In this country, when your business flourishes because you’re well connected and landed the juiciest tenders, you celebrate by buying a Ferrari or a Porsche, a fancy mansion and by running up bar bills for hundreds of thousands of rands (if not more) and posting those on social media.
Not so Chippa United Football Club owner and businessman Siviwe Mpengesi.
He helps out those less fortunate than he is – and so far, through his companies’ corporate social investment initiatives, he has built homes for 20 families, moving them out of shacks and giving them back hope and dignity.
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Why does he do this? Because he knows what it is like to be homeless and to live under a bridge.
There will, no doubt, be those who say that building houses for poor people should be the job of the government.
And that is a valid argument because taxpayers pay more than hundreds of billions of their money to the central purse.
But that money, even without the rampant looting of it, would not be enough to meet those desperate needs of our people.
That is where citizens like Mpengesi can step in. Ubuntu is the spirit South Africa needs, rather than that of single malt whisky.
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