Congress 2009 (Part 1)

The Master Builders South Africa Annual Congress was held at the Sandton Convention Centre from 27 to 30 September 2009.  A quick glance at the programme before the event, highlighted a tight schedule with a good selection of speakers and two panel discussions.

First up was a presentation entitled ‘Living Boldly in Uncertain Times’, by Bobby Godsell, Chairman of ESKOM Holdings.  Mr Godsell spoke about the 3 major uncertainties that we live with at present:

1. The Financial Market Collapse (Sep 08 to Mar 09)
2. Getting used to living in an Asian centric world
3. Africa – Our Continent.

On the latter, Mr Godsell had a number of interesting comments and statistics.  Africa has shown the greatest continental growth rate for the last 15 years and remittances by Africans living abroad now exceeds foreign donor aid and foreign investment.  The Economist magazine recently indicated that Demography (an increase in population) could in fact be a major contributor for growth.  For living proof of this, one simply needs to turn our eyes to the Chinese model, which has worked very well.

There are also a number of large South African companies that are doing very well in Africa.  These include MTN, SAA, Shoprite, Standard Bank and DSTV.

In Mr Godsell’s opinion to live boldly in uncertain times, one needs two facilitators – good Government and good people.  He went on to look at the latter by looking at ‘what we can do’?  His recipe for success included the following focus areas:

• We need to take our duties and responsibilities seriously
• We will need to be more entrepreneurial and will have to undertake different projects/jobs simultaneously
• The banking fraternity needs to recreate trust in their institutions
• We all need to manage debt more effectively
• There needs to be a revised look at Education – from the bottom up
• We need to manage the AIDS crisis
• Energy and Water will become even more scarce – we need to learn how to conserve both.  One way is to install Solar Water Heaters.
• A renewed focus on the Family unit

In a response to one of the questions that followed this presentation, Mr Godsell said that in his view, the capacity to generate electricity would have to double in the next 25 years to meet the demand (from 40,000 MW to 80,000 MW).  To do this, Eskom would require all of the following; “lots of Nuclear”, Coal, Wind, Solar and Biomass.  The impact of this would be an even greater increase in the unit price of electricity and much more responsible usage.

Next up was Dennis Dykes, Nedbank Group’s Chief Economist.  He briefly ran through a run down of the effect of the financial market collapse, where we are now and his estimation on the recovery time of the economy as a whole, as well as specific industry segments.  His conclusion was that we had surprisingly quickly reached the trough and that there were tangible signs in most sectors of either a slow recovery, or a marked halt in the downward trend.

The ‘other’ Michael Jackson, the Master of Ceremonies for Congress 2009, then gave a fascinating chat on change.  We purchased a copy of his presentation and hope to put it up on our website for our Members to access in the near future.  Not surprisingly, the rate of change is increasing exponentially.  Perhaps more alarming is that the frequency of change, measure in how quickly the world doubles its knowledge base, has gone from over 10 years during the last century to months/weeks this century.

Look out for Part 2 of this News Article later this week.

Gary Amstutz | Commercial & Online Manager