60 & NOT OUT THE GAME-CHANGER IN BUSINESS

It was 1988, the year London's Wembley Stadium beamed to the world a jam-packed pop music concert in tribute to Nelson Mandela on his 70th birthday.

- Renuka Methil

Far away, in apartheid South Africa, the collective global cry to free incarcerated revolutionary activist Mandela echoed. The first stirrings of change could also be seen in the country's cricket grounds, signifying the potential of sport to influence social transformation.

South Africa was inching tantalizingly close to getting back to international cricket (after a global boycott of apartheid sport for over three decades), and in the townships, young Black children were taking to the game with new zeal.

Imtiaz Patel was a lanky 24-year-old at the time, from small town SchweizerReneke in the country's North West province, joining the cricket development program to fully commit to pursuing the sport.

"It was at the height of a very passionate, positively-emotive time. The cricket development program [founded by South African cricketer Ali Bacher] was taking cricket to the townships, and we were all talking unification, we were all making a difference to people's lives, and building facilities. We were so passionate, those were dreamy times" recalls Patel, his eyes sparkling at the thought, on a warm afternoon in June as we sit in the larney mezzanine floor lounge of the Grosvenor House hotel where he stays in Dubai.

It's a million miles from those times before democracy in South Africa, but Patel, who helmed pan-African video entertainment business MultiChoice in various capacities for almost a quarter of a century, paints the picture like it was yesterday, full of hope, full of excitement for what was to come, a future that included him.

"I ran the cricket program in Gauteng, which included all the townships such as Alexandra and Soweto; they devolved the program to the provincial units, so I worked for Gauteng cricket," he says.