Hope Springs: Why Ramaphosa-led South Africa means the future is bright.

After a career that included the creation of business radio and two major online portals, Alec Hogg is South Africa's best known financial journalist. He has also been one of the rare optimists in recent times, keeping faith that the country would eventually self-correct – often signing off his 100 000 subscriber daily newsletter with "Hope Springs". Late last month, Hogg attended the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos for the 15th time where president-in-waiting Cyril Ramaphosa made a favourable impression. He rates this year's event as South Africa's best since 1993 when Mandela, De Klerk and Buthelezi shared a stage to global acclaim. Now based in London, the founder of Biznews unpacks the story of a South Africa poised for a turnaround, a country now rated by international investors as the most exciting destination on earth..Alec Hogg's presentation to Shell Dealer Conference at Sun City in the NorthWest province of South Africa, February 2018..What I'm going to be talking to you about today is the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). It's a term that describes many things. I'm going to be bringing you back to SA where we've come from – 2017 was not the easiest year for SA, but there's pretty good reasons to understand why it happened and why we are looking forward to a future, which will be very different, very blessed for this country..___STEADY_PAYWALL___.So, let's start off in the world itself. You've heard of the 4IR. It's not the first time that we've had incredible seismic change and it's not just SA. It's a global phenomenon..It started off with steam – that was the First Industrial Revolution. The Second Industrial Revolution was electricity. The third one was computers, and now we have digitisation of everything. It's amazing to think that only 10 years ago, 2007, was when we saw the first smartphone..When you consider what happened in the first three industrial revolutions it's probably easier to now overlay what's happening today makes it even more dramatic because of what some people call the Second Renaissance..The First Renaissance was sparked by an explosion of knowledge. The older guy there, in black and white, is Johann Gutenberg, he invented the printing press in 1450. Up until that time you could have put all the books that existed in Europe, we don't have records for China, but all the books in Europe would have fitted onto the back of one single wagon. Imagine that, imagine the diversity that you had there and how elite the elites were because they had all the knowledge and the common people didn't have access to it..When Gutenberg came along it sparked things like the reformation, and a dramatic change in mankind. Who's the Gutenberg of today? Well, the guy on the left-hand side, his name is Tim Berners-Lee, and he's the inventor of the internet. The internet has done for us exactly what Gutenberg did. When I started MoneyWeb in 1997, above my garage at home, my colleague said, you must be stone mad, why are you leaving this career in journalism and newspapers to go onto an inter-web thing. That was about 4 or 5 years after the internet had started, but we know today that the internet is everywhere..The other similarity that you have there on the one side you have a great inventor, Leonardo da Vinci, next to him, who's the modern Leonardo da Vinci – an inventor, designer, and artist – the late Steve Jobs, who brought us the iPhone, the iPad, the iMac, and many other things that have changed our lives..Remember, the renaissance was sparked primarily in Italy, but in certain parts of Europe you had the commercial interests, and there they are. That's a guy called Ferdinand Magellan. What did he do? He got on a ship and went around the world to discover where he could get products that he could bring back to Europe to sell to Europeans. Next to him is Christopher Columbus, who of course, went from Portugal and hit into the Caribbean..At that time, all of these things that they brought back, were terribly expensive, and the modern day Magellans and the modern-day transformers of our society are these two guys. I'm going to spend a bit of time on them because one of them is a South African. He comes from Pretoria. Pretoria is where Elon Musk began his life, he was a nerd. He used to read books so, if you have any one in your family who reads or is a bookworm don't laugh at them – give them another book because one day they might also be worth $20bn. Elon Musk went to the USA, he went via Canada and he started a company there called PayPal..PayPal is disrupting the entire payment system. It's not that big in SA. We've got M-Pesa, and we've also got a very efficient banking system but PayPal is now transforming the payment structures around the world. Once he sold that business he decided to reinvest all of that money into transforming space. So, he started a company called SpaceX. I urge you, if you want to know more about this fellow from Pretoria and the impact that he's made, and why people in the USA call him, 'America's greatest entrepreneur.' Read a book by Ashlee Vance on Elon Musk. He's only in his 40's but already, he's shaken up three industries..What Elon Musk did at SpaceX was he's always been a bit of a nut about going into space. In fact, he worries about the human race wiping itself out, and his view is that we need to colonise other planets to get human beings there and indeed, he wants to die on Mars. That's his plan. He's got a spaceship that he's built that can go to Mars but when you read his book it will tell you that he nearly went bankrupt. It was his last chance. He had three rockets that he sent into space that all failed, they all fell-over. The fourth rocket was all his money. He had even sold his car. He had borrowed from every friend that he knew. This was about the end of the line, and that rocket succeeded. Of course, today, we look at Elon Musk as this incredible entrepreneur. Had that rocket not succeeded we would probably have forgotten him very quickly..What did SpaceX do? SpaceX transformed the space industry. How? By finding a better way. Elon Musk's rockets cost 1/8th of what the old rockets did 13% so, now, he's in a situation where people are coming to him and other people in other industries are changing. He also, started a company called SolarCity to attack solar panels or renewable energies in the US. It's a retail outlet. The guys who ran that are Lyndon and Peter Rive, who come from Pretoria, who are Elon Musk's cousins. In fact, his name is Elon Rive-Musk that's his full name. They built-up this business and in June 2016, his other company called Tesla, which is the one that is most common to most of us, bought SolarCity..So, here you have these Pretoria boys who are transforming big markets in America. Now, to give you an understanding of this. America accounts for about 26% of the world's wealth or the world's GDP. SA accounts for about 0.5%. Okay, so America is 52-times bigger than SA. If we were part of America, or a State of America, we would be about number 17 on the States. So, to put this into context – this guy is shaking up the world. He's one of us and look at what he's doing. Tesla is a story that I'm going to dwell on for a little bit because it was named after Nikola Tesla, who was a great inventor from Serbia. He was an electrical engineer and after doing lots of inventions he went to America and he started transforming things there as well. He died in poverty because the system didn't let him break through..There was no internet then, where you could post your papers onto. You had to work through big corporations who did not allow you to do that. But a Nikola Tesla or the next Nikola Tesla who could be in Mogadishu, he could be in Gugulethu, he could in fact be just around the corner here, at Sun City – they have access to that marketplace at that opportunity. The unleashing of human potential is very real and very much with us. What Tesla's claim to fame is, is that it started making electric cars. By September this this year, they had told their 250-thousandth electric vehicle. We don't see many Tesla's around here but where I live in London, they are everywhere. They're magnificent cars, beautiful vehicles..For those petrol-heads amongst us here, they recently brought out a Roadster, which is the fastest car from zero to100mps ever created. So, it just shows that electric cars are now not only more efficient but also faster. I'm talking to people in this audience who are at Shell and they're saying, 'what's going to happen to our petrol-pumps?' What's going to happen to the internal combustion engine? Well, the good news is that the guys at Royal Dutch Shell have done a lot of thinking about this and are, as you know from reading the reports. They're focussing on the new world and on swinging the new world, but it is a new world. By 2040, the British and the French will no longer allow internal combustion engines to travel there..Only at the end of last year, Volvo announced it will no longer be making internal combustion engines and only electric engines. That's the way it's moving and that's the world that we're in. Tesla, incidentally people think it's a small company. It's got 33 000 employees. It's got a market value bigger than General Motors today, and it's produced a fraction of the number of cars that General Motors has done. That is, when I say, 'market value.' It's the number of shares – if you want to buy a Tesla share or a General Motors share and you put the whole thing together they recall. You'd have to pay the same amount of money to buy Tesla as you would have to, to buy General Motors..So, I'll just give you that as a little bit of background on this fellow South African, who is changing the world but even more so, is the richest man in the world next to him, a guy called Jeff Bezos. He came from nowhere to be the richest man in the world. In fact, in 1999, people thought that his invention called Amazon.com was going to go bust. Amazon.com is now the third most valuable company on earth. It's worth $670bn – that's twice SA's annual GDP. In other words, take all the money spent in SA in a year, double it – that's what this company is worth. These are extraordinary numbers and there's an extraordinary thing that's happening in our world – in this Fourth Industrial Age..In case you were wondering, the biggest and most valuable company in the world is Apple, Steve Jobs. They're worth about $800bn and second is Google, now known as Alphabet, at $735bn. Then come all the way down to a company like General Motors, at $60bn. So, these are the realities of where the world is going. What did Bezos do? Well, he started-off by selling books online, and in 1999, with the boom in the NASDAQ, his share price rocketed because people saw this as the future. In fact, that was when I listed MoneyWeb. Those of you who know anything about finance – when we sold shares then, I didn't have to pay for the listing and usually, it's quite a few million Rand because people were so excited about the potential of the internet, when I listed in July 1999..The projections that we had were 100-times next year's revenues/profits. Now, usually if you're paying 15 or 16-times that's quite expensive. This was 100-times. We only made the profit – that was what we were objecting to make. That's how crazy those times were. It's a bit like Bitcoin – the Bitcoin bubble, where people just get frenzied about it, and in the short-term the impact is off the charts. In the long-term, generally, we underestimate these things as we have underestimated the internet. Anyway, in 1999, Bezos' company, after the big burst it fell and it went to about 1/20th of the previous share price and he stuck at it. What did he stick at? He stuck at putting all his money back in his business that he could. In other words, not declaring profits, and he also stuck at a belief that the consumer is king..Now, if you think that what you're doing today, and I've heard some really good stuff today about engaging with people on the forecourt. Interacting with your customers – if you think you're doing it well, Amazon does it many times better. In the rich North, and perhaps it is because it's a rich North, but you can order anything on Amazon now. I remember last month my wife needed for her white board, she needed a khoki-pen and there was a khoki-pen on Amazon for $1.50. They have a loyalty program, as do you have a loyalty program, their one is called Amazon Prime. We pay £80 a year for it, and Amazon Prime means you get free delivery of everything, or pretty much everything. So, she ordered the khoki-pen, it cost £1, and it arrived the next morning at our home. You would hate to think what it would have cost to get somebody to find that khoki-pen wherever it might have been, to bring it forward but that's part of the whole Amazon-promise..Clearly, they're making up for those kinds of losses or those kinds of margins on other products but it just gives you an understanding. When Amazon suggests that its moving into a particular market, as it recently did when it bought Whole Foods, which is a food retailer. The share prices of the other companies that were in the market fall sharply. Why? Because people look at this and they say, 'the world is changing – Amazon are coming at us.' It is the modern phenomena and that is why Bezos is now worth $120bn, personally, and he's the richest man in the world. The second richest man is Bill Gates, he used to always have that position from Microsoft. He started Microsoft many years ago. They've transformed their model, and he's worth about $90bn, and Mark Zuckerberg, those of you who are on Facebook, he's the third richest, at $76bn – just to put it all into context again. Bezos put consumers at the top of the pyramid and he sent us all a message. Unless you put the customer first, you are not going to make lunch – you're going to be lunch..In this Fourth Industrial Age that we're going into there are a few things that you have to have that we learn from these two guys, these two-incredible people. Incidentally, last year I often go to Omaha to listen to the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett. A wonderful man, in a hall like this, well much bigger than this with 30 000 people from all over the world who go there to go and listen to this chap who is 86, and his business partner, Charlie Monger, who's now 93 – and they sit there eating peanut brittle and answering questions. They've just done a deal with Amazon. Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and JP Morgan have tied-up in healthcare to attack the healthcare problem that exists in the US market. So, nothing is immune but what Warren Buffett has been saying continuously, over the last couple of years, is that this guy is in a different league, Bezos. He hasn't said anything about Elon yet, hopefully next year he'll talk about our guy, but he's been explaining that the whole business-model. The Amazonisation – the call it the Amazon-Effect is with us and it is transforming us. We're aren't yet feeling it in SA, but it's coming because as it has, in other parts of the world..So, in this new world that we're going into what are your assets? I've heard probably for 20-years now – you've got to do lifelong learning. I'm sure you've heard that. It doesn't help to go to university, get a degree, or to read a book once. You've got to be a lifelong learner. That's no longer just something that gets thrown out. That is reality. If you're not learning every day, you are being left behind, and how do you learn? You learn through humility. You learn through listening, not talking. God gave us one mouth and two ears for a very good reason. The more we listen, the more we learn. In your business, in my business – I have an amazing business. We have half-a-million people come to BizNews every month. I have a daily newsletter, I hope you all get it, it goes to 100 000 people a day. Imagine that in the old world – how the hell would you send out 100 000 letters and then expect them to get it the next morning, or instantaneously? That's what the internet has brought for my business but I listen, because if they tell me, I'm a little off-track here or I'm being arrogant there, or I've been giving Zuma too much of a hard time there – I listen because everything is a balance. Everything has to be mindful of those that you are serving..The other big thing about lifelong learning that you can learn is from Leonardo, I mentioned him earlier. Leonardo used to make a list of things and every single day he would find out, and this is in the latest biography by the way, by Walter Isaacson, who wrote that great biography on Steve Jobs. He said, Leonardo used to, every day, make a list of something that he wanted to find out like why does the woodpeckers head not get blasted off when he pecks the tree so hard? The answer to that is that he's got a very long tongue that goes around inside of his head and acts as a shock-absorber, but Leonardo was interested to find out that, and many other things. Like why is the sky blue? What I'm telling you now, is one of the secrets to surviving and thriving in the 4IR, and that is curiosity, retaining curiosity..Open-mindedness goes with humility, it goes with the ability to listen, and it's not negotiable anymore. Travelling is a wonderful thing that happened post my time unfortunately, well, we never had the resources to do this but today, if there's one thing you can give your kids, send them on a gap year. Send them into Africa or into Europe, or Asia, or wherever – just let them go and see that we are humanity. That we live together and that they'll pick-up lots of ideas, and travel yourself, and not skiing..Travel like an entrepreneur with an eye open because that's what it's all about. Everywhere we go, we need to learn and finally, creativity. We need creativity and the only thing that creativity is generated by is by diversity. So, please, don't look at diversity as being forced upon you. Look at diversity as a business advantage, listening to different points of view. Coming back from the airport, I stopped at my in-laws for a cup of tea on my way here. Waze, which is a fantastic app, those of you who don't have it – it's the only way I've survived in London. Waze took me through Alexandra township – not the route I would ordinarily take. But driving through Alex I could not believe in the main artery, because I hadn't driven through Alex for many years, I could not believe how full of muck and rubbish it is. Those of you who know the Alexandria Township, or some of you may have either lived there or have relatives there, you will know that it's an every day event..Yet, just over, and a stone's throw away, is Sandton, which boasts to be the richest square-mile in Africa. Surely, the people from Sandton, who love going and sleeping out once a year with the homeless people, (or so they say) – they should just have a look at Alex on their doorstep and think of how you can affect and help things on a daily basis. I met an amazing guy called Tich Smith, those of you from KZN will have surely heard of Tich Smith. He's quite close to Zweli Mkhize, who's a man that I admire greatly. Not because I know much about his politics but I know of his relationship with Tich. What Tich did he was guided in his own way to look after kids, homeless kids. He's now got an establishment where there are 1 500 of them, where he and his wife are looking after orphans, the most vulnerable. So, there's just so much we can do. Sometimes our eyes aren't open, sometimes we're talking too much, sometimes we're thinking on the wrong level, and by going into that – the creativity that comes from it and the diversity that is stimulating it is terribly exciting..What I'd like to share with you is the context about our beautiful country, and I'll draw on something that Pravin Gordhan, who's amongst the national heroes, I know people come from different political sides of the fence. I've known him for many years, when he was the Commissioner at SARS. I had quite a lot to do with him because at the time we had some really strange, dodgy characters who were stealing from the country, and we also had companies who were claiming innocence and SARS was going after them so, I needed educating – I needed to listen. He was the most willing and wise teacher but what was interesting to me was what happened prior to his reshuffle out of the Cabinet. He said to SA, to the international world, "We are resilient." I heard that word coming up today as well. "We are a resilient nation." My goodness, what other nation on earth has gone through what we've gone through, and is still standing?.I'm not talking about recently, I'm talking about the last 300-years. He also said, after he left the Cabinet, "Please, join the dots." Those are the realities that I'm going to share with you now, and hopefully this will help you to kind of join the dots for yourself, into what's happening in this country and how things are changing. We have our canoe people here. We have our people who will go out, like me. We work within this environment, and then off we go to foreign lands where you learn more, where the growth expands. Elon Musk is sitting in the USA. Trevor Noah – what would American TV be like without Trevor Noah? What an ambassador for our country – what a bright, smart, sussed, super-star coming from this part of the world. Everyone who watches Trevor Noah knows he's South African and the see his courage, and so on and so forth, and they're not alone..Often, I hear people in London talking about the 10th Province – they call themselves the 10th Province. They know where home is, home is here. But as the 10th Province is the Diaspora and the Diaspora is in a situation to make a contribution there. But we need to know what's happening here. We need to understand what's going on in our own country to be able to build on that resilience and to be able to join the dots. Now, this is a graph that unfortunately, is a real graph. This is SA, and I'm not going to show you many graphs because many people switch off when they see these economists putting charts up there, but you can see very clearly. That is gross domestic product. In other words, our economy in USD terms and, as you can see, since late 2010, we've been going down or backwards. We have been losing. The size of the economy has been shrinking. Not as bad as Zim but we've been shrinking. Why? Because we've had to wrong policies in place..I'll show you some more of that. There's GDP per capita – that means individuals, how are we doing individually? What is each person doing? If you're selling to consumers this is a very important graph for you. You want to see that going up and not down..As you can see, there's the zero line and SA, for the last couple of years, and these are World Bank figures, has been going underneath the line. I just used India, which is the red line to give you an idea of what can happen when you do get the policies right, and then the UK, which is a far bigger economy than ours – even they have been growing more than we've been growing. Part of the reason for is it when you start implementing the wrong economic policies you get this..That is probably the most powerful graph that we have in SA, and the one that we should all be paying huge attention to. If you have got a household that is spending more than it earns – there's only one way to keep going and that's borrowing. We have a massive household called SA, which has been spending more than it earns and the debt to GDP ratio, what this means is the amount of money we're borrowing just to keep things going has been going straight upwards since 2009. In 2009, we had political change. We had Mbeki out – Zuma in. Join the dots..This is the first chart that I'm going to show you from Davos. It's put together by Edelman's. Edelman's is a public relations outfit in New York. Every year they have a survey of 30 000 people in 28 countries, and their idea is to try and find how much the people trust the four major parts of constituents in the country. That would be NGOs, who always come up top, businesses, media, which by the way is falling through the floor, and government. As you can see from this the bottom of the league with only 14% of South Africans who were surveyed, who trust their government. In fact, it's even down from last year..An interesting part of this is that in fact companies in SA come out quite well. I heard earlier the promise that Shell will be doing more to communicate with you. That's because Shell knows as do most people around the world, that employers or the company that you engage with, is far more trusted than any other source of information. More trusted, by far, than the media. In fact, 50% of people do not consume media in a week. They've stopped. They've said fake news – they've listened to Donald Trump perhaps, or they're just tired of the negativity so, they don't trust the media. But employers, and here you can see that SA, if you look carefully, is sitting there at 71%. So, 71% of South Africans say, I do trust companies. The employees trust the companies that they work for..So, that's kind of the bad news and a lot of that came through in the last year or few years. Those are the stats, they're irrefutable and you cannot change them..Then suddenly, we had a watershed moment. Now, I know the media has made a lot of it but on the 18th December SA changed course. It changed course dramatically. We had a situation where the tree people, insular, not worrying about the rest of the world, decided that they would allow the canoe people who had been out there seeing the rest of the world and what's happening, to start leading again. In this Fourth Industrial Age or the Second Renaissance you cannot afford to be isolated. You need to learn from what's happening elsewhere, if you're going to reverse the decline and the difficulties that we had in this country in the last 8 or 9-years..The appointment of Cyril Ramaphosa as the new leader of the ANC cannot be over-emphasised. SA is a developing country. That means we need money from other parts of the world to keep the economy going. We can't do it ourselves we don't have enough resources, and when we try and do it ourselves we have the consequences of those graphs that I showed you earlier so, it's very important to gauge what does the rest of the world think about us – do they want to put money into this country? I think Shell is incredibly prescient to double, as we heard earlier from Justice, the capital investment into SA in the year ahead, and others are following..There is a picture of the Rand exchange rate. If you look carefully, it's over the last year – we were bumping along between $13 and $14 to the USD. Until November, when something started whistling amongst the global investors and to give yourself an understanding of this, SA has 0.5% of global GDP. In other words, if SA disappeared off the map the rest of the world would have a 0.5% of a jolt. That's it. We are very small in the grand scheme of things. We're a cork on the ocean so, when the big money decides to either come or leave it affects our currency, and what is our currency – the ZAR or our share price if you like. So, our share price has been heading south, not surprisingly because you saw the data earlier, and then suddenly around November it started improving. There, where I've put the arrow, was the 18th December..From the 18th December it's been going one way. Why? Because there's been a huge amount of money coming into this country. People are betting on the country again. One of the things that has helped with that has been just ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF), and as Ursula told you, I was in Davos for the 15th time, in fact, just over a week ago..Now, that place is cold – it's -30 in some towns in the night, but there you have our proudly SA flag right there next to Brazil and the UN, not bad, but just ahead of Davos or WEF and that, just to digress briefly. The WEF is a place where the most powerful people from all over the world come together. This year Donald Trump was there, so was the Prime Minister of India, President Xi was there last year, the Head of China, and you would find the top one-thousand corporations send or are invited, with either their CEO or their chairman, not both, one of the two. These power mongers, you have the smartest academics, and they get together and they set the economic agenda, and seriously they do..How they do it is not by sitting in a smoky room and decide how the world is going to go, but how they do it is by cross-pollinating ideas, listening to the next one, opening their ears and closing their mouths for a change, which as you know CEOs find very difficult to do. You know that in your own business. It is difficult as a CEO sometimes, to listen but that's something we need to train ourselves in. The bigger the company the more difficult it is to listen, and these are the leaders of the biggest companies in the world. So, they get together for a week in Davos, Switzerland and they discuss these things. From SA, traditionally the president goes, but what happened last year three-days before WEF, President Zuma stepped back and Cyril Ramaphosa went in his stead, the deputy-president. He made a good impression but he was just the deputy-president. This year, a couple of weeks before Davos, the president stepped back and said, you go. Not surprisingly because Ramaphosa is the president of the ANC, and likely the next president of the country..Just before this whole thing started Goldman Sachs, which is the most powerful Wall Street firm, put out a report on the strength of what happened on that watershed moment on the 18th December, to say SA is the hottest emerging market in the world. Now, Goldman Sachs tells this to all its clients. Many of its clients are going to Davos and suddenly, from being a pole-cape, that nobody wants to know about, SA is suddenly on the agenda..Not everybody got the memo. That's the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, on the left-hand side, I asked him, after 18th December, because they downgraded our economic growth again. I said to him, surely, that you need to reassess in the light of what's happened recently. He said, "No, too soon to tell." Then the other guy, a guy called Bob Moritz of PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) – they bring out a survey every year just at the opening of Davos and that survey comes after they interview about 1 400 CEOs of the biggest companies in the world, and they ask them, 'where are you putting your money and how will it be allocated?' These guys are super confident about the rest of the world but not about SA..He said, 'we're taking a wait-and-see attitude.' So, you can imagine, after we saw on the trust survey a little earlier, and these two guys – I wasn't feeling terribly upbeat. Then something interesting started to happen..This is a picture recording the moment of the turnaround, Elsie a Tanzanian who runs the WEF's Africa unit was introducing Cyril Ramaphosa there to foreign investors. This is a private meeting – I got the picture from Greg Beadle, a photographer who shared it with us, as I wasn't allowed in there. But this is a private meeting between the president and his cabinet and foreign investors. For the first time since 2010, it was oversubscribed. Too many people wanted to get in, thank Goldman Sachs, thank Ramaphosa, thank the media, thank what you like but suddenly people were interested. Those of you who know Cyril will know that's he's a wonderful communicator, apart from being very bright and he reads a lot, as does Elon Musk..He's a great communicator and very quickly he was starting to explain that he has three-priorities. What are those priorities? We are going to have legislation in this country that we can trust, i.e., it's not going to change halfway through. The legislation will be the same – we need that consistency, otherwise we can't invest. We, as human beings, need to know some kind of certainty. He said, we are going to attack corruption – those who have stolen from the State will be put in jail. I asked him a few times, I went to various cabinet ministers, and surely, we had the TRC, and those guys did heinous things as well. Surely, we should be looking at that in national interest. No, we've got to set an example for our children. The third thing we've got to fix the SOEs (state owned enterprises) – those were his three messages, and those messages, for a foreign investor, who's looking at the whole world remember, he's got a little cork on the ocean that he can consider, the 0.5%, but foreign investors said, 'I like it – I like it a lot.'.To the degree that it wasn't long before, back home, Zapiro put this beautiful cartoon, which kind of encapsulates everything. Remember, I've been to WEF 15-times, for the last 7-years its been a pretty gloomy place to go. Nobody wanted to know about my country. Nobody there was interested. They pushed us to one side. China, India have much better investment opportunities than here. Even the Nigerians, at one stage, were more popular than the South Africans, then the oil prices came down so, that's kind of rebalanced again, but this is a reality. What really impressed most people though was the way Cyril operated at a dinner. Now, every year Brand-SA has a dinner in Davos at the Kirschner Museum, and we're encouraged, as members of the SA delegation to bring foreigners with us. I struggled every year as no one was really interested. You'd get to the dinner and it would be half-full. There were only people there who wanted a meal, generally South Africans. Well, when you're paying R500 for a hamburger, but this year there was standing room only..This year they had to bring in tables at the last minute. This year I had people asking, 'can I come with you?' Including the head of a major bank in London, who I took with me, he was my plus-1. When Cyril got to the stage he started off at a podium like this and he began talking for about a minute and there were television cameras, I think it was eNCA or E-News, and SABC, and then he took the microphone and said, 'sorry guys,' and he started walking. Now, it was a long table, as you can imagine, and he walked to the middle of that table, as you can see there, and for 35-minutes he gave the most inspiring speech you will hear. Go onto BizNews, Google Ramaphosa off-pieced. Off-pieced means if you're skiing, and it's not a popular term in SA, but if you're skiing down the Davos slopes and you go off the main ski slope that's called 'off-pieced.'.So, there he was, completely off-piste. It is a wonderful speech about a country that is about to rebound because if you pick the right decisions..We've seen it in Sierra Leone, we are seeing it in Liberia with George Weah, with his ascendancy to the presidency, we are seeing it, for heavens sake, in this guy here – Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was also run off his feet in Davos. Both he and Cyril Ramaphosa didn't have enough time to meet with foreign investors. Now, I'm not coming to you as somebody who wasn't there. I'm not coming to you as someone who read this third-hand – I'm coming to you as somebody who saw it with my own eyes..I spoke to Mnangagwa, he actually assured me that we could have an interview before the event started but when I called him on his cell phone to ask, how about it. He apologised and said, you're going to have to talk to my media people. He was getting 20-plus engagements a day. The Wall Street Journal wants him, Bloomberg wants him, New York Times wants him, the Economist wants him – BizNews is important but we're not there yet, and that was Zimbabwe..As far as SA was concerned there was a press conference at the end of the meeting to summarise and bring together the SA-story. As you can see, the cabinet ministers on the righthand side, Rob Davies, and Ebrahim Patel were there. Gigaba was there as well but he wasn't front and centre. There was a lot of engagement from Davies and Patel and I asked all of them, how has Davos this year, how has this engagement with the rest of the world been different to last year and years before? They said it was like being at a different event..Rob Davies came to me afterwards and said, 'maybe this will make it easier for you – last year, the only people who wanted to talk to me were foreigners who had invested in SA, who actually wanted to take their money out but were grumbling about what we were doing here.' They were whining and unhappy. They wanted to just complain to somebody because nobody was hearing them, and they wanted to complain to me, as the Trade and Industry Minister. He said, 'this year, the only people I saw, and they found me, were those who had investments in SA who, like Shell, want to double it or expand it, or others who had ignored this country and who wanted to get in. Now, most of you are in business and most of you are in business for your own account. When you see that kind of a dramatic transformation and you hear it from a guy who has actually had to go through the experience. Some little bell has got to be going off in your head and saying, hey, something big is happening here..The 18th December, was a watershed. The Jewish people tell us that 18 is a very lucky number, the Chinese people tell us that 8 is a very lucky number. Well, I tend to believe them both, in this instance. The 18th December, was so transformative for this country that it's very hard, unless you see it with your own eyes and you actually understand the global scenario, and you get the context of all of this – it's very hard to appreciate quite what a watershed or quite what a binary option the ANC was given, at that stage..There's Letsetja Kganyago, who's the taller of the two gents, he's with a guy from Transnet, (head of strategy). This picture was taken during Donald Trump's speech. It was an extraordinary occasion. You do remember what Donald Trump said about Africa? Something with an A and a hole somewhere in there. Letsetja hasn't forgiven him yet but it was extraordinary to see the way the Davos gathering reacted to Trump. They packed into that hall and they stood in line for 30-minutes before his speech, to make sure that they got good seats. When he arrived in Davos, despite most of the people in Davos saying they really don't like this guy. They were four-deep to get a glimpse of him, and of course, he loved that. Trump is quite an entertainer – he likes to be acknowledged. Apparently, he's not the smartest guy on earth, if you read Michael Woolf's book, but quite the entertainer. What he reminded me of was the dictator, Benito Mussolini, or others of that ilk. He had this long coat on, and of course, many people around, his protection and security people, to make sure that nobody got too close to 'The Donald,' but he would look up and wave. But it was eerie. Nobody smiled, nobody clapped, nobody booed. One guy said, "You're not welcome in Davos." And Trump looked at him and said, "Look around you. How can I not be welcomed?".Well, he wasn't welcome amongst the African contingent in Davos but I put Letsetja there because not just to show where his colours lie but we had the opportunity to have a little chat. It's nice to get your governor of your Reserve Bank in an informal manner and he said to me that last year, all of his meetings, were polite. It was those other central bankers around the world, all bankers, remember, bankers are the people who control the money flows. He said, those meetings were all because they were being polite and courteous to him. He said that this year they chased and found him wherever he was. They found him to get hold of him to ask, 'how do we bring the money in?' Extraordinary. Now either Letsetja is lying, Ramaphosa is lying, Davies is lying, the exchange rate is lying, or something quite extraordinary has happened in the last month-and-a-month to this country..I'm closing off with this picture because it's also quite reflective and indicative of a guy who arrived in Davos as, I suppose, uncertain because we are coming from a place of deep concern, and he told us that night – this was after his press conference, and as you can see there aren't bodyguards around. He was sitting on a golf cart and being driven away from the media centre on a golf cart up the hill, and a big broad smile. Well, he can have that because the message he left with us was an extraordinary one that I would like to share with you. That night, when he was off-pieced and he was talking for 35-minutes. Cyril said to us, he has an ambition, a dream to be a filmmaker. He has always wanted to be a filmmaker. That's like his passion and he's finally now done it..Ramaphosa has done a film about four lions who hunt together. The idea was to show how, when the lions work as a team they achieve things that would be impossible if they were hunting separately. So, learning from nature, he used that as a metaphor for what he believes SA needs. Cyril said that those four-lions are business, government, labour, and civil society. His message to us as South Africans, primarily, as well as the banker who was sitting next to me and the others who had been brought in as guests of SA that night. His message is that if we hunt together, not only do we have to do it to survive, but we can do it to thrive. The banker who was sitting next to me, incidentally, after that looked at me and said, my goodness – I can't believe the difference. He's a class act, this new president of yours. Thank you.

Hope Springs: Why Ramaphosa-led South Africa means the future is bright.

Related Stories

Meet Tshepo Mahloele – Big Capitec shareholder, ABSIP’s “CEO of the Decade” now accused by Holomisa as kingpin of corrupt network

PREMIUM: Making of a great editor – the George Palmer playbook

Premium – BizNews global portfolio: ASML joins – so does Adobe as Bull takes hold again

Alec Hogg: Helen Zille predicts SA choice will be DA or EFF