Metropolitan’s chief economist and head of international portfolio management, Réjane Woodroffe, is working from home this week, so I call a cell number. The line is excellent, and I find it difficult to believe the voice on the other end — so close it could be in the next room — is speaking from a rondavel in the Eastern Cape, reached via satellite phone.
But this is normal for Woodroffe. She spends alternate weeks working out of her office in Cape Town and her home in Nqileni village in the Eastern Cape, where she and husband Dave Martin run an eco-tourism lodge. While he looks after Bulungula, a collection of ten huts 40% owned by the community, she manages a portfolio worth R4,5-billion.
Woodroffe and her team have to keep up with international trends for equities, bonds, commodities and money-market movements. Says Woodroffe: “2006 was a very good year for international equity markets. Risk aversion was at an all-time low, global developed markets returned 18% in US dollar terms, emerging markets around 40% and gold 22%. Our international portfolios were particularly well positioned for these market moves and took exposure to both emerging markets and commodities. Our international balanced portfolios performances rank in the top quartile when compared to other large South African asset managers. While in the near-term we expect volatility to rise, we are long-term structural bulls on emerging markets and commodities.”
Martin, an IT programmer by trade, is passionate about development and loves travelling, so when he decided to start a sustainable business, tourism was a natural choice. He walked the length of the Wild Coast in 2002 looking for the right place to invest his savings in starting a lodge.
But getting the project off the ground proved difficult. “There’s a lot of inefficiency in government,” Woodroffe explains. “There’s lots of bureaucracy and the process is quite complicated. This is pristine coastline and you need a lease from the community so that people don’t mess up the coastline and the community gets what’s due to them. We have the first legal lease issued on the coast since democracy. We really wanted the right documentation and the right lease. A lot of people have tried and given up. The only reason why he didn’t give up is because these are his life savings.”
Tourism and development are natural partners, especially when unskilled and semi-skilled workers are involved. The community decides who should be given jobs and businesses, so that those who benefit directly are those most in need. “So most of the people who work at the lodge are widowed, single mothers,” Woodroffe explains.
Half of the households earn an income directly from the lodge, and 100% community-owned businesses provide services to the lodge: horseriding, canoeing, village tours, herbalist tours, a honey project, nursery, vegetable garden, fishing and laundry services.
All this runs off sustainable energy. The lodge uses gas for cooking and refrigeration, along with wind and solar power for the laptops. Solar parabolic heaters — “they look like large satellite dishes, and you put the food in the centre” — are also used. They received enough funding to subsidise wood-burning smokeless stoves for the village, which cuts down on smoke inhalation and eye irritation. They also collect rain-water for drinking.
“It was a conscious choice. There is an initial expense, but over time it is cheaper. Maybe it rains for a few days and you can’t use the solar panels, so you just use less as you need to. It’s about using what’s available,” Woodroffe says. But part of that conscious choice is minimising wastage — “like leaving your laptop on over lunch. We would never do that”.
Bulungula has turned a small profit every year since October 2004, when it opened, and they have been able to pay staff bonuses each year, although Martin doesn’t draw a salary. Praise and accolades have arrived too: the lodge is one of the first to be Fair Trade-certified. The Lonely Planet describes it as a “must-see” and the Rough Guide lists Bulungula as one of South Africa’s top 28 destinations.
Woodroffe stays connected through email and a satellite phone, illustrating just how far globalisation has come, and how much development is still needed.
The village is desperately poor. Woodroffe’s neighbour’s baby died of diarrhoea, one of the world’s most treatable diseases, but one of Africa’s biggest killers. Woodroffe and Martin both speak Xhosa, a necessity in a village where only one other person speaks English.
It’s not an easy commute: to reach Nqileni she flies either to Johannesburg and then to Mthatha, or to East London where she takes a three-hour bus trip to Mthatha. Once at Mthatha, there’s still a two-hour 4×4 trip to endure, as there are no roads to the village. It’s eight or nine hours’ travelling time, but she says the travel isn’t the hard part.
“The adjustment is the contrast between the excesses we live with [in Cape Town] and how little people survive with here,” she says. “Here, we live in the same mud hut as everyone else. There’s no running water, no electricity, no flushing toilets.
“I’ll give you an example: I don’t take my clothes back and forth. I have clothes at my mom’s place in Cape Town and clothes here in the village. One time, I left my shoes behind and I bought a new pair. When I got back here everyone went crazy because I had new shoes, and it was something I hadn’t even thought of.
“There’s no crime, there are no locks on any doors, but the problems are bigger. The nearest hospital is six to eight hours on foot, so pregnant women are pushed in wheelbarrows for two hours and then they catch a taxi.”
Another serious issue is alcohol abuse. “There’s no education about the effects of alcohol. There’s aspirational advertising combined with very cheap alcohol. It needs to be like cigarettes: no advertising and warning labels in all 11 official languages … We’re not adressing the alcohol problem. The treasury will probably hike sin taxes a few cents as he [Finance Minister Trevor Manuel] does every year, but it should be the choice of consenting adults with full knowledge, which it’s not in this country.”
She says that a 750ml bottle of beer retails at the village shebeen for R8,50, compared to a retail price of R7 in town, yet the same amount of beer would cost R70 in the United Kingdom.
“If it was prohibitively expensive and came at a premium, people would drink less. And if they brewed their own, they would make umqombothi, which is low in alcohol and very nutritious. But for aspirational reasons, people buy bottled beer.”
Woodroffe says there should be special provision in the budget for rural areas. “Forty percent of South Africans, according to the last census, live in rural areas. The urban and peri-urban areas will always be first with basic services … The biggest problem is that we keep waiting for municipalities to deliver. One quick, easy fix would be to get 4×4 ambulances, and that could be tendered directly from national government.”
Has her life here helped her economic work? “Yes, definitely. I think I have a holistic view of the whole country, not just the urban and peri-urban areas.”
I wonder whether she’ll ever choose to give up the commute. “For as long as I continue to work, I will be happy to continue the commute. Although commuting can sometimes be tiring, travelling is part of the lives of most financial professionals. Also, I get to have the best of both worlds: the challenge of working in the financial sector and paradise to call home,” she says.