Phiri Sets Up Half A Billion Pula Headquaters
Monkagedi Gaothobogwe | Monday April 3, 2017 15:35
Phiri broke the news exclusively to the Monitor after his company, Khato Civils Botswana was granted change of land use permission by Minister, Prince Maele after he had acquired a P3.4 million farm at Gaborone North.
Tesmic headquarters, to be located in Gaborone North, will employ 2,000 permanent staff members to service the machinery across the SADC region, according to the confident Phiri. He adds that the employment figures will surely rise.
He’d been put-off by two years of delays in granting him the change of land use permission, where he had aimed to open the headquarters of his holding company, Khato Civils. An executive chairman of a multi-billion pula acompany, Phiri says Botswana will still salvage something tangible from his dream, despite eventually setting up the headquarters in Johannesburg.
Phiri, the executive chairman of Khato Civils and South Zambezi engineering companies, both headquartered in Johannesburg, says he had initially intended to erect the headquarters in Gaborone, but had a change of heart after delays in approving change of land use for his Gaborone North plot dragged on and on.
Born of a Motswana mother and a Malawian father 55-years-ago, Phiri says his determination to do something for his motherland will now bear fruit after the application for change of land use was approved by Maele’s Ministry.
“I must thank Minister Maele. He has just come into a new Ministry, and before he could even settle, he approves my application, I could never imagine his speed, considering how it took years before him.
I will definitely do something for my mother’s country, my land, and it will be something unapologetically gargantuan of course.”
“We will no longer be setting up Khato Civils headquarters, that South Africa had been quicker to grant land and everything, but for Botswana, we are now at an advanced stage of erecting regiuonal headquarters of Tesmic Brands of machinery, which is simply the future of the public works machinery.”
Phiri sees Botswana strategically located to market and distribute, as well as maintenance of the machinery as the brand spread to the rest of the region in the not so distant future.
Phiri says Botswana’s forex dispensation was another attractive factor in the decision to consider the country as the headquarters, as the Pula is largely stable, as well as the political climate, and the flexible forex regime, “Unlike in other countries, including South Africa, Botswana does not have a rigid policy that limits investors’ movements in money transfers, which allow companies to transact flexibly with foreign based entities in commerce in the absence of a rigid forex regime...,” opines Phiri.
“For that reason, me and Tesmic, which is based in Italy, decided it would be much easier to pay for Tesmic merchandising from Angola and the rest of the SADC region, for easy transactions.”
Phiri, who has a special attachment to Botswana since his mother, Census Maposa is a Motswana from Tonota, says he had initially also planned to set up his multi-billion pula company headquarters here, a project that later went to South Africa due to delays in land use permits.
In South Africa, Phiri sits inside a P480 million headquarters in Johannesburg, where they currently employ over 560 staff members, whose annual turnover is P3.4 billion, for the holding company that includes Khato Civils and South Zambezi, the latter representing the engineering division and the former being contractors.
The two separate headquarters were built simultaneously from May last year and took only seven months to complete.