Jannie Mouton’s R7.2bn bid to take over Curro is an audacious proposition, at once unsettling and unprecedented. While other billionaires assemble yachts, Mouton, a man whose fingerprints are already all over SA finance, has chosen a different tack, wrenching Curro from the stock market, erasing its for-profit DNA and recasting the country’s largest private education group as a mission-led nonprofit.
Immediately, the scale of the ambitions is astonishing. The price on the table is not a rounding error, even for a titan of the PSG/Capitec type. Still, the deal is more than the sum of its rands. It is a manifesto, a provocation and a reframing of what capital is for. When the state falters, can moral intent piggyback on private balance sheets to fix society's most intractable failures — one sector at a time? The answer is a qualified yes.
Our social compact is threadbare. State capacity declines, while business shows little appetite to step beyond R100,000 shoes charity towards messy reform. The Mouton Doctrine, if one may call it that, holds that capital’s truest purpose is not just profit maximisation but social repair by design.
Mouton, who has elicited comparisons to Warren Buffett and is referred to as the “Boere Buffett”, is not merely SA’s ubiquitous banker. As founder of PSG and Capitec Bank, he has repeatedly married financial acumen with an eye for disruption. Importantly, his philanthropic leanings are not new. But Jannie Mouton Stigting, his foundation, has previously preferred behind-the-scenes giving, always with a bias towards uplifting through education. His rationale, oft stated, is that education is the only meaningful equaliser.
Still, the Curro transaction is a different beast. Mouton is here not as a silent partner but a protagonist seeking to wield capital as a lever for systemic change, repositioning the entire notion of corporate philanthropy in SA from reactive charity to the structural delivery of public good at scale.
His logic is, at one level, brutally pragmatic. State education is failing, elite private education is growing, and some with sufficient capital can expand access to quality education more efficiently than the government. And there is something more personal, almost moralistic, about the move. A conviction that the mission can, and should, supersede the half-yearly reporting cycle.
The ambitions, at least rhetorically, are expansive. Not only is Mouton offering shareholders a handsome exit, he’s promising the largest philanthropic contribution in SA history, with the explicit goal of expanding bursary provision, building new schools in regions profit-driven investors overlook, and turning Curro into SA’s premier education-centred philanthropy.
At the heart of this saga is the damning record of state education. SA spends lavishly, as much as 20% of national expenditure on education, but the outcomes remain dire. The no-fee public school structure’s intention to ameliorate equality is a smart idea, in theory. In practice, it has entrenched a two-tier system where nearly three-quarters of children attend state schools free, and a small, well-resourced elite opt for the private sector.
The Curro deal packs a lesson for corporate SA. Profit and purpose need not be strangers. By redeploying R7.2bn of family capital, Mouton crafts a template for the ultrarich individuals to effect structural change. If he pulls it off, expect a stampede of boardrooms rethinking where they park their profits.
Calls for private capital to partner rather than displace the state have been a recurring theme. The consensus is that business has a strategic interest in repairing the system, not merely to train tomorrow’s workforce but to avert the social rupture that follows from mass education exclusion. The Mouton Doctrine represents the first credible attempt at sector-wide reconstruction.
The true measure of the Mouton Doctrine will be the number of underprivileged children who graduate, the schools that rise in neglected areas and whether this brand of deal making sparks a broader rethinking of capital’s role in society. For now, at least, corporate altruism has found its headline act.
• Motsoeneng is Business Day acting editor
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