Patrice Motsepe, founder of African Rainbow Minerals, has a simple message for young Africans who want to build a business or a career: believe you will succeed, get an education, and then start anyway. He was speaking to a young audience in a talk shared on The New Africa Wealth YouTube channel.
Belief first
“The critical issue that all of us must leave here today is the total belief, absolute belief that through hard work, determination, perseverance you will indeed succeed,” Motsepe said. The most successful people in the world, he argued, come from poor backgrounds and humble beginnings, and what set them apart was determination and hard work.
He tied that to a number. “We’ve got 300 million young people on the African continent between the ages of 15 and 25,” he said. “We have to give a future, creative future, for every single one of them, because if those young people do not have a future the African continent doesn’t have a future.” Young South Africans face a hard job market: South Africa’s youth unemployment rate was 47.4% in the second quarter.
A childhood behind the counter
Motsepe grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. His grandfather owned a shop in a rural area that, he said, still has no running water, and his father ran a business that included a fruit shop. The children were woken at five in the morning to go to the Pretoria Market to buy fruit and vegetables, and Motsepe also went with his father to Metro and later Makro to buy stock. At boarding school he heard classmates talk about holidays and visiting relatives, while his own school holidays meant standing behind the counter from five in the morning until midnight. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life standing behind the counter,” he said he told himself, and he started looking for a career. Medicine was out because he could not stand the sight of blood, so he chose law.
It was also a different generation, he said. He and his wife had to ask the government for permission to attend a university that was then reserved for white students. She went to medical school and he went to Wits, after first studying in what was then Swaziland and is now Eswatini.
The customer, and profit
Two lessons from the counter stayed with him. The first was that the customer is always right: a shopper who asked for Coca-Cola would not accept Pepsi, even if, to Motsepe, they tasted the same, and that taught him to follow customers’ preferences. The second was to focus on profitability, which he called critically important. He also spoke of what the family does through its foundation, describing it as part of the duty the family owes to the many people who supported it.
“Dead dogs”
When he started his businesses, Motsepe said, the company bought mines that were unprofitable, marginal, old or being closed, and people asked how anyone could buy such mines. The headline in the papers, he recalled, read “Patrice Motsepe buys dead dogs.” The method, he said, was a partnership with the workers: they would be paid a little less than the big mining companies paid, but with an assurance that they would share in the profits and end up earning more than before.
Failure, and starting
He urged his audience not to be put off when a venture struggles or when people around them say it will not work because others tried and failed. “Don’t get discouraged if you fail,” he said, adding that he has had many failures and made many mistakes, and expects to make more. He told the young people to “open that restaurant”, to “start that app” and to “start that grocery store”, and said the challenge is to move “from thinking and planning and preparing to starting, to implementing, to making things happen.” Established rivals with more money and infrastructure are not a reason to hold back: the common factor among the most successful entrepreneurs and professionals, he said, is determination, hard work and sacrifice.
Education, and the lecturer who talked about fulfilment
Earning a good living starts with education, Motsepe said, and he admitted he was not always a model student: while others studied, he sometimes went to parties, then had to catch up at night before exams. But the most important thing, he said, is to be happy at what you are doing, and he gave an example. A professor who had studied with him at university was, five years after Motsepe started African Rainbow Minerals, asked what he earned. Motsepe then offered to pay him $14,000 a month, and then $20,000, to come and work with him.
The professor’s reply, as Motsepe told it, was about his students. After 20 years of lecturing he had seen many who arrived average or uninspired, and he worked to make them excellent. Watching a student with no direction and no hunger become committed and enthusiastic about the future, he said, gave him “more fulfilment than the money”. He asked Motsepe to keep the conversation between the two of them; Motsepe shared it with the audience anyway, as an example of being happy in what you do.
