Davos 2019 webinar: Reflecting on a watershed event for SA. Here’s why.

LONDON — Ahead of Alec Hogg's traditional post-Davos road trip, he hosted a webinar yesterday for Biznews Premium members updating them on the latest information emerging from the World Economic Forum. Supported by the WEF's strategic communications head Oliver Cann, the message rang through that after nine years of mis-governance, South Africa is rapidly getting back on track. Global investors are slowly starting to embrace the message that while it will take time to clean up the mess, the country has a realistic and workable plan – one that resonates with international companies who appreciate that South Africa has listened to their callings, and its new leadership is determined to fulfil the destiny of being the gateway to the continent of a billion souls. A fascinating, uplifting hour. – Alec Hogg.Oliver Cann: I think for me, just for the benefit of giving you our insight, as the organisers of this annual meeting. Of course, it's not a conference, it's an annual meeting – it's a working meeting so, with over 350 sessions, 150 which are webcasts, it's kind of difficult to make your way around the entire meeting, and as much as I've been spending a lot of time this weekend trying to debrief and recap with colleagues, my picture is not complete but I hope to give you as much of view as possible..I think the only kind of headline I would give is that this was an issue driven meeting, and not a personality driven meeting. It's interesting that we had quite an ambitious theme this year, Globalisation 4.0 and to give you this full title, 'Shaping a Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.' So, what we try to do is we try to set about imagining what a new round, an inevitable new round of globalisation might look like and, more importantly, how we can make it work without the frailties and the failings of past rounds of globalisation. And make it one that is human centred, to use a forum term, but basically fairer and more prosperous, and more equal for everybody..___STEADY_PAYWALL___.So, it was an ambitious meeting theme and we covered a lot of areas because I think in practical terms you never know how a meeting is going to really shape up, until the meeting actually starts, and you know who's coming. So, for example, there were four major areas that I kind of perceived really kind of coming to the fore, and talking to colleagues in the media and participants, and I think these are bearing acts, these four issues are climate, technology, inequality, and the global architecture piece – the multilateralism piece that we were so hoping that we'd get to the bottom, or close to the bottom, of kind of deciding..Alec Hogg: Well, I'm quite relieved that you've made those points because we didn't share or swap notes before, and that's pretty much what we're going to be looking at in this presentation. We have Oliver Cann, who is head of strategic communications at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Geneva. We've got Stuart in Johannesburg, and me in London so, it just shows that we have this very international webinar coming to you today, and in fact, very fresh as well because the WEF meeting only ended last week. So, what I'm going to do now is I'll take you through the highlights, throwing to Olly from time-to-time, if he can just kind of fill in some colour, and then what we'd like to do throughout this is answer questions. Stuart is in Johannesburg to pickup your questions, but first, Stu, I think we need to make sure that we've got everybody hearing us loud and clear..Stu: Yes, Alec, definitely, I've seen there's a lot of hands coming up so they can hear you loud and clear, so that's all good. I'm not sure if you heard before, just on the questions, it is on the right hand control panel. If you put your questions in there, I'll pick them up and throw to Olly and Alec so, we're all good to go..Alec: Fantastic, and just to make sure, as we always do in these webinars, that I am not a cardboard cut-out. There we go, you can see with my… Stuart, I've got to get a better background than this pretty flower wallpaper but it is a rented house in London and as Olly knows, rented houses in London don't come with that, in other words and seriously, you're not allowed to put a nail in the wall so, that's the story. I can't even put a nice picture behind me. Anyway, let's get into the presentation now and just to give you a few of those highlights. Please can you see, Stuart, can you see the presentation on the screen? Is everything technically working?.Stu: Alec, your front page is there so it's all good but when you try to do what you tried to do previously it sort of closed up so I don't know if you just need to go through the pages individually..Alec: When we do that is it not working? Have you got a problem with it?.Stu: Yes, I think if you just go down on the presentation in this format, I think it will be easier. I don't think you can go full screen..Alec: Okay, got it. Microsoft is in our portfolio so, we're going to have to say, hang-on, we're shareholders now – fix things up, Microsoft (I'm joking). Let's move onto the first slide here, which is really just to highlight how damn cold it was there. I think it was about -17 on a number of the mornings. Olly can give me some insight because he gets around later at night and earlier in the morning than I do. But I found that for a South African to be walking around in that kind of temperature is just not fair. It's like torture but I guess Europeans find it a little easier, Olly..Olly: Alec, it was a mixed bag for us, I'm just going to interject very briefly. But last year we lost 30 members of our staff out of about 250 because they were held up in apartment buildings that were closed due to avalanche risks. They were unable to leave the buildings for 48-hours. We didn't have that this year but just to kind of balance things out, we did lose two members on the Saturday night, before the meeting started. One to a broken ankle and another one whose wife broke her wrist on the ice so, less snow, more ice. It's a bit of a scored role..Alec: Yes, a very good point there because just anecdotally what happened with me. My snow shoes decided on day-one to come sole-less so, I lost the sole, and fortunately Greg Beadle, who you guys bring over there from CT for your camera pool, he brought an extra pair of Veldskoen or Vellies, as we call them in SA, with this fantastic rubber sole and he said he uses them and they are incredibly good. I put them on and they were. They worked like a dream. Olly, before we go more into the presentation itself, why would Greg be brought from CT all the way to help you with your pics? Is that the way the WEF works, i.e. you pick out the best from wherever they might be in the world?.Olly: Yeah, have you seen his work? He's amazing. He's great. I can't remember how many years it is now but we started working, as you know, we have regional meetings in Africa, in Sub-Saharan Africa at least. Our hopeful home is CT, where we generally make ourselves present every couple of years. So, we've been working with Greg for a couple of years and it's as simple as this – we bring the best of all the regions to Davos. I think it's his third or fourth Davos now, I love the guy. He lent me his scarf last year. He obviously comes well prepared..Alec: Yes, a scarf to you and shoes for me. So, anyway, just to take you through these four little pics, which for me kind of epitomise what goes on – five little pics I suppose. There's a screenshot there, which shows -17, but on the left-hand side, something you've got to get used to when you go to the WEF meetings is security, very tight security. Not surprising because the people who were there would be, well high-risk targets for extremists, if you like. Everywhere you go, you go through security blocks. Once you're in the centre of things, of course things ease up very nicely but you have to be quite calm and patient and for the most part, people are. .The second picture there is in the evening, you have some pretty late nights and some pretty early mornings, and there's a lot of darkness. The sun only coming up, as you can see in the third picture there at around about 08h00, but the action begins from, depending on where you're staying, you've got to get on the road by 06h00. The third thing is Davos itself, the crane, they're still building in this town, which the very first year I went was in 1993, just before SA got its democracy and it was astonishing this year because many of those who were there in 1993, remember this is pre-democracy in SA, were again there this year but of course, in very different positions..Tito Mboweni, who helped me to do an outside broadcast, those days I hired a camera crew and we did an outside broadcast back to the SABC, where I was working at the time. And I asked Tito, who was just Tito then, to come and help me do a broadcast. Today, of course, Tito Mboweni is the Minister of Finance for SA. Ebrahim Patel, he worked out of a tiny, little office in CT, where he was the head of the clothing and textiles workers union. He is now the Minister of Economic Affairs so, it's really interesting when you go back to how deep a role this WEF has played in South African history..Indeed, in 1992, the year before I went there for the first time it was the very first time that Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk, and Mangosuthu Buthelezi shared the same stage, and Davos is credited with changing Mandela from arriving as a man who wanted to nationalise everything that moved, to leaving as a man who managed, or certainly under his guidance, the economy to a fabulous first few years of democracy, until what's happened most recently (we'll talk about that later though). So, there's how Davos has just transformed over that period and it is now, I think it has five 5-star hotels. Something like 80% of the revenue of the hotels are generated in this one week of the WEF and I think the less said about the rents that they charge the better..Then finally, on the right-hand side the Congress Centre of the WEF, which started there in 1971, has become one of the most prestigious in the world. So, that's a little bit about that. This year the themes and Olly has given you a little taste of the way the WEF saw it. From my perspective I look at three themes. The one, on the left-hand side, an unusual reflection of this theme, which is sustainability, is Hendrik du Toit who is the joint CEO now of Investec. The reason I put him there was, I was at a private breakfast with him where he spoke all about sustainability. I'll give you more insight to that a little bit later..The second theme for me was SA because Trump wasn't there. In fact, there wasn't a single member of the US delegation, and they were supposed to be there in full force. Who was present in Davos, we did get Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State doing a live video crossing but outside of that the US officialdom was absent, of course US business was not, and that kind of cleared the way with the UK having their Brexit issues. With Macron having his Yellow Jacket issues – it cleared the way for SA to get a little higher up the agenda than it might have otherwise, and very positive feedback coming from the South African delegation. It's a year on since Cyril said, we are going to be transforming and it's being appreciated by the smart money, I'll tell you about that later..Then on the right-hand side is a reflection of tech. To me, tech was a big theme as well, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) so, I guess when I talk about SA that that would really be aligned with what Olly was saying more about the world, generally the emerging world getting a bit more attention. Moving onto the first of those themes now, Olly, tell us and give us some background on it. That's Sir David Attenborough. Now, for me, an incredible achievement by the WEF this year was not only to get Sir David Attenborough, and there he's getting the Crystal Award from Mrs Schwab, which is a highly prestigious thing. Two South Africans have won it, Charlize Theron and Anant Singh. But first of all, you got David Attenborough to come to Davos and then you got him interviewed by Prince William. How do you set something like that up?.Olly: Well, it's a good question. I think one thing I just say about that is the fact that I think in the past people, especially the media when they look ahead to a meeting and they're thinking about what kind of an impact it's going to have. They look at the numbers of senior public figures coming and they kind of judge or they pre-judge the meetings impact and success on the number of heads of State and Government coming. Of course, they're really important but every year there's always somebody coming out of their field who has more of an impact than almost anybody..Last year, you'd probably remember, Alec, you and I shared a briefing with Yuval Noah Harari. It was absolutely fascinating. He gave us huge glimpses into the way that technology was changing humanity and this year the real star of the show was David Attenborough. I think this goes back to what I mentioned earlier about this being an issue driven meeting. He would have been speaking on the same day as Donald Trump, according to the original program. Now, I'm personally delighted that we were able to give a major stage to Lord Attenborough or Sir David, I'm not quite sure what he is now, and Prince William as well. I thought he did really good job..How did we set it up? Well, we had been completely talking of course, to Sir David or Lord Attenborough for a really long period of time. It's very closely tied up with the major work we're doing with biodiversity. You probably also noticed that Netflix released and launched a series on the subject around the same time. I think it premiered in Davos so, we've been kind of working and coordinating that for a long time, and the Prince, of course, he's also very keen on other issues. The other major session he was involved in was mental health, which I was looking at the numbers from media performance this morning, in fact, when I came to the office. And mental health was actually the eighth most prominent issue that was discussed during the whole week. So, it's really a matter of getting the most interesting people to represent issues that we know are reported but..Alec: The whole story of health was something that I also focussed a lot of attention on. I had two incredible interviews, Olly, thanks to your guys at the Forum inviting these amazing people. Two of the leading scientists in ageing in the whole research that's being done in that field as well. So, maybe you can just tell us how you decide who to invite? For instance, there's Dame Linda Partridge, who is one of the pre-eminent scientists in ageism. How would you have found someone like her to bring her to the annual meeting?.Olly: Well, we have like a good football club or a cricket club which has a kind of network of feeder events or teams. If I'm Manchester United and I play my favourite club in Belgium, where I go scouting for talent, etc. We get ourselves out all over the world during the year, but we also have communities. I like to think of Davos as a bit like the Olympics. It's not just one tournament or one get together. It is a meeting of the security community, or the health community, or the renewable energy community. Just in the same way that wrestling, swimming and athletics come together at the Olympics. So, we have really dynamic active communities throughout the year. We have, and I'm not sure if you've been to or joined us for this meeting, Alec, but we really have a fascinating brainstorming event called the Global Future Summit, where we basically, get 700 experts, generally academics. Sometimes chief strategy officers..Sometimes former public figures, people like Gordon Brown, and we lock them up for two days in a very nice building in Dubai, and we kind of throw away the key until they come out with lots of good ideas. That is the basis of Davos for us, and the programming. We kind of use that meeting to determine where we want to focus on in three months later, when we all get together and meet up. After that if I think we've got a good idea if you want to bring them to talk to us and help raise those issues..Alec: Well, we really are privileged to have you with us this morning, thanks Olly, for joining us and giving us this insight track, and as you can see, Stu has put up links to the interview with Hendrik du Toit and a link to the interview with Dame Linda Partridge. In fact, this year the interviews that I did were, and I think it's my 16th time that I've attended, were the best that I've had. There are some incredible interviews. Of course, one very timeous one that you might want to listen to after this webinar is the one that I had with Maria Ramos, who this morning has resigned or is retiring as the CEO of Absa, and I've got a feeling she's going to go into public sector service..It's almost like when Cyril Ramaphosa winks and says, 'Thuma Mina' people drop everything that they're doing, including even running Africa's biggest retail bank and get their shoulder to the wheel. We'll talk about that in a minute though but just before we move off the subject of sustainability. One of the issues, well, there were many issues that Sir David Attenborough addressed and I agree with Olly that it was a fabulous interview by Prince William. What's he called, Olly, the Duke of Cambridge, is it?.Olly: The Duke of Cambridge and it's Sir David, not Lord Attenborough – I've just checked..Alec: Sir David, right, and Sir David and the Duke of Cambridge to give them their full titles but they were just splendid. It was a very first event on the opening day in the preliminary session, followed by the president of Brazil, the newly elected president of Brazil, Bolsonaro, giving his first international address. So, you can imagine that's the calibre of the fare that one gets exposed to in Davos. But the important thing thereabout sustainability was from an African connection, Sir David said that his eyes were opened in the 1950s when he visited Africa for the first time, it was before there were pesticides and he said it was just incredible how many species were there, particularly bugs which have been wiped out now by mankind. He said that it really saddens him to see how we, as a species have been killing other species, but he said he remains optimistic because there is a greater focus now and appreciation by the whole world on what is going on with the natural kingdom..It was interesting. I've never heard anybody refer to our good pal, Lewis Pugh, who incidentally those of you in SA who haven't been following the news in the UK, would probably not even know. But he has now not only swum across the English Channel, he swam along the length of the English Channel. So, not enough for Lewis just to do a normal old Channel crossing. He's done the whole length, I think it took him two-weeks or something but he was on Sky News every night, and Lewis has dedicated his life, as you're well aware, to cleaning up the oceans, and particularly of late, plastics in the oceans. Now, that's gone mainstream and you heard that being referred to in many instances in Davos this year, the problem of plastics and what it's doing to marine life. That is really what David Attenborough was saying. Not long-ago people were not paying attention to these issues but the reality is, where you put your attention then, things actually start happening. So, very positive on the broader environmental side..But also, sustainability in focus on the investment side, and that's why I put the picture of Hendrik du Toit there a little earlier. Remember, Hendrik is the CEO of Investec, or co-CEO of the whole Investec. They're going to be splitting it up into two units and he'll be the boss of Investec Asset Management, and Investec Asset Management has got £150bn under assets under management. So, they're not the biggest but they're a sizeable operation and people listen in the city of London when Hendrik talks because remember, he started that company, literally with his briefcase and that's how it all began..Hendrik was saying that he believes, and they're going to start pushing for activism in this front that you need an Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) expert on every board of directors, who is responsible for the company's ESG activities. That's very different to even five-years ago, as he was saying where it was all about PR, the soft stuff, and environmentalism – yes, we're do gooders and the CEO would leave and let some junior employee go out and do some social responsibility. Nowadays, the social license to do business is really critical, and Olly, you must have seen this trend. This trend towards social responsibility, sustainability going mainstream in the business environment given that most people who do come to Davos are business leaders, and guys like Polman from Unilever, who in the past was seen as a little bit out there, is now very mainstream..Olly: I can indeed, yeah, it's great. The example you gave is fascinating one, a very strong example. It was my headline three-years ago. I think it was in 2016, so four-years ago, when we called out the fact that by 2050, if we're not careful, there would be more plastics than fish in the oceans. We started that debate in Davos. I noticed there were adverts and recordings and slogans on the streets of Davos this year. For us, in terms of raising intention and profile it was a very strong headline. It was actually, sitting very deep within the report. We only found it the night before and we just launched the publication. But it rightly caught people's imaginations and woke people up to that fact. We keep having a kind of internal competition to come up with the next major campaign that will be successful..I think my one this year was that we put out a report and announced a collaboration in Nigeria, aimed at improving the way we deal with e-waste. So, for example you may not know, but there's 100 times as much in fact, gold-ore in e-waste than there is in the gold ore you mine from the ground. So, there's a tremendous opportunity not just to extract gold more efficiently from than you would in the ground but also to deliver much better sustainability and must better environment, and remove health hazards. In Nigeria alone, there are 100,000 people that work informally to recoup some of these precious metals that we throw away on a daily basis. I believe the average European throws away half their body weight in electronic waste each year. So, it's a scandalously serious problem and yet they way we like to see challenges is to turn them into opportunities and I think we've done that electronic waste..Just very briefly, just on the business side, I just want to mention the CEOs, I'm not sure because I don't have the list in front of me, whether Investec is one of them, but we have a really vibrant community of CEOs that have signed up to make commitment to honour and support the climate goals of reducing carbon emissions and we've seen some great ones. The banks, such as ING that are now refusing to lend infrastructure finance to companies that use coal as a broad kind of an energy mix. So, we've seen some really creative initiatives and the kind of business to actually see this sustainability. As you say, not as a PR but as something, which is actually core to their business..Alec: I'm sure Investec will be there because Hendrik was telling us very proudly how he's on the WEF's sustainability grouping that he's involved with so..Olly: He will be in that case..Alec: Something that Sir David Attenborough was saying that really resonated with me. He told the story of the sea otter and how because, and this is 100 years ago, how sea otters had the finest coats. As a consequence, the wealthy people of Europe wanted to wear sea otter so, the incentive was to hunt them down. As a consequence of the area of where the sea otters used to live, they started being hunted out but worse than that the fish disappeared. And he explained that the reason for that was that the sea otters would eat the sea urchins and the sea urchins would eat some other micro marine animal, and that would then be the area where the fish would be laying their eggs. Now, because the sea otters weren't eating the sea urchins there were too many sea urchins around. They were eating too many of this other micro animal and, as a consequence the fish didn't have anywhere to lay their eggs, and so forth, so there were much less fish in the area. Just using that as an example, how everything is intertwined and inter-led and WEF really works hard on making those connections and just educating people to understand that..One last point on waste, which Olly brought up was Satya Nadella who is really growing in stature, the CEO of Microsoft, who was one of the co-chairs this year with a whole lot of young people, which was a lovely innovation. But he made the point that in the USA, as rich as it is, there's still 40-million people who go without food every day, 1/6th of the population. Yet, there's 40% of the food that is produced is thrown into waste. So, there's lots of work to be done to sort out all of that. That's sustainability. It's now, front and centre. It's something that you need to be aware of in your investments because the less sustainable businesses, says Hendrik du Toit, who should know these given the work he's done on investment analysis. The less sustainable businesses are the poorer performers. So, it you find a business that ranks high on sustainability or on those ESG goals then you will be almost certainly, be out performing other companies with their investments..So, that's the first one. The second area I'm going to talk about is this one and make a note please, of this name. This lady, Mariana Mazzucato, is one of the stars of Davos. One of the up and coming economists. She had quite a lot of attention in various sessions but by none more or none greater than the South African delegation. Now, on the Wednesday evening, every year, brand SA hosts a diner at which it invites primarily the leading SA delegation there and international guests. Every year, up until this year, I've cracked an invite and it's been easy to get a seat and all has been well. This year, because of the interest, I had to kind of wait at the door and make sure that if somebody didn't arrive, then only then could I get a seat at the table, which really is fantastically good news..As it happens, I ended between or opposite Ebrahim Patel, who as I mentioned earlier, I had known for a long time, and had a fascinating conversation with him. But one from Pravin Gordhan so, he was sitting two seats away and there was a seat between us, and he said to me that he'd been keeping this seat for Mariana Mazzucato, who then duly arrived. The Minister of Economic Affairs told me that he and Pravin Gordhan had been discussing her books and in fact, they'd been reading this and looking at her new ideas and they're completely enthralled by them. The president came up later to come and have a little chat to her as well, and he was also very excited about having met her..So, if you want to learn about where SA is likely to be going in its economic policy – read her books. She's got two of them and, Olly, I don't know if you've come across her or if you've had much to do with Mariana, in the build up to Davos or in any of the sessions?.Olly: Yes, I did. I'm a huge fan of hers and we are, as an organisation, she's a good example, you mentioned earlier, how do we decide who's who? Who to bring to the meeting when we can only bring 3,000 people and they've all got to be at the top of their game? Mariana, we've been courting, I think frankly for a couple of years. Last year we invited her onto our Global Future Councils on Economic Progress. These are the folks that go to Dubai in November and I actually moderated a session with her in Dubai, which is available on the website, about the risk of jobs, and skills in the future and she's such a refreshing voice. I missed all of her sessions this year in Davos, but I did, as I say, meet her in Dubai and I'm really glad that she's continuing to make an impact. I think it's a sign that more and more we realise that market economics does need to change, you do need sometimes, you need new approaches, sometimes radical new approaches to solving really chronic challenges. I think she's one of those voices that kind of nails it..Alec: Well, the SA delegation agrees with you. I cannot believe that the, or certainly the reaction to her was extremely positive and they couldn't speak highly enough of her and her views. So, for South Africans, who are wondering about the direction that the economy is going to take in the future, and I must tell you that after this meeting… Last year, I was positive but this year's meeting I'm really positive and I think that is probably part of understanding that of course, there's a mountain to climb, and there's nine-years of chaos that the country has to unravel or get beyond but the right people are in the right places and doing the right kind of thinking, and it's lovely to hear from Olly, that Mariana Mazzucato is so highly respected by the WEF as well. So, there we go, you've got two books to read. I'm going to be consuming them and hopefully having an interview with her in the not too distant future, here in London. A very charming economist and it was a true delight to meet with her..As far as the SA delegation is concerned, they really did make another good impact. The Zimbabweans unfortunately kind of slid off the front pages, if you like. Last year Zimbabwe and SA were both being well courted by international investors. The chaos in Zimbabwe has differentiated the two countries quite significantly. But from the South African point of view, we had a president who continues to just grow in confidence. There were various meetings that I attended, where he was engaging with South Africans and with foreign investors. You need to get both parties. You need to get the business investing as well as foreigners as well. It's almost like they take their lead from what's going on in SA itself and there you could see that he certainly has won over the South Africans..As far as the 'international plan' or that plan of a R100bn to be raised in five-years. Last year, Rob Davies very proudly said at one of the sessions, I think it was at a press conference, that SA was one of the few countries in the world, where foreign investment in fact went up last year, they used a figure of 400-odd percent it went, according to UNTAG, part of the UN, direct investment into SA rose from R1.3bn in the last year of Zuma, to R7.3bn in the first year of Ramaphosa. So, if you ever doubted – that was a transformative event at NASREC in December 2017, and there it is. Of that amount, R4.9, call it R5bn, 2/3rds was invested into independent power producers so, the one area where the Zuma administration was not able to completely mess things up, or one of the areas they weren't able to mess up, was in the IPPs. Although they did put the whole IPPs on hold for two-years..When Ramaphosa came in and appointed Jeff Radebe as the Minister of Energy, it took him all of three-days to unlock that logjam and now SA is looking very good, as far as independent power producers are concerned so, that's an area of excellence. Ramaphosa said that the problems that had been caused in the logjam on regulation or policy. The way he described it is that the policy seemed to have been made on the hoof, as it were, in certain cases. And we know, from the Energy Policy that certainly is the case. He said that is now being addressed and the focus areas there are mining, tourism, telecoms, and energy..He was brutally honest as well. He said that SA had lost its way. In another conversation Maria Ramos was saying that it's just been a horrible nine-years so, it was almost like the South African delegation was saying, 'look, we really were out of step for the last nine-years, but we're determined to fix it, to do the right things, and to move in the right direction.' I think anybody, who is looking at the future of any country and when you stack up that kind of a message it's hard not to give those, if they have credibility, the benefit of the doubt, and we're seeing that increasingly..So, $20bn of the $100bn has been committed already, in fixed investment into SA. The President Ramaphosa did announce that there's going to be another Investment Summit later this year, and I think it's probably going to be around the time that the WEF Africa Summit is. Olly, is that scheduled for September?.Olly: Yes, it is. I haven't got the date in front of me but yes, it is in September so, hopefully we'll be able to attend both. I'd love to..Alec: And there was a little bit of a hiatus in the Africa Summit. Is it now back on the calendar? Will it be every year again?.Olly: Good question so, we had a shift about a year ago. We always have these kinds of reflections when we try to do things differently. We just break things up a little bit and I think at the time we decided regional meetings, not just in Africa but everywhere, East Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and North Africa. We've moved to a biannual model and I think sometimes we feel just as everybody else does. There's sometimes too much talk and not enough action so, I think the rationale was that we wanted to give a little bit more time for the action to catch up with the words. It seemed to make a lot of sense. As you know, it doesn't mean that we're no less committed to Africa or other regions, but especially Africa..We had a dialogue with President Ramaphosa in June last year. I was very happy to be able to be there for that, and it was a very high impact meeting. Although just aimed at CEOs, so there were only 100 people in the room. This year, of course, we're going to be in Cape Town for our regular one. The interesting thing I've noticed is that not only is more parts of my organisation engaged in work in Africa than any other region in the world, but I've also noticed that since I joined in 2012, there's been a steady uptick in the size and scale of the African meeting. It is now our largest regional meeting, and that was not the case. It was kind of 3rd or 4th in 2012. So, a huge amount of interest. Who knows where we'll be next year? There has been talk and I'm sure you would have noticed that we may be going to Ethiopia in 2020. Personally, I don't think that will be a bad thing at all..Alec: Yes, the president of Ethiopia was mentioned in 'The Financial Times' of London this morning as being one of the two stars of Davos this year so, it's nice to see that he's getting the recognition for some incredibly radical economic transformation that's going on in that country, who knows. Maybe next year they're going to be saying the same thing about SA. So, SA on track. If you had been there and engaged with the calibre of the people who are leading this country now, you could not have thought any differently, and it's lovely to know, as Olly says, that the WEF will be back again with the CT meeting this year..Onto the final subject or the final area, and our partners at 'The Wall Street Journal' invited me to come along to their organisation. They hold, it's almost like they have a parallel program going at the same time, that the WEF program is going on and it was good to be able to go and shake hands with people who I've gotten to know over the past year or so that we've been partners and this was a highlight for me. Mr Kai-Fu Lee is the former head of Google in China and that book is well worth acquiring, you can get it on Amazon or Kindle. I'm not sure that you'd get it in the bookshops in SA but it certainly is available on Kindle, and he was full value. They called it the chief executives book club and they had him there talking about AI and I guess, you can imagine, he comes with a huge pedigree. He's a professor at business schools and, as I say, formally head of Google in China..He had some really interesting things to say on the fact that it's a war on AI, in his opinion, between the US and China, with everybody else nowhere, and the reason for that is that there are two things that determine who the winners are going to be on the AI side. The one is the amount of research that you put into it, and there the Americans outspend China 11:1. The other, as he says, is the data that you get. Now, you can imagine you build it and there America has got the advantage, Silicon Valley being the obvious pointer to that. But on the other hand, the data is where China has the advantage. It was quite interesting for him to say, it's very hard to work out who's going to win of the two of them because the Chinese have its entrepreneurs who're supercharged and we know that..We know that the Chinese people, perhaps because of where they come from are a lot more focussed and a lot harder working than people in the West. You only just have to look at the way people are educated or the investment in education. My daughter is teaching in South Korea, it's obviously not China, but she's teaching English there, and she's been blown away by the stage that people start learning, i.e., they're almost toddlers and they're in there learning English. Right up until the hours that they work, they come into learn, there's a hunger. A bit like SA in many ways – there's a hunger for education amongst the population. So, those are the countries that according to Mr Lee are going to be the winners into the future..But the question was raised, 'okay, let's get practical – what about autonomous vehicles?' In other words, driverless cars. Who do you think is going to be first, America or China? He said, it's likely that China will be the first ones to use driverless cars on a grand scale because China will put down smart highways where only driverless cars could go. But it's unlikely, he said, that you're going to see driverless cars down in the middle of Shanghai or any of the other cities in China. So, America will have the technological advantage and probably be using things like that at a deeper level. Whereas China has the mass production advantage. It was just really interesting..But generally speaking, AI, tech – huge theme again this year. One of the points that came out, and in fact my interview with Koos Bekker, and I urge you to go and listen to that. He was amazing. He is the chairman of Naspers and it's through his efforts that Naspers is now 20% of the entire Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). Can you believe that? A company that comes from the back water because of this incredible entrepreneur who had a very good slice of luck, I guess. He would be the first to admit it. I think others would say, yes, you've got to make the bets to be able to win the bets. Then investing in Tencent, when there were only three people, as a small, little business in Hong Kong and now Tencent being certainly one of the top-10 internet companies on earth, and Koos Bekker was pointing out that, isn't it interesting that in the last year Facebook had come under a lot of pressure. I know that they cancelled one of their big appointments. I went to an event there two-years ago, when Sheryl Sandberg was around. I don't think Zuckerberg has been to Davos for a while. But certainly, the COO Sandberg was there. This year the person who was supposed to have hosted one of the events that I was invited to, couldn't come anymore..And what Koos was saying, was that in years gone by Facebook books out this huge position on the Promenade or the Main Road, the High Street of Davos, and this year the branding was tiny and, in the window, there was no branding whatsoever. So, it's interesting to see how things change. Talking about that, on the Promenade, a little bit further down from where Facebook was and certainly no way that you could have missed the branding was Absa. It's the first time ever that a South African company has had a presence of that size in the informal kind of marketing area of Davos and that was quite exciting to see..So, AI, autonomous vehicles, data, the fight there between China and the US. On the technology side, the belief that the regulators are going to start coming after Google, Facebook, Amazon to a larger degree than they did in the past, particularly Google, which has just got another, almost on cue, another €5bn fine this time, and it's being sued in Germany by Axel Springer for abuse of content and so on. It's a fascinating arena but you can't continue in the duopoly that Google and Facebook have had on online advertising indefinitely, at some point in time the regulators do come back to the party..Before I bring Olly in again, I just want to give you just a little collage there of some of my individual highlights. There's Koos Bekker – top left-hand side. I would also urge you to go and listen to the Popo Molefe interview. Popo is the former Premier of the North-West Province, who has been standing strong against corruption. He's currently the chairman of Transnet and the interview, if you ever doubt that the corrupt are going to be nailed listen to Popo's view on it. He's talking about South Africa using the extradition treaty with Dubai to bring back the Guptas to stand in front of the courts. It really is something that I would urge you to read. You'd be very heartened – there's a lot of people in SA who say, yes, but no one has gone to jail that. The retort to that is, 'watch this space.'.Next to him we have the two scientists on ageing, Constantinos Demetriades, he runs one of the units of the Max Planck Institutes, which is one of the great scientific institutions in the world and then, as mentioned earlier, Dame Linda Partridge – both of those interviews, if you're interested in the science of ageing are great..On the left-hand side, I do this every year, I talk to the joint-CEOs of Sasol. It's so good to see these guys, Steve Cornell and Bongani Nqwababa. They just are friends. One often hears the story that joint CEOs don't work. Well, these two guys have been together now for three-years. You know, it's the informal things that you see in Davos, the two of them sitting together, not because they have to but because they want to. Swapping notes, chatting and you can see that they really are good pals and it come across in the interview I had with them..The imitable Adrian Gore, he really is an extraordinary human being. Unfortunately, missionaries are not always fully appreciated in their homelands but the last time I saw Adrian was in London, where he was releasing a challenge that he and partners are going to be changing 100-million lives in the next five-years and supported there by Apple, the chief operating officer of Apple talking. You had the British Minister of Health also saying how Discovery, which is known in the UK as Vitality, is working closely now with the NHS, here in the UK to go towards preventative medicine and Adrian is just really keen, as always in promoting SA. Both he and Stephen Koseff, from Investec, is sitting next to him put a figure on the cost of the Zuma years and they put it down to R1trn in lost GDP, and that was, if you started thinking how that R1trn could have been invested differently or could have been applied differently, there would be a lot more people who'd be working. But both of those interviews are well worth picking up as well..Then a gentleman there called Mohammed Hassan. He was one of the co-chairs. I watched him on the stage, but I bumped into him afterwards and had a chat with him. He's from a refugee camp in Kenya. He comes from Somalia. His parents were killed earlier on. He's been in that refugee camp for 18-years and he is an activist to try and make sure that others don't have to go through another 18-years, which is a problem with the refugee camps… This is what Davos does so well. It highlights not just the good things that are happening or the difficulties that we're seeing on a big stage but it highlights human tragedies like this, and he was given a voice, he was given a platform, and I hope a lot of people listened..Then finally, on the right-hand side, just a little story. That's Samantha, and Samantha works for a company called LiquidChefs, it's a SA company. They've been involved in doing catering in Davos now for 11-years. This year they brought in 85 people and they did 42 events, and pretty much all the high-profile events that you went to, behind the bar, or serving the drinks, or making the food were a whole bunch of South Africans and that is LiquidChefs who have become… In fact, Adam Solomon, who is the founder of the company, said to me they doubled in size this year. So, it's lovely to see a proudly South African operation doing as well as they are doing..Olly, we're kind of running out of time but I would love to get your thoughts on Mohammed and how you would find someone like that to come in as a co-chair?.Olly: Well, that's a really good question so, as you know one of the more interesting but perhaps in lesser communities that we kind of incubate at the Forum are the young global leaders. These have a very grand title. Basically, the criteria are you've got to be between the ages 30 and 40, and be brilliant. Emmanuel Macron is a young global leader, for example. Jacinda Ardern is a young global leader. Lewis Pugh is also a young global leader. He maybe older by now, I'm not quite sure but he's always been very well committed and we're great fans of his. One of the initiatives of the young global leaders embarked upon, during the summer, was a trip to Kakuma, a refugee camp in Kenya, and in Kenya it's the world's largest refugee camp, if I'm not mistaken..And the idea was to see if they could come up with some interesting ideas or solutions as to how they can make life a little better, and they actually found quite a thriving local economy. It became a growth area for the wider area, within Northern Kenya, and they were quite impressed by that and a number of the young global leaders have come from other and have kind of initiated coding programs for people. Mohammed was from Kakuma himself, and we brought him over. We also brought over a very talented young filmmaker who worked with us in our video team during the meeting, from Kakuma as well. We're going to try to hire him for other events because he was amazing. I guess it's a bit of the soft stuff of the WEF in terms of using our ability to work with the Swiss authorities to arrange visas on short notice, but it kind of goes back to what we're always trying to do, which is trying to find new, fresh, creative solutions to problems and seeing who out there is so good and so talented – they really deserve a biggest audience..Alec: Fantastic, and what a wonderful young man, who has got all of the credentials to study anywhere. His problem is, he just can't get the money to do it. I'm going to close off with this picture. I know, Stu, you've got a few questions and if you have questions to ask Olly or myself please just type them in there and Stuart will relay them. But I love this picture. This is again, there it is, Greg Beadle. And you said earlier on, isn't he an exceptional photographer – well, I just love this. This is the best picture that I've seen of Cyril Ramaphosa ever. Even though he has a punishing schedule. He mentioned that one evening he had been woken up at 05h30 by the National Union of Mineworkers, who wanted to know what's going on at Eskom. Having being in liminie and that was previously where he obviously made his name was at NUM and he has given them an open line to them. So, he was talking to NUM in SA at 05h30, and I know the night before he'd been out entertaining or hosting the SA event which only finished pretty late and it takes a while to get around things. Yet he was there, he was driven by high energy and he made a huge impression..I sometimes wish I could take the cynics in SA and just plant them in Davos for a couple of days and just see how, someone like Ramaphosa can play on a major stage and does it so well. Stu, would you like to just pose those questions, I see there are a few..Stu: Alec, thanks a lot. Yes, there's two of them. There's one from Peter, he just wants to know what are the risks of nationalising the SA Reserve Bank?.Alec: That was an interesting point. It was discussed and the nationalisation of the SA Reserve Bank in fact, would align it with what happens in other countries in the world. It's so funny when you are isolated by the tyranny of distance. You don't realise always that the reality of what has been perpetrated in SA. For instance, we were the only country in the world where the Mineral Rights were not owned by the State, until post 1994, and that was a heritage of colonialism where the Mineral Rights of course during colonialism were owned by very rich people in London and that's kind of a consequence. The SA Reserve Bank is a private institution. At the moment it's got shareholders. So, the idea is to try and align that with global best practices. It doesn't mean that suddenly the Reserve Bank is going to be creating money. Anybody who's met Lesetja Kganyago and seen how he stood up against Zuma and his cronies will realise that he's no pushover..Stu: Excellent, thanks Alec. There's a global question from EJ. He wants to know how will the Chinese dominance affect the Dollar in the future and will it still be used as universal currency?.Alec: Olly, have you got any thoughts on that?.Olly: No, a wonderful question, but I'm not an economist. I'm not a particular expert in finance. We did look at whether to hold a session on the rise of other reserve currencies, and we decided to drop it. We just didn't think there was a huge amount of interest there. Instead we decided to focus on the debt crisis or looming debt crisis that we see. So, which is all dollar denominated so instead we kind of focused on the fact that if you take into account business, corporate business, and household debt. We're in a much worst place then we were in 2008. So, that was our kind of focus. Whether the Dollar's domination is going to continue that's very questionable and I don't want to go beyond my very strict confines of economics here. I suspect that is going to be called into question but perhaps not any time soon. We didn't hear a huge amount of interest to discuss this subject this year..Alec: The reserve currency does give the USA a huge advantage, but as Olly says, it's just a matter of time. But will that time be 50-years, before there's an alternative reserve currency. Who knows? But if you've got 1.3 billion people in China, and they're growing at the rates that they are and you've got 320 odd million people in the US. At some point in time there has to be a switch over. Of course, Donald Trump wants that to be much later, rather than sooner..Olly: I think just on that note, what we are seeing and this goes back to the theme of the meeting and the global architecture. I think one of the points that we wanted to get across was that the global institutions, IMF, World Bank, etc., they've done a great job, and an amazing job but 70 years ago they didn't have to deal with climate change, Fourth Industrial Revolution, shifting geopolitical, balance of power, etc. There is a new breed of multilateral organisations of the Asian Infrastructure Bank, the AIDB of which I believe that's the name, of which SA is a member of the BRICS Bank – there is a new emerging international architecture and that is going radically change the way that we kind of seek to achieve multilateral governance..Alec: Stu, more questions? .Stu: No, Alec, we just had two questions today unfortunately, so that's it from my side..Alec: Okay, it says six on my screen but maybe that's people commenting and saying, 'hey get rid of these guys now.'.Stu: You've had a few compliments, I would say, but no questions..Alec: Oh, good. Well done Olly. Thanks very much for joining us today. You really did add a completely different dimension to the normal feedback and I wish I could take you on my roadshow around SA, but I guess, Klaus Schwab wouldn't be too happy to hear that. Although, I'm sure you wouldn't mind going to a little bit of sunshine..Olly: I would love to join you, it's a perfect time of year. I will be in SA in the first week of March so, if you around maybe we can hook up then.

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