“noise makers” led by one big guy from the Eastern Cape whom I particularly disliked. One day, having skipped a class to go to a nearby bar to watch the springboks play, I came face to face with the Xhosa noisemaker who introduced himself to me as Thathi Makunga. We became friends and would regularly study together while talking about how we would one day like to run our own business. We launched Pamoja Consulting as the consulting arm of Carlos Pereira with Thathi and I owning 60% while the audit firm had a 40% share of the business. We landed a big transaction with Kola Karim, a London based Nigerian businessman, which was fairly lucrative and held the promise of more to come. I told Carlos to keep the fees we earned from it in exchange for his shares in Pamoja. Soon after, at the end of 2005, I resigned from the audit firm to run Pamoja full time. Thathi remained a business partner whilst working full time at Deutsche Bank as an investment analyst.
while a patient Thathi supported me from his own salary. It was a difficult time and I would advise all aspiring entrepreneurs to have at least 4 to 6 months salary saved up to focus on business development. A tender seeking the services of qualified professionals to sit on a panel of financial advisors came up at the City of Johannesburg (COJ) and we submitted a proposal. To our surprise, we received a letter confirming our appointment. The
fixed assets. We became heroes of sorts and were rewarded handsomely. Eventually Thathi joined the business full time and we had to work even harder on the small projects before being entrusted with big country projects such as the 96 billion rand passenger rail agency project. The largest project we did for the COJ was a 200 million dollar project where the City was rolling out a fibre optic cable to underprivileged areas. The primary strength of the COJ is that it is a progressive city with constant development opportunities which we are in a position to replicate to the 280 odd municipalities that look up to the COJ.
“One of my goals is to build a solid asset by 2015 such that when I launch my presidential campaign, it is Pamoja benefi tted from not for monetary rewards.”
Other than Kola’s business, we acted as the accountants for Priscilla Muthuis’ business interests. I owe her and her husband RMB CEO Pat Muthui a lot for getting us started. Kola’s business went quiet after a while and for about five months we had little to do. I spent my days sitting at my brother in law Henry Kihara’s Atnet IT Consulting premises
job was to verify their fixed assets and we outdid the previous provider PriceWaterhouse Coopers (PWC) who now began to court us and even tried to sell to us their fixed asset services division Combined Systems which we declined. A year later, Combined Systems tripled its turnover so in retrospect maybe we should have bought it but I believe everything happens for a reason. We decided that rather than getting excited about the short term financial rewards, we would try and make our name synonymous with delivery. We subcontracted PWC and worked our socks off. For the first time ever, the COJ got a clean audit largely due to the new state of their
has BEE which is why, despite having no experience, we were given a chance to sit at the first panel on the COJ. I am however not a tenderpreneur – commonly defined as someone who is awarded tenders because of political connections but lacks the capacity to deliver. Our business is 70% public sector and 30% private. We would not be able to play in the private sector, which is very unforgiving, if we were ‘tenderpreneurs’. Pamoja Consulting was recently rebranded to Pamoja Capital. South Africa is the “capital Capital of Africa” and “Capital” better reflects our service offering. We have began investing in deals that we structure through a Mauritian based entity
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