Steinheist. Rob Rose
University of Pretoria, not Stellenbosch). Swiegers would spend much of his career at the auditing firm Deloitte. By the time he retired in 2016, he was Deloitte’s chief operating officer in Africa. “Markus was a popular guy and very social, even though he wasn’t part of the crowd of boys who played rugby seriously,” says Swiegers today. “He was clearly very intelligent, though he wasn’t one of those pupils who aimed to get seven distinctions. He wasn’t top of the class, but he was clearly smart, and Affies took its academics very seriously.”
At the time, Jooste was one of only a few of the Affies pupils to go on to study accounting. “Studying accounting wasn’t sexy in those days,” says Swiegers. (Sexy is perhaps not even a term you’d use too quickly to describe the profession even today.) “Kids became doctors and lawyers – it was what most of those ‘seven distinction guys’ went on to study. That’s what your parents wanted. So Markus and I were outliers.”
From Affies, Markus Jooste won a scholarship to Stellenbosch University. The bursary didn’t pay for everything, so despite the vacation work he did at the small accounting firm of Theron van der Poel, he left university with a student loan debt of R100,000 (or so he claims). Never having had much money early on bred an intense desire to succeed, say those close to him. This drive was already evident early on in the legend that he obtained the highest mark in the country in his board exams.
By coincidence, Johann van Rooyen, the son of the Pep founder, Renier van Rooyen, also began studying at Stellenbosch in 1979, the same year as Jooste. They ended up in the same elite residence, Wilgenhof, as did Rian du Plessis, Markus Jooste’s long-time family friend who’d later become CEO of the racing group Phumelela. “We were in different streams,” says Van Rooyen today from Vancouver, where he now lives. “He was doing accounting, I was doing law. I was an avid supporter of the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) and I don’t think we shared the same political philosophy, so we weren’t close.” Van Rooyen says Jooste had his own clique, often consisting of others from upcountry and especially Pretoria. “I remember him as the sort of person who aspired to be popular and part of the in-crowd.”
Some say Jooste used to boast about his sporting prowess – how he’d played squash for Northern Transvaal. Which, of course, he hadn’t. Others say he was initially unobtrusive: a sluiper – somebody who doesn’t really participate in the sort of extra-curricular jollies you’d expect of students at universities. When he became more senior, he’d relish inflicting embarrassing initiation rites on first-year students – something for which Stellenbosch was notorious at the time. “If there was some fun to be had, such as catching and ‘punishing’ passing students who shouted ‘bekfluitjie’, you’d find Markus at the centre of the obligatory cold shower, or dunking a bucket of water over the offender’s head,” says Van Rooyen.
Thys du Toit, who later founded Coronation Fund Managers in 1993, was two years ahead of Jooste at Stellenbosch. “One businessman I knew had this saying: employ them poor, bright and with a deep desire to succeed. That was Markus to a T. He has an unbelievable drive to become successful, come what may,” says Du Toit today.3
There were others who studied with Jooste who’d go on to make headlines too. Someone else who shared the same residence with Jooste was one of the best players ever to pull the national rugby jersey over his head, Carel du Plessis, who would play twelve times for the Springboks during the apartheid years. At the time, Wilgenhof was seen as the Petri dish for creating future Springbok rugby players. The housemaster at Wilgenhof was Danie Craven, the legendary and longest-serving president of the South African Rugby Board, from 1956 until 1993. Jooste was one of a minority at Wilgenhof who didn’t play rugby, but he was still quite close to Du Plessis. Today, Du Plessis doesn’t want to say much about Jooste. “He was a smart guy, a top student, but we didn’t really stay in touch,” he says.
The man who would ultimately take Craven’s post as head of SA Rugby was also in Jooste’s orbit: Rian Oberholzer, who as boss of the rugby federation presided over an infamous army-style training camp called Kamp Staaldraad. Contacted today, Oberholzer says he doesn’t want to discuss Jooste at all: “I don’t want to get involved in this.”4
Jooste did his articles – the apprenticeship required of accountants and lawyers – at a Cape Town law firm called Greenwoods. Today, it is called Baker Tilly Greenwoods. In the evenings, he studied for his honours degree in accounting with the University of Cape Town. At the time, he shared a house in Cape Town with two people who’d remain trusted friends in Jooste’s life and, later, became colleagues at Steinhoff: Jan van der Merwe and Frikkie Nel.
Jooste would describe their relationship as one of “full trust”, saying that whenever a job came up, “we always looked for somebody within the circle who we could put in”.
Fortuitously, on the first day of his articles with Greenwoods in 1982, Jooste was part of the audit team assigned to a company owned by Christo Wiese, called Octha Diamonds. Both Octha and Greenwoods shared office space in the old Trust Bank building in Cape Town. At that stage, Wiese was an entrepreneur who had a stake in the emerging low-cost clothing powerhouse Pepkor, but he hadn’t yet taken control of the company. He wasn’t then the rock-star businessman he’d later become.
Jooste, speaking about that first meeting years later, says that Wiese made an instant impression on him. “Christo impressed me – he built things, put deals together. I thought, I wanted to be like that.”5 Wiese says he remembers Jooste, but at the time he was one of many accountants coming through his business. “I noticed him as a bright young guy. I’m told he got the top mark in South Africa when he wrote his board exam, so he’s clearly the sort of guy you’d notice.”6 Then Wiese bought control of Pep, and moved to his office in Parow. He lost touch with Jooste. “From time to time, I heard from friends of mine in Hermanus that this young Jooste guy is smart and is building a great business, but I didn’t meet him again for years.”
Jooste’s ambitions in the 1980s went far beyond simply remaining an accountant, sentenced to a life of spreadsheet-constrained drudgery. As he said in one interview: “At 24, I left the auditing firm the day of finishing my articles because I knew that I had to do something for myself – the next morning I became a shareholder of my biggest client at the auditing firm. I think it’s in your blood to want to have ownership.”7 Or perhaps, more accurately, to become wealthy. One of Jooste’s mantras – one he would repeat to people he’d want to hire – was that you can’t get rich by earning a salary. So, he’d liberally dose his executives with share options.
Jooste and Jan van der Merwe, his former housemate, were then conscripted to serve in the South African Defence Force in 1985, back up on the Highveld in Pretoria. At the time, “national service” was just the way it was for white men, who were forced to serve two years in the army. If you were lucky and had skills, you’d find yourself conscripted to somewhere relatively benign – a desk job perhaps – rather than wedged inside a Casspir army vehicle on any smoke-filled street in Soweto, firing a volley of teargas canisters to choke those rioters who’d dared demand the vote. So, with his accounting degrees, Jooste scored a job at the Receiver of Revenue, the tax authority, as a deputy director during his army years. The insight gained by working for the Receiver must have been invaluable training for a man who, later, seemed to be able to find every trick in the book – and some that weren’t in any book – to reduce his tax burden.
Jooste was itching to run his own company, however. So, after the army, he began working for an older businessman named Michael Delport, who ran various companies in a desolate place in the sticks called Ga-Rankuwa. David Meades, a veteran stockbroker who was also a journalist for many years, knew Delport well. “Michael’s family had large asparagus farms in the Northern Cape, but he’d decided to move to Brits, near Pretoria,” says Meades, who has since retired to Somerset West.8 “One day, I was visiting him, and he was gushing about how he’d hired this smart young accountant named Markus Jooste, who was probably only around 25 or 26 years old, but who was clearly going places.”
To deem Ga-Rankuwa “unfashionable” is like suggesting China has a few quibbles with free speech. During the apartheid era, Ga-Rankuwa’s barren, rust-red soil made it the ideal dumping ground to which the National Party confined black