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Top entrepreneur turned apartheid into opportunity
BUSINESS ACUMEN
THE black businessman voted as KwaZulu-Natal's top entrepreneur credits apartheid for his success. Awarded the title of KwaZulu-Natal Entrepreneur of the Year in Durban this week, Sisa Bikitsha said SA's former racial laws made him a businessman, and the homeland system made his business. BT Money is a co-sponsor of the award. Bikitsha, who grew up in rural Transkei, now owns eight Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, an exhaust fitment centre, a service station and a cold storage plant. He lives with his wife Maureen and their four children in the wealthy suburb of La Lucia, where his brand-new Mercedes E320 points directly at Harry Oppenheimer's home. His privately owned fasxt food chain has a yearly turnover of R15-million and employs about 200 people. His total holdings - located around KwaZulu-Natal and the former Transkei - boast sales of R27-million. Bikitsha launched his empire in Umtata in 1979 when he used the Transkei's dubious independent status to break a Kentucky monopoly in the Eastern Cape. "The Nats put me into business - I am eternally grateful," Bikitsha says, laughing. "I had a problem opening the first KFC store because a white guy in East London said he owned the franchise for the whole Eastern Cape, up to Natal. So I got a letter from the Transkei government to say it was independent, and I've owned the franchise for that area ever since." His personal transformation occurred four years earlier, after five years of unemployment on Johannesburg's streets where he was forbidden to take a job without an apartheid work permit - the dompas. Bikitsha chose to abandon his search for work, and take up "a search for money" instead. In the first of a series of legal confidence scams, he started to make "real money" by posing as a funeral parlour owner. He acquired the addresses of newly bereaved families by offering "incentives" to clerks at several Johannesburg hospitals and police stations, and sold coffins by escorting the bereaved around funeral showrooms. "I would rush out and buy the casket they selected wholesale," he said. "I needed to pay the parlours only for cold storage for the corpses." When he returned to the Transkei in 1978 he discovered that it had most businesses except a KFC. Bikitsha said the former Xhosa Development Corporation encouraged him to start his own business, but he had to seek R20 000 from Standard Bank - using someone else's house as collateral. "In 1986, US-based KFC disinvested and they had to sell their stores in a hurry, so I immediately snapped up their outlet in Malvern (near Durban)." Bikitsha's two KFC outlets became a chain in 1992, when the SBDC granted him loans for stores in Durban, Lusikisiki, Mount Frere and Ngcobo - all of which he built from scratch. He plans to take on many more projects, starting with a shopping centre in Umlazi. Bikitsha says: "I exploited apartheid to get here. Somehow, I don't feel guilty about it."
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