Patrice Motsepe: following his instincts, dreaming big

BUSINESS tycoon Patrice Motsepe is never shy to shake up the status quo. He has always followed his instincts to stay ahead of the curve. An icon of corporate South Africa, he is as much known for his leadership in the world of football as for his philanthropy.

He was a top lawyer when he followed his dream of being an entrepreneur, making a deal with Anglo American in the late 1990s that marked the beginning of a series of unique relationships which today define his African Rainbow Minerals empire.

As the owner of Mamelodi Sundowns, he led it to becoming one of the most accomplished clubs in Africa. Then came the powerful seats of president at the Confederation of African Football and vice-president of FIFA, football’s global governing body, in 2021. Yet questions linger about his political ambitions because of his close links to the ANC and particularly his brothers-in-law, Cyril Ramaphosa and Jeff Radebe.

In this unauthorised biography, best-selling author and journalist Janet Smith mines public archives, academic papers, international media and gets a rare one-on-one interview with Motsepe himself to find what lies behind this hugely successful, intensely private man, and what may lie ahead.

EXTRACT

It was a coup for the new chief of African football when TikTok partnered with the confederation for the Africa Cup of Nations in January 2022, for what was the social media platform’s first major brand partnership in Africa. And Motsepe could boast that CAF had come second only to UEFA in attracting TikTok as a digital entertainment platform sponsor – it had only worked on Euro 2020, UEFA’s top tournament, before.

It would be a year-long sponsorship that would cover the Champions League 2022 and the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations 2022, set to be held in Morocco. TikTok promised innovation, which Motsepe always chased, to expand fan communities around Africa’s unique football culture. These were areas into which CAF had not previously ventured, even though TikTok’s research showed that the hashtags #football and #soccer raked up an incredible 273 billion and 108 billion views, respectively, in 2022. #African- Football had more than 48.3 million views. Drawing millennial, Gen Z and younger fans around the world to African football was becoming easier.

But Motsepe was not going to have a smooth run in his first year at the helm of CAF. At his first major tournament, the 2022 Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon, an entirely unexpected picture emerged of him.

The event would mark the first time in 50 years that Cameroon had hosted the tournament, and Motsepe had fought hard for it to happen. Many in world football had tried to have the Cup postponed or moved, as the country – situated on the Gulf of Guinea in the west-central region of the continent – was in the midst of a violent battle between those who wanted to preserve its Francophone identity and its equally nationalist Anglophone citizens, who demanded separation.

Cameroon had lost a previous hosting opportunity in 2019 due to infrastructure problems, and as late as December 2020, detractors were still lobbying Motsepe to change the venue, but he gave it the go-ahead.

European football administrators who had urged him to postpone as they didn’t want to lose some of their top players who were Africans for the weeks required in preparation and matches, were sorely disappointed. Their protestations had essentially been dismissive of Africa’s basic rights to equal footballing time on the calendar, and had sounded more racist as they grew louder.

It was a key moment for Motsepe: if he’d blinked, and allowed European clubs to have a say, it would have been game over for him. In any event, it was a fist in the air for Africa when he didn’t budge – but he couldn’t have known that it was neither civil war nor infrastructure, nor even Afrophobia, that would leave a tragic legacy for the event.

The Cameroon national team, the Indomitable Lions, were playing Comoros at the Olembé Stadium in the capital, Yaoundé. A gate had been briefly locked at an exit to an area where Covid-19 vaccination certificates and test results were being checked, and as soon as it was opened, a crowd of people pushed security guards aside and forced their way in. The stampede resulted in the deaths of eight people – one of them a child – and injuries rose to nearly forty.

Motsepe would have clearly remembered how 43 people had died when there was a crush at Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg in 2001 after spectators without tickets bribed gatekeepers to gain access to see Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates play in a packed derby. And Ghana, Zimbabwe and Egypt had had their own horror stadium stampedes over the years.

CAF called an urgent press conference at Ahmadou Ahidjo Stadium in Yaoundé the following day. ‘Looking wary and devastated … Motsepe expressed “deep condolences to the families” of the victims on behalf of CAF and the local organising committee. He added that CAF, the committee and the government should all shoulder the blame, even though security is the responsibility of the local organising committee’. ‘If that gate was open as it was supposed to, we wouldn’t have had this problem we have now, this loss of life. Who closed that gate? Who is responsible for that gate?’

All remaining matches started with a moment’s silence. Players of all teams wore black armbands.

The tragedy immediately seemed to quieten Motsepe’s more sociable profile, but as the months tracked on after that, little information emanated out of Cairo about the disaster.

It could be that for Motsepe that moment would be one of his most significantly disruptive. He’d told Forbes magazine in 2011 that ‘people must see you as someone who is fallible, who also makes mistakes. I’m a sinner. I fumble. People must see me as one of them.’

A test now lay ahead to prove that to be real.

In April 2022, Motsepe gave a steely response to questions about Côte d’Ivoire’s ability to host the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations when he visited Abidjan to assess readiness. Having met Côte d’Ivoire president Alassane Ouattara during his mission, he said CAF had ‘identified areas where we can improve and will improve’. ‘We are going to [Côte d’Ivoire] next year, but we are not going to make the same mistakes again. There are certain preconditions, and in the public domain, I have to be nice and polite, and of course respectful. But I think behind closed doors, we will be significantly more assertive and more uncompromising in terms of safety, the police, the security, the army where appropriate, football pitches – and hopefully Covid-19 will be less of a challenge.’

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ABC is Motsepe’s father: Augustine Butana Chaane

Patrice was named after Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the independent Republic of the Congo and a revolutionary hero for many Africans, likely including ABC. His and Kay’s first son was born on January 28, 1962, just more than a year after Lumumba was killed by political opponents.

Motsepe seemed at one stage as if he might become a professional soccer player. A neighbour of the family in Mmakau, Reggy Morale, remembered him playing for boyhood teams Magnificent FC and Dynamos FC, while another Mmakau resident, Matsuwa Taukobong, said he would himself take Motsepe to watch Pretoria Sundowns playing in the apartheid leagues. Taukobong, who’d worked at ‘the landmark Kay Motsepe Bottle Store’ when Motsepe was a child, said ‘the boy would jump for joy’ when their team scored. Had ABC not insisted on his children devoting themselves to school work, said Taukobong, Motsepe, ‘a good laaitie (youngster)’, could have been a football star.

But even at a tender age, so the narrative goes, Motsepe was good at business. He would wake up early in the morning during the school holidays in Mmakau to help ABC at the counter of the family shop, which catered mainly to mine workers, who had a liking for the enthusiastic little boy. His fond memories of those days included counting the chickens in the family’s yard, and Decembers, when his parents’ shop was full of customers spending their Christmas pay packets.

Perhaps ABC would have wanted his son to take over the business when he grew older, but Motsepe was nursing a different aspiration: to be a lawyer.

ABC and Kay were fiercely opposed to the National Party’s 1953 Bantu Education Act, which specified that black children be trained for manual labour and the menial jobs that the government deemed suitable for those of their race, while explicitly inculcating the idea that black people had to accept being subservient to whites. For this reason, they sent Patrice for part of his schooling to St Joseph’s, a Catholic, ‘coloured-designated’, Afrikaans-language boarding school in the farming community of Aliwal North (today, Maletswai) on the border of the central province of Free State and the Eastern Cape.

Motsepe recalled that his father ‘wanted to give me a good education and, just as important, he wanted me to speak proper Afrikaans’. ‘At boarding school, I spoke better Afrikaans than any other language.’

He was a highly motivated student. ‘Even at school I had to be first … for me it was always about hard work, blood and sweat and coming out top.’ And it was at St Joseph’s that Motsepe discovered a liking for rugby, as it was the hinge for a happy life at the school. (Although rugby teams were racially divided during apartheid, the sport has had black and white players and fans in South Africa since the late 1800s.)

Those kinds of race, culture and language intersections in Motsepe’s early years played out to his advantage throughout his life. Motsepe was at St Joseph’s until he was 15, and then moved to St Mark’s in Mbabane, the capital of Swaziland (now eSwatini).

Motsepe was not going to have a smooth run in his first year at the helm of CAF. At his first major tournament, the 2022 Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon, an entirely unexpected picture emerged of him.

Even at a tender age, so the narrative goes, Motsepe was good at business. He would wake up early in the morning during the school holidays in Mmakau to help ABC at the counter of the family shop.