Introduction: Reach for the stars

ONE OF THE MOST remarkable features of the transition to a full-fledged democracy in South Africa in 1994 when an Afrikaner-controlled government surrendered power to a black liberation movement has been the rise of Afrikaners in business under a totally new dispensation.

Despite successive Afrikaner-controlled governments having wielded the sceptre for many years, white English speakers and Jewish entrepreneurs dominated the South African business world. In the post-1994 era, however, a number of Afrikaans-speaking businesspeople in the private sector have taken the lead.

Of the Afrikaners who started excelling in business since the takeover by Nelson Mandela's government, several have become billionaires, some with huge international firms spread far beyond the country's borders. A few of them rank among the wealthiest individuals in South Africa and are included in the lists of billionaires - the super-rich with assets in excess of R1 000 million. A handful have become dollar billionaires whose names appear in global rankings.

The most phenomenal ascent has been that of Koos Bekker, who became the chief executive and later chair of Naspers. Under Bekker's leadership, the former media company that had been founded in 1915 to advance Afrikaner interests was transformed into a global investment holding group focused on e-commerce and the internet. After the mining giants Anglo American and Billiton moved their head offices offshore, Naspers has come to dominate the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) to such a degree that Naspers shares make up more than a fifth of the JSE's total market capitalisation.

Johann Rupert, heir to the business empire founded by his father Dr Anton Rupert in the university town of Stellenbosch, has strengthened the global footprint of the Rupert tradition at the helm of Richemont, the world's second-biggest luxury-goods group.

Two former residence friends at Stellenbosch University, Christo Wiese and Whitey Basson, have gained renown as the uncrowned kings of retail. The two lifelong friends grew Pepkor and Shoprite into Africa's biggest clothing and food retail groups, respectively.

Jannie Mouton, shortly after being fired by his partners in a stockbroking firm in Johannesburg, started off with practically nothing and within a few years built PSG into one of the largest financial services groups in the country.

PSG supplied the start-up financing for the Capitec founder Michiel le Roux who, with his exceptional success story as a young entrepreneur in banking, has become another of Stellenbosch's billionaires. Capitec, which provided thousands of South Africans in the low-income bracket with banking services for the first time, has grown to the country's largest banking group by customer numbers (13 million).

Another player in the financial services industry is Coronation co-founder Thys du Toit, who has carved out a niche in Stellenbosch with the concept of family offices that manage the assets of wealthy families.

Elsewhere in banking, two other Afrikaners, GT Ferreira and Laurie Dippenaar, founded a relatively small enterprise in Johannesburg together with Paul Harris, and eventually built it into the country's biggest banking group, FirstRand.

Two Afrikaners, both former pupils of Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck in Cape Town, have accomplished outstanding feats in separate fields of the modern economy overseas. The fascinating story of Roelof Botha, grandson of South Africa's longest-serving minister of foreign affairs, Pik Botha, stretches from his schooldays in Cape Town to Silicon Valley in California where he is now one of the leading lights in the United States' venture capital industry. Hendrik du Toit is another Capetonian who has made a name for himself in foreign parts. As founder of Investec Asset Management, he moved to London to expand the group internationally from there.

A pacesetter from the insurance industry, former Sanlam chair Johan van Zyl consolidated a close association with South Africa's foremost black businessman Patrice Motsepe and his African Rainbow Capital to establish ARC as a heavyweight in the economy.

Another leader from the insurance industry who forged close ties with a black leader is Douw Steyn, a maverick among the Afrikaner businesspeople. With the phenomenally successful Meerkat advertising campaign, Steyn, founder of the insurance giant Auto & General, established one of the biggest insurance companies in Britain. The meerkat symbol was a connection with South Africa that was enhanced by his friendship with the late former president Nelson Mandela, who was housed by Steyn while the ANC leader completed his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.

Many of the super-rich have also demonstrated that South Africa is a country of givers. François van Niekerk of the Mergon Group, for instance, was named Africa's top philanthropist by Forbes magazine in 2011.

Beyond the business sector there have consistently been outstanding achievers in agriculture, a sector regarded by the ANC government as a key future job creator, along with mining and tourism.

Though South Africa does not have Africa's most fertile farmland by a long chalk, accomplished Afrikaans-speaking farmers play a crucial role in keeping the country at the forefront of the continent's food chain. They help ensure that food security is maintained domestically while agriproducts are also exported on a large scale.

In the industry, a number of them are referred to as ultrapreneurs: mega-farmers who, as innovative agriculturalists, use state-of-the-art techniques to ensure large-scale and sustainable production. The ten or so mega-farmers discussed in this book cannot be viewed merely as farmers. Rather, they are market leaders and creative businesspeople who run their farming operations like a multinational company.

But the rise of Afrikaners as trendsetting figures in business has not just been a one-way trajectory. The fall of one of their number dominated the news for weeks, even amid sensational revelations of state capture under the corrupt administration of former president Jacob Zuma.

The leading figure in the Steinhoff scandal which stunned the South African business community, was Markus Jooste, around whose head a fraud bombshell exploded on 6 December 2017. On that day Jooste, also a resident of Stellenbosch, resigned out of the blue as CEO of Steinhoff International due to 'accounting irregularities'. The global furniture and clothing retailer's share price plummeted overnight by more than 90 per cent to a paltry R6, eventually dropping to below R1 as the shock waves of South Africa's biggest corporate scandal continued to ripple outward.

The collapse in the share price severely damaged the pensions of millions of South Africans and almost wiped out the fortunes of quite a few of Jooste's business acquaintances. Among them was Christo Wiese, who resigned as chair of Steinhoff and lodged a R59-billion claim against the company. Prior to the Steinhoff scandal - through which Wiese lost fifty years' work, by his own account - he had been labelled the richest man in South Africa.

Jooste was one of the businessmen associated with the 'Stellenbosch Mafia'. An appellation used in jest by the fund manager David Shapiro in a radio interview in 2003, this term was subsequently weaponised by politicians as a slur against a collective of Stellenbosch businessmen who in many respects differ with, and are very different from, one another.

The reference to the 'Stellenbosch Mafia' derives from the fact that the town, formerly mainly known for its university, has become the domicile of a generation of billionaires. In late 2017, business figures with intimate knowledge of the town calculated that between 30 and 35 billionaires lived in and around Stellenbosch.

The 'Mafia' generalisation was coupled with a propaganda campaign against so-called 'white monopoly capital' which was devised in London by the discredited public relations agency Bell Pottinger in collaboration with the Zuma clique in the ANC and the Gupta state capturers. Even after Bell Pottinger collapsed in disgrace, notably as a result of criticism that it had inflamed racial tensions in the sensitive South African situation, 'white monopoly capital' has remained a target for race-baiting politicians who plundered state coffers, and their hangers-on.

The post-1994 rise of Afrikaners in the private sector was indirectly boosted by the ANC government's intention to wholly dominate the public service and parastatals. In 1998, this hegemonic goal was spelled out in the ANC mouthpiece Umrabulo: 'Transformation of the state entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the National Liberation Movement over all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on.'

Prior to the election of 2019, Deputy President David Mabuza reaffirmed this policy. According to a report in the Sowetan, he stated that there were 'other options' for those who failed to make the ANC's national and provincial candidate list - which boasted the names of notorious state capturers. Mabuza referred to a wide scope of deployment 'so that we occupy every important point and every important institution in the country'.

The intention to control 'all levers of power' as part of the National...