Protest action in South Africa is so bad that one company plans for 12 of its buses to be burnt every year

Golden Arrow expects 12 of its buses to be burnt to a crisp every year as a result of protest action and political activity. 

Hosken Consolidated Investments (HCI) CEO Johnny Copelyn told the 9th BizNews Conference that this is what the company considers normal in South Africa.

HCI is Golden Arrow’s parent company and is the investment vehicle for the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU). 

Copelyn has led the company for 29 years and is set to retire sometime during the 2027 financial year. 

He has turned it from a small cash shell valued at R1 million into a R14 billion investment-holding giant on the JSE. 

Doing this has been far from easy for Copelyn, being a trade unionist at heart and having a union as his major shareholder. 

However, Copelyn is a believer in business unionism, where unions use member contributions to invest and create wealth. 

Most unions do this through pension funds, which are heavily regulated. By taking a controlling stake in HCI, SACTWU effectively gave itself a private equity firm to invest on behalf of its members. 

Copelyn explained that HCI has benefited significantly from the elevated political risk associated with investing in South Africa. 

This gave the company significant opportunities where other operators were afraid to participate due to the prevailing sentiment in the country. 

“When you come to the actual business opportunities, I would say the one thing about South African businesses is they are incredibly anxious about political risk,” Copelyn said. 

“Any business with political risk, they ran 100 miles from. We did not see it that way. We saw those as opportunities for us.”

Copelyn and HCI grabbed any opportunity where businesses were highly regulated or politically oriented with both hands. 

“New licences were being given out for television companies – grab that with both hands. Radio licences, mining rights. These were all opportunities that seemed to be absolutely designed for us,” Copelyn said. 

However, running at political risk has brought challenges for HCI and posed dangers, alongside substantial profits. 

Bus burning in South Africa

One of the challenges Copelyn discussed was the routine burning of Golden Arrow buses, which is largely out of the company’s control. 

Copelyn said the burning of buses is a tragic yet deeply embedded part of doing business in the public transport sector. 

“Choosing opportunities and building businesses that are real has a lot of tricky pieces to it,” Copelyn said. 

“Business is about making money. It has a logic to it. It is not a handout game. It is a tough game.”

Pointing to Golden Arrow as an example, Copelyn said doing business in parts of South Africa’s economy is extremely tough. 

“When you get into a business like that, it is not an easy business to be involved in. Over the past 20 years, we have survived in it, but you do have clashes from time to time,” Copelyn said. 

“The bus business is a tough business. We have a thousand buses, and we regard it as normal if we lose 12 buses a year to arson. That is what is normal in South Africa now.” 

Copelyn explained that you can be insured and have political risk cover to get by, but ultimately, the consumer pays for the damage. 

“That is the way the system works. You need to buy extra buses that are simply burnt. You have to raise your fares. The people that are hurt by this are the passengers,” Copelyn said. 

“These things can creep up at any moment. You can have some issues where they want toilets, or there are garbage problems or potholes, something that has nothing to do with our business. The first thing they do is burn a bus.” 

Copelyn said this is part and parcel of operating in what he describes as a “frontier economy” with bad actors. 

“It is like being a cowboy and walking into the saloon, and everyone is staring at you in your three-piece suit. All they see is that you do not have a gun,” Copelyn said. 

“You may think they are all rough and whatever. But, if you cannot learn to play in that world, then you must not enter it.” 

“And I think we’ve done well. We don’t look for trouble. We avoid trouble where we can. We certainly don’t want buses to get burned out without taking the most defensive steps we can.”