The South African business and mining landscape has just witnessed a low-key move by a giant in continental, or rather, global business. Sam Jonah, former executive president of AngloGold Ashanti, announced his biggest personal investment in South Africa. This marks a further entrenchment of roots in a new country by this Ghanaian native who is also a keen African art collector, deep-sea fisherman and a fierce protector of black economic empowerment (BEE).
This week, Jonah announced his investment in Scharrig Mining, a R1-billion JSE-listed mining services company. Jonah becomes the company’s non-executive chairperson and a “cornerstone investor”. The deal will cost Jonah’s Sankofah Trust about R79-million and bring his total shareholding in Scharrig to just less than 30%. The company has also acquired Geo Search, a drilling and exploration company.
Jonah is also a significant investor in Bayport, a microlending company, in partnership with Brait, which has operations in five countries.
He is also chairperson of Equator Exploration Petroleum, an oil exploration company currently anchored in West Africa. It listed on the London Stock Exchange at $150-million and in the past year has grown ten-fold to about $1-billion.
At the Scharrig announcement this week, he cynically noted that “it is no accident that this attention on Africa comes at a time when we have a commodity prices boom”, suggesting that economics or the need to provide the world with minerals and oil may finally stabilise Africa.
Jonah believes that debt forgiveness and aid are not what’s needed for the continent. “If the world is serious about Africa,” he says, “they should invest massive amounts.”
Johannesburg is his new base, more for practicality than sentiment. The ability to fly to Kenya with the same ease as flying to London to facilitate finance for his ambitions is what draws him to South Africa, which he describes as “a first-world country with third-world innocence”. The move to Johannesburg means he cannot often indulge in deep-sea fishing.
From his resplendent offices in Illovo, Johannesburg, he talks about his business in a relaxed fashion as South Africa goes about electing local councillors.
His African art collection changes what could easily have been a northern suburbs house of soulless opulence into a vibrant, warm space. No kitsch leopard prints or long-faced wooden masks. The collection ranges from oil paintings by young Congolese artists to works by Ghanaian painter Andimah and by local artists.
His latest enthusiasm is for a business biography, Sam Jonah and the Transformation of Ashanti by London School of Economics researcher AA Taylor.
When one hears about how he joined Ashanti Goldfields Corporation as a 19-year-old shovel boy and then rose to become the company CEO, one cannot help but be enchanted by this evocative rags-to-riches story. The reality is slightly more nuanced.
Jonah comes from the mining town of Obuasi in Ghana. He describes it as an upper-middle-class town, where the only image of a miner was that of a soiled migrant labourer. Upon completion of his schooling, he didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he knew he wanted to travel. His parents, though relatively affluent, could not afford to fund an overseas study venture. His only way out was to obtain a scholarship and that would require him to study a discipline that wasn’t offered in Ghana. Thus in 1969 he settled on mining engineering, without a clue about what it entailed. His mother was so horrified by the decision that she never really made peace with it until days before she died in 1978.
Jonah studied mining engineering in Wales and set off on a global odyssey that included him working on mines in Australia before he started at Ashanti Goldfields. When he took over in 1986, Ashanti was producing 210 000 tons. When he led the company to its merger with AngloGold in 2004, the company was producing 1,6-million tons, having become the first African-operated company to list on the New York Stock Exchange in 1996. That merger was vehemently opposed in Ghana and elsewhere on the continent. “Ashanti evokes a lot of emotion,” he says, declining to be drawn on the intricacies and extent of the opposition.
His proudest achievement was to change the face of the mining industry by doing away with hostels and converting them into settlements with two-bedroom family units. That is why, on his early visits to South Africa, he was shocked by mineworkers’ conditions. He feels South Africa should have addressed the issue of miners’ accommodation a long time ago, but, with some “creativity and commitment” and the use of facilities such as mortgages, which he did not have access to in Ghana, a solution can be found.
Some of the most turbulent days in the company’s history were in 2000.
The company was found to have suffered hedging losses under Jonah’s watch. In what was seen as attempts by the authorities to bring the company to its knees, a Ghanaian court gave a shareholder with 0,2% shareholding the right to call an extraordinary general meeting, a privilege normally reserved for shareholders with a 5% shareholding.
The extraordinary general meeting was to oust Jonah and his entire board and news that it had been granted came at the annual Mining Indaba in Cape Town. Jonah pitched up at the dinner with a broad smile in spite of the ruling, leading one of the executives to remark: “You have the biggest balls in the industry.”
For his modest contribution to global business, he was knighted in 2003, but prefers the KBE [Knight of the British Empire] suffix to the more regal and popular prefix of “Sir”, which he has permission to use. In 2004, Time magazine named him as one of its global business influentials.
His words of advice for local executives is “not to see problems but challenges, and then opportunities”. He is unimpressed by those who say BEE benefits an elite handful of members. He cites an example of a man who took a few unviable mine shafts and built an empire, which this week announced a R2,4-billion joint coal venture with XStrata. His name: Patrice Motsepe.
“These people have spotted opportunities and gone for them; you cannot blame them.” He also notes that society is driven by “a handful of entrepreneurs”, noting there is only a handful of Oppenheimers, Ruperts and Fords. In time, the Jonahs will be among this handful.