Johannesburg - Thabo Rafuthu was a young black scholar from a small mining town in North West, with limited prospects, and now he is heading up Protea Hotel’s Roodepoort branch.
Rafuthu was, sadly, denied many opportunities in his youth because of his parents’ poverty and the impact of the apartheid legacy. His education prospects were limited.
He came from a small mining town in North West, and it seemed unlikely that he could secure gainful employment – certainly nothing beyond work as an unskilled labourer, like his father.
After finishing school, Rafuthu spent a year at home, trying unsuccessfully to secure some sort of employment after he had matriculated from a local technical high school. Frustrated by this situation, he hitched a ride with a friend to Johannesburg, hoping that things would look up for him there.
Soon after arriving in the metropolis, Rafuthu heard about casual jobs for waiters on offer at the Protea Hotel Midrand. “Getting any sort of job was a coup for me at that stage of my life,” Rafuthu explains. “Having had absolutely no prospect of any work for a whole year, I was really excited to secure this position.”
Read also: Marriott is on the expansion trail
From there, he managed to go on to better things. Within a decade, he was an executive in South Africa’s hotel industry.
Protea Hotels says his success has been due to a combination of Rafuthu’s hard work, and its human resource policy, which seeks to enable.
Rafuthu worked hard as a waiter and, “within a few months, I was offered a permanent position as a bar waiter. My ambition then was to move into a reception desk position – I think I was attracted to it because the staff always looked so good in their smart uniforms.”
Rafuthu went onto become part of the team that opened the African Pride Melrose Arch Hotel, and he joined the new Protea Hotel Fire & Ice! in Cape Town when it opened in 2006.
“My biggest break was in 2008, when I got a call from the Regional Director of Protea Hotels for Gauteng,” Rafuthu says. “He offered me the position of GM of the Protea Hotel Transit.”
After that, he moved on to become GM of the group’s Roodepoort outlet, a position he has held for four years. In that time, the chain has improved occupancy levels from about 30 percent to 90 percent.
Rafuthu says the courses he attended and the mentorship programme aided his progress. “My mentor allowed me to meet some of the most senior people in the organisation even though I was still relatively junior, and this exposure was crucial because I was recognised by the decision-makers in the business,” he says.
Currently, he is big on training, and is developing the 40 staff members at the hotel, and providing residents in the nearby area of Bramfischerville, Soweto, where more than 90 percent of the hotel’s staff reside, with aid. He also focuses on initiatives with local schools, providing them with advice about careers in the hospitality industry, and offering job opportunities to local matriculants when possible.
IOL