Book on Steinhoff's demise shows danger of 'big men' business leaders

Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste was an excessively dominant, forceful and feared boss.
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The collapse of Steinhoff International, the multi-billion dollar global business group, has been rightly described as the biggest corporate scandal in South African history.

The company’s history, and its subsequent evolution and demise, are skillfully told in a new book Steinhoff: Inside SA’s Biggest Corporate Crash, by former journalist James-Brent Styan. It is the story of a bold vision and ambition, entrepreneurial grit and guile, continuous innovation, relentless risk-taking, corporate hubris, and friendship betrayals.

The extraordinary way in which Steinhoff grew from being a modest firm with a footprint only in Germany and South Africa to becoming a multinational behemoth straddling sectors such as furniture manufacturing, retail, logistics, consumer finance, building material, wood and vehicles with a global presence, is impressive.

In its pursuit of growth, Steinhoff employed a two-pronged strategy. The first focused on creating a low-cost manufacturing base. This enabled the business to supply products at cheap prices to its target market of lower-to-middle income groups.

The second pillar consisted of an aggressive acquisition of companies. A great deal of the acquisitions took place in European countries such as Germany, Poland and France but also extended to Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the US.

The acquisitions were costly and the conglomerate paid above the market value for the shares. The rapid spate of takeovers saw the group expand to 12 000 stores across the world, employing 130 000 people. Ultimately, Steinhoff became a fully vertically integrated enterprise – it was involved in all the value chain links from sourcing raw materials, to manufacturing and finally to distribution and sale of products.

Shaky foundations

At the pinnacle of its success, the international business giant became the darling of investors, asset managers, analysts and financial journalists. They all feted its expansion into new ventures and countries. But, as it later turned out, its success was built on shaky foundations epitomised by unfettered greed as well as dodgy and unethical practices, including alleged accounting irregularities, tax evasion and lax corporate standards.

The day before the Steinhoff group’s precipitous crash, the corporation was worth R193bn. On the following day, its market value was decimated by a staggering R117bn. Among the victims of the financial carnage were financial South African services giants Coronation Fund, Foord Asset Management, Sanlam, Investec, Liberty, Old Mutual, Allan Gray, Discovery and the Nedgroup.

The biggest losers were key investor and Pepkor chairman Christo Wiese (R37bn) and the Public Investment Corporation (R14bn), which manages the Government Employees Pension Fund. Overnight, millions of South Africans had lost billions of rands in pension funds.

The book encompasses a diverse range of themes and proffers a number important business lessons. Some bear mentioning.

Lessons

The case of Markus Jooste, then Steinhoff CEO, shows that the cult of personality and “Big Man” syndrome is as ubiquitous in the corporate world as it is in politics. He comes across as an excessively dominant, forceful and feared boss. He brooks no dissent and only those subordinates who obsequiously defer to him benefit from his extensive patronage. To the detriment of the business, his leadership style fostered an institutional culture of uncritical subservience and self-censorship.

A recurring question in the book is: Despite occasional red flags how could the analysts, investors, asset managers, directors and the Johannesburg Securities Exchange have been oblivious to the wrongdoing at Steinhoff?

Part of the problem was the dominant view that the company could never go wrong. As long as the share price kept rising, and the good news kept flowing, there was nothing to worry about. There were, of course, some skeptical and dissenting voices, but they were too few to upend the prevailing consensus.

The crucial lesson here is that the share price is not the only indicator of corporate performance; fundamental governance issues are equally, if not more, important.

As Steinhoff’s global expansion accelerated, its business model and structure became more complicated. Some market analysts have argued that the firm’s increasingly complex structure, coupled with the group’s continual acquisitions, made it nearly impossible to analyse its books and to do year-on-year comparisons.

Even so, there was a belief that as long as strong, charismatic and venerated business personalities such as Jooste and Wiese, Steinhoff’s chairman at the time, were at the helm the business was in safe hands. This trust in Jooste and Wiese, as well as in management and directors, proved to be misplaced. As Warren Buffett has wisely counselled, never invest in something you don’t trust.

The Steinhoff board of directors, long viewed as one of the strongest and most dependable, has come under fierce criticism for failing to exercise its fiduciary duty. Describing the board, one fund manager stated that it was
“ineffective, not independent and was overwhelmed by Jooste’s strong personality”.

Criticism has also been directed at Deloitte, the firm that audited the company’s statements for 20 years, for disregarding the irregularities and the danger signs preceding the crash. It is this milieu that prompted an analyst to describe what happened at Steinhoff in the book as follows:

It’s a buddy-buddy system, a bunch of people who know each other and have worked together for years. It strips them of their capacity to question things that don’t make sense.

Up there with the worst

Styan must be commended for producing a cogently written and thoroughly researched book. In terms of its drama and catastrophic impact, the Steinhoff scandal is up there with the likes of Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Freddie Mac, Bernie Madoff and other world infamous episodes of business malfeasance. As such, the book provides valuable insights and lessons that are universally applicable and comparable. It must be made compulsory reading in corporate boardrooms and business schools.

Mills Soko, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Why giving South Africans title deeds isn't the panacea for land reform

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The land reform debate in South Africa has become increasingly polarised since Parliament resolved to consider amending the country’s Constitution to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation.

But the slow pace of land reform – a process that aims to address the dispossession of the previously oppressed black majority – will not be solved by amending the Constitution. That’s because the main problems with the country’s land reform programme have nothing to do with it.

The main problem lies with the government’s thinking behind land reform. It’s rooted in a Western, colonial mindset that’s totally out of step with how many would-be beneficiaries understand land.

The problem stems from the fact that indigenous systems of land ownership are not the same as the absolute ownership approach preferred by the West. Nor are they what early colonialists assumed when they adopted a communal paradigm, assuming that land was collectively owned by indigenous communities. This was not the case. Some land was for communal use (particularly grazing and some agricultural land), but families and individuals held exclusive use rights over other areas such as homesteads.

The legacy of this is devastating. Adherence to a communal paradigm strips people of the ability to hold land rights individually. This is unconstitutional. Yet the paradigm persists: we can see it in, for example, the communal land rights Act, and the communal land tenure policy.

South Africa needs to move away from the communal paradigm that entrenches colonial and apartheid-era thinking, and move towards an approach that’s better aligned to living norms and traditions.

Rejecting the communal paradigm, I prefer to refer to customary land tenure to describe how indigenous communities manage their land. Customary tenure systems are regulated by traditional norms and practices, within which land rights are socially embedded. They are dynamic, multi-layered and responsive to the needs of the community. As a result, and contrary to common perception, they can offer secure tenure.

What is required is legislation to recognise and protect them, and for such legislation to be properly implemented. This, unfortunately, is not the government’s approach.

Flawed thinking

The government sees customary tenure as insecure and an impediment to economic development. In terms of the Green Paper on Land Reform, land in South Africa may only be owned by a “small elite”. The State Land Lease and Disposal Policy (which does not provide for ownership, but allows beneficiaries of land redistribution to lease land from the State), has been criticised as showing the government’s lack of faith in poor black farmers. And the Communal Land Tenure Policy seeks to transfer ownership of customary land to tribal authorities.
This deprives land rights-holders of their land rights, rendering them subjects of the chief instead of citizens of the country. Such an approach is unequivocally unconstitutional.

Globally, individual title to land (ownership) is seen as the ultimate goal because it allows people to access the capital value of their land and promotes investment. This view is supported by both the African National Congress and the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance.

Titling is seen as a sure way to lift people out of poverty. But the link between giving people title deeds to their land and poverty alleviation in sub-Saharan Africa is contested.

Ownership

Titling, or the formalisation approach is supported by some people, while others argue against it. Those who oppose it warn that it could bring about greater insecurity of land tenure, especially for women and other vulnerable groups.

From interviews I conducted with customary land rights-holders in the Eastern Cape, the biggest fears around formalisation were:

• Having title to land is expensive because you are immediately liable for rates and taxes, and banks may seize your property should you default on loan repayments.
• For the poor and vulnerable, especially, this may lead to a decrease in tenure security and push them further into poverty.
• Titling also leads to a loss of tribal identity because individuals may choose to sell their lands to outsiders who do not identify with the traditions and customs of the area.

Government views formalisation through registration and title as a quick fix “silver bullet” solution, but it’s beset with “intractable problems and conflicts”.

In some cases, beneficiaries of land titling programmes revert to customary practices. This is partly because they don’t identify with government’s imposed system of ownership.

Customary tenure systems

A conservative approach is to recognise customary tenure systems that are socially embedded and that may offer more security than ownership through titling. Such recognition represents a shift away from the supremacy of ownership that views individual title as the be all and end all.

In South Africa, both the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act and the former Land Rights Bill of 1999 adopted a conservative approach. Both documents recognised existing land rights and sought to protect and further strengthen them. But Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act is often overlooked, and the Bill was scrapped.

Current policies seek to undermine customary land rights-holders, allowing them only to lease land from the state or to have secondary use rights as subjects of traditional authorities. South Africa needs a new approach, one that challenges the supremacy of titling and casts off the shackles of the communal paradigm.

Simon Hull, Senior lecturer, Division of Geomatics, University of Cape Town

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Apartheid, guns and money: book lifts the lid on Cold War secrets

A London bus displays anti-apartheid message at the height of South Africa’s isolation.
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It’s not very often that a book really reshapes our perception of an issue, but Hennie van Vuuren’s “Apartheid, Guns and Money: a tale of profit” is one. It is a massive work: over 600 pages and the result of a decade of meticulous, painstaking work.

From a modest office in a rundown suburb of Cape Town, Van Vuuren has been beavering away to probe into the stories that could never be told during the apartheid years. Formerly director at the Institute for Security Studies, he now runs Open Secrets, which peers into economic and human rights violations. This volume, first published in South African in 2017, is the result.

The extraordinary tale that Van Vuuren tells is how – as the South African state gradually became an international pariah and as the truth about apartheid became internationally known – it moved from a normal member of the world community to a covert operator. It began working in shady ways, through even more shady operators.

To ensure that it had access to arms and oil, Pretoria moved from legitimate to illegitimate trade; from overt to covert deals and from legal to illegal transactions. This was supported (or at least connived at) by many western powers. That the US, Britain and France did this has been known, or at least suspected, for many years. Van Vuuren fills in the blanks and gives us plenty of new information on this. Although shocking this is less than astonishing.

What is really novel is that he uncovers a completely new set of actors: the Chinese and the Soviet Union. In the past it has been assumed that, for the most part, they were completely wedded to the liberation movements. The support from Moscow and Beijing for the African National Congress and – to a lesser extent – the Pan Africanist Congress, was so widely reported that few suspected there might be less than total solidarity between the communist powers and the liberation movements.

Yes, there were the odd stories about the South African diamond giant – De Beers – being spotted at the ballet in Moscow doing deals with Russian diamond companies, but this was seen as a small aberration. After all, both countries wanted to keep up the prices of diamonds on international markets, so some kind of arrangement was perhaps inevitable.

But – if Van Vuuren is right – these relationships went far, far beyond the odd contact.

Mind-boggling complexity

Take one example: the voyage of the Pia Vesta, now a rusting hulk, lying off the coast of Venezuela. This vessel was, says Van Vuuren

once at the centre of one of the greatest arms heists of the 1980s involving socialist East Germany, South Africa, Peru, Panama, probably the CIA and a crafty French arms dealer by the name of Georges Starckmann.

The tale begins with a top secret minute of a meeting between the head of the South African Defence Force, Jannie Geldenhuys, and his senior officials in connection with operation “Daisy”. This was an attempt to recover $20 million that Starckmann had allegedly swindled out of the South Africans.

The story is of mind-boggling complexity, but involves Starckmann doing a deal with an East German firm called IMES, run by the East German deputy foreign minister with Stasi employees – members of the East German secret service. The result was an arrangement which involved 60 shipments of weapons to South Africa via a Danish shipping company. The shipments were to be trailed half way around the world to disguise their final destination.

These shipments were for vital military equipment, including 1,400 anti-tank missiles. The weapons, which had Peruvian end-user certificates, ended up off the coast of Panama where the ruler, General Noriega, had apparently given the green light for the operation. In the end the dictator reneged on the deal. When the Pia Vesta arrived in Panama on 14 June 1986 its crew was arrested and the vessel impounded. In 1989 General Noriega was ousted by the Americans.

How the ship ended up sunk off Venezuela is a bit of a mystery, but then, as Van Vuuren points out, so is much of this story. He concludes that South Africa’s state arms dealer, Armscor, was involved:

But for all the smoke and mirrors, one thing is as clear as day. There is more than sufficient evidence that Armscor bought arms from IMES, a Stasi-run East German company operating behind the Iron Curtain. During the Cold War, much was not as it seemed.

Nor was this an isolated incident. Van Vuuren says he has evidence that Armscor had a team of military experts working inside the Soviet Union with an office in Leningrad. So close was the relationship that when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster took place in 1986, the Russians turned to South Africa for medical support.

The relationship with China

The relationship that the book portrays between South Africa and the Chinese is just as complex. It involves purchases of Chinese military equipment – everything from machine guns to missiles and rocket launchers – using Congolese companies as a front. Sometimes the shipments were destined for South Africa’s Angolan allies, UNITA, sometimes not.

Overall the book is a compelling and convincing narrative: our understanding of apartheid’s global supporters has been transformed.

“Apartheid, Guns and Money: a tale of profit” will be published by Hurst, 1 November 2018, Hardback: £25. pp. 620

Martin Plaut, Senior Research Fellow, Horn of Africa and Southern Africa, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Can the centre hold, or will South Africa get its own Bolsonaro?

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa faces the daunting task of fighting corruption and winning votes for his party.
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Present indications are that South African voters are not gearing up to “do a Brazil” in the face of a mounting economic crisis and high levels of corruption within the ruling party. Polls indicate that they are unlikely to
totally abandon the African National Congress (ANC), which has governed the country since the end of apartheid in 1994, for existing political alternatives.

The reasons are familiar. Although the ANC has lost prestige, ground and voter loyalty, many South Africans continue to cleave to their memories of its past virtues and hope for it to return to better ways. Furthermore, President Cyril Ramaphosa will make copious and not unconvincing promises of tackling corruption.

Meanwhile, although almost a decade of misrule by former President Jacob Zuma should have rebounded to the major advantage of the Democratic Alliance (DA), the leading opposition party has failed to convince. And, the long running fight with it mayor for Cape Town Patricia De Lille has made it look divided, poorly-led and tainted by racism. It’s unlikely to go much forward, even if it is unlikely that it will actually go backwards.

So, that effectively leaves the radical but smaller Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). But, the red berets continue to look more like a party of protest than a party seriously preparing to govern. And, while its leader Julius Malema’s populist charisma may appeal to a minority, especially the black youth, he continues to frighten the many. End of term report: continues to improve but should be doing better.

Ramaphosa’s daunting task

It wasn’t so long ago that predictions were being made that the 2019 election will result in the formation of a coalition. That continues to be a possibility, although the ANC’s experience at running an electoral campaign will more probably edge it above 50%. But if that is so, it only delays dealing with its problems, and South Africans are left to speculate about future possibilities.

One option is that, following an election victory, Ramaphosa will dispense with the Zuma hacks who continue to populate his cabinet and appoint an honest and capable team to lead the country, tackle corruption and put the economy back on track. It’s a scenario which the overwhelming mass of the population will support, and if he were to meet anything resembling a success, the ANC will reap the benefit.

However, the obstacles in the way of this path are formidable. Ramaphosa is already battling concerted fight-back by the Zuma crowd, and this is only the beginning. The looters, from the heights of the parastatals Eskom, the power utility, and Transnet, the transport utility, to the depths of the most miserable municipality in the country, will fight as hard and as dirty as they can to hang on to newly acquired wealth. And, there are enough crooked lawyers around to help them do it (all in the name of Black Economic Empowerment course).

In any case, increasingly the ANC has come to function as an extended patronage, jobs and cash machine. Hopefully, Ramaphosa and his team will prove capable of cleansing the upper reaches of the state. But, carrying the fight downwards, into the provinces and local government, will simultaneously mean reforming the ANC. That may well prove beyond the bounds of practical politics, especially given that Ramaphosa himself will need to maintain his support base for an attempt at a second term as president.

A more likely second option, therefore, is that even if Ramaphosa does a reasonably decent job, the economy will at best enjoy only slow rates of growth and improvement. Overall, it will do little more than limp along if not actually decline. Even with the best will and efforts in the world, turning the economy around so that it makes a serious dent in inequality, unemployment and poverty is going to prove a massive job. And it’s probably beyond a political party which, for all the appalling legacy of apartheid, itself bears heavy responsibility for the mess the country is in.

Future prospects

So, in coming years, the probability is high that South Africa will experience even higher levels of popular protest and class tensions than is happening at the moment.

How politicians respond to these, and how they are handled, matters hugely. On the one hand, they will offer opportunities for genuine renewal, for doing things in a more progressive and democratic way. On the other, they will offer opportunities for cynical exploitation of popular frustrations by tellers of untruths and sellers of snake-oil, wrapped up in radical language, probably with some charismatic prophet at their head.

Whether latter-type calls come from within or from outside the ANC South Africans will have to see. But they will probably be made by appealing to the dispossessed, impoverished masses in rhetoric which obscures the greedy interests of a frustrated, kleptocratic, Zuma-style bourgeoisie.

It is then that South Africans will have to face down the risk of a local Jair Bolsonaro. Brazil’s new president is threatening a lurch to political authoritarianism of the most brutal kind. This after a campaign in which he rode to power on an extreme right programme in which he questioned the most basic of democratic values.

Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

South Africa's new finance minister postpones tough decisions

South Africa’s Finance Minister Tito Mboweni must walk a fiscal tightrope.
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South African finance minister Tito Mboweni’s 2018 medium-term budget policy statement brought no surprises. Standing before the National Assembly on Wednesday 24 October, Mboweni presented the Natural Treasury’s fiscal policy and projections for the next three years.

The country’s economic growth has been officially revised down to 0.7% – it was at 1.5% in the Budget tabled in February by one of Mboweni’s predecessors, Malusi Gigaba. Revenue collection is lower than had been forecast. This all means that national debt levels will, again, be higher than projected.

In short, there’s very little tangible good news. That is to be expected. The economy and public finances have been in a poor state for some time. The current level of economic growth is below estimates of population growth, meaning that South Africans will have become poorer per person by the end of the year.

But with debt levels having repeatedly exceeded the levels previous ministers of finance had promised, numerous risks on the horizon and an election looming, there was relatively little room for Mboweni to manoeuvre.

What Mboweni and National Treasury have tried to do is to keep walking an increasingly thin tight-rope. This involves containing the growth in debt while not reducing government expenditure or increasing taxation to the point where it greatly harms economic growth or South Africans’ well-being.

Unless economic growth improves, the country will have to step off this tightrope. Either debt must be increased well beyond what had been planned, possibly leading to downgrades, higher borrowing costs and the associated consequences. Or expenditure will be cut and more taxes imposed – leading to immediate negative effects for citizens.

Public finances

One way that Treasury is trying to stay on the tightrope is by making use of other borrowing and spending capacity in the state. In particular, it’s looking to government’s development finance institutions such as the Development Bank of Southern Africa, the Industrial Development Corporation and the Land Bank to use their borrowing and lending capacity.

The medium-term budget policy statement also argues that various municipalities have sufficiently reliable revenue streams to borrow and spend more than they currently do.

The Treasury has indicated in the policy statement that it hopes to keep tax rates at their current levels and not introduce new ones. One important exception will be at the forefront of many South Africans’ minds: increases to the cost of fuel, in this instance possible large increases in the Road Accident Fund levy, to address the massive accumulated liability in the Fund itself.

Last year the medium-term budget policy statement discussed risks to public finances, including possible further downgrades of debt by international rating agencies and the likely consequences. This year’s statement avoided such references – but some debt downgrades and their negative results remain a possibility.

Mboweni made it clear that one of the most serious risks to public finances is the perilous condition of state-owned enterprises. More than R9 billion is going to be given to South African Airways, SA Express and the Post Office in the current financial year to prop up their finances.

Beyond this, all he could do was express the hope that restructuring these and other state-owned entities means it could reduce the risk although he offered little detail about what “restructuring” actually means.

Even though he said that there should be “no holy cows”, it’s questionable whether structural shifts could really deal with the financial risks; in certain circumstances, restructuring could actually increase the state’s financial burden.

Reforming key state institutions in general is critical. But there will be little to show for that in the short term when it comes to public finances. In fact, in some instances, doing the right thing can lead to short-term costs.

Hints, but little detail

There were some suggestions in the statement of a sensible, “New Deal” way of thinking. These include the reallocation of existing funds to the Expanded Public Works Programme, clothing and textile industry support and faster-spending infrastructure programmes. But with such limited resources this is likely to only have a small positive effect.

And in parts, Mboweni provided too little or no detail. There remains inadequate information on the costs of providing “free higher education” as promised by former President Jacob Zuma to new entrants. This reflects the irresponsibility of committing to a blank cheque to university student funding at a time when public finances are under huge strain.

Politically, the cabinet will be hoping that local and global risks will be kept in check until the 2019 election. But if some of those materialise then the government could face the unenviable task of either presenting a very unpopular budget in February 2019, or allowing public finances to deteriorate to a concerning degree.

Seán Mfundza Muller, Senior Lecturer in Economics and Research Associate at the Public and Environmental Economics Research Centre (PEERC), University of Johannesburg

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.