It is with great sadness that we heard Eric Molobi lost his battle with cancer on Saturday night, 3 June 2006. Our thoughts are with Martha and his family during this difficult time. Eric's funeral will be Saturday, 10 June 2006, at West Parl Cemetry, with the reception at Sacred Heart College afterwards.
Eric Molobi Executive chairman of Kagiso Trust Investment and resident in Gerard Street Married to Martha Molobi, PA at Sacred Heart College
What does Eric Molobi have in common with Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa? They’re the cream of the crop in the business world.
In fact, Molobi and Sexwale were named Top Business Personality by the Impumelelo Empowerment Awards last year.
And he topped the list of active BEE directors together with Ramaphosa in 2003: each then had six directorships – and Molobi’s list just keeps on growing…
This 60-year-old ex-chairman of Telkom is currently:
Executive chairman and co-founder of Kagiso Trust Investment Company (Pty) Limited;
Chairman of the Kagiso group; First Lifestyle Holdings Ltd; Resolve Group; and Metropolitan Holdings since January 2005;
Director of Imperial Holdings Limited; Mvelaphanda Resources Limited; National Housing Finance Corporation; Northam Platinum Limited; Rembrandt Group Limited; Ukhamba Holdings; NM Rothschild and Sons (South Africa) (Pty) Limited and Steffen Robertson and Kirsten (South Africa) (Pty) Limited.
Molobi also serves on the International Advisory Boards of Indepent Newspapers and loveLife.
But his first love is Kagiso. In 1990 he joined the Kagiso Charitable Trust ("Kagiso Trust") as CEO, where he was responsible for raising funds from foreign government agencies to channel into educational and community development projects in South Africa. Just four years later he was awarded the prestigious Ordre National de la Legion D'Honneur by the French government.
Following South Africa's successful reintegration into the global community in 1994, Eric initiated the establishment of Kagiso Trust Investments Limited, an investment company with the primary purpose of providing long-term financial support to the Kagiso Trust.
Education is another of Molobi’s passions. Eric obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of South Africa whilst serving as a political prisoner on Robben Island with numerous prominent leaders, including Nelson Mandela.
As a United Democratic Front activist, Molobi was to deliver a speech on education at a conference of The National Education Crisis Committee (NECC) soon after the launch of the UDF in 1983 – but because he was in hiding at the time, his lecture, Education as a Liberation Force, had to be read as a statement at the conference. Molobi was detained three months later …
Following his release from Robben Island, he worked for the Munich Re Insurance Company of South Africa as a trainee insurance underwriter and was subsequently recruited by the South African Council of Churches to set up a community development programme aimed at the disadvantaged.
He then joined Kagiso, a name Eric describes as "rooted in our community and closely associated with the transformation of our country.
“It is a name that is synonymous with empowerment and is unrivalled in its reputation for business success and integrity. It is a name with a reputation for nurturing enterprise and for its belief in better business, for a better society. A name to trust."
About Kagiso:
Over the past decade, Kagiso Trust Investments (KTI) has pursued probably the most conservative investment philosophy of all SA's big black economic empowerment (BEE) groups.
The approach has paid off. Other high-flyers of the 1990s such as New Africa Investments Ltd (Nail) and the Real Africa group collapsed under pressure from the market.
But KTI weathered the storms on the JSE Securities Exchange during the late 1990s and has emerged as one of the most focused and viable BEE groups in the country, thanks to a patient and rigorous investment philosophy.
The company has achieved high annual growth in net asset value with relatively low dilution of KTI's controlling interest. KTI has kept virtually the same management team, led by co-founders Molobi, the executive chairman, and Johnson Njeke, the MD.
KTI was one of the first BEE groups in SA. It was formed in December 1993 with a capital injection of R26m from Kagiso Trust (KT), a nongovernmental organisation, which was looking for a way to reduce its dependence on donor funding.
The objectives were to provide a long-term means of financial support for the trust and to achieve true empowerment through active operational involvement in underlying investments.
In the early days, the company facilitated the listing of Real Africa Group in 1995 and sold soon afterwards, pocketing a healthy profit.
But it also lost money on a bad investment in building group Boumat during the mid-1990s, which was made on the assumption that the Reconstruction & Development Programme would take off in a big way.
