Against what he had been told by numerous people – including his own parents and teachers, Kgosietsile Mariri had a simple enough plan for when he completed his studies at the University of Botswana: to get a well-paying job and buy himself a nice car. Reality was much more complicated than that. After a part-time job at the Botswana Guardian/Midweek Sun as a proofreader, he got his first proper job at Commercial Motors. He didn’t last long and was soon at the Grand Palm Hotel casino where he was also fired after falling out with management. “A lot of people had told me that I cannot work for anyone because I have a strong personality.
At the time I didn’t know what they meant,” he says. Strong as it was, this personality was not going to put chicken salad on the table and so Mariri had to do the most natural thing – work for himself. However, he had decided that start-ups were a little too risky with no guarantee for success. Fortunately for him, around this time, the former and now late Member of Parliament for Francistown West, Tshelang Masisi, was selling his dry cleaning business in Maruapula shopping complex in Gaborone. “The business was on the brink of closure. Masisi spent most of his time in Francistown and the business was being run by employees who were messing up,” Mariri recalls. However, there was a complication. While he had a plan of how he could turn the business around, Mariri didn’t have the finances to back up such plan.
It is in times like these, when dreams are big and pocket shallow, that the acronym ‘CEDA’ has a particularly magical ring to it. Unfortunately, Mariri’s application for this funding was turned down thrice with the explanation that the dry-cleaning business was overtraded. “It took me eight months to convince CEDA to buy into the idea and I remember there was a time when I had a big fight with Dr. Matsheka in his office,” he says, referring to Dr. Thapelo Matsheka, the current CEO of Aon Botswana who at the time was the CEO of the Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency. At this point, Mariri’s entire plan could have collapsed but a miracle that is very rare for present-day Botswana happened. Masisi said that he could take over the drycleaner and not have to pay for the equipment while he sought CEDA funding. And so for the next nine months, Mariri used his own money to run the business while he continued to implore CEDA to fund his business plan. Ultimately, the persistence paid off and the loan application was approved but there one hurdle still lay ahead.
In a fast-paced world of technology, the drycleaner had not kept pace with the trends and its equipment had become obsolete. Mariri’s deal with Masisi was for the purchase of this equipment but CEDA questioned why its money had to be used to buy outdated equipment. “They were saying, we are buying you new equipment. Why should we have to pay for this old equipment? Ultimately though, Masisi and I were able to agree on a price and the transfer of ownership made,” he says. One problem solved, another remaining. Dry-cleaning equipment is not replaced with the ease and speed one can apply with a sim card. This meant that before the new equipment arrived, Mariri had to make do with the old one that kept breaking down and was driving customers away.
“This got to a point where I had to outsource the cleaning of laundry to another drycleaner which was costly. I had to use the small turnover I was making to pay that drycleaner on a daily basis because I wanted to retain my customers,” he says. For as long as it had operated, the drycleaner depended on volume of business to make money but after the new equipment had arrived and been installed, Mariri decided that it was time to change tack. This came in the form of doing business the way Botswana does with its tourism – offer superior service to a small, high-end clientele. The more common phrasing with regard to the latter is “low volume, high value.” “I decided I would go with less for more which is what I’m still doing right now.” Having fewer customers has enabled the dry cleaner to improve its service and nowadays, laundry brought in in the morning is ready for collection in the afternoon at no extra cost to the customer as happens with most drycleaners. The drycleaner had been called Pula Drycleaners and when he took over, Mariri wanted a complete break with the past. As part of a branding exercise, he renamed the business C’est Magnifique Drycleaners and Laundry Services.
The French means “it’s magnificent.” On account of his magnificent stewardship of the business, Mariri is one of the CEDA success stories. He says that this has been possible because, unlike the quite numerous CEDA disaster stories, he never mistook the CEDA money to be a personal loan to him. “Some of the CEDA-funded businesses fail because someone gets P1 million and thinks it is their money and not that of the business. I was always very clear about what this loan was for and always put the business first. It is not enough to have a good concept because it will definitely fail if you have no discipline. Most CEDA-funded businesses fail because their owners lack discipline,” says Mariri, who retains the conviction that start-ups are not good for a small economy like Botswana. From personal experience and holding local Asians as an example, he is also convinced that the most successful businesses are the ones that are managed by their owners. “When you have to make a decision, you do so on the basis of what you see, not what you are told,” he says.
Having repaid his entire loan and with the business sailing smoothly (except when for days when water and power supplies are interrupted), Mariri is casting his net far and wide. He would have wanted to be part of the Joe Thomas show that took place last year but that was not possible and has become a legal matter. The story he tells in his court papers is that he approached the Kgalagadi Breweries Limited (KBL) with a proposal to sponsor a music concert by the American R&B singer and that the company cut him out and got to enjoy the fruits of his labour. Conversely, KBL refutes such claims and is defending the P800 000 breach-of-confidence lawsuit that Mariri has instituted against it at the Gaborone High Court. The debacle with the Joe show has not diminished Mariri’s appetite for music promotion and a few weeks back he announced that he would be bringing another United States musician, Kenny Lattimore, to perform in Gaborone on July 26. This is a done deal and at this point Mariri is typing up loose ends. With his music promotion, he is fulfilling an ambition from his UB days when he would tell friends that in the future he would want to bring big international acts to Botswana. Nothing like that was happening at the time and the friends would laugh him off.
He gets to have the last laugh in three months. A few years back, Mariri featured regularly on the Btv sports programme, something he says “worked for me while it lasted.” The point at which it stopped working for him (when it actually got “boring”) was when he realised that certain individuals at the station were putting personal before national interest. “Things could be done better there. Btv can compete with the best in Africa, it can compete with Multichoice and every sort of production can be done in its studios which I’m told are the second biggest in the world. However, there is no thinking outside the box,” says Mariri, adding that the fault doesn’t lie with the government but certain individuals who are effectively “sabotaging” an important national development effort. “I don’t miss Btv.” Off the record we compare notes and find that we have a near perfect match on who the culprits are. A footballing manqu├®, Mariri did football analysis for his Btv stint which he came to learn was appreciated by most football fans. In his youth he had played a bit of football at club level. Although he was very good at it by independent accounts, he says that he deemed it wise to not a make a career out of it because Botswana lacks a supporting environment for such venture.
Things sure did work out for Mariri because at the end of the day, he got a well-paying – and yes, the car is very nice. However, not a day goes by without him remembering who helped get him to where he is today in life. That person died last year and his empty parliamentary seat presented to the opposition on a silver platter by his own party. Mariri knows that he could never defray his debt of gratitude to Masisi but at an appropriate time, he plans to show the late MP’s family just how grateful he is.
