Reuel Khoza, a 2024 Sunday Times Top 100 Companies Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, is a well-rounded businessman whose career I have followed for about 35 years.
The best way to take his measure is through the frame that six historians used to examine Winston Churchill in Churchill: Four Faces and the Man. Though Churchill and Khoza’s careers aren’t comparable, the British statesman makes a useful benchmark. The two men share similar traits.
According to his biographer Martin Gilbert, Churchill was “always outspoken and independent, and expressed his views without prevarication, criticising those whom he thought were wrong with a powerful armoury of knowledge, and with vivid, adept, penetrating language”. Khoza has always been like that too.
I propose to look at Khoza through the business, leadership, spiritual, philosophical, artistic and familial frames.
Though his father had been a businessperson since the mid-1960s, Khoza wasn’t interested in following in his footsteps. Things changed in 1974 when he was sacked as a psychology lecturer by the University of the North (now Limpopo).
After working for consumer goods group Unilever and later petroleum company Shell, he formed his own business, a consultancy that first focused on marketing and later on management.
By the time I arrived in Johannesburg from Durban in mid-1988 and first heard of Khoza from fellow Black Management Forum co-founder Eric Mafuna, his outfit was best known for management consulting.
It was the latter that raised his profile as “a young man who seems to have a point of view”, resulting in him being recruited to the boards of several big local and multinational companies, including Standard Bank, Munich Reinsurance and IBM.
For someone who has been running businesses for more than 40 years, it’s impossible not to accumulate scars. The deepest entrepreneurial scar for Khoza would perhaps be Shareworld.
Though it collapsed, the Disneyland-style theme park was illustrative of Khoza’s pioneering spirit. It opened its doors in November 1987, the peak of apartheid SA’s political and economic turmoil.
“We’re trying to construct a miniature future SA,” Khoza said in April 1988. “We are under no illusions as to the enormity of the challenge.”
Khoza has always been a straight talker. Long before most businesspeople spoke out against Jacob Zuma’s tenure, Khoza warned about the country’s political leadership.
As chair of Nedbank Group he wrote in his 2011 statement: “Our political leadership’s moral quotient is degenerating, and we are losing the checks and balances that are necessary to prevent a recurrence of the past. This is not the accountable democracy for which generations suffered and fought.”
Then there is Khoza the musician and lyricist. Had he not become a businessman, he has said, he “probably would have opted to be a musician of the choral genre”. A popular a cappella singer in high school, Khoza returned to music big time in 2011 when he started writing lyrics to the music of his late cousin, Shalati Joseph Khosa.
The better-known side of Khoza is about leadership — the public imprint of which lives on in his books and speeches. Recently, he linked leadership and spirituality, the latter being another of his emotional anchors, but there’s a philosophical side too. Khoza has long been a proponent of the ubuntu philosophy, which talks to the interdependency of the human species.
On the familial side, the key anchor is Mumsy, his partner of more than 45 years. Though I know little about Khoza’s marriage, some of his words do hint that his marriage to Mumsy was one of the defining moments of his life.
The other shaper of Khoza was his father who, based on Khoza’s descriptions, was a hard taskmaster who always set the bar higher than Reuel’s most recent achievement. When Khoza was in boarding school the old man would edit his letters for grammar and send them back with his replying letter.
This behaviour rubbed off on Khoza. I came across it in the early 1990s. I had called him with some questions on a topic that has since faded from my memory.
In my opening statement I used the phrase “so-called black”, to which Khoza’s response was a stun grenade: “Why so-called black?” I was stunned for a few seconds before he came to my rescue. Lesson learnt — the interview continued as if nothing had happened.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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