Dr. Mandla Lamba, the founder and Chief Executive at Agilitee Limited (PHOTO/Courtesy)
Dr. Mandla Lamba is an African Billionaire who is the richest person in South Africa and the second richest man in Africa with a net worth of $18. billion, this is after Aliko Dangote who is worth $19.1 billion.
He came to prominence through the rise of his GreenTech & AI business known as Agilitee.
Agilitee is the first Electric Vehicles Manufacturer and GreenTech Company in Africa and the first black owned in the world.
Agilitee became a public company on the 1st of September 2022 with a total issued share capital of 1 billion shares and Lamba owns 900 million shares that represent 90% of Agilitee and the company is currently raising a total of $2 billion by selling 10% of Agilitee at $20 a share.
But what many don’t know is that Lamba is a market analyst whose love for the financial markets started in 2007 when he founded Verityhurst, a Private Equity Firm that invests in publicly traded companies in South Africa and abroad. Verityhurst invests on balance sheet and does not accept third party capital as it purely invests its own money.
Over the past 15 years since Verityhurst was formed, the firm has invested in companies that are listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange such as, DRD Gold, MTN, Accelerate Property Fund, Prosus, Sasol just to name a few and these are companies where the firm held very minority interests. Verityhurst also held significant investments in other companies where it also had influence on strategy at board level, those companies are Labat Africa Ltd, Pembury Lifestyle Group and Visual International Holdings which are also listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. During Covid 19, Verityhurst poured millions into Pembury Lifestyle Group and Visual International Holdings as interest free loans to save these companies from collapse.
At the time Visual International Holdings was suspended from trading by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange for failure to submit audited accounts on time and Verityhurst came in and saved the day by providing R6 Million interest free loan to help the company pay its auditors, other creditors and get a new audit of its books until the Johannesburg Stock Exchange was satisfied to uplift the suspension of VIS and the company still trades on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange this day.
In the same year of 2020, Verityhurst saved another JSE listed company Pembury Lifestyle Group from liquidation, saved over 200 teachers jobs and even a month ago in November 2022 Verityhurst signed an almost $2 million interest free loan with the company that will assist the company to clean its balance sheet and at the right time the loan will be converted into shares.
Through structuring and engineering these financial transactions and investments, Lamba learned the art of investing with a great flair of market analysis which helped him know when to buy shares, when to hold and when to exit investments.
In 2019 he started providing market analysis on his social media platforms until it attracted the SABC and he was called to SABC TV News Channel 404 to provide market analysis with both local and global focus. This is where on the 28th of June 2019 Dr Lamba predicted the 2020 Market Crash and global recession and advised people to start selling their positions as his Verityhurst was also doing. Verityhurst exited all its investments by December 2019 and the markets crashed two months later, that was 20 February 2020 when the markets crash.
His market analysis has been so precise that the SABC’s largest radio station with almost 8 million listners gave Dr Lamba a feature on a program called 1223 Cafe with Siya Mhlongo and Selbyonce Mkhize and the feature was called Umnotho Wezwe (World Economy) and this became the first time that there was a dedicated feature for financial markets in vernacular particularly in Zulu. SABC is where he made a lot of predictions that included the global recession and a global market crash that happened in 2020.
He started of 2021 with predictions of a global recession again, but this one he said will be a global economic reset that will usher the planet to a New World Order that will be driven by the Green Revolution and Artificial Intelligence.
WARNING FOR THIS FESTIVE SEASON
Dr Lamba says people should be frugal this festive season and ensure to spend less as he believes that the world is headed for the biggest economic depression in human history. He says because the nature of this one is to introduce a New World Order that will lead to the end of many industries and wipe away around 2 billion jobs globally.
He says that this week as companies are closing, many of them will be retrenching a lot of people to a degree that when the markets crash in 2023 more jobs will be lost and never be recovered. He is warning everyone to learn more about the green revolution and Artificial Intelligence and up-skill themselves in areas where humans will do better than AI.
Dr Mandla Lamba says, “The rise of AI will introduce us to a job market where there’s no lack of jobs but a scarcity of skills to an extent that companies will end up deploying AI because humans won’t be to do most jobs. Most things will get automated but I see that Africans are relaxing and not bothered because they believe that the degrees they have will save them when in all truth and honesty 70% of the qualifications people have will be irrelevant in the New World Order and most people even the highly respected and most skilled today will be relying on government grants.
Those who will survive this will be either those who up-skill or those who will start solution oriented businesses that can solve the problems of the future, but we are heading into a world where around 70% of the world population will be unemployed. After this looming global market crash we will be ushered into this New World as the global economies recover, the markets will take 36 months to recover after the crash which means there’s not much time left for humans to adapt to the new settings of the world.
I am sharing this information because I believe that this is the only time where Africa has a chance to build immunity against this chaos because, because historically, Africa has always been the greatest victim of market crashes, economic recessions and depressions because our people don’t listen and choose to be stubborn and later suffer from something they could’ve prepared for because this will be not stopped by anyone, it is happening and it is final.
Those who will listen to me and take heed of this will be safe. The global recession has already started but once it deeps to a depression markets will crash in a crazy way. So those who are getting bonuses this festive season, don’t go buy things you don’t need but find something you can put your money into and generate a passive income that won’t rely on you working to get it, because soon you will be without a job and won’t find any so it is important to understand that even saving money won’t help you this time around because you will spend it and finish it abd still no job. What happens if you were saving money and your income stops because you lost your job and then you have to start spending those savings until there’s nothing left. It’s time to wake up Africa.
It is time Africans wake up and realize that, the time pretend and look rich is over, it is time build immunity against the poverty that will be brought by this looming global economic depression.
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