Africa

"Agathocles the Sicilian2 became king of Syracuse not only from private fortune but from a mean and abject one. Born of a potter, he always kept to a life of crime at every rank of his career; nonetheless, his crimes were accompanied with such virtue of spirit and body that when he turned to the military, he rose through its ranks to become praetor of Syracuse. After he was established in that rank, he decided to become prince and to hold with violence and without obligation to anyone else that which had been conceded to him by agreement. Having given intelligence of his plan to Hamilcar the Carthaginian, who was with his armies fighting in Sicily, one morning he assembled the people and Senate of Syracuse as if he had to decide things pertinent to the republic. At a signal he had ordered, he had all the senators and the richest of the people killed by his soldiers. Once they were dead, he seized and held the principate3 of that city without any civil controversy. And although he was defeated twice by the Carthaginians and in the end besieged, not only was he able to defend his city but also, leaving part of his men for defense against the siege, he attacked Africa with the others. In a short time he freed Syracuse from the siege and brought the Carthaginians to dire necessity; they were compelled of necessity to come to an agreement with him, to be content with the possession of Africa, and to leave Sicily to Agathocles."

"Hazy had spent some time working at Hughes Airwest and then consulted to the industry. Through resulting contacts, in 1973, Hazy discovered a DC-8 aircraft on sale for $2.2 million from National Airlines of Miami. Gonda heard of a Mexican airline hunting for a plane to use on a new route from Los Angeles to Acapulco. Putting the two concepts together, Hazy and the Gondas acquired the DC-8 and leased it to the airline. The economics worked, producing positive cash flow that enabled the trio to repeat the transaction profitably. They bought a series of turbo-prop planes from Hughes on the cheap—$250,000 each—and leased them to capital-short airlines in Africa. In the early years, the trio scouted for planes they could acquire at a low price and bought only when a leasing deal was in place. That required persuading airlines about the appeal of the aircraft operating lease. Airlines had conventionally bought their own planes or swapped them with each other under temporary leases to handle seasonal travel fluctuations. The significant capital required to buy planes had to be internally generated or borrowed. The idea of airlines leasing from independent third-party owners was new. Most of the trio’s early customers were airlines based in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, starved for capital and attracted to leasing."

"Schweitzer, ‘that great benefactor of Africa’, who reportedly said: ‘Everyone is getting involved in politics – but no one is prepared to work.’ ‘Let us therefore get to work,’"

"He fully conceded that it might be more efficient to run his business empire from Geneva or some other central location, but felt he had certain responsibilities to South Africa. Responding to a question in this regard, his answer was brief: ‘There’s too much to do in Africa. I feel more needed here.’"

"Seeing the world from a helicopter is phenomenal. You’re like a voyeur, looking over the neighbour’s fence, and then you come down and mix with locals. From 500 feet, you gain a grasp of the landscape and the geography. Then as you cover more ground, I think I’ve been to 130 countries so far, you get a real understanding of the earth. The first thing you realise is that it’s nonsense when people worry that the earth won’t be able to feed a growing human population. I’ve flown over millions and millions of acres of unused or underused productive land, particularly in the Ukraine and Russia, South America and Africa, where the most obvious example is in Zimbabwe. And the world’s certainly not crowded."

"No. My return to adventure capitalism needed to bear the hallmarks and characteristics of my past ventures: a business opportunity in a sector like telecoms that I knew something about, but in a territory that constituted a great unknown and fed my curiosity for the new. Asia was enticing but too far away for me to make any meaningful inroads. Africa is going to be a major opportunity but, with all the ventures I looked at there, I decided it was too soon; the necessary infrastructure was simply not there yet. Then I travelled to Latin America and decided that this was a place where I could do business."