Social entrepreneur Johnny does good!

Investec: Brad Rubly, Jamey Lipschitz, Alexia Slutzkin, Anna Robertson, Rob Cohen, Johnny Copelyn (HCI), Melanie Levy, Grant Webber, Deon Prins and Marc Donneson.

John Copelyn, CEO of Hosken Consolidated Investments (HCI) Limited, inspired his audience at a YAD business breakfast sponsored by Investec, with a message of optimism about the country’s future, saying there were “great opportunities” ahead. He said this belief, however, was not always shared in the business community.

“In South Africa all the poor people love the place and all the rich people say, ‘This place is doomed — five years tops’. This (attitude) has been there ever since I was born.

“If that’s your view of the country, it makes you behave in a way that you have to rip the guts out of everything; you can’t invest in anything. For me, that’s a disaster when the business community has that attitude.

“In 20 years’ time, we’ll have another breakfast — five years will have come and gone many times and we’ll all be here,” he predicted.

Copelyn admitted to a “sense of great panic” when he had seen the Chronicle advertisement announcing his talk, warning the audience that they would not learn much from him. In the event, their attention was rapt throughout as he recounted his company’s success through being prepared to take political risks in a “rather different and special” business.

Copelyn, an admitted attorney and former ANC MP, was involved in the trade union movement for 20 years from the early 1970s. He remembered how he had became general secretary of his union after only a week as thenminister of police, Jimmy Kruger, had “banned and house-arrested all my predecessors!”

Copelyn recalled how in 1993 he had seen the opportunity to build a large capital base for the movement which until then had depended on donations, hand-outs and subscriptions from members. HCI now provides a base for all the social work the trade union does, including giving housing loans to members, operating a “massive” bursary scheme for their children studying at tertiary institutions and providing mobile clinics and testing for HIV.

HCI’s simple philosophy was “to take political risks and trust in South Africa”, said Copelyn, describing the country as “one of the last of the big untapped markets of the world.”