Businesspeople From South Africa

"You know, the people you actually compete with are the reason why you go a little bit harder because they keep raising the bar but in the same breath, you’re not aware that you’re positioning yourself to be great or elevated as an artist"

"See, the way I feel about it is, for example, if Messi (touch wood) were to pass away, Cristiano Rolando would possibly feel a certain way… he’d probably stop playing soccer"

"Living your best life doesn't mean splashing out, yes we all love nice things but there is more than the price tag"

"We need to learn the trade of diamonds, the business of diamonds, and we need to challenge the status quo"

"I end up being questioned a lot about my knowledge of wine … I have to try to build that trust"

"It takes a village to raise a business that can be sustainable"

"It’s really important that we, as Africans, can benefit from the value of the resources on the continent"

"but we also recognize that at the highest level in the world, we have to compete against the best in the world and win."

"In business, it’s crucial to learn from those who have succeeded before you. Their experiences can provide valuable insights and shortcuts to achieving your own goals"

"We remain deeply committed to upholding the highest standards of corporate governance, transparency, integrity and accountability across all aspects of our business"

"And we are now in what we call the golden period, the revolution that’s taking place in African football"

"I think the barrier to doing incredible things has been lowered by technology, which has started to reduce inequality."

"It’s really hard to wake up every day and fight patriarchy, which is why I am so exhausted. I honestly want to see women make loads of money so we can all just invest in other women and shift the power dynamics in business as well as in our homes and families."

"Engineers design our world and our society, and if we don’t have women at the design table, we exclude 50% of the population."

"“We are thrilled to open WomHub and provide a space where women can grow their businesses and hopefully make more money,” our mission is to empower women to pursue their passions and achieve success on their own terms.”"

"“ For women who are breastfeeding, we’ve got a wellness area where women can do yoga, meditation and prayer. We’ve also got what we call the junior engineer hub. It’s basically a co-play space for kids that when you are working, your kids can co-play in the space and also learn about STEM and tech,”"

"“I think this is so important because none of this means anything unless we can move the capital into the hands of women so that they can grow their businesses. And so, this is why my business partner and I have been so focused on raising the venture capital fund so that we can start to not only create the spaces for a woman, literally and figuratively, but give them the capital that they need to thrive,”"

"Women have been largely excluded from an industry that literally designs and supports the building of cities, countries and the virtual world. When women are excluded, we have a world that was not built for us and we see gender bias persist in everything from infrastructure to virtual safety. The way we combat this is through bringing more women to the design table."

"I’m blessed to have a network of incredible women entrepreneurs and team members who inspire me every day to get up and fight."

"With WomHub, I’m particularly excited about our work supporting female founders, especially given the lack of capital that goes into female-founded businesses as well as a general lack of support."

"I think the barrier to doing incredible things has been lowered by technology, which has started to reduce inequality. Before, you needed an Ivy League education, where now you can learn cool things online from those institutions, tinker with technology and develop cool things, connect to others and have your voice heard, and that excites me for young women in STEM."

"“Don’t take life too seriously. You don’t need to figure things out right away. Figure things out along the way…“"

"We don’t just don’t have the time to do the things that don’t matter. I think we are called on in this season as young Africans to seize power"

"I am often confused by people who fail to understand the importance of the city centre. The reason you build a city centre is for the rest of the city, and you want the rest of the city to reflect the state or the province"

"Put it this way: you have goods coming in (through the port) from the east, going to the west.They go through Durban as a port; Durban is a mega port. I don’t understand why it looks the way it does; it makes no sense to me"

"To think of Durban as simply a city is to miss its larger role - it is a vital engine for the state, a bridge between local communities and global markets"

"A strong, vibrant city centre breathes life into the surrounding neighbourhoods, and in turn, the city itself fuels the strength of the wider state"

"Do you know that Durban has an economic output higher than some countries in Africa? There’s actually no reason why Durban should be in the state it’s in. It’s the most extraordinary thing for me…"

"Getting to the next level of life involves reaching another level of self-discipline."

"Your first step, in building your startup online, should be to identify your audience and where they are most active online."

"And so the question as the continent rises is: will we be men and women of courage? Will we be the generation that in 50 years time, our children reference and say ‘They did it right"

"Let me tell you, young people. There is no old person going anywhere. If you want that sit in that office, board room, chamber, or ministry, you are going to have to fight for it. Power is not given, it is taken"

"However, our primary focus must remain on the prevention of gender-based violence against the young girls and women of our country. Working with civil society and other partners across our society, we continue to call upon men and boys to stand at the forefront of changing attitudes and behavior."

"There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amidst the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States experimented with denial. For them climate skepticism and virus skepticism went hand in hand. In Mexico, the notionally left-wing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador also pursued a maverick path, refusing to take drastic action. Nationalist strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey did not deny the virus, but relied on their patriotic appeal and bullying tactics to see them through. It was the managerial centrist types who were under most pressure. Figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the United States, or Sebastián Piñera in Chile, or Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen, and their ilk in Europe. They accepted the science. Denial was not an option. They were desperate to demonstrate that they were better than the 'populists.' To meet the crisis, very middle-of-the-road politicians ended up doing very radical things. Most of it was improvisation and compromise, but insofar as they managed to put a programmatic gloss on their responses—whether in the form of the EU's Next Generation program or Biden's Build Back Better program in 2020—it came from the repertoire of green modernization, sustainable development, and the Green New Deal."

"The ANC has been the ruling in South Africa since the dawn of democracy in 1994. By the time Ramaphosa rose to speak [in his inaugural State of the Nation address on 16 February 2018], South Africa had experienced nine years of destructive and devastating rule by Jacob Zuma. To give hope to the broken nation, Ramaphosa, in his New Dawn delivery, invoked the lyrics of a song by struggle and music icon Hugh Masekela called Thuma Mina, or Send Me, in a desperate but brilliant effort to galvanise all South Africans to action to reverse the negative effects of the excesses of the Zuma presidency. […] He had struck the right chord with the nation and Thuma Mina instantaneously forced its way into the social and political lexicon of the rainbow nation. […] Hugh Masekela was immortalised."

"They were saying Shangaans must leave [Ekurhuleni]. The Vendas must leave. The next thing they will say the Batswanas must leave. The BaXhosa must leave. Who is going to remain? ... We must defeat the demon of tribalism."

"In Zimbabwe, I was booed by the whole stadium. I had to apologise to the people of Zimbabwe for the attacks. I do not want to call it xenophobic attacks. South Africans do not hate people of other nations. … We had to offer an apology on behalf of the people of South Africa. We are loved in the continent. We are a sought after country. … I had to apologise because those attacks were a national shame, …"

"The US has been unable to imagine a better future that goes beyond four plus one G, where they have been unable to imagine what 5G has to offer. They are clearly jealous that a Chinese company called Huawei has outstripped them and because they have been outstripped, they must now punish that one company. We cannot afford to have our own economy being held back because there is this fight that the US is having."

"The independence, the standing and the role of the Reserve Bank is sacrosanct. It will remain independent, as clearly stated in our constitution."

"The manifesto had a paragraph on a wish and an aspiration, acknowledging that the Reserve Bank is independent and that there is no intention whatsoever to tamper or tinker with the independence of the central bank. The wish that is expressed is, that as it goes ahead with monetary policy machinations, it will keep an eye on employment."

"The last decade has seen many of the gains of the early years of democracy reversed through state capture and corruption, a failure of collective leadership, policy uncertainty and a growing distance between the people and their movement and their government. We have had to come to terms with the erosion of the values of the ANC and confront difficult questions about the quality and integrity of our leadership as the ANC."

"One of the other things that is going to help to give a boost to our economy is how we reform our state-owned enterprises. … The state-owned enterprises were sewers of corruption, a number of them. … There was rot, there was filth and there was deep corruption. We are rooting all that out right now."

"We now have a great opportunity to put land to good use, to take it out of those hands, lazy hands I might say, and put it into the working hands of our people."

"This conference, with overwhelming agreement, unanimous agreement, has resolved that the expropriation of land without compensation should be among the mechanisms available to government to give effect to land reform and redistribution. It has also been resolved that in implementing this decision, we must insure that we do not undermine the economy, the agricultural production, and food security in our country."

"It is therefore important that as we put our vision to the country, we should do so directly, knowing that people out there want to be part of the process and will be responding, because in the end the drafting of the constitution must not be the preserve of the 490 members of this Assembly. It must be a constitution which they feel they own, a constitution that they know and feel belongs to them. We must therefore draft a constitution that will be fully legitimate, a constitution that will represent the aspirations of our people."

"As a people, our unity, determination and resilience has seen us through hard times. Just as this has been a year of great change, we look to the next year with great hope."

"Just as we attained our freedom through the support and solidarity of many people and nations around the world, we continue to stand in solidarity with the victims of injustice in other parts of the world."

"It is important that in the process of change, existing institutions of value and means of production are not destroyed. The fabric of society, however critical one may be of its present structures, should be adopted and modified where required, but not destroyed."

"I regard the Honourable member for Randburg as a friend. I regard him as a person who has done tremendous work as treasurer of the United Party on the Witswatersrand branch. The test of friendship comes in what you do as a man in adversity. I want to say, and I make so secret of it, that I am my brother's keeper and I will not be his executioner."

"My lord, one can perhaps be pardoned for saying that perhaps his (Jimmy Kantor) biggest crime, if it is a crime, is that he was a partner of Harold Wolpe, and that Harold Wolpe was his brother-in-law."