Khehla Mthembu, who has died in Soweto at the age of 67 from Covid-19-related complications, was a founder and president of the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) who played a courageous role in the anti-apartheid struggle while pursuing a successful business career and becoming a black pioneer in the insurance industry.
He led the biggest black empowerment venture the country had yet seen when in 1993 he became the chair and CEO of New Age Beverages (NAB), a black-owned consortium that formed a joint bottling venture with Pepsi-Cola International.
Nine years after selling its beverage business in SA in response to international sanctions, Pepsi had announced it was going to return and challenge Coca-Cola’s dominance of the local soft-drink market. Charismatic, inspirational, well connected, with an impressive business record and brilliant at networking and marketing, in Mthembu they found the ideal person to lead PepsiCo in SA.
A star-studded group of African-Americans, including singer Whitney Houston and actor Danny Glover, invested $120m (R1.7bn at current exchange rates) in the empowerment venture at the instigation of the then US ambassador, Andrew Young, a friend of Mthembu’s from his activist days.
Mthembu believed Pepsi’s squeaky clean image would help it seize a sizeable chunk of Coca-Cola’s 70% share of the $1bn local soft-drink market. Unlike Pepsi, Coca-Cola had disinvested by selling out to a local subsidiary, letting it corner the soft-drink market post-1994. While Coca-Cola was seen as part of the old SA, Mthembu told the New York Times that NAB and Pepsi had “everything of political correctness going for us”.
Mthembu, then 40, created unrealistic expectations of what Pepsi and NAB would be able to do in terms of empowering black people. The dream started turning sour for him and his NAB team from the first day in late 1994 when the Pepsi plant in Johannesburg opened. Almost daily, wrote the Washington Post, “executives arriving for work in their fancy new cars” were assailed by hundreds of demonstrators demanding jobs. There weren’t any jobs, and the unemployed people thronging the plant gates were in a nasty mood, blocking delivery trucks and clashing with police.
“It’s a reflection of the serious challenges South Africa is facing,” said Mthembu. “Those people at the gate feel they contributed to the struggle and they feel it’s payback time. But many of those who helped us get where we are today cannot be employed.”
A larger problem for Mthembu was that Coca-Cola had signed exclusive contracts with local black bottlers and NAB was forced to import what they needed at ruinous cost. In 1997, with debts of more than $155m, PepsiCo pulled the plug on NAB and ended SA’s first post-apartheid empowerment dream.
He showed early signs of entrepreneurship when at 14 he started selling fruit and refreshments on the train from Johannesburg to Soweto to raise money to put himself and two younger siblings through school
Mthembu was born on January 12 1954 in Soweto. He showed early signs of entrepreneurship when at 14 he started selling fruit and refreshments on the train from Johannesburg to Soweto to raise money to put himself and two younger siblings through school. He was so successful that he offered micro-lending facilities to his teachers.
After matriculating in 1972 from Orlando West High School, where he excelled in maths, he became founding secretary of the South African Student Movement, studied computer programming, completed a BCom degree through Unisa and an advanced management programme at the University of the Witwatersrand Business School, got a job as a computer programmer and became a financial adviser at Old Mutual.
Meanwhile, he continued to play an active role in the liberation struggle. He started a “Christian youth club” called Teen Outreach which he used as a cover to build support for the Black Consciousness (BC) Movement.
He was inspired by Steve Biko’s BC philosophy and met him several times at the Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre (WFC) in Roodepoort in the 1970s where BC activists gathered to plan strategy. The WFC was closely watched by the security police. Gatherings would frequently be disrupted by the clatter of helicopters overhead.
Mthembu helped start the Soweto Action Committee in 1977 to fill the vacuum left by the banning of BC groups that year and the murder of Biko. In 1978 he was a founding member of Azapo and its third president from 1981-1982.
The Azapo leadership changed rapidly as a tactic to avoid leaders being targeted by the security police. He was frequently detained in the ’70s and ’80s, held in solitary and interrogated, but never charged. He saw no contradiction between his political activism and immersion in business. “We felt that liberation meant getting the economy in our hands,” he said later.
He joined African Life and started his own brokerage that merged with the Foundation of African Business and Consumer Services to form Afsure, at the time the largest black insurance brokerage in the country. Insurance was a swear word in the black community when he started. His father was furious when he heard he was selling insurance. He made it acceptable and brought many talented young black people into the industry.
In 1993 he became MD of African General Insurance, the largest black-owned insurance company in SA. After NAB he was appointed chair of Sun International SA. In the highly competitive gambling environment, he steered Sun International to a leadership position. In 2003 he became CEO of Old Mutual in Gauteng. In his later years he started Wanachi as a platform to explore business opportunities in the tourism sector, and joined the board of City Power.
Mthembu, who was married and divorced three times, is survived by eight children.
1954 - 2021
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