The Prince of Mines

Patrice Motsepe entered the mining business when South Africa ended apartheid. Today the onetime lawyer and avowed capitalist is the country's first black billionaire.

On a brilliantly sunny Thursday in January, Patrice Motsepe, a vigorous 46-year-old with regal posture, is striding through a gleaming shopping mall on the Cape Town waterfront. Suddenly a crowd forms. A half-dozen employees from the Build-A-Bear Workshop ask for his autograph. Two giggling young women roll up their sleeves as Motsepe signs their arms with a black marker, smiling while admirers snap photos with cell phones. An older woman approaches Motsepe and nearly swoons, grasping his arm and laying her head on his chest as he pats her back and murmurs thank you in Xhosa, one of the six African languages he speaks.

All this is not for a movie star or entertainer but for South Africa's first black billionaire. Over 15 years Motsepe, preaching free market capitalism, turned a low-level mining services business into the country's first black-owned mining company, African Rainbow Minerals, with 2007 revenue of $875 million. Driven by the Asian commodities boom, ARM's share price has rocketed in the past year from $12 to $24, pushing the value of Motsepe's net worth to $2.4 billion. Motsepe, a lawyer by training, serves as ARM's executive chairman, with a 42% stake in the company. He also owns a 5.5% stake worth $295 million in Sanlam, a publicly traded financial services company outside Cape Town.

By billionaire standards Motsepe has a modest lifestyle. His three sons attend prestigious private schools, but he has only one home, in the affluent Johannesburg suburb of Bryanston, and no yacht or plane. His one indulgence is to own the Mamelodi Sundowns, a soccer team. It doesn't tarnish his star quality that he's married to one of South Africa's most glamorous women, a medical doctor turned fashion impresario.

But for all the adulation, in South Africa such success comes with a price: being labeled an oligarch. Even many blacks have complained that the country's 1994 transformation from apartheid to democracy has benefited only the elite few. The criticism stems from laws that require substantial black ownership in certain industries, including mining. A handful of politically connected individuals have grown enormously wealthy as a result. One of Motsepe's sisters, Bridgette Radebe, who's married to transport minister Jeffrey Radebe, heads a mining company and is said to be among the wealthiest black women in the country. "It's called crony capitalism," says Moeletsi Mbeki, 62, brother of South Africa's president and an outspoken critic of the race-preference laws. "It's an anticompetitive system."

Motsepe concedes he benefited from the system yet says that his success was no handout, as he began building his mining business before the laws started taking effect in 2005. He says, "The legislation came way after we did our deals."

Motsepe and his family were in a better position than most to take advantage of the end of apartheid. Born in the sprawling black township of Soweto (next to Johannesburg), where his mother had grown up, Motsepe is a member of a royal clan within the Tswana tribe. He is, in fact, a prince.

Motsepe's father, Augustine Motsepe, was a critic of the apartheid regime. Before his son Patrice was born, Augustine was banished by the government to Hammanskraal, a rural area north of Pretoria where the government thought he could do less damage (he named his son after Patrice Lumumba, head of the Republic of the Congo and one of the first black African postcolonial leaders). There he opened a grocery store and then a beer hall and restaurant. "People don't know that there were very successful black businessmen in the years of apartheid," says Motsepe.

Though one of Patrice's maternal great-grandfathers came from Scotland, the old government classified the Motsepes as African. The family had to pull strings to get their seven children admitted to an Afrikaans-language Catholic boarding school that was officially designated for so-called "coloreds," South Africans of mixed race. From age 6, Motsepe spent school holidays working behind the counter in his father's store, where he says he learned his earliest lessons about business. "Whenever my father made a profit, he always plowed it back into the store," Motsepe recalls.

He graduated from the University of Swaziland and then became one of the few black law graduates of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, designated whites-only by the apartheid government (Motsepe had to apply for an exemption to attend). In 1988 he joined Bowman Gilfillan, one of South Africa's largest corporate law firms, and in 1993 he became the firm's first black partner. Energetic and affable, Motsepe never wore his race on his sleeve, says Bowman partner and longtime Motsepe lawyer and confidant Neil Rissik.

Indeed, ask Motsepe about what it was like to grow up as a black man under the violent, racist apartheid regime and he responds with bromides. "The apartheid system was very bad for our people, very bad," he says blandly, switching quickly to the positive. "Only in South Africa could you have a change in government without civil war. If there wasn't the depth of love and caring among our people, this would not have happened."

Source: Forbes Magazine

'If you show that you support MDC, you will starve'

Credible elections in Zimbabwe were among the main objectives of the talks between the Zimbabwean government and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) last year. But despite new regulations, Zimbabwe's polls are unlikely to be free or fair.

President Robert Mugabe's government would like the world to believe otherwise, arguing that political space has been opened up for the opposition to campaign. Neighbouring states should look beyond the rhetoric as, sadly, nothing could be further from the truth.

For weeks now, I've been travelling through Zimbabwe's 10 provinces. Ordinary voters around the country described to me how supporters of the ruling party have physically attacked and intimidated people perceived to support the opposition.

Food has become a political weapon. In nearly all the provinces I visited, Zimbabweans told me that only supporters of the ruling Zanu-PF receive state-subsidised grain or farming equipment. An elderly man from Marange in Manicaland province told me: "If you show yourself to support the opposition, you will starve."
In Mutare, even a Zanu-PF loyalist confirmed that the party manipulates the distribution of food according to political loyalty: "It is very easy. Only those who are on the councillors' lists can access the grain," she told me. "At our rallies, only known supporters of Zanu-PF are allowed to attend."

Despite improved electoral laws, across Zimbabwe I found a chaotic -- and easily abused -- voter registration process. The electoral commission is unprepared and partisan. The voting procedure will be new and more complex than before, but there has been minimal voter education around the country. The opposition's access to the broadcast media is restricted.

A local activist from Makonde constituency in Mashonaland West province told me about the intense intimidation of opposition supporters in his area. "The opposition MDC are visited daily by Zanu-PF youth who shout and sing outside their homes," he said. "They call them sell-outs and tell them they will deal with the MDC candidates after the elections."

In spite of the intimidation, violence has been less conspicuous than in previous elections - in part because of prohibitions in the reformed Electoral Act. But, given the widespread violence during elections in 2000 and 2002, mere threats or allusions to past acts are enough to scare people.

In Masvingo province, a primary-school teacher told me how ruling party youths attacked him after he urged people to register to vote.

"They hit me with clubs on my head," he told me. "They displayed me before the rest of the school and now they are keeping an eye on me." Terrible scars were still visible on his head a month after the attack.

The police claim they are taking a "zero tolerance" approach to violence ahead of the polls, although many members of the police were previously involved in attacks on the opposition, civil society activists and perceived opposition supporters. None of these incidents, documented by Human Rights Watch, have been investigated. The teacher in Masvingo reported the incident, but the perpetrators were never caught.

The onus for reporting violations now rests on regional observers, in particular the Southern African Development Community (SADC) observer mission. International and local observers who charged that previous elections in 2000 and 2002 were blatantly fraudulent were not invited to return for parliamentary elections in 2005, nor for the general elections.

Mugabe's government claims that the elections will conform to the SADC guidelines and principles governing democratic elections. South Africans and their SADC neighbours have a key role to play in the run-up to the elections. SADC should call on the Zimbabwean government to grant access to all election sites. To gauge compliance, observers need to judge the political context in which the elections are being held, not just the voting process itself.

Previous post-election assessments by SADC were alarmingly positive, despite widespread human rights abuses and irregularities in the last three polls. If South Africa and other SADC observers are serious about ending Zimbabwe's political crisis, then another round of flawed elections in Zimbabwe cannot be followed by a "business-as-usual" approach.

South Africans have already seen hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans vote with their feet by crossing the Limpopo to flee hunger, violence and persecution. Now is the time for SADC to help ordinary Zimbabweans to exercise their right to vote freely at home.

Source: Human Rights Watch

Shock testimony at Taylor trial

Charles Taylor celebrated his rise to power in Liberia with a ceremony involving a human sacrifice, burying a pregnant woman alive in sand, one of his former military commanders has testified.

The admission came during a trial at The Hague where the former president is accused of war crimes. During a day of grim testimony, Joseph "Zigzag" Marzah described the ceremony and acknowledged committing hundreds of other murders on Taylor's orders.
"We executed everybody - babies, women, old men. There were so many executions. I can't remember them all," Marzah told the court. Among the victims were Taylor's opponents and former allies who he thought had betrayed him, Marzah said. One was a guerrilla commander known as Superman, who Taylor ordered executed and his severed hand brought to him as proof of his death. The killers ceremonially ate Superman's heart, and afterwards were given $200 each which they were told came from Taylor for "cigarette money".

Taylor often leaned forward with a scowl on his face as he listened to Marzah's testimony for more than five hours. Asked under cross-examination if he had any "pangs of conscience", Marzah replied "yes", but said he had no difficulty carrying out his orders."I was a servant to my chief, Charles Taylor," he said. He was adamant that Taylor had specifically ordered him to chop off hands, and paid a monetary reward for the killing of babies. He recalled receiving an order from Taylor to cut open a woman close to giving birth because the unborn child "is an enemy". Under prompting from Courtenay Griffith, defence counsel, Marzah said: "It's not difficult to kill a baby. Sometimes you just knock them on the head, sometimes you throw them in a pit, sometimes you throw them in the river and they are dead. Then you give the report to Charles Taylor."

Prosecutors described Marzah as one of their key witnesses, testifying with inside knowledge of the former Liberian president's operations in Liberia and neighbouring Sierra Leone. In both countries he is accused of responsibility for the widespread murder, rape and amputations committed by soldiers loyal to him.

The first former African head of state to face an international tribunal, Taylor, 59, has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is being tried by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. His trial began last year but was halted for six months after a chaotic first day on which he fired his legal team. The case resumed in January, when prosecutors began to call the first of dozens of witnesses expected to testify.

Describing the ceremony on the beach behind White Flower, Taylor's executive mansion in Monrovia, Marzah said a woman was placed standing up in a pit between two oil drums, then covered over with sand. Then a white sheep was killed on the spot. "It was a sacrifice," Marzah said. Taylor "was the first person to put sand in his hand and put it in the hole". Marzah said the event happened in 1995, although Taylor did not come to power until he won an election in 1997. At other times, Marzah repeatedly became frustrated and angry when questioned too closely about the timing of events, saying he had been with Taylor "from beginning to end," and had done too much to recall the dates of each event.

Marzah said Taylor encouraged his fighters to "play with human blood" to create fear among his enemies. He described militia checkpoints meant to terrify the population. After setting up roadblocks, "we used human intestines. We put heads on sticks for people to be afraid. "When the person is executed, the stomach is split and you use the intestine as a rope".

Source: Al Jazeera

NPA: Parly 'incorrect' over Browse report

Parliament's joint standing committee on intelligence came to "incorrect conclusions" in its report on the so-called "Special Consolidated Report" produced by the Scorpions, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said on Wednesday.

Source: Mail and Guardian

Anger at Cape eviction order

The Cape High Court has given the go-ahead for the eviction of several thousand residents of the Joe Slovo informal settlement to make way for a housing development. The order, handed down by Judge President John Hlophe on Monday, followed an application by state-owned developer Thubelisha Homes, Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu and Western Cape minister of housing Richard Dyantyi. Hundreds of Joe Slovo residents, who had gathered in the street outside the court, chanted angry slogans after the judgment was handed down.

Anti-Eviction Campaign coordinator Mzonke Poni said: "We really do not welcome the judgement because we are saying there's no way a judge can issue an order to evict more than 20 000 people without considering the impact it will have on their livelihoods. The residents are being evicted to make way for the construction of the N2 Gateway housing project.

Source: Mail & Guardian