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Winning Women: A lively, quicksilver power broker

Dolly Mokgatle is used to sparking her way into a room, not only because of her extensive background in energy matters, but because her effusive, lively character generates warmth.

The day we meet at Peotona Group Holdings in Rivonia, Joburg, where she is one of four executive directors and a founder, she is hobbling.

Elegantly, but it is a hobble.

The day before, she had walked 15km for charity. She’d done little training and, in a year in which she celebrated her 60th birthday, that was possibly not wise.

But all her fascinating life, Mokgatle has been throwing herself into whatever it is she is doing.

Peotona was established 11 years ago to leverage sustainable opportunities for people and communities in the “second economy”, through Peotona’s “first-economy” activity.

Peotona Group Holdings includes Peotona Capital, an investment company owned and managed by Mokgatle and three other high-powered women – Cheryl Carolus, who chairs it, Wendy Lucas-Bull and Thandi Orleyn.

Over the past decade, Peotona has developed a programme to mentor young people – predominantly women. This programme will be taken to the next level through section 21 companies.

The group has been involved, together with its partners, in educational and sports projects, university programmes, and the building of schools and small businesses.

Mokgatle rises at 3.30am to give her enough hours in the day to be “of service to South Africa”.

Apart from her extensive responsibilities at Peotona, she is nonexecutive chairperson of Zurich Insurance Company SA, the State Diamond Trader, the Rothschild Foundation Trust and the Unisa School of Business Leadership.

Last year, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed her to the panel he chaired that was tasked with getting South Africa out of the endless power cuts crippling the economy.

“We had to help turn Eskom around,” she says. Nobody was surprised that Ramaphosa had included Mokgatle because for 12 years, from 1991 to 2003, she was managing director of the Eskom Transmission Group.

LITTLE BLACK BOOK

BUSINESS TIP: Anyone can write a strategy, but to achieve it is a different matter. Refocus when you need to do so.

MENTOR: Allen Morgan, former CEO and chairman of Eskom, is still my mentor today.

BOOK: The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, on the 2008 banking crisis.

INSPIRATION: My mother, who sold clothes and worked as a cleaner.

WOW! MOMENT: Receiving the Eskom Chairman’s Award from John Maree in 1995.

LIFE LESSON: The more generous you are, the more you receive from others.

During that time, she ensured that the lossmaking division became a technically successful, financially profitable and transformed group.

She knew the business inside out. Asked about the best source of energy for the country today – with debates over nuclear, solar, wind and fossil fuels – she says: “We need a diversified approach. It primarily needs to be a balanced one.”

The wisdom and experience gained from a lifetime of work ensures Mokgatle will continue to sleep less than most South Africans.

Recently, she was appointed to a new fund for small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) established by business moguls Adrian Gore, Brian Joffe and Johann Rupert. It does not have a name yet, but its function will be to raise funds for SMMEs.

The pint-sized woman who funded her own education – she has an LLB and is a nonpractising attorney of the high court – is passionate about mentoring and supporting schoolchildren.

“I hear many reports about the abuse of young people. It hurts me that, as a nation, we don’t rise up and do something.”

She’s decided that she would like to empower children to obtain excellent matric results “by sending tutors to help them in Grade 8 and upwards”.

Mokgatle will fund tutors in a foundation she has established, called Palesa Sa Sechaba.

One of the reasons she will need to continue working, she says,
is to fund her foundation. She intends to start small, by focusing on certain key subjects, such as maths, that children historically find difficult.

Mokgatle, a mother of three, was the sixth child in a family of eight born to an entrepreneurial tailor in Alexandra township near Sandton.

She relied on her ingenuity, loans and bursaries to put herself through school and university.

Whatever this lively, quicksilver personality is doing, her primary focus is always to make a difference in the country she so loves.

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