Motsepe, Patrice Tlhopane

▪ 2009

born Jan. 28, 1962, Soweto, S.Af.

      The price of gold rose to historic highs in 2008, causing the value of many mining companies to rise with it. In South Africa the high share prices of African Rainbow Minerals (ARM) and associated mining interests made company owner Patrice Motsepe the country's first black billionaire.

      Despite having grown up in the apartheid era, Motsepe fared better than many other South African blacks. His father, once banished for voicing opposition to apartheid, became a successful liquor distributor by affiliating with South African Breweries. Throughout his youth Motsepe worked at his father's store and beer hall, a job that gained him essential lessons in business management and exposed him to the lives of the mine workers who bought their daily provisions from him. Largely because of his father's opposition to Bantu education, Motsepe and his six siblings attended a Roman Catholic boarding school in Eastern Cape province. Motsepe then earned a bachelor's degree in law from the University of Swaziland and a law degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He joined the law firm of Bowman Gilfillan in 1988 and became a partner in 1993, having worked as a visiting attorney with the American law firm McGuire, Woods, Battle & Booth in 1991–92.

      When Bowman Gilfillan reorganized in the new postapartheid environment, Motsepe left to apply his business acumen to the mining trade. He believed that he could use management techniques, such as low base pay coupled with production incentives, to transform less-productive shafts into moneymaking operations. Even more important, he found ways to benefit from his country's Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) laws, which required companies to have a minimum 26% black ownership before a mining license would be granted. In 1994 Motsepe founded a mine services company, Future Mining, and applied all of his life experience—knowledge of the mining trade and its workers, school connections, political and legal structures, and a shrewd spirit of entrepreneurship—to his new work. In 1997 he launched ARMgold, which in 2003 merged with Harmony and acquired Anglovaal Mining (Avmin). Motsepe was named chairman of the newly reorganized ARM in 2004, and by 2006 the company had expanded beyond gold and other metals into coal mining. Motsepe's growing wealth allowed him to purchase a 51% interest in the Mamelodi Sundowns association football (soccer) club in 2003, and the next year he gained full control of the club.

      Critics argued that the BEE laws benefited the most well-connected of South Africa's blacks, such as Motsepe and his family, while failing to create a black middle class. Yet many in South Africa viewed Motsepe as an important role model who ran successful businesses and supported many of the country's important institutions, such as the Nelson Mandela Foundation, to which he gave a gift of 3 million rand (about $375,000) in June 2008, one month before Mandela's 90th birthday.

Sarah Forbes Orwig

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