JOHN DLUDLU: Fare thee well, Foxton

It’s hard to recall when I first met Dick Foxton. But it feels as if our relationship covered more than a lifetime. 

I find it interesting that almost everything I’ve read since his passing has been true. A humble gentleman. An entertaining gossip, who nevertheless loved listening more than talking.

In the many group meetings he hosted, like the ones he organised with his many clients/friends and newspaper editors, he spoke relatively little, yielding the floor to his mostly shy clients, who didn’t know how to deal with tricky senior media types. 

Decades ago he created a niche, providing his clients with concierge services. This requires skill and humility. He never pushed a line. He invested heavily in goodwill for rough times, and as it turned out scarcely had to cash it in. By the time a crisis hit, Foxton’s relationships were already built: editors could call CEOs directly for an unvarnished insider version of the crisis. 

This was decades before then BP CEO Tony Hayward was lectured on what a crisis is. After the Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis he couldn’t wait to get his life back. I read somewhere, probably in Vanity Fair, that a crisis is never one’s fault, but one’s turn. This is the boneheaded truism Hayward missed and Foxton got right from the start.   

His modus operandi was embarrassingly simple. Once he signed clients on he spent a lot of time listening to them, their strategies and pain points. Then the harder part came: hours of liquid lunches with editors during fair weather. Because the editors were not being worked on, so to speak, they accepted these invitations, and the conversation was generally free-flowing. 

Foxton loved his clients, but preferred to work in the background rather than fronting for them. This CEO-is-my-client positioning put him on a collision course with in-house heads of communications, who never understood his role. 

His model was straightforward: have many clients, and charge a modest retainer. When he considered retiring, a friend and I approached him about buying his business. We were shocked that he had never raised the retainers for his clients over many years.  

When more black executives started joining corporate SA’s C-suites he signed them up too, ensuring that his base was as diverse as possible. They too easily bought into the concept that “this a man we can be vulnerable with”. 

For some reason he chose to call me by my family name, which he pronounced as only a white man could. So in return I also resorted to calling him Foxton. 

In the one-on-ones Foxton was a great gossip. I lived in constant fear that our lunches would be less riveting because of my boring input, but over the years I learnt that I could trust him so I shared as much as he did. 

Foxton loved good food. One upmarket Johannesburg restaurant even had “Foxton’s Pie” on its menu. Yet beneath the food and wine appreciation and gossip Foxton was a serious man who made an outsize contribution to SA. 

Few people know that he brokered talks with government that led to the resolution of the so-called “lifeboat” controversy: a loan from the Reserve Bank to one of the commercial banks. 

After the Marikana killings by the police, Iain Farmer, who had left Lonmin as CEO, returned to the country and drafted a thoughtful paper about how the mining industry could contribute meaningfully to growth in the context of the National Development Plan.

He wanted to share this with government but didn’t know how to go about doing so. Foxton sprang into action and the paper soon made its way to Jacob Zuma’s desk. Unfortunately, like so many ideas originating outside government, Farmer’s document was eventually binned. 

As well as loving his many friends — clients, editors, waiters, car guards and politicians — Foxton spent his last years loving Thuli Madonsela, his partner, whom we code-named Ms Stellies. He will be missed. 

• Dludlu, a former editor of Sowetan, is CEO of the Small Business Institute.