A LEOPARD THAT EARNED ITS SPOTS: A TRIBUTE BRA JABU MABUZA

Bra Jabu Mabuza was a quintessential South African who combined the world of practical entrepreneurship, street wisdom, profoundly connecting networking skills, and the finesse of 'wat bang'. He rose to his stature through hard work and understanding of a relationship between own energy and output. 

In his short life he became a public servant that volunteered himself to the service of the nation at many of its levels. He carried the public from one point to the other, and thus became a thread that connected employment with the employed, retailers with those that came to buy, public services with those that came to access them, families with their relatives as far as they might have chosen to be or dumped. He was a taxi driver.

He carried many a human souls and listened to several conversations about people he did not know but whose life stories as told by passengers definitely shaped him. He potentially buried many he did not know, because it was his business to carry the bereaved to where bereavement was. He multiplied himself by getting more taxis that were driven by others fro him.

He was thrust by the practice of his trade to more and more work on his business and less inside it. Working on his business Bra Jabu elevated his stature to a taxi fleet owner and thus a practical fleet management practitioner who would be a critical component of many a value chains that shape the South African economy, minuscule or otherwise.

Born in Waterval Boven, a small town connecting what is commonly known as the Maputo Corridor, Southern Africa's most contested outbound and inbound logistics route to Maputo Harbour in Mozambique if Durban and Cape Town are not an option. The town overlooks the N4 that connects Maputo and Windhoek in Namibia. Small as the town is, together with Machadadorp, it connects the interiors of Mpumalanga in a way that explains why being a taxi driver and owner became a natural career path that unlocked the 'gigantic entrepreneur' he ultimately became. 

The N4 defined his life beyond measure, as he sought better pastures he had a choice in Emalahleni to either proceed with the N4, as some of our parents did, or take the N12 to Johannesburg, and he went for the latter where he became part of the 'rand' and through that grew to being a appropriately rand ranked and randed individual that influenced our country to the very end.

He drove the Chevrolet Constantias, Chevrolet Commandos, and Ford Fairlanes that defined the taxi industry in Daveyton and the East Rand. His entrepreneurial prowess and inability to be ordinary, thrust him into leadership positions that shaped Black organised business as we have seen it grow, collapse, disintegrate, regroup, and hopefully growing again. 

To this effect he became a strategic nodal person for the east rand right through to his Mpumalanga roots of Waterval Boven, Whiteriver, Mapulaneng, Mbombela, Babtini, and the many towns that lie en route to Swaziland along the Carolina to Mbabane road. As a node, he would be influential in the formation of the Foundation for African Business and Consumer Services (FABCOS). In this endeavour and as part of a collective that included leading lights such as James Ngcoya, Mama Ellen Khuzwayo, Xolani Qubeka, and many others. 

It is through this cohort of African Business Leaders, of course complimentary to what NAFCOC had crafted since the 1950s, that in 1988 a voice to focus on the circulation of the rands in black townships was born. FABCOS became a home for the so called informal business sector of South Africa. It understood how as informal businesses its members are actually the empowers of what is today called monopoly capital. It understood the power of informal retailing in the consumer value chain of South Africa.

Boasting membership of 'coal face' entrepreneur associations that deliver single units of bulk produced commodities to households, the Mabuza and cohort generation struck strategic partnerships with private funding institutions that saw the gap of entrepreneur funding. Whilst government, then through the Small Business Development Corporation that once had Saki Macozoma as CEO, and lately the DTI complex of such like bodies, had the policy will to change the plight of informal businesses, its lack of entrepreneur driven funding mangers became a disincentive whose impact is still felt to date.

In Bra Jabu we saw the growth of a relationship between the Rupert driven Business Partners, related financial services houses and FABCOS. He became a pragmatic voice of business transformation, he understood that the radicality required to transform the economy lies in the value system defining business men and women, he understood that monopolies are built overtime even if they are state sponsored, he understood the interface of deal making and politics without capturing the inherent redistributive role of public procurement.

Forthright as Bra Jabu was, he courted scorn, praise and controversy. In his later years he took bold decisions on corruption as he understood it, and bold decisions were taken on him about corruption as understood by others. He was thrust into the most reputation poison chalice infested institution at the centre of South Africa's energy security and monopoly building wars. Being a product of yet another rough industry in South Africa, taxis, he could navigate the space with legitimate and unfortunate casualties in the form of young and budding future Bra Jabu's from within ESKOM

The truth of him having been the last frontier in the recalibration of ESKOM into an entity different from its supply commission mission into an enterprise prepared for sale to waiting global investors, anchored by local Rockefeller aspirants, foregrounds any conception of him as a political economy transformation activist. His flirting with the privatisation process going on in ESKOM, the unbundling process that will result in fiscal reform and review of the local government system, and the handing over of the last trillion available for economic equalisation, is a chapter in his life history still has to write and judge him on. 

A celebrated paragon of corporate governance at a point in his business history life, his latest corporate governance missteps still to be recorded in history give different decorations to his clinically presented profile. The extent to which his career has taken a somewhat backseat as a result of contracts his company got when he was in ESKOM, will be an additional chapter still to be written on the varying definitions and understandings of state capture defined the Zondo Commission Complex way.

As a mind that was organised, death to him might well be the beginning of another adventure. Our relationship with Bra Jabu as a society should not end with his life, but be curated in libraries of black business history in order to make posterity a friend to his contributions. If he was a Leopard his scars would have been made the spots that distinguishes him from the many cats that have forgotten that hunting defines continuity of cats, domestication castrates cats. 

Paying tribute to this South African can only be summed up with a quote from a South African poet that "In your closing eyes our future is never to be seen" and in your memory what you taught needs to be resurrected.

To those you hurt, your story sends a resounding message of 'I am sorry it had to be done'. Lala ngo xolo Bra Jabu. Condolences to you family, friends, enemies and South Africans.