Richard Branson: Business Stripped Bare

For me it was the story of Donald Makhubele, one of the waiters at our Virgin game reserve, Ulusaba, that gave the tragedy of Aids a human face. Donald was a poet and musician, a wonderful character who wrote eloquently about the local land and its people — and about his illness. His own testament was deeply humbling. He said: ‘I’m a songwriter who writes about HIV and Aids… Let us work together as one, to be proud of ourselves and have the same purpose in order to defeat the enemy. This is not a disease but it is a war that is in Africa, aiming to destroy our continent.’

Donald died of Aids-induced tuberculosis. When he passed away I pledged that no other Virgin employee would die unnecessarily. I thought it was wrong that any of the hundreds of foreign companies operating in Africa should allow their people to die of Aids, and the same should apply to local companies.

At Ulusaba, we first had to show that we had no inhibitions about HIV. Nelson Mandela had told me about a time when he had visited some Aids orphans who lived in a hut. Instead of throwing the food over a fence, he ventured in and spent some time with the girls. As he walked back to the car, his driver was so scared of catching something from him that he jumped out of the car and ran away. He said that Princess Diana had done more than anyone by cuddling a young child with HIV — this simple act had been a huge positive step forward in Africa.

So Joan and I invited a wonderful doctor and extraordinary social entrepreneur, Hugo Templeman, to come and see us. We then gathered all our staff at the game reserve and took an HIV/Aids test in front of them. We tried to encourage as many people as possible to come forward and also take the test — and most of them did. Afterwards, we invited some young people with HIV to speak to all of us about how antiretroviral drugs had saved their lives.

In 2005, Virgin Unite worked with a partner to fund two films, created by Africans and translated into multiple languages, to show how the HIV/Aids drugs worked and how the human immune system worked. In one of our African businesses we found that 24 per cent of our staff had HIV, which meant nearly a quarter would die within six or seven years without drug treatment. I was shocked — yet we were typical of so many other businesses working across Africa.

I said our organisation would supply anybody working for us with free antiretroviral drugs. And then we rolled out the 0% Challenge across the whole of our Virgin business: that no staff should ever die from Aids, that no one else would become HIV positive, that no HIV-positive pregnant mothers would pass on HIV to their baby and that we would have zero tolerance towards any type of discrimination against people who were HIV positive. The 0% Challenge is not only helping to stop needless suffering, but also makes absolute sense for our business to ensure we keep our people happy and healthy.

I went on a tour of local projects fighting the spread of HIV and Aids. We asked to spend time visiting as many clinics as possible to see first hand the medical crisis — I was already well acquainted with the facts and figures of the situation, but I was keen to gain a better impression of the scale of the epidemic.

The images of that tour are still too harrowing for words. In clinic after clinic, the vision of hell was clear for all to see. The sight of row upon row of near skeletons, both men and women, often with their babies and children by the bed, was utterly appalling. And the waiting rooms were full of people waiting to get into beds where people had died just hours before. These were not hospitals. They were places where people went to die. And yet we knew that this problem could be tackled. We even knew how .

I wrote in my notebook: ‘ A pregnant mother with HIV or Aids giving birth to her child is likely to give that child HIV. For as little as fifty US cents the mother can be given medicine six weeks prior to birth, and the baby can have an injection six weeks after birth, and nearly 100 per cent of such children lead a normal life, free of HIV .’ Yet very few pregnant women in South Africa had access to these lifesaving drugs.

All this troubled me deeply. As I returned regularly to South Africa to build up our companies, it seemed as if the HIV/Aids epidemic was getting worse. Since the first case in 1982, millions had died and the prevalence in South Africa was higher than anywhere else in the world. By 2006, the incidence rate in South Africa was up to around 29 per cent for females coming into antenatal clinics.

Those who know they have HIV must be given hope. They can’t be consigned to a living death and told that their life will be extinguished in a horrible way in five years — seven if they’re lucky. Antiretroviral drugs are a lifesaver. Before our zero tolerance campaign had started, one of our employees at Ulusaba had been reduced almost to a skeleton — he was barely a day away from death — when we managed to obtain the right drugs for him. A month later, he was back to normal weight. Three months later, he was back at work. If antiretroviral drugs are used properly, a person can live a full life. The drugs also cut dramatically the chance of that person spreading the disease. We decided to use our business skills to partner with some great organisations and come up with ways to help stop this health emergency. One of my thoughts was to help build clinics that can sustain themselves over time and start to administer drugs and ensure that condoms are distributed. Virgin Unite teamed up with Hugo Templeman, plus Brian Brink from Anglo American plc, the South African government and the US President’s Emergency Programme for Aids Relief to set up the Bhubezi Community Health Care Centre in Mpumalanga — a brilliant example of the kind of public and private partnership that really works, where local health officials and the business community are working hand in glove to fight Aids more effectively.

Hugo’s idea was to create a one-stop-shop for primary health care, to include a pharmacy, X-ray and obstetrics facilities, an HIV/Aids patient care clinic, and a laboratory. Hugo had not only built such a centre; he had helped create an entire economic infrastructure with basic utilities such as water, electricity, roads and even a bakery, a car wash and a nappy-manufacturing factory! Bhubezi was a great opportunity for Hugo to develop and extend his ideas.

In 2006, I returned to open the Bhubezi centre. In the interim, thousands more people had suffered and died from Aids and thousands more had become infected with HIV. Of course, I wasn’t alone in my concern. There were dozens and dozens of worthy and learned organisations and donor countries working to eradicate Aids. In fact, the number of organisations actually helping out was crippling some of the effectiveness on the front lines. We spoke to one doctor who said that 40 per cent of his time and his staff’s time was spent on managing over a hundred different funders. With this in mind, I worked with Virgin Unite to look at how we could set up a ‘War Room’ for sub-Saharan Africa to help better coordinate and mobilise resources in the fight against diseases.

During my trip in 2006, after some incredibly emotional visits to hospices and still angry at myself for letting Donald die, I decided that I could no longer be silent about the issue. Much to the dismay of the Virgin Unite team, who were worried that this would slow down or shut down our ability to progress with some of the projects, I went on national TV stating that I felt the leader of South Africa and his health minister were guilty of genocide and should be tried for crimes against humanity.

The next morning — 27 October 2006 — the Financial Mail reported: ‘British billionaire Richard Branson has slammed President Thabo Mbeki and health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for presiding over "a government [that] is effectively killing its own people".’