youth unemployment today becomes elderly poverty tomorrow 💔💔
South Africa's retirement stats show most people simply can't afford to stop working
the heartbreaking reality is an entire generation may never experience financial stability... at any age
Literally what the Black guy that trended about not having IDC funding was speaking about. To the consumer,you having all the structural,systemic and institutional support will have you coming across as professional while the Black entrepreneur comes off as amateurish.
As a private company, we don't speak about Nando's success enough. I don't think British people and Americans even know that this company is South African
Quick story:
Alan Knott Craig jnr is the son of Alan Knott Craig Sr., who was the CEO of Vodacom at the height of the Please Call Me battle in the early 2000s. He claimed that the idea for Please Call Me was his idea in a book he published, essentially stealing the idea from young black man Nkosana Makate.
This wouldn’t be the last time his father was accused of stealing ideas from young black men. Years later, after claiming that Please Call Me was his idea, he was accused by three founders of stealing the concept for “Look4me” and passing it down to his son, Alan Knott Craig Jr., in the video below, as his own. Look4me would go on to be acquired in a major deal with his son as the founder.
With the “credentials and experience” he was able to rally Stellenbosch millionaires and billionaires to help him buy the platform from its Namibian founder.
As soon as he and those Stellenbosch guys, like Michael Jordaan (former CEO of FNB at the time), had their hands on it, the platform fell apart.
We need more iconic images of African entrepreneurs in their early days. Documenting these journeys helps show young people that their role models don’t have to be Steve Jobs in a California garage, Jeff Bezos packing orders out of a garage in Bellevue, or Mark Zuckerberg coding Facebook from a Harvard dorm room, but people much closer to their own realities.
Apartheid was a violent legal system that stripped Black South Africans of citizenship, land, movement, education, and skilled work. Today’s redress policies are not “anti-white laws.” Equating the two is historically illiterate, morally bankrupt, and deliberately dishonest.
We don’t talk enough about the time, capital and support it actually takes to build something real. Imagine how many South African startups could thrive if they had the runway to figure things out, fail forward and eventually win.