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in 2011, and today he is CEO of Accelerate Cape Town, tasked with a job covering more than 100 000km2 and at least 20 years deep: to catalyse the reinvention of his home city and region into a powerhouse that ‘connects Capetonians to Cape Town, and Cape Town to the world’. A think-tank working to galvanise economic growth, Accelerate Cape Town may seem like a standard business club or chamber of commerce, but Whelan considers his organisation a rare bird in South Africa. It’s a not-forprofit organisation funded by members, in return for which it promotes and protects their collective interests. Modelled internationally on the group London First, locally it follows in the tradition of the Consultative Business Movement – the corporate leaders who engaged with the then-banned ANC in the 1980s – and the Mont Fleur Scenario Exercise in the early 1990s, at which senior money men presented ANC figures with possible national futures such as Icarus (nationalise everything, flame-out) or Flight of the Flamingos (whoa, steady on).
‘Historically, business has played a crucial role at different junctures in the country’s life,’ Whelan says. ‘I would argue that the engagement of business, along with government, academia and civil society, is required for us all to own the solution to Africa’s problems.’ The subtext: don’t wait passively for the future – go and create the damn thing yourself. So it was that, in a province hotly contested by the ANC and DA, Accelerate Cape Town came into being, formed in 2007 by ‘business leaders brought together by a common concern over the pace and direction of change in the Cape and all agreed that long-term vision was needed to inform the strategies and activities of business, government, labour and civil society’. It was agreed, too, that big business should take the lead in the process of shaping this vision and its strategies, the result of which was Vision 2030, a research-based blueprint for transforming the Cape Town city region ‘into Africa’s Global City, a city of inspiration and innovation’.