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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 countryโs future, saying there were โgreat opportunitiesโ ahead. He said this belief, however, was not always shared in the business community.
โIn South Africa all the poor people love the place and all the rich people say, โThis place is doomed โ five years topsโ. This (attitude) has been there ever since I was born.
โIf thatโs your view of the country, it makes you behave in a way that you have to rip the guts out of everything; you canโt invest in anything. For me, thatโs a disaster when the business community has that attitude.
โIn 20 yearsโ time, weโll have another breakfast โ five years will have come and gone many times and weโll all be here,โ he predicted.
Copelyn admitted to a โsense of great panicโ 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 companyโs success through being prepared to take political risks in a โrather different and specialโ 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 โbanned and house-arrested all my predecessors!โ
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 โmassiveโ bursary scheme for their children studying at tertiary institutions and providing mobile clinics and testing for HIV.
HCIโs simple philosophy was โto take political risks and trust in South Africaโ, said Copelyn, describing the country as โone of the last of the big untapped markets of the world.โ