My Africa Today

We’ve all heard of M-Net; most of us grew up watching K-TV, then came Carte Blanche, the Sunday night movie and satellite TV. But what about the man behind it all?

Koos Bekker went to the US in the 1980s to do an MBA and wrote his thesis on pay television. Then he came back to South Africa and, with the help of Naspers and a few other media companies, started M-Net.

In 1997, Bekker became the CEO of Naspers which then owned most of the initial M-Net company (Electronic Media Network).

Since then, he’s grown the group into a multinational, multi-channel (DStv) media house that has operations in China and South America, and is Africa’s largest media company. Naspers also owns pretty much all the Afrikaans daily newspapers in the country (Beeld, Rapport, Die Burger), some English ones (Daily Sun), almost every magazine (from FHM to Huisgenoot) and the “24” brands (News 24, etc). Oh, and they own 30% of cellphone messaging service MXit.

He is not your average entrepreneur.

For one thing, he is currently on sabbatical – not something CEO’s usually do when the company is roaring ahead.

But as he explained to us late last year: at the age of 54, he has already been the CEO of a JSE-listed company for 16 years.

He is also unafraid to admit that he has faults, “People often get stale in their later quarters. You know, many presidents of the US, for example, had a poorer second term than a first term. I think you start believing your own wisdom and you lose your daring. So I’d like to refresh myself. But also there are many interesting things in media, and what tickled me particularly are Korea, Japan and the West Coast of the States, where young people are inventing new technologies. So I’d like to spend some time there.”

It is this sort of understanding of self and the desire to constantly innovate that comes through in his discussion of entrepreneurship.

Asked, if he defined himself as an entrepreneur, he told Tycoon “I think entrepreneurs are not very good at explaining themselves I think what makes them entrepreneurs is something that maybe you don’t even yourself recognise it could be a defect, for example, Bill Clinton’s father was a drunk; sometimes a defect creates a need to compensate by showing the world.”

He adds that probably the worst environment in which to nurture an entrepreneur is in a happy, well-balanced family “Where do you develop your will power or your skill in getting out of trouble if you have no challenges? You have to be tossed challenges regularly and in fighting those challenges you learn how to control your self and then you learn how to run a company,” he says.

In order to be successful though, you need to learn how to take the punches and keep on coming. “You have the loneliness of the king, you might have a team of people around you, but if things go really bad, they all look at you and if you panic the business goes down the drain,” he says, adding, “Quite often entrepreneurs don’t care very much what the world thinks but they have one thing in common and that is the ability to take knocks and keep smiling.”

But sometimes the punches can be useful, “If we have a success all we learn from it is how smart we are and we carry on doing the same thing the next morning and we don’t learn anything but, if we mess up, we can learn some very valuable lessons.” - Geoff Candy