t is fashionable nowadays for business owners to proclaim their "passion" for exhausts or widgets or whatever it is they're selling. Of course business life is more complicated. Most of us are driven not only by a love for what we produce and sell, but also for the idea of independence, building our own business, and providing security for our family and employees.
But every now and then one comes across a business owner that truly believes in his product, to such an extent that his business is a mere tool in the accomplishment of his mission. Such a man is Fhatuwani Mulaudzi, who resigned from his job as the first black chief geologist on a South African mine, to become, as he calls it, "a toilet cleaner".
Mulaudzi always wanted to be a teacher like his school-inspector father and school-principle mother, and so he kept a keen eye on the comings and goings at a large high school close to where he worked as the chief geologist on a mine in Carletonville. One morning in 1996 he asked a group of girls in the street why they were not at school. They were looking for toilets, they said, prompting him to check out the ten ablution blocks at the school.
He found them in an indescribably shocking state. The school principle professed ignorance. With a raging anger, Mulaudzi spent the rest of the day cleaning the toilets himself, on his own, with a spade and a wheelbarrow. "A voice just said to me: 'this is the job you should have been doing all along.' I became so convinced because I got a fear that if I don't do something about this and just make noise maybe, I won't help anybody. And I felt that if I ran away I'll be a coward. I decided I'll make it my business, I'll do it."
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Mulaudzi may have been unique in his decision that day to start a business dedicated to a "toilet revolution", but he was part of a broader trend taking place shortly after 1994. Thousands of black artisans, middle managers and foremen left their corporate jobs to start their own businesses, believing that the time had come to do things for themselves. It was a relatively short-lived exodus based on the euphoria of the early '90s rather than on business acumen and calculation. Many of them were badly hurt as they found out just how hard small business life was, and how ill prepared the new government was to help them.
Mulaudzi's efforts to land a single school contract came to naught, despite the evidence that he kept on gathering on the horrific conditions. At thousands of schools, children are compelled to leave the school grounds to look for toilets at other public places - usually nearby taverns. At primary schools especially, smearmarks are common on the walls of filthy toilet cubicles as small children, unable to cope with the lack of toilet paper, wipe themselves with their hands. "All opportunity of teaching hygiene education are lost - you wouldn't make any sense to anybody as a teacher (in such an environment). A mere thing like a toilet is destroying our education. It has a huge, huge, amazing impact," he says.
The Department of Education simply fobbed him off to the school governing bodies, which at best would be content with a hapless part-time cleaner armed only with "a little broken broom and some Handy Andy from Checkers", and at worst be in a state of utter ignorance or denial.
"Like two days ago I was in Kagiso in a high school. The principal was very shocked when I showed him the picture in his own school. He was just saying: 'My dear God, my dear God.' I said to him: 'Mister Sir, it's here.'"
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