
Perhaps Zanele Mbeki has taken a page out the empowerment hand-book of her husband Thabo Mbeki, who last week warned against narrow empowerment for the lucky few.
The company she pioneered – Women’s Development Bank Investment Holding Company – is the only one which sinks every cent of its profits into loans for rural women in Mpumalanga and the Northern Province.
“We’re different,” says adviser Yogan Kgl, adding: “This is investment for development.”