OBITUARY | Peter Matlare looked into the eye of the tiger and roared

Peter Matlare, who has died at the age of 60 from Covid-19 complications, had messed up spectacularly as CEO of Tiger Brands and had zero executive banking experience when Absa CEO Maria Ramos made him the bank’s deputy group CEO and gave him one of the most fiendishly challenging jobs in the sector.

This was in effect to turn 1,267 branches of Barclays bank across 12 countries in Africa into Absa branches after Barclays’ sudden 2016 decision to cut its stake in Absa from 63% to 14.9%.

Absa had been running these banks under the UK bank’s brand since 2013, but Barclays decided it had had enough of emerging market risk and now Absa had to rename and rebrand them.

“He played a key role in overseeing our regional operations and safely leading our banks through the major separation from Barclays and rebrand to Absa,” said Wendy Lucas-Bull, Absa Group Limited chairperson.

Matlare’s leadership was critical in ensuring that the separation from Barclays, a complex multiyear project that also included the largest single data and systems migration in Africa, was successful across Absa’s operations on the continent.

Analysts who thought Ramos and her board must be mad when they entrusted the then 55-year-old Matlare with such a complicated operation were told the board were looking for someone who had gone through the school of hard knocks on the continent.

A rebranding on this scale across such multiple jurisdictions had never been done successfully before in Africa.

The obstacles were daunting, starting with the need for multiple regulators led by the SA Reserve Bank to agree to a set of rules that then had to be complied with by all the countries involved.

Matlare had to soothe many very ruffled feathers and negotiate his way around many injured egos from Zambia and Mauritius up to Nigeria and Ghana. He had to win over central bank governors and presidents in countries that had only ever known the Barclays brand, and get them to accept Absa, a bank many of them saw as a creation of apartheid SA.

The governor of the central bank of Kenya initially refused to see him or anyone from his Absa team at all. “We are not your bridesmaids,” he said. “You will not treat us like your bridesmaids.”

He had to appoint the right management, MDs, boards and chairs, balancing skills with political considerations and taking care not to offend national, racial or gender sensibilities.

A giant fireworks display in Nairobi in February 2020 attended by the president and the governor of the central bank signalled the successful culmination of his monumental task of separating Absa from former UK parent Barclays.

Analysts who thought Ramos and her board must be mad when they entrusted the then 55-year-old Matlare with such a complicated operation were told the board was looking for someone who had gone through the school of hard knocks on the continent.

That was putting it mildly.

He made one of the worst deals anyone could remember when in 2012 he splurged more than R1.6bin on 63% of Dangote Flour Mills in Nigeria while waxing lyrical about the country’s fabulous “growth opportunities” and how the deal would be “mutually beneficial”.

Losses soon ran into millions. Matlare closed two of the five flour mills he’d bought, but it didn’t help. In the end Tiger sold the company back to Dangote for $1 after writing off R2.8bn in Nigeria.

He stepped down, admitting “we got a lot of it wrong in Nigeria”, including not doing enough research about the market.

Analysts had two major concerns about his appointment by Ramos. One was that it would be a disaster. The other was that he might succeed Ramos in the top job.

In fact, he’d already decided he didn’t want to be CEO. He thought he’d be too old, and wanted to retire at 63.

Matlare was born in Durban on November 30 1960 and schooled for a bit in Botswana, where his father was working in the attorney-general’s office, before being shipped to England, where his mother was.

He sounded every inch the ex-English public schoolboy he was.

He got his O and A levels at Langley in Norfolk before proceeding to the University of Plymouth for a political science degree and the University of York for his masters in political economy.

He returned to SA in 1983 and worked for the Urban Foundation before stints with Anglo American and Primedia.

In 2001 he was appointed CEO of the SABC.

He was criticised outside the corporation for making political appointments designed to please the ANC rather than on professional grounds.

At the same time he clashed with communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, who was trying to push through the Broadcast Amendment Bill, which he felt was in violation of the SABC’s charter and constitutional guarantees that the public broadcaster should be independent and impartial.

The government backed down but then appointed a board that infringed on the broadcaster’s independence anyway.

Matlare was at loggerheads with the board and its politically connected chairperson Eddie Funde, who described him as “politically naïve”.

He fiercely opposed the board’s appointment of Snuki Zikalala, whom he regarded as an ANC apparatchik, as head of news.

Relations between them were frosty, to say the least. Matlare was effectively sidelined on the news front while Zikalala called the shots and answered directly to Funde.

Matlare fought Zikalala’s appointment even to the extent of going to ANC headquarters at Luthuli House to try to prevent it.

After leading the SABC through one of its rare profitable periods Matlare left before his contract ended amid allegations that he’d been forced out by the board.

Funde said such reports were invented by those whose motive was to undermine the SABC and the efforts of the board to build a world-class public broadcaster.

He was snapped up by Vodacom and tipped by many to succeed Alan Knott-Craig as CEO.

“I hope they didn’t put any money on it,” Matlare commented drily when in 2008 at the age of 49 he accepted the leadership of Tiger Brands, which had been rocked by a price-fixing scandal that cost the incumbent Nick Dennis his job.

He stepped down from Tiger Brands, admitting ‘we got a lot of it wrong in Nigeria’, including not doing enough research about the market.

Why did he sacrifice the top job at Vodacom to lead what at the time was the most reviled company in SA?

Because his succession was by no means certain, he said, and because in spite of its problems Tiger was “growth-orientated” and Vodacom was not.

Here was an opportunity to continue to build a company not just domestically but internationally, he said. He felt that Vodacom’s ability to continue to build and grow internationally had become constrained.

He said he was very excited about growing Tiger Brands in emerging markets, particularly in Africa. And especially Nigeria.

Matlare appreciated refinement in himself and those around him. It came through in how he spoke and dressed, and how his meetings went.

He was a stickler for punctuality, and they always started dead on time.

Style mattered to him.

He played golf and the piano, and was an accomplished cook. He would invariably have four or five junior Absa executives at his house on a weekend and cook and serve the drinks while mentoring them.

He is survived by his wife Nomvula and three daughters.