Lot Ndlovu: Leading figure in banking transformation
1951-2013
LOT Ndlovu, who has died at the age of 62, led the first attempt to create a black-owned bank in South Africa.
Peoples Bank was started by Nedbank with Ndlovu as CEO in 2000. As a director of Nedbank from 1993, he drove the process with the then Nedbank CEO, Richard Laubscher, from 1995.
He believed South Africa needed a black-owned bank and thought it would answer the need for both transformation and affordable banking. But by 2003 it was struggling to survive. There was negative equity and his empowerment shareholders were losing heavily.
Nedbank itself was in desperate trouble. A new executive team took over in 2003, decided that the concept of a separate bank for the lower-income and emerging black market was strategically flawed and not viable and closed Peoples Bank in May 2004.
Ndlovu furiously opposed this. He thought that, given enough time, Peoples Bank would turn and become profitable. He felt the new leaders at Nedcor had pulled the plug on him prematurely and was extremely bitter about it.
It was not the bank that had failed, he said, but the system that had failed the bank. Not everyone agreed. They saw Peoples Bank as Nedbank’s bank for black people and said they did not want a bank that was separate but equal. It reminded them too much of apartheid.
They also questioned its value as a tool for transformation, pointing out the fact that Nedbank remained by far the least transformed of the major banks.
Ndlovu was made a vicechairman of Nedbank and chairman of the transformation subcommittee of the board. He drove the transformation agenda passionately and uncompro-
By the time he resigned from the board, Nedbank was one of the most transformed JSE companies
misingly. He was sharply critical of the Financial Sector Charter accord, which was signed with much fanfare in 2003 after three years of tough negotiation between the banking and insurance industry, labour and the finance ministry. They congratulated themselves on a job well done, but Ndlovu attacked the accord in a blistering speech, saying it did not go far enough. He was mildly rebuked by the Nedbank hierarchy but was unapologetic.
By the time he resigned from the board in 2009, Nedbank was one of the most transformed companies on the JSE, which was largely Ndlovu’s doing.
In 1997, Ndlovu made a powerful submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on behalf of the Black Management Forum, of which he was president, saying claims by white business leaders to have resisted apartheid must be rejected with contempt. He said the strategy of white business was one of co-option and containment and accused it of having used the state security system to bully black workers into submission and subjugation.
He said the role of white business under apartheid was lamentable given the resources at its disposal and the government’s dependence on it.
Black leaders felt the lash of his tongue too. In 2010, he wrote an open letter calling for a vote of no confidence in controversial Black Management Forum president Jimmy Manyi, who had been one of his chief lieutenants at Peoples Bank.
He said that under Manyi the forum had become an unthinking organisation that was no longer respected. He said Manyi’s views were “embarrassing” and betrayed “a frightening brand of arrogance, amateurism and lack of logic”.
Ndlovu was born on August 15 1951 and raised on a farm in the coal-mining district of Kriel in Mpumalanga, one of 11 siblings.
His father used to be a farmworker, but “he was a very smart guy”. By the time Ndlovu was born, he was running his own business buying and selling cattle, bottles, skins, hides and whatever else the local farmers needed.
Ndlovu was sent to a Seventh Day Adventist missionary school in Butterworth in the Eastern Cape for his secondary education. His father wanted him to be a minister of religion, but he was good at science and wanted to be a medical doctor.
He “desperately” wanted to go to the University of Fort Hare because of its intellectual and political traditions, but could not get permission because he was classified a Zulu and under apartheid law Fort Hare was for Xhosas.
He started work as a clerk in the Department of Bantu Affairs in Witbank to give himself time to figure out his way forward, but stayed for four years. In the process, he developed a lifelong empathy with people who had to stand in queues in government offices.
“I became a champion of the public against the behaviour of government civil servants.”
He began a course in psychology through the University of South Africa but did not find it challenging and gave up.
Then he joined Eskom as a training officer in labour relations, but he was fired when he tried to champion the cause of two cleaners.
After six months without a job, he joined the mines in a similar capacity and then worked in human resources at various other companies, including Afrox, where he became manager of labour relations.
After three years in management and marketing at Philips, including a one-year stint at head office in Holland, he took the job of managing director of the Black Management Forum in 1991.
He is survived by his wife, Zanele, and five children. — Chris Barron