Archie Nkonyeni: Transkei business pioneer
Archie Nkonyeni, who has died in East London at the age of 84, became the bestknown entrepreneur in the Transkei during apartheid, when the dice were loaded against black people trying to break into what was a white-dominated business universe.
He was a pioneer in the field of property development. He was the first black businessman in the Transkei to establish a company for the purpose of acquiring, leasing and renting commercial property to business enterprises, and he built the first blackowned and -run shopping mall in the region.
He joined the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce (Nafcoc) in 1978, and due to his extensive business training and entrepreneurial expertise, quickly became part of the leadership at regional and national levels.
In 1981 he became a founding director of African Bank, one of Nafcoc’s most important establishments. He was vice-chair of the board and chair of the audit committee.
He became deputy president of Nafcoc in 1990 and president in 1992.
Nkonyeni was born on June 3 1936 in Qora, a remote rural village about 100km south of Mthatha.
His father was a “boss-boy” on the mines, and his mother sold home-grown vegetables, tobacco and soap which she made from lard from a small piggery she started.
By the age of 12 he was an orphan. He matriculated at Healdtown missionary college, where the main topics of debate were Bantu education, the defiance campaign, and violence as a means of defeating apartheid.
He wanted to study medicine but didn’t have the money, so got a job as a messenger in a law office.
In 1956 he enrolled to study part-time for a BCom at the University of Cape Town. During the day he packed soap in a warehouse and worked as a filing clerk for a firm of chartered accountants.
He applied to do articles but was told the firm’s white clients wouldn’t want a black person doing their books.
He began working as a freelance bookkeeper for traders in Cape Town’s Langa township, where his clients included a general dealer, butchery, stationery shop and doctor’s surgery.
After graduating in 1965, he worked as a
senior clerk in the Transkei homeland’s department of finance while completing his articles.
When he failed a supplementary exam in a subject he needed to pass to become a CA, he decided he wanted to go into business and be his own boss.
He became the accountant and then manager of the Transkei Hotel, where his first challenge was telling a conference of irate homeland leaders that apartheid laws forbade them from addressing white journalists in the hotel.
He had been warned that he would lose his licence if he allowed it. So Kaiser Matanzima, Mangosuthu Buthelezi and co held their press conference on the pavement outside.
After spending six weeks on a leadership exchange programme in the US, Nkonyeni decided to pursue his ambition of becoming an independent businessman.
In 1978 he used a Transkei Development Corporation loan to buy a hardware business in the centre of Mthatha called Jobs Hardware, which attracted him because it was cash-based, had a rising turnover, and a newly “independent” Transkei was experiencing a construction boom.
Above all it was part of a complex of businesses which he thought had great potential for an upmarket development.
Over the next 10 years he used the steady income from this business to fund numerous other ventures, including the acquisition of various gas, fuel and paint businesses which he merged into National General Agencies in 1981.
He started other businesses, including Push Investments and the National Investment Syndicate, in order to encourage black people to invest in commercial property.
He created the City Centre Shopping Complex company to build and run the City Centre Shopping Complex in Mthatha, the first black-owned and -run shopping mall in the Transkei and the realisation of his dream of an upmarket development. His auditor was Wiseman Nkuhlu.
The complex opened in 1988 and within a year its occupancy level was more than 90%.
Nkonyeni’s many business successes were recognised by the award of an honorary doctorate by the Walter Sisulu University.
He was chair of the Resilient Property Fund and sat on the boards of Metropolitan Life, M-Cell, which started MTN, MultiChoice, Tiger Oats and DaimlerChrysler, among many others.
A larger-than-life but humble person, Nkonyeni, known as much for his astute strategic insights as his tough talking, said the key to success in business was the ability to be ruthless and never to allow personal feelings to influence business decisions.
“Pity doesn’t keep a business afloat,” he would say.
He expected his tenants to pay up on time, and he expected high levels of performance from those who worked with him and for him. He wasted no time getting rid of anyone who fell short or did not deliver on his expectations. Whether they were senior executives or shared his clan name made no difference.
He hated nepotism, cadre deployment and corruption, and spoke out fearlessly whenever he encountered them. This brought him into frequent conflict with some powerful figures, who in the homelands of the apartheid era wielded considerable power.
There was speculation that his vocal intolerance of such practices may have been a reason why he served only one two-year term as president of Nafcoc.
Nkonyeni is survived by Nodyuti, his wife of 57 years, and six children.