Farewell to crony capitalist Kerzner

SOL Kerzner’s “retirement” has triggered an embarrassing discharge of praise of which the man, born 78 years ago in Bez Valley, Johannesburg, to Lithuanian immigrants, is not remotely worthy.

In 2007, the UK’s Independent newspaper summed him up best: “He is not just . . . vulgar and brash and apt to begin his telephone calls with the words: ‘So what the f**k is going on?’. He is a small man with big wives.”

By contrast, South Africa’s scaredy-cat press has fawned on the pudgy former husband of four wives, praising his giddying hotel prowess instead of focusing on how he made his cash.

The prevailing view, as Business Day wrote last week, was that Kerzner “remains one of SA’s most admired entrepreneurs”.

Well, sure, if the high benchmark of entrepreneurship is crony capitalism and dropping bags of cash at politicians’ doors.

If he’s admired, it’s because today’s executives are less adept at bartering favours. Witness former Imperial Bank executive Eben Kotze, who was slapped with a 19year jail sentence last week for granting loans for kickbacks.

Sol was more savvy — even if the canvas for his best work was the putatively “independent” bantustans, the godforsaken stretches of dirt that the apartheid government dictated would be a “homeland” for “non-whites”.

Kerzner told this newspaper he was just a “boring accountant” in Durban when, at 29, he got his first break: developing the Beverly Hills hotel in Umhlanga into SA’s first five-star hotel.

But Sol’s real break was in 1979, when he opened the gaudy Sun City in one such homeland, Bophuthatswana, built for what was then a mega R35-million.

“Sin City” hosted singers unconcerned by the cultural boycott, such as Frank Sinatra and Cliff Richard, had bawdy topless dancers and the $1-million golf challenge.

But it’s real grip on the psyche of white South Africa was that it boasted casinos at a time when gambling was outlawed by the quixotically puritanical state.

Whispers that Sol had greased the palms of homeland leaders to get those gambling licences were never far away; speculation he, of course, brushed off — until the 1990 Harms Commission.

Cornered, Sol then admitted that, yes, he had paid R2-million to Transkei’s prime minister, Chief George Matanzima, to score exclusive gambling rights. ( He claimed Matanzima exerted “undue pressure” on him.)

What other names lay in Sol’s black book, people wondered? Bophuthatswana’s Lucas Mangope? Then-president PW Botha?

Sol wasn’t going to take any chances of anyone finding out.

When former Finance Week editor Allan Greenblo wrote a book dishing the dirt, Kerzner Unauthorised, the Sun King dashed to court to ban it — a gambit The New York Times described as an “early test of press freedom under SA’s new constitution”.

The Mail & Guardian published some details from the book, revealing that when the Transkei authorities tried to prosecute Kerzner, the National Party government shielded him from “extradition” in mid-1990. ( The quid pro quo, apparently, was that Sol agree to save hotels in the Comores, an island which the government used to smuggle arms)

In 2002, Judge Horn extended the ban on the book in perpetuity to protect Sol’s “reputation”.

Last week, this newspaper described Kerzner as “South Africa’s Donald Trump”, which is hardly an endorsement except, perhaps, among Tea Party conspiracy theorists who lionise perpetually bankrupt tycoons with a tin-ear for too much kitsh and blowdried roadkill for hair.

It is ironic that Sol’s former business partner in launching the Southern Sun empire in 1979, SA Breweries, said this week that it might quit the hotel business.

SABMiller is “reviewing its strategic options” for its 39.6% stake in Tsogo Sun, which now controls Southern Sun. It’s a chunky stake, worth R10.9-billion, and if SAB sells, it’ll draw a line under a time when conglomerates spread their tentacles as far as they could, rather than blinkering themselves to a “core business”.

Sol now lives in London, where he moved in 1988. Good riddance to a man who pioneered a particularly noxious brand of South African crony capitalism.