Africa-Press – Lesotho. GROWING up in Ha-Abia, Moneoa Hlabana, had no idea he would one day become a successful businessman. During his childhood, he would be asked to help in the family businesses for no pay.
His grandfather ran a fleet of cars. “Regardless of how committed I was in the family business, I did not get even a cent from the business fortunes,” recalled the 45-year-old.
But that did not dampen his spirits. “My parents would ask me what I needed and they would pay,” Hlabana chuckled. Then a seed of the entrepreneurial spirit was planted in him.
In 2009, Hlabana says he bought a Hi-Ace taxi to use as a public transport vehicle from Lithabaneng to Maseru bus stop. Because there was no influx of taxis at the time, the business boomed and he was able to buy a second taxi the following year.
“The two taxis became my cash cows,” he said. When the taxi industry became flooded, Hlabana bought a 4×4 car that he rented to different companies and government ministries and departments.
But he did not entirely leave the taxi industry as he bought sprinter cars for long distance journeys from Maseru to Quthing. “I just extended my business tentacles,” said Hlabana, who transports people to different countries such as Botswana and South Africa for shopping excursions.
Occasionally, he takes business people to as far as Cape Town in South Africa. He says travelling to Cape Town is fairly expensive because it is further than Durban, Gauteng and Francistown in Botswana where business people go for shopping.
Hlabana says people running boutiques are the ones who usually group themselves to go shopping outside Lesotho’s borders. He says transporting people across Lesotho’s borders has its challenges.
He says their colleagues at the border side of South Africa usually throw banana skins on their way to frustrate their movement in and outside South Africa.
Hlabana said South African operators often order them to offload passengers and return to Lesotho while the South Africans ferry the shoppers to their different destinations in that country.
“Sometimes they ask us to pay a platform fee of M500 to let us proceed with our passengers.
Because of these problems, taking people shopping to South Africa is unpredictable business,” he said. He charges M1 000 for a return trip to Durban and Botswana.
“We were charging M800 per head and we just adjusted the fares after the fuel price hike,” Hlabana said.
This business, he says, is profitable but has a litany of challenges. “We have to be careful as we drive across South Africa because thugs there can waylay us.
The thugs know that these businesspeople travelling to South Africa carry stashes of cash with them,” said Hlabana, recalling that the thugs once masqueraded as policemen and waylaid them with a car mounted with police blue lights.
It is particularly tough for businesspeople making the trip for the first time as they are not used to these stumbling blocks and rarely receive help from experienced ones.
“So bad is the situation that the first timers sometimes return home with nothing,” he said, adding that he usually takes care of his new customers to guide them to buy stock that is needed back home. To broaden his customer base, Hlabana has opened a Facebook page to market his services.
He says to be successful in the touring business, one has to always have money on hand because clients often delay to settle their dues while the operator still needs to pay for fuel and other logistics to keep the business going.
Business suffered heavily at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Hlabana said. “I bled financially. There was no movement of people across the borders at all.
Things were tough for me,” he said. Faced with the daunting challenges, he said he went back to his roots in Ketane Mohale’s Hoek to look after his flock of sheep.
“Wool from my sheep saved me from starvation. From now on, I realised that I have to care for my animals because they saved me during the bad times,” he said.
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