Rapelang and her two colleagues Wilter du Toit and Lungisa Matshoba, then 23 years old, founded Yeigo Communications shortly after completing their studies at the University of Cape Town. She graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor in Business Science majoring in finance and an Honours in Computer Science.

Yeigo specialises in the development, implementation, deployment and marketing of software-based communications solutions that take full advantage of convergence trends within the mobile arena.

TelFree takes the four most popular means of communication and combines them into a single application where one can access everything at once. The four have a unified single platform referred to as Calls where TelFree provides a single global call rate to anywhere in the world for the same price, she explains.

When Yeigo launched in 2007, it was among the first companies worldwide to offer Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services for cellphones. Asked about the relationship between Yeigo and TelFree Group, she says “This partnership brought the latest unified communication solutions for mobile phones, pioneering carrier-grade telecoms infrastructure on par with the incumbent operators, locally and internationally”.

Rapelang is very passionate about Yeigo and what it has achieved and says that her role remains to continue with the delivery of cutting-edge mobile technology. At TelFree, she assists in utilising Yeigo’s technology within the broader telecoms environment for the benefit of the group.

Always busy and on the run, she says, given her two important jobs, she has yet to attain a complete work-life balance. However, this is a decision she made consciously to relinquish for a few years in order to establish the success of what TelFree is doing.

Like many young companies, she says life does not follow a typical day, telecoms and technology move fast making it hard to tell what will grab her attention on that day. Rapelang is yet to find balance between her work and life and has received acknowledgement from the industry thanks to Yeigo’s innovative technology. In 2007, she was selected as an Endeavour Entrepreneur and was a finalist in the BBQ Young Business Achiever Award.

She attended Roedean School in Johannesburg and passed Matric with seven distinctions and went on to study at the University of Cape Town. She assumed leadership roles in the Commerce Students Council and Young Women in Finance.

Her strong leadership abilities led to her selection to attend a number of leadership conferences with companies such as Accenture, Unilever and Edcon. She also completed internships and vacation programmes with Deloitte, JPMorgan and Business Beat before graduating in 2005.

Although she has achieved so much since her graduation, she says there is always room to improve and challenges to deal with, especially in her industry.

South Africa still has slow telecoms deregulation processes when compared to its African counterparts such as Uganda. We have finally seen the regulator remedy, the absurd reality where new operators such as TelFree had to pay a wholesale rate of R1.25 to terminate calls to the incumbent operators while the incumbent operators pay a retail rate to business customer for less than R1. This makes it difficult for new entrants to compete because of the high costs of telecoms in this country, she says.

Another major limitation has been access to quality international bandwidth from South Africa and this is still being addressed with the new undersea cable, Seacom. “We are in a position to change how people, particularly in developing countries communicate such as MzansiSMS project.”

Through her work, she wants disadvantaged communities to be touched by the benefits of communication and mobile technology. She believes that the mobile phone will be the key to the advancement of many people in the continent and one such initiative is the mobile learning platform called EduMandla.

“By making information and learning available on the mobile phone, many lives would be improved through education.” She lives in an apartment right in the centre of the Cape Town, which is easily accessible to all places. When not working, she visits the amazing wine routes in Cape Town and reads a lot of business and inspirational books. She cannot live without internet access of some sort, mobile phone and TelFree on her phone.

Asked if there is anything she could change about her life, she says she would decide to live with less fear, as this takes something away from us.

The closer you examine him, the more you realise that the discrepancy between expectation and reality plays itself out in many ways in the story of Trevor Noah. Take the name ‘Daywalker’, the name of his new show, for instance. Common sense would suggest that this has something to do with being a standup comic, a night time profession. But no! The essence of being a daywalker, for Trevor, is about being a failed albino messiah. It turns out that his light skin, the legacy of his Swiss father, was mistaken for albinism in the Soweto community he grew up in, resulting in him attracting a group of albino disciples as a child. “A lot of people think I’m lying but a lot of the stories in daywalker are true. A lot of people didn’t know who I was, or what culture I was, when I was growing up.”

However, it is not like Trevor observed his life throughout his childhood and youth, fishing for comedic material. In fact being a comedian was never really an ambition, but rather something he seemed to fall into by accident. One night five years ago at a comedy event at Horror café in Newtown, his friends convinced him to take to the stage at an open-mic session. “I hadn’t prepared anything, we were just watching the show. Just through male bravado I got up and spoke, just about things that were in my head. I don’t even really remember what I spoke about that night: it’s a blank. I just know it went well.”

He’s become famous as a professional funny-man since then, but most people still don’t know just how unplanned and, in his term, “organic”, his career in comedy is.

Before that fateful night, Trevor had tried his hands at some interesting ways of making money. One would never guess, for instance, that once upon a time he was the proud owner and driver of a taxi! “I was the youngest owner, and I was also the lightest skinned owner! Being part of that was insane: waking up at 3:00 in the morning. It was just a different life to live.”

When it came to the entertainment industry, the height of Trevor’s ambition was to become an extra on the SABC 3 soapie, Isidingo. Yet this ambition would be short-lived because instead of persevering quietly as an extra on the show, he “accidentally” went to an audition in 2002 and got a part as a gangster. “My dreams were shattered because they told me I couldn’t be an extra anymore, I had to act. Zane Meas told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to go back to being an extra now because people would recognise me in the background.” He recovered from the disappointment well enough to land other roles on the political drama series Molo Fish, and then came the national ad campaign for SARS, where he introduced himself as “the other Trevor”.

But he really hit the headlines across the country in 2008 when he was a close runner-up in the fourth season of Strictly Come Dancing. By then he was also a well known radio personality on Yfm and presented TV shows The Real Goboza, a celebrity gossip show, and Siyadladla on SABC sport.

However it is standup comedy that has become his obsession and it is an art form that he respects and works hard at. According to Trevor standup comedy is easily the hardest profession in the entertainment world. “You’re dealing with so many variables. You have to evoke an immediate response and success or failure is determined by that response from the audience. In comedy you write for yourself, you direct yourself, you are your own actor, your own critic, you are everything. So I would say comedy is the bastard child of the entertainment industry. As a semi-outsider, I have never really fitted in perfectly anywhere. So in my comedy I can give the outsider’s perspective and also explain it as an insider.”

It is this perspective that is also motivating his next move for his comedic career: he has decided to spend a lot more time in the UK, speaking in front of audiences that don’t know who he is. “I want to go back to being bad at what I do again. I want that vulnerability because it is the only way I’m going to grow.”

He is also taking his growth as an individual seriously, outside of comedy. He has started reading books about finance and the stock market, and has already started buying shares and exploiting property investments. “We love being this ignorant young nation. We need to better ourselves. How are we going forward? Now I don’t need the fancy cars, the designer clothes. I just live the way I want to live. All the other stuff, it doesn’t mean anything.”

It is a message he tries to work into his material, but as he reminds us, as much as he is a social commentator he is first and foremost an entertainer. “Comedy is about entertainment. My first job is to make people laugh, and then I can make statements.

She started off in the hotel business and soon decided that she needed a measurable barometer of client satisfaction rather than the anonymous feelings of a hotel guest to gauge her performance. The Dauphin seating brand was licensed within the Grand Andrews stable in 1994 when Isla Galloway was given the brand to develop as a specialist seating solution. Fifteen years later and Dauphin has nearly 40 percent of the South African office seating market, has grown turnover by more than 300% and is immediately identifiable as a high quality, sophisticated brand.

Awareness was needed that seating is the most important component of the office environment, and Isla and Dauphin were perfectly suited. She was a fantastic salesperson, Dauphin was a fantastic product. She had an innate interest in every aspect of the product line, Dauphin needed someone with sales and technical aptitude. She was an entrepreneur at heart and Dauphin needed a driven individual to spearhead its brand and gain market share.

“I always admired the way Dauphin, and specifically Elke Dauphin, has always given so much love and attention to the band. It’s something I just cherished, was to grow that brand.” Isla embraced every aspect of the chair within its environment – how important it was ergonomically, how important it was for your health and how the chair was the central part of the workstation. In fact for Isla, it went a step further. Your working lifestyle meant that your environment had to be perfectly suited to your needs and Dauphin’s brand extensions into Bosse and Zuco through the Dauphin HumanDesign Group, took the brand from a purely seating solution, to a working lifestyle solution with the chair as the focal point.

Her entrepreneurial flair – which she reckons was always there and was waiting for a brand like Dauphin to show itself – was recognised by Bidvest eight years ago and she flourishes in the group’s decentralised environment where she champions the brand relentlessly. She also champions South African business development and the fact that Dauphin is committed to maintaining a manufacturing element in the country. “On some levels we’re not there yet but we will continue to develop the skills of our workers.”

 Tough economic times mean alternative approaches and a view to other markets. While the European parent might not understand fully the social responsibility needs in South Arica and the use of resources for upliftment, Isla believes firmly in creating meaningful, sustainable businesses where possible and is always on the lookout for opportunities without compromising the quality of the brand. The holistic approach to the industry is Isla’s focus when to comes to service. She says there’s more to it than just selling chairs. “I must tell you that the office furniture industry has unfortunately, been one of easy entrance and easy exit. Companies can pay huge amounts of money into orders and next thing the supplier as disappeared. We are here for the five day game not the day/night.”

It’s really Isla’s alternative take on things that makes her stand out together with the Dauphin brand. She admittedly lives the part, so most of her life is taken up by constantly being vigilant over the brand and devising ways of maintaining market share in tough economic times. She is managing director, as well as confidant to her staff and the years of hotel training give her empathy with people that elevates her above the pure business of the industry. “That is me using my God given ability and empathy to relate and take care of a client or a person.” Ultimately Isla Galloway believes in truth, in delivering the promise that she makes, in never compromising the brand, always being humble and, as she says, “although we have the ability to be a hero, never ever forget to be gracious.”

Check out the range of furniture at www.dauphin.co.za

There was a nip in the air in Newtown one May morning and a small group of tourists were bundled in caps and scarves. They huddled in a small circle listening to a hulking Indian in bright white Nikes, a white T-shirt and a red Ohio State baseball cap who was telling them how it was all going to go down.

“This is not a democracy,” declared Zunaid Khan, the founder of the tour outfit Urban Walkabout. “I say where we go, where we don’t go. We are not at war here in Joburg. We are not going to get shelled. There are no snipers. But it’s not an easy city to read. People get mugged. There is safety in numbers. If you are uncomfortable at any point, just tell me.”

Khan stopped short, thought for a moment and turned back to the group. “Oh,” he said to the Swede, the Canadian, the Russian, the New Zealander, the American, a guy from Argentina and the token South African. “And I’m not PC. I’m a hip hop fan. I might just say mother fucker every now and again. Please don’t take offense. It’s just the way I talk.”

Indeed it is. Khan is the potty-mouthed Wits-trained town and regional planner whose homebrewed tour is a favourite on the international NGO circuit. This is no glassy-eyed tour. There are no visions of Joburg grandeur in Khan’s world, even if he is a self-professed lover of the city whose favourite haunts happen to be in places like Hillbrow, where his father once owned a corner shop. This 31-year old streetwise intellectual knows a whole lot more about the city than those who are in charge of planning it.

It was actually one of his instructors at Wits, Garth Klein, who required Khan to take to the streets as part of the curriculum. Klein told his students something that Khan takes to heart: you can’t learn about planning a town from a book. Khan began taking visiting foreign students for tours of the city as a hobby. Hobby turned to work and now his bustling little business hosts everyone from high-level government delegations to school kids, taking them into places in the inner city where most northern suburbanites wouldn’t dare to go.

It always starts at the same place: Melrose Arch’s Primi Piatti (Khan is the restaurant’s owner and also runs a town planning consulting business) where everyone must sign an indemnity form, abdicating him from what could happen. Because this is Joburg, after all, and anything could happen.

Kahn begins his tour at the beginning – with the two Johanneses – and he tells the group about where we have parked – Mary Fitzgerald Square, and talks a bit about the bubonic plague that emptied out the area at the end of the 19th Century and finally about its current incarnation: the Newtown Cultural Precinct, courtesy of the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA).

But it is in front of the old Worker’s Library that Khan takes aim. He bemoans agencies like the JDA for their less-than-visionary plans, starting with their ideas about adding more restaurants to the area and booting out the Worker’s Library – a former mining hostel which was, until recently, used as a resource centre for mine and domestic workers but is now slated to transform into yet another restaurant hub.

“This isn’t the Champs-Elysées. There are no people in Chanel gowns with little white poodles. There’s no foot traffic. You can’t pimp out these things. You see if I’m lying,” he says gesturing around him, toward the Gauteng Visitor’s Centre, which sits in its steel and glass shell waiting idly for visitors to flock forth from the pavement. “There are no tourists here.”

And Khan is right. There are no tourists, except for the ones that he’s brought with him. And that would make those planners over at the JDA, who have poured millions into Newtown, flinch. Khan’s beefs about the city run throughout his tour: unscrupulous developers, little to no educational outreach and planning done via Google Earth by people who have never walked the streets.

The group follows their leader toward the South African Breweries building, the Reserve Bank across the road with its slick, imposing and impenetrable grey granite. Kahn stops. He points out that there is not a single person on their side of the street, then upward to the cameras that make sure no one violates the ‘no trading’ signs posted, and again across the road to the bustling shops, the informal economy exploding, vehicles being loaded with goods for all points north.

Ahead are several empty buildings, one wrapped in a Johnny Walker ad, and another owned by property developers Urban Ocean, who snapped up the high-rise on the cheap in boom times and marketed the units as investment property. But without many takers, many of these developments are at a stand still. Khan takes the group down Diagonal Street where the former Johannesburg Stock Exchange once sat; now it’s an Edgar’s office. “When the JSE left, that was it,” he says. “Imagine if the stock exchange left New York City. Bloomberg would have a heart attack. There’s just no way.”

Next stop is the Metro Mall, the taxi rank where vendors are selling everything from chicken feet to dried mopane worms and toilet paper. Khan gives a 10-minute talk about the history of the taxi industry, shows some hand signals for getting around – hold up your index finger for town – and says Bus Rapid Transport won’t work. “The taxi drivers will attack the first bus and that will be it, nobody will take it,” he says.

Back toward the minibus, at the foot of a Newtown housing project, Khan pauses to show off some of the better ideas that the city has had. The brightly-painted social housing sits on one side; just opposite are decaying buildings filled with squatters. Still, Khan likes what they’ve done here – housing on top, shops at the bottom – but says the planners forgot about schools.

He bemoans the Mandela Bridge, which sits off in the distance, calling it another bastardisation of an icon and tells the group: “If you want to do that bridge, you can go with someone else because my black ass does not go across that bridge.”

The group follows his black ass and does not go across that bridge toward the Faraday muti market and taxi rank. The group wanders among the endless stalls with animal bones and skins, tortoise shells, dried whole starfish and bottled animal fat captured in small glass Smirnoff bottles. Any other city would capitalise on this – think: the floating market outside of Bangkok or San Francisco’s Chinatown – but the vendors here sit quietly, their goods lying before them waiting for the taxi riders to come by for their fix.

And then it was time for Hillbrow. Khan used to take people up into the 51-story Ponte building but that was before the New Ponte plans for luxury apartments collapsed and the original owners slapped up security guards at the entry points. No matter, he drives, pointing out the Ethiopian quarter, the Mozambiquan quarter, Little Lagos, the old Jewish synagogue where the sacred stone was removed so it could serve as, among other things, the Voice Pub and a grilled chicken outlet. Khan hits a stoplight on the corner of Beit and Claim, and that’s when the tourists discover the real Joburg.

A guy in a thick beige jacket walks up to the driver’s side, hitting the window. “Open the door!” he shouts. Just seems like a drunken vagrant, mildly harmless, until he starts slamming the window harder, grabbing inside his jacket as if he’s trying to show Khan what he’s going to do about it. “Open the door!”

“Okay my brother,” Khan says calmly. “Okay, hang on my brother. I’ve just got some tourists here, my brother.” The man in the beige jacket bangs harder. Khan gets a gap, the light changes and he speeds off.

Welcome to Joburg, now go home.

Alex Okosi, 34, is currently the managing director and senior vice president of MTV Networks Africa, a part of MTV Networks International’s (MTVNI) Emerging Markets Group. Always multi-tasking with his finger on the pulse of international news and trends, he loves his role and all it entails. He manages the growth and development of MTVNI’s portfolio of channels in sub-Saharan Africa including MTV, MTV Base, VH1 and Nickelodeon which is certainly not a nine-to-five kind of job – answering calls and emails in the middle of the night when strategists and senior management in America, Europe and Asia are in the office.

He was born in Nigeria and went to the US when he was 12 to visit his siblings who had emigrated there and landed up staying on. Although his parents were upset to lose the last of their children to America, they reluctantly agreed as they knew he would get an admirable education there, one he couldn’t dream of in Nigeria. So Alex moved around to different cities, from sibling to sibling. He accredits all of his subsequent success to luck and mentorship. “I have been very lucky with the amount of adults I’ve had who have provided great mentorship and guidance at critical times in my life.” As a child he was a passionate football player but arriving in the US he realised it was not a sport that Americans related to yet so he tried his luck at basketball and eventually landed a scholarship to St Michael’s University in Vermont where he studied business and economics. But it was the grounding he received at his prestigious preparatory school which opened the door to such achievement, which he also amounts to mentorship from people who had genuine interest in his success and who introduced him to the unique school – the Phillips Exeter Academy, where the Harkness teaching system was implemented (12 students and a teacher sit around an oval table, sharing their opinions and debating subject matter). “When you leave there you know there’s nothing you can’t articulate. My fellow students are some of the greatest minds in the world. I still feel like I owe that school so much.” It was through great relationships with his teachers that he landed some exceptional internships which in turn were used as a bouncing board into what has become an impressive career in marketing.

After a couple of other projects, he tried his luck applying for a job at MTV, through connections he had made in university, but after three weeks of no call he found himself flipping a coin to choose what graduate school to go to. Without a green card his options were limited – get a job and get sponsored, continue studying or go back to Nigeria. Between coin tosses he got the call and with it a job at MTV. After a few short months of witnessing Alex’s passion and dedication, the company took the risk and offered him sponsorship, not something they would normally do. He worked avidly on developing new ideas, events and adapting content for the MTV channel. Alex was soon scouted to move to MTV Networks Affiliate Sales & Marketing team in Los Angeles where he met MTV’s CEO who had only heard great things about him and decided to take the time to hear his ideas, one of which was to launch MTV Nigeria – Alex’s dream goal.

Impressed with this suggestion, the idea barrelled into something bigger and more beneficial to the corporation – MTV Africa. Alex was then sent to London to work on all international strategic initiatives but still persisted with the MTV Africa plan and then in a moment of great pride helped launch MTV Base in February 2005. Now based in South Africa, he has also played a key role in the debut of Nickelodeon in Africa and further developing MTVNI’s entertainment brands on multiple media platforms. The corporation has grown from strength to strength since that and Alex has proven this by launching the first MTV Africa Music Awards (MAMAs) last November in Nigeria. “After over 10 years I still get excited, I wake up and make notes for new ideas trying to stay ahead. TV and the spend on TV in Africa is growing all the time and there is more focus on quality these days.”

Alex has made South Africa home and although he misses his two-year-old son who lives in Nigeria and as a result, spends a lot of time on flights, he thinks for now he is settled in South Africa as it is the gateway to Africa for MTV Networks Africa. “I like South Africa. It is a softer landing into Africa and I hope the World Cup changes people’s perceptions. Africa is not the ‘dying continent’ it has been portrayed as on the news, you can only do Africa right if you do right by it.”