The Editor’s Diary: Out and About with Mutumwa Mawere Part 3: Corporate Literacy, Finest Wines and The Business Environment

Brian Kazungu, 19/12/2020

Its Thursday afternoon, the 17^th of December 2020 at The Royal India Restaurant, Johannesburg’s prime food rendezvous in Sandton where I am to join a corporate literacy discussion with accomplished business leaders such Mutumwa Mawere and Dr Eric Soubeiga.

Also present was South Africa’s former Ambassador to Nigeria and Brazil, Bagumzi Sifingo who is passionate about seeing entrepreneurship being used as a vehicle for solving community problems and creating better standards of living among citizens.

Mutumwa Mawere and Dr Soubeiga are both investment specialists who worked for the World Bank and are also authors with Mutumwa having written When Minds Meet: A Conversation with Mutumwa Mawere and Dr Soubeiga having written Mastering Financial Modelling: A Professional’s Guide to Building Financial Models in Excel.

As a media house (iniafrica.com), in our pursuit for promoting entrepreneurship, we are part of a subscription member based community, the Connections2Communities (C2C) initiative which helps in developing and creating a shared understanding and better appreciation of corporate matters.

This approach is practically effective and useful towards helping entrepreneurs in solving business problems and in utilising opportunities together as opposed to doing it individually.

Among the issues that are often touched on in the corporate literacy discussions are what a company is, what are the duties and responsivities of directors, what is the relationship between directors and shareholders, what is profit, what is corporate governance an investments etc.?

We discussed the possibility and relevance of coming up with a Corporate Literacy Institute that can help corporates and the general public with practical as well as tried and tested knowledge which helps in making the best possible entrepreneurship and investment decisions.

Later on, we were joined by Ronald Mkize from the Graham Beck enterprises, the producers of the globally renowned and award winning range of Cap Classique (Methode Cap Classique) sparkling wines.

In way that shows why they are the people’s choice when it comes to wines, Ronald shared a number of expert insights on their brand and the wine business in general touching on the significance of bottle caps, colour, taste and even packaging in relation to their target market.

The knowledge shared and the insights gained in corporate literacy talks are priceless because more than academic theory, under the C2C corporate literacy engagements, real life business experiences are shared mostly by people who have been and those that are still in the field.

Ambassador expressed his joy that at least there are many young people who are considering and putting effort on setting up their own businesses as compared to the time when he was still a youngster where looking for a job was the norm for many young people after finishing school.

He also talked about the love for wines in celebrating life especially among South Africans and Nigerians across the board.