Author: AlisaAdmin

As part of the Rachman Review podcast series David Pilling, Africa editor of the Financial Times, asks Stefan Dercon, professor of development economics at Oxford University why some countries stay poor while others find a rapid path towards growth and development. Professor Dercon has made a life study of this question and wrote the book, Gambling on Development, as an attempt to solve the riddl...

A month ago, scientists measured the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (as they constantly do) and found a reading so high that they spent time confirming it before publishing. A very discomforting new record has been achieved. 420 ppm. Up from 300 ppm in 1960. A 40% increase. In just my lifetime. Despite promises by governments and businesses, despite a long series of CoP gatherings and man...

Class 13 was the first ALI cohort to meet each other on Zoom. We feared this would mute their enthusiasm or dilute their class chemistry. Yet, they burst on to the ALI scene with enviable energy, expressing strong opinions on all readings, calling for extra sessions, and bombarding the moderators with questions. This a class of strong characters, tempered by wise voices. They showed an early det...

  Our history is one of migration, colonial conquest and the construction of four countries that were amalgamated to enclose a single economy, within which solutions to the “national question” continue to drive conflict. The tribe, class, race, creed and gender issues central to the building of our nation remain unresolved. Despite significant variation in definition and usage, we can ac...

Earlier this month (April 2022), the Constitutional Court handed down a precedent-setting judgement that has shaken the law-enforcement community of South Africa, and beyond.The woman who drove it, over a period of a decade, is Andy Kawa (Class VII: Mahube). The judgement in question relates to police treatment of victims of abuse. It confirms that the South African Police Service (SAPS) has duti...

We gathered for our first seminar, aptly titled The Challenge, just as the first Covid-19 wave started to gain momentum in March 2020. The period that followed proved to be exceptionally challenging, but we overcame the unforeseen obstacles brought about by a global pandemic and hosted Seminar 2: The Good Society (with a very successful Antigone) in September 2021. Class XII: Isilimela  experi...

Akona Matsau will assume the role of Chief Executive, Bidvest Services South Africa, on 1 April 2022. This is a newly-formed Group division that will focus on the continued growth of Bidvest’s services operations in South Africa. Akona has been a part of the Bidvest Group since 2013, when she was appointed as COO for Customised Solutions at Bidvest Facilities Management. She was later promo...

In these turbulent times, with rampant inequality, dislocation and alienation; when, for thinking people, moral and emotional outrage is unavoidable – Can one be happy?  In fact, should one be happy? In the journey ALI-SA Fellows embark on we clearly encounter two arcs: the personal (Fellows emerge with a better understanding of themselves); and the social, which deals with governance of human...

Greetings to all ALI fellows across the continent and globe. After 2 very challenging years for public life, the sense I get is that we are returning to normality. Just at my children’s’ schools I see more public gathering and  greater social interaction as we have started the academic year. Ironically this felt awkward at first, then we appreciated the fact that this was what life was like ...

Native Merchants – The Building Of The Black Business Class In South Africa is Class 2 ALI Media Fellow, Phakamisa Ndzamela’s debut title. The book explores underwritten stories of black entrepreneurs during the 17th to early 20th centuries, giving insight into a time when black people built successful enterprises on their own account and not as labourers. The book is available from online re...

The 2030 reading panel plans to meet annually, bringing together respected SA leaders to monitor and influence progress in literacy in South African schools. Their gathering on 2nd February highlighted the parlous state of our nation. With SONA around the corner let us hope some attention is paid to their conclusions. For those who were able to join us yesterday for the inaugural Reading Panel, t...

What a wonderful year this has been! We wonder why, when solutions are at hand, we allow global heating to run rampant, fail to change our behavior in the face of the pandemic and tribalise into fractured communities when we know now more than ever, that issues of race, tribe and creed are social constructs that artificially divide. And this is just the global position. In SA we can add failure t...

Roboticist Prof Arthur G.O. Mutambara who is an author, chartered engineer, and academic has been appointed as the executive director and full professor of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge (IFK) at the University of Johannesburg. The IFK is a cross-disciplinary ecosystem – an epistemological interface between the fourth Industrial Revolution and the Humanities. He will be establishing ...

South Africans – at least, the party-political ones – are facing the future with a large degree of consternation since the results of the local government elections were released. With  42m South Africans eligible to vote and 26m registered these are the key considerations: There was a low turnout of 46% of registered voters. That is not unusual in local government elections. What was dif...

The CoP dance continues. One step forward, two steps back. With a jump to the left then a leap to the right. If we are to accept that the agreements reached in Glasgow is where this process will end, we must accept a 2,5 degrees Celsius warming and some dire consequences.  The credibility of the process is – again – being tested. However, it remains the only global forum and is valuable in m...

Long, long ago driving with my grandfather (a teetotaller and plumber) we saw someone lying next to the road. He pulled over and we checked on the man – somewhat drunk, but uninjured – then gave him, a complete stranger, a lift home.  Yesterday I saw two people lying on the pavement outside a private hospital in Rondebosch, Cape Town. Along with others, pedestrians and drivers, I drove on by....

Predictions of doom are as bad as denialism. There is much we can do to shift the trajectory of climate change.  We currently face the greatest challenge of civilised humanity. We are heating the planet, upending the balance of the ecosystem that birthed us, risking livelihoods, crop failure and drowning cities. In November, in Glasgow, politicians from 189 countries will gather under the gaze ...

Between them, Adriaan Basson (Class XIII), Ferial Haffajee (Class II) and Mondli Makhanya (Class III) represent three of the most credible news sources in South Africa: News24, Daily Maverick and City Press respectively. If anyone should know what’s going on, it should be they. So, these are the things we seem to be able to be sure about at this stage: What took place in KwaZulu Natal was an or...

The RDP and Breaking New Ground initiatives held “housing” as an excellent tool for redressing racial, economic and Apartheid spatial divides. These saw the delivery of three and a half million houses to poor South Africans. This we justifiably celebrate as a great success for the country. However, the failure of our housing practice was driven by our measuring success only by the numbers bui...

In November 1916, Pavel Milyukov, recognising the inability of the Duma to do the right thing, asked whether that was driven by stupidity or treason. Here, in the last few days, we can add questions of the levels of competence, quality of leadership, and management failures. For example, our intelligence services failed to understand and prevent the actions intended to reduce our supply chains in ...

Just under a year ago, in the first week of July 2020, the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy gazetted the procurement of 2 000 MW of energy “from a range of energy source technologies”.   This month, a consortium including H1 Holdings, of which Reyburn Hendricks is Chief Executive, was given Preferred Bidder status. Through their ambitious solar hybrid storage projects, H1 Holdings (...

by Sibongile Khumalo Seventy percent of South Africa’s children enrol in low and no-fee (quintile one to three) schools. Pre-COVID-19, less than a third of these children were making it out of the schooling system with a matric certificate. Almost half dropped out before grade 12, usually after repeating a few grades; and this grade repetition cost the system over R20 billion annually. Eight pe...

by Naledi Nomalanga Mkhize Many years ago, I had lunch with an American education funder. Her name could have been Rachel or Lindsay, I cannot remember, but it just fit the profile of the kind of person who jets into South Africa every two years to check on projects, catch some sun and fun in Cape Town, and then returns to the United States feeling like she changed the world. Anyway, at this lunc...

Eighty-one people joined a Zoom Dialogue in early March when a range of Fellows was invited to share their personal reflections on the state of the nation. It became abundantly clear that although there is the odd silver lining here and there, the dark clouds are mounting, leaving many feeling – if not helpless, certainly frustrated. Let’s start with the few silver linings that shone through ...

Previously known as the Young Africa Leadership Initiative (YALI), the ALI – Young Leaders Programme is premised on the Africa Leadership Initiative’s (ALI) purpose to develop the next generation of values-based, young African leaders who are prepared to be significant co-creators of a good society. The age profile of ALI – Young Leaders Fellows ranges from 25 – 35 years, and ...

Money has always evolved, and this evolution has always been towards reduction of transactional friction and better stores of value. Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and the underlying blockchain technology breakthrough fit the mould as possibly, even probably the next evolution of money. These are the bitcoin fundamentals: Only 21 million tokens or coins will ever exist (just over 18,6 million are al...

There is a fascinating concept at work in Like Water Is For Fish, a non-fiction book detailing the effectiveness of storytelling in communicating important messages and doing so in a mixture of memoir-style flashbacks and combinations of the perspectives of other individuals author Garth Japhet has met along the way. If it sounds like a hodge-podge, it doesn’t read like one, rather coming a...

How can the audit profession find its way back to noble leadership? In a passionate digital Dialogue hosted in late January, Professor Wiseman Nkuhlu spoke about the social role of the auditing profession with an emphasis on the big four auditing institutions. ALI Fellow Sindi Mabaso-Koyane (Class VIII Mahube) responded, and the session was moderated by South Africa’s Auditor-General, Tsakani ...

In the early 2000s, ALI Fellow (Class IV: Kalipha) and South Africa’s “First Lady of Song”, Sibongile Khumalo, released her hit single, Mayihlome (https://bit.ly/2L7vsy3). It would go on to be amongst the most loved songs within her illustrious discography of globally-acclaimed hits. Yet there was more to that particular song than poetic lyrics sung in her matchless voice. It was more than j...

Dear Fellows, To say that 2020 was a year like no other, would be classified as a massive understatement. The COVID-19 pandemic has been the item looming largest for all of us at a political, professional, social and personal level. Beyond the pandemic there is still an unprecedented democratic challenge in the USA,  the Black Lives Matter movement taking centre stage in the debate on race and t...

Written by Dr Zoe Lees It’s all very well talking about these lofty ideals of a new order for Africa, but in sub-Saharan Africa we are facing serious human rights abuses and chaos in Zimbabwe with deepening poverty and desperation, Mozambique is facing an ISIS incursion, Zambia is defaulting on its debt, Ethiopia… Tanzania….the list goes on. We can’t even agree on a common vision ...

2020 was a year in which natural phenomena shocked the globe in many ways. If we didn’t fully appreciate the economic imperative of addressing climate change before, we do now. And Africa is at the end of the queue for global support in terms of climate initiatives: of the total global ±$720 bn philanthropy spend, $5/6bn goes to climate space; and of that just 1% comes to Africa. The coronavir...

What a year it has been. It started well. From February 26-29, we had the rare joy of spending four days together at the second Africa Impact Forum. More than 100 Fellows from nine countries came together in Accra, Ghana, around the theme “Building to Last: Leadership vs Systems”. In the group there were 25 from ALI-SA; as always when we engage with our ALI colleagues from across the continen...

Class VII: Dinatla fellow, Tsakani Maluleke continues to make history as the first woman to occupy a senior position in the office of the Auditor-General (AG) South Africa. On October 20, 2020, she was unanimously recommended by Parliament’s Ad Hoc Committee to take over from the outgoing Auditor-General, Kimi Makwetu, whose seven-year term ends at the end of November. Since the Mbeki admini...

The Solidarity Fund has appointed Fellow Tandi Nzimande as Fund CEO. Nzimande was recommended as the CEO at a Board meeting held on October 22, 2020. It is her work in the development and empowerment fields which makes her the ideal candidate to lead the Fund especially now, as it enters a new phase that requires strong leadership to ensure mandates are met with efficiency, integrity, and passio...

The numbers of those in South Africa who are thought to now need food relief vary, depending on who you talk to [1]. Gift of the Givers director Dr Imtiaz Sooliman says maybe about 20-million. Andy du Plessis, manager of FoodForward, says it could be 30-million including those who were previously below the poverty line, those who lost their jobs during the pandemic lockdown, and those who lost ac...

Enzo Scarcella. Photo © Africa Leadership Initiative. ALI welcomes Enzo Scarcella as our new Board Chair after Adi Enthoven, who served on the ALI Board for a dozen years and had been Chair for the last five, ended his tenure.  Enzo Scarcella will ensure that the ALI board is effective in its task of setting and implementing the organisation’s direction and strategy. Enzo Scarcella is the Grou...

The Aspen Institute has never been accused of a lack of ideas. And nobody attending its events complains of too little talk. Indeed, as we can all recall, the ALI seminar program is experienced through conversations. The readings, Antigone performance, and even the ventures are discussed at length. Moderators urge fellows to take action at every turn, “…..yes, but what will you do about that�...

The founding intent of ALI was for our Fellows to achieve an increased positive impact on the world in which we live. Whilst we now better understand the impact of our programme onFellows, it remains elusive to measure the full impact of Fellows on the world. It has long been said that the “Projects and Ventures” Fellows are required to initiate will be the drivers of our impact beyond tha...

My dear friends So many of you have been reaching out in the hours and days following the tragedy in Beirut, asking about us, about what happened, and about how you can help. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to respond to all of you. Here is my response now. Before anything else, we wanted to thank you from the bottom of our hearts; I cannot begin to express what it means to have your su...

Covid-19 has hit education hard. In an already fragile system, teachers, pupils and managers were all impacted negatively by the State of Disaster lockdown. The re-opening has been, if anything, worse, with contradictory messaging, union action, the trauma of infection hotspot suspicions, and crushing socio-economic disparities compounding fear, anger and frustration. In the formal education worl...

By Nomfundo Mogapi Our starting point: psychological depletion South Africa’s population was critically psychologically depleted even before Covid-19 dropped a pall of fear, stress and confusion over the country. Reports note that somewhere between one in four and one in six South Africans suffers from some form of mental disorder during their lifetime, with only 15-25% of affected individuals ...

The Karl Flowers Trust launched this June, 10 years to the month since our friend passed away. A member of the Kilimanjaro class, Karl was passionate about ALI and our work. He assisted as a moderator and was integral in helping to build our community. Karl’s will stated that a significant portion of his estate should be placed in a trust to assist “young people between 16-25 years, who are u...

ALI stands for a commitment to contribute to a set of lasting interventions towards the Good Society. The municipal audit results, under the theme “not much to go around, yet not the right hands at the till”, came at a particularly bleak time – a time when the Good Society feels like it may be an impossible dream. For some, the last straw has been questionable tender awards relating to the...

The University of Cape Town (UCT) has elected ALI Fellow and former Safika Holdings CFO Babalwa Ngonyama (Class VIII: Mahube) as the new chair of its council. Nazeema Mohamed will serve as deputy chair. In the words of UCT’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng, the appointment is “historic” because it is the first time in 100 years that a woman chair serves on UCT’s Council. It i...

It is widely held that death and taxes are the only certainties. Given the state of the world’s economy and natural and social systems, we can add two more for the foreseeable future: debt and uncertainty. With unprecedented government borrowing, the lockdown of half the world’s people and the strangulation of much of the world’s economy, we are “on the way to hell in a handbasket”. Emp...

ALI would like to congratulate YALI Fellow Phathutshedzo Madima for his appointment as the new non-executive director and advisor of the Young African Entrepreneurs Institute (YAEI). The non-profit youth development organisation focuses on well-rounded career development by integrating employability, entrepreneurship and mentorship for diversified post-schooling opportunities in South Africa. Wit...

Paul Garner shares his experience of having COVID-19 In mid-March, I developed COVID-19. For almost seven weeks, I have been through a rollercoaster of ill health, extreme emotions, and utter exhaustion. Although I have not been hospitalised, it has been frightening and long. The illness ebbs and flows, but it never goes away. Health professionals, employers, partners, and people with the disease...

Adi Enthoven has served on the ALI board for 12 years; he spent the last five years serving as the chair. Most Fellows are aware that Adi and his family have been the backbone of this organisation and its largest funders for some time. He will soon come to the end of his tenure. Adi commits to remain active in support of ALI, and we will keep Spier as our seminar base for the foreseeable future. ...

On the 30th day of South Africa’s lockdown, 91 ALI fellows and guests joined a virtual Dialogue centred on the socio-economic impact of the national shutdown. Our immediate future is, as we know, tumultuous and stormy indeed, but the speakers also identified some potential silver linings. The dialogue was moderated by Ralph Freese, executive director of ALI South Africa. The panel included Adi ...