Group Chief Executive, Investec Group
Young 11-year-old Fani Titi - Part 2
Fani Titi has been the Investec Group Chief Executive since March 2020 and is responsible for leadership and management. Together with senior management, his objectives are to continue to grow and build Investec’s core businesses and deliver the right outcomes for Investec clients and stakeholders.
From October 2018, Fani acted as Joint CEO of the Investec Group alongside Hendrik du Toit, up until the successful completion of the demerger of its asset management business (Investec Asset Management), which became separately listed as Ninety One on 16 March 2020. Fani is now the Chief Executive...
About Fani Titi
Fani Titi, Group Chief Executive of Investec, has spoken about the need for stability and economic growth in South Africa as the country prepared for a new administration. In a June 2024 interview, he argued that the first 15 years of democracy were successful in growing the economy, but that the subsequent 15 years were not, and that the country needs a policy framework that engenders confidence and investment. He stated that if the economy grew at 1% more than the current trend, the fiscus could collect approximately 100 billion rand more per annum, and that a government choosing an anti-business policy framework could lead to higher inflation and make life harder for the most vulnerable. In earlier interviews, Titi discussed the structural challenges facing the South African economy, including electricity supply, logistics, and crime and corruption. He said that business is trying to help government address these issues. Titi has also spoken about his personal background, describing his life as "highly improbable" after growing up on a farm in the Free State. He has emphasized the importance of education, stating that if the education system continues to be irrelevant to the economy, the country will still be dealing with inequality and unemployment in 25 years. He has also described Investec's culture as having an "attitude and a sense of belief," and said he prefers people to make decisions and take responsibility rather than waiting for authorization.
Transcript (8 segments)
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Interviewer0:02
About 900 and between 920 and 980,000 students sit for their final year of school grade 12 every year. And so we know this year I think it's about 920,000, last year of that number. In a world that is increasingly complex and digital and so forth, only about 50,000 passed with a B and above in mathematics, right? So basically less than 3% of our matriculants passed with a B in math in 2022, and this has been a quite consistent trend for the past 20 odd years. And yet some farm boy from Qua Decid, he wants to study mathematics. Help us to understand where that comes from. If I knew, I would be lying, but surely I mean do you come from a family of undercover mathematicians?
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Fani Titi1:19
Not quite, not quite. I think it's a combination of a number of things. I think each one of us gets born with a particular set of attributes, and ours is to find those attributes and to cultivate them to be the best we can be. Second, we require an environment that can support the development of the innate gifts and talents that we have. In my case, I was born with an orientation towards medicine, science. I had a family that had a strong structure, and one of the greatest destructions of the apartheid movement at the time was that families were not together. So while farms were pretty rough in those days, there was an integrity of a family structure. You had a father, a mother. If there was a problem with a roof that gets blown away in August, there's somebody who can fix it. There's a mother who can instill discipline. So the cultivation of the innate gifts I had became much more possible because of that family structure that was there. The destruction of family structures is one of the things we have to deal with as a country, because you grow up in societies where firstly there are no role models, second there isn't an example of what a life should be of a young child, thirdly there are so many households that are child-headed and the levels of poverty are quite high. So in my case, born with certain gifts, lucky that I grew up in a family where there were two parents, and of course we had siblings, and we were able to develop whatever gifts that we had. I mean, when we got to matric, we were taught by somebody who had matric, but there was a structure that could just repeat. Your teacher at school, their highest qualification was matric, and they were teaching you to get their highest qualification. That's...
I
Interviewer3:36
Right, that's right. Clock that, that's right. Yeah, yeah.
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Fani Titi3:43
So that's been the journey. So when I look at my own journey, my own level of achievement or lack of it, I always compare myself only to myself, because the gifts and capabilities and abilities I have, I was born with. I was born into a family that helped me to have a particular structure that allowed me to be successful. So the only comparison is about the opportunity I had and what I've done with it. So I never compare myself with you, the professor, because you've done a lot, a lot better than I could ever do. But I haven't had a Fulbright scholarship. Okay, I haven't been to UC Berkeley. I don't have a UC Berkeley on my CV as a degree. Small little university on the west coast of the US, which is responsible for some of the big giant tech companies that rule the world.
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Interviewer4:50
So let's just kind of take... Has anyone watched Oppenheimer? In perspective, go for it. Yeah, the film. Yeah, okay. This guy, the development of the atomic bomb was done in the Berkeley area. There is what is called a Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. So the scientists were around there. In my place, the laboratory is part of the university system. So unfortunately, you contribute to education, you do get, yeah, unfortunately you do get some of these destructive outcomes as much as technology is good. But let's stay a little bit in Berkeley. In addition to furthering your education, did you learn anything else beyond the university that contributed to who you are today in that west coast of the United States?
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Fani Titi5:41
I mean, obviously I'm quite distracted by what's happened to the US now, a divided country, post-truth, a country that does not necessarily believe in the best of values, given the epoch we are in now. So the America I went to in the early 80s, when some of you may not have been around... Did you have to get a permission from some minister to leave the country? Not quite, not quite. So it was getting better, yeah, it was getting better, middle 80s. So coming from a firstly a very restricted society, because information was highly controlled, was very much limited. You couldn't, I mean, you could be imprisoned for reading an article that had the name ANC on it, literally. For you it may sound like hyperbole, but that is the truth. And very segregated. So the first time I get to Berkeley, around August of 86, beautiful, beautiful, just to put it in context.
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Interviewer7:00
South Africa is burning in 86, I know, right? So just understand where he's coming from. We've had a guy called... 'South African problems will be solved by South Africans and not by foreigners.' The crocodile, right? He's had his Rubicon speech and has taken us back, right? And so this is your context, and you leave and you go to that very strange part of the world.
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Fani Titi7:29
Continue. So the first marvel was a society that is open and where nothing is taken necessarily as dogma. So you get into university, even the existence of God, as we assumed here in the country, that was a given, was not given anymore within the university system. So the openness to challenge, to think differently, to be yourself was probably the most important discovery of a different society. Obviously, the lack of racial at least legalized or legally enforced racial separation was something that was particularly interesting as well. The level of technology that you got exposed to was interesting. So it was a completely new world, a world that could be discovered, a world that could be experienced, and it was fantastic. Still, I went out on a one-way ticket, so the only way you could go home was through an aircraft. And from time to time, from San Francisco International Airport, you see a little plane go up and say, 'Goodness me, when do I ever get to go back home?' I could only speak to my mom about once every week or every second week, and she had to walk from the village about three or four kilometers to get to a place where there was a telephone. So a contrast of a highly technologically advanced world, an open society as we had it at that time, against a restricted, very segregated, and in fact a very oppressive country. So two worlds, but really an opportunity to experience life differently.