Mario Olckers

Tech startups in Africa: A tale of survival

Africa, according to Chris and Martin from ‘Be the Creature’ (Animal Planet), is a place where “survival is always on display.” They were off course referring to the harsh and brutal reality of the African bush and the challenges faced by animals of all shapes and sizes. Also the relative sophistication in terms of their optimal placement in a challenging ecosystem. The relationship between being either the prey or the predator and your chances of survival in the African wild is something I will use as an analogy to describe the tech startup scene in South Africa, where I live.

First, let me make it very clear. South Africa is not an equal society. No matter how shiny a sheen the ANC dominated regime is trying to polish around the ‘liberated’ South Africa, things are still very much unequal. Only this time it has nothing to do with racism or apartheid. It has to do with access to resources and opportunities, and who controls and allocate and successfully manage those resources.

Since 1994, when South Africa has held it’s first non-racial democratic elections, things have been going from bad to worse. And it has nothing to do with the fact that the new government is mostly consisting of black people. It has to do with the fact that democratic ideals have been sacrificed in the service of corrupt and incompetent politicians, many whose behaviour, attitude and actions border on the criminal. There is a tendency in South Africa to wanna anonymize each and everyone and reduce everything to the lowest common denominator and mediocrity in all things seem to be the only wothwhile pursuit.

Speak up about government corruption and you are quickly labelled racist; racist having become a blunt instrument to hit anyone over the head that does not get overwhelmed and convinced of the “rainbow nation” poison meme. I recently read a quote from someone’s sig on slashdot: “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the issue.” What I essentially am trying to say is that majority rule as it has manifested itself in South Africa, is having disastrous consequences for everyone. Just because the two wolves vote to have mutton for dinner because they are the largest number of voters, how democratic does that sheep feel the process is exactly for his personal happiness as an autonomous being deciding over his own fate.

In South Africa where millions of uneducated and politically unsophisticated voters get swept into a frenzy by insincere egomaniacs, they swarm to the polls and vote into power, by sheer overwhelming numbers, people who have no idea of how to run a country and more or less equitably distribute a huge amount of resources amongst many competing, and mutually exclusive, interests. We then have a situation where the infrastructure starts showing signs of strain, because all of a sudden there is a huge increase in load, but the back-end systems have not been prepared and are not scalable, at least not in the short-term. A good example is the electricity supply in the country. We are going through a period of black-outs and power alerts on the media to switch off essential appliances during certain times. This never happened in the past, because in the past millions of households weren’t suddenly plugged into the power grid without building more power generators first.

Now everyone, including industry, who provides the life-bread of our economy, comes to a stand still because some incompetent politicians was so eager to “provide the previously disadvantaged” with power, they never saw the strain on current capacity that would cause. Eager to satisfy short-term immediate needs for political gain (“Look how many millions of houses we gave power to, vote for us next election”) as opposed to (“Look how we cripple the economy, the mines and big manufacturing plants now lose billions and have to retrench thousands of workers because of erratic and unreliable power supplies, so now the whole country suffers”).

Unfortunately, we do not seem to have the kinds of brains in government to think of these kinds of considerations, and as a result South Africa is fast going down the road of other pathetic post-independence African stories. Blaming the apartheid government or the colonial powers is wearing a bit thin and the world is laughing.

So what has all this to do with tech startups? Well, what was described above can similarly be applied to the tech sector in South Africa. I do not claim to know everything there is to know or that I am an expert, only my own experience based on my own process that I chose to implement according to my own constraints and circumstance.

First of all, who is the type of person most likely to start his own tech company? The one with access to the necessary resources, knowledge and skills base to implement whatever it is they envision. In most cases these turn out to be white males between 20 – 50 years of age. Then we saw an initiative by the government and private sector to train and equip the “previously disadvantaged” with skills through a disastrous SETA (Sector Education and Training) program where the beneficiaries were the crooks who set up fly-by-night training schemes and get funding from the government and when everyone wanted to see where these trainees are, the crooks have vanished with the money.

So after a while, those with enough dogged determination (and their own resources and know-how), strike out on their own. Whether they make it or not, that depends on many factors, but mostly it is just plain common sense, and the thing with business is: no one has an obligation to make your business model work. It is up to the entrepreneur to identify an opportunity and then to work very hard at executing and bringing it to market.

No one is there to help you, if you do not have your own resources to fall back on or a brilliant idea that will have investors sit up and listen, you are better off doing the 9-5 cubicle thing for a big corporation. Although soul-crushing and unsatisfactory, if you need the reassurance of a regular paycheck, it is better to leave the tech startup business to those who know how to survive in the harsh African bush, where your wits and instincts only stand between you and being devoured at the first sign of weakness or non-vigilance.

In conclusion: the tech start-up scene in South Africa is not for the faint-hearted. If you are looking for easy funding and promotion and help from the big “incubators” you gonna have to some serious “lobbying” at one of the few companies that do exist in this space.

There you will have to deal with an ego-based hierarchy where self-appointed tech gurus decide whether your idea or proposal is “worthy” of their esteemed and oh-so-valuable time and money. Most of the time I dealt with these kinds of people, I got the feeling I am not talking about the same thing: empowering people to be self-sustainable and being fair and equatable in their dealings with people from all sorts of backgrounds.

So I grew tired of all that very quickly and decided to not waste my time and effort on trying to tweak my idea to be “acceptable” to these self-appointed VC’s. I started doing my own thing as I wanted to and set up my own blog publishing network. And the clients and the advertising arrangements and agreements I decide on myself, no equity for VC funds, all the gain and all the loss is my own, and at the end of the day there is not a more satisfying feeling than enjoying the success of doing things for yourself.

If someone decides to partner up or fund this operation, well done! If not, well, back to the drawing board, I suppose…