When South Africa’s schools reopened after the COVID-19 disruptions, there was hope that attention could return to learning losses, teacher development and educational recovery. Instead, many schools have become mirrors of the violence, poverty, gangsterism and social breakdown affecting communities across the country.

The numbers tell a disturbing story. According to Statistics South Africa, more than 1.15 million learners experienced some form of violence at school in 2024, with incidents involving both fellow learners and, alarmingly, educators themselves. Teacher-perpetrated physical violence accounted for more reported cases than learner-on-learner physical violence.

Yet statistics alone fail to capture the human cost. Across Gauteng, the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and other provinces, learners are being stabbed, shot, assaulted, robbed and recruited into criminal activity. Schools that should be places of safety increasingly find themselves on the frontline of South Africa’s broader crisis of violence.

Over the past five years, several patterns have become increasingly clear. Violence is becoming more severe. What once centred largely on bullying and intimidation now increasingly involves weapons.

Stabbings have become a recurring feature in headlines involving schools across multiple provinces. Recent years have seen murders, attempted murders and serious assaults reported both on school grounds and in areas surrounding schools. Educational institutions recorded six murders, 26 attempted murders and 335 serious assaults during one recent quarterly crime reporting period.

The issue is not merely indiscipline. It is violent crime. School violence increasingly reflects community violence.

Researchers and provincial education departments repeatedly point to the same conclusion: schools are not generating violence in isolation. They are absorbing violence from surrounding communities.

Gang activity, drug trafficking, family instability, domestic abuse and organised criminal networks are increasingly influencing school environments. Gauteng research identified gang-related violence, substance abuse and criminality around schools among the key drivers of incidents reported over the past five years.

On the Cape Flats, for example, schools frequently operate in communities affected by long-running gang conflicts, meaning learners often move between two dangerous worlds rather than one.

Gangsterism has become a significant education issue. It is not just a policing matter.

Schools have reported hundreds of gang-related incidents. Researchers note that gangs provide vulnerable young people with a sense of belonging, identity and protection, particularly where poverty and weak family support structures exist.

The result is that gang culture increasingly influences behaviour, recruitment, intimidation and violence both inside and outside school grounds.

One of the most disturbing developments is the prevalence of learner-on-learner violence. Learners are often the victims and perpetrators.

Recent incidents across Gauteng, Mpumalanga and the Eastern Cape have involved pupils allegedly stabbing fellow learners to death after disputes or confrontations.

This points to a deeper failure to address conflict resolution, trauma and psychosocial wellbeing among children.

Are current interventions working? The honest answer is only partially.

Government deserves credit for recognising the crisis. The National School Safety Framework has established school safety committees, incident registers and risk assessments.

But despite the framework, school searches and stronger SAPS involvement, more than 1.1 million learners still reported experiencing violence at school in 2024. The problem is not about security. It is social breakdown on a national scale.

The Department of Basic Education and SAPS have also strengthened the Safe Schools Protocol to improve cooperation between schools and police. Gauteng has installed CCTV systems at hundreds of schools and identified high-risk institutions requiring greater support.

These interventions have undoubtedly improved reporting and awareness. But there is little evidence that they have fundamentally changed underlying trends in violence.

Why? Because many interventions focus on responding to incidents rather than preventing them. How does society change from a violent ethos to one that epitomises peace?

Metal detectors may recover knives. Random searches may remove drugs. Police patrols may deter criminals. But none of these measures addresses the underlying causes of violence, namely poverty; gangsterism; substance abuse; trauma; unemployment; family breakdown; and community crime.

As many experts now argue, school safety cannot be separated from community safety.

One of the most recent examples highlighting the intersection between gangs and education comes from Westbury in Johannesburg.

In August 2026, ongoing gang violence left five young people shot, three of whom reportedly died, with the Gauteng Department of Education confirming that one of the victims was a learner at R.W. Fick Secondary School. The violence disrupted teaching, examinations and learner attendance across the area.

Earlier this year, Gauteng also witnessed several fatal stabbings involving schoolchildren, including learners from Forest High School and Daleview Secondary School.

While not all school-related killings are gang-related, they reveal a common reality: many South African children face dangers simply travelling to and from school.

The evidence suggests South Africa cannot police its way out of this crisis.

Security remains essential, especially around identified high-risk schools. But meaningful progress will require stronger psychosocial support services, school-based social workers, anti-gang interventions, greater parental involvement, and community-wide violence prevention initiatives.

Most importantly, school safety must become a whole-of-society project. In the same manner society mobilised against apartheid, there should be an intervention to put education and the safety of children at the top of the agenda.

A child carrying a knife into a classroom is often telling us something about conditions outside the classroom. Until South Africa confronts those realities, schools will continue to reflect the violence around them rather than serving as places of refuge from it. And that should concern every parent, teacher, policymaker and citizen in the country.

South Africa’s school violence crisis is not a failure of education policy alone. It is the most visible symptom of failing communities, and until the country tackles poverty, gangsterism, trauma and youth hopelessness, schools will continue to absorb the violence society creates.

@Higher Education Media Services

Leaders are often too quick to blame the strategy when a business is not making the progress they expected. It is an understandable instinct because strategy is visible, discussable and relatively easy to revisit. Execution is harder to interrogate because it forces a more uncomfortable question: did we actually do what we said we were going to do?

A business can spend months changing direction when the original plan was never properly executed in the first place. I saw exactly this with a business owner I will call John, who had been running his business for 15 years. Growth had been steady, but slower than he believed it should have been, and he was convinced the strategy was wrong.

Once we unpacked what was happening, however, the strategy itself proved to be sound. The problem was that the team knew what needed to be done but was not executing consistently enough. The problem was not one of direction, but of follow-through.

In practical terms, the distinction is fairly simple: are you unsure what to do, or do you know what to do and it simply is not happening?

A strategy problem exists at the level of direction. The goal may be unclear, or there may be several possible paths towards it and the business struggles to decide which should take priority. The team can work hard and still make limited progress because, although the effort is there, it is being aimed at the wrong target.

Good strategy requires research, trade-offs and judgement calls, often under real uncertainty about how things will play out. Leaders have to decide where they want the business to compete, what deserves attention and which opportunities they are prepared to leave alone.

An execution problem looks different. The direction is understood and the team is aligned on what needs to be done, what the deadline is and what ‘complete’ should look like, yet the business still underdelivers. Deadlines are missed, accountability is inconsistent, there is not enough capacity or capability, or the plan for getting the work done is simply not robust enough.

This is where misdiagnosis becomes expensive. If the underlying problem is execution but the leadership team responds by changing the strategy, the business can spend a great deal of time and money revisiting decisions that were not necessarily wrong in the first place.

One of the reasons this happens is that strategy is often the part people enjoy. Setting strategy is interesting, creative and intellectually stimulating. Leadership teams get to step away from the day-to-day running of the business, challenge assumptions, explore opportunities and think about where the company should go next. There is a certain appeal to the process.

Execution is usually far less appealing because it happens over weeks and months, alongside everything else people are expected to do. It requires teams to keep returning to the same priorities, follow through on commitments and have difficult conversations when things start slipping.

For owners and leaders, it can therefore be easier to decide that the business needs a new direction than to look objectively at what was agreed and acknowledge that the team simply did not do what it said it would do.

That does not automatically mean people are lazy or incapable. More often, the disciplines required for strong execution are not embedded properly in the business. There may be too many competing priorities, weak accountability, insufficient capacity or no consistent way of measuring whether meaningful progress is actually being made.

The cost of poor execution can also be easy to underestimate because it does not always appear as a hard expense on an income statement. A product that does not get to market when planned, a quality assurance system rolled out six months late, or a sales strategy that is agreed but never properly implemented all have a cost. Time and resources may already have been invested, but the value those initiatives were intended to create is delayed or, in some cases, never realised.

When this happens across several strategic priorities, quarter after quarter, the opportunity cost can become substantial. Yet because there is no single invoice attached to it, leaders do not always see the full impact.

This is why its important to spend a considerable amount of time working with clients on execution. Businesses that become good at execution tend to make consistent progress as they learn how to turn decisions into action and strategic priorities into completed work.

The disciplines behind good execution have been written about extensively, but in practice I find that a few principles come up repeatedly. The first is prioritisation. CEOs and leaders almost always have a long list of strategic priorities they want the business to pursue, but resources are not unlimited and the people expected to deliver those priorities still have operational responsibilities.

When urgent operational work and important strategic work compete for the same person’s time, urgent work will usually win. Prioritisation therefore requires leaders to make real choices about what the organisation will focus on now, rather than treating every worthwhile idea as an immediate priority.

The second discipline is accountability. People are busy, and organisations need mechanisms that keep strategic commitments visible rather than assuming everyone will simply hold themselves accountable while balancing multiple demands.

A regular accountability rhythm helps teams return to priorities that might otherwise disappear beneath the day-to-day workload. That may mean reviewing progress every two weeks and asking what has moved, what has stalled and what needs to happen next.

The third principle is keeping score. If something is genuinely a strategic priority, the business should be able to see whether progress is being made against it. Tracking agreed measures keeps priorities visible and makes it harder for projects to drift into an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ space.

There is a reason every sport has some form of scoreboard: when people can see how they are performing, it affects how they respond. The same principle applies in business.

The ability of a CEO or business leader to develop a good strategy remains vital, but even a sound strategy delivers little value if it stays trapped in plans, presentations and unfinished projects.

In most cases, if I can help an organisation achieve 80% to 90% of its most important strategic goals quarter after quarter, I can be confident that the business will make good progress even if the strategy itself is not perfect. Progress does not require a perfect strategy. It requires a strategy that is understood and consistently acted upon.

Before leaders decide to revisit the strategy, they need to understand what is actually preventing progress. Sometimes the direction does need to change because the market has moved, assumptions have proved wrong or the original choices were poor. In other cases, the business already knows what it needs to do and needs to become much better at actually doing it.

The next time growth stalls, it is worth asking whether the strategy really is the problem, or whether the business simply needs to execute it better.

©Higher Education Media Services.

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Last week, the University of South Africa (Unisa) asked the Gauteng High Court to interdict and silence a journalist before a single word of evidence had been tested. Unisa wanted Pragasen Edwin Naidu, the publisher of the education-sector outlet ednews.africa, to take down three articles about staff deaths, hospitalisations and burnout at the university, to apologise unconditionally, and to be interdicted from ever again suggesting the university bears any responsibility for what happened to its own employees.

It sought all of this on an urgent basis, having given Naidu barely a day to respond to papers it took more than a week to prepare.

Cases such as this are becoming a familiar pattern in South Africa, where an institution stung by unflattering coverage reaches for an urgent interdict rather than a defamation trial, because an interdict can silence a story a court will only test months or years later, once the news value has evaporated and the legal bill has done its own quiet damage.

It is worth asking, plainly, what right entities such as Unisa are vindicating when it goes to court in matters such as this.

What the Constitution says

Buried in Unisa’s papers is the claim that the articles violate its dignity. This deserves scrutiny, because it is doing more work than it should. Section 10 of the Constitution says “Everyone has inherent dignity”. Section 8(4) extends Bill of Rights protection to juristic persons, but only “to the extent required by the nature of the right and the nature of the juristic person”.

That qualification is not a technicality; it exists precisely to stop institutions from importing rights designed to protect human beings. Roman-Dutch law has long distinguished the three interests protected by the actio iniuriarum: corpus (bodily integrity), fama (reputation, standing, good name) and dignitas, the personal, felt sense of self-worth that only a human being can possess.

A company, a university or a government department can have a reputation. It cannot feel humiliated, ashamed or diminished, because it has no inner life to wound. This is not lawyerly hair-splitting – it is how our courts have framed the dignity interest in defamation.

In Khumalo v Holomisa, a judgment that remains seminally important in determining the issue of defamation by media publications, the Constitutional Court described the reasonable-publication defence as one that requires journalists to show respect for the individual’s interest in human dignity (dignitas). The judgment held that this is an interest that attaches to a person, not an organisation.

A public university, staffed by thousands but possessing no mind of its own, simply is not the kind of entity the right was built for. This is, in fact, the position Naidu’s own answering affidavit adopts: that “public institutions of higher learning… do not have a constitutional right to human dignity”.

Unisa may retain an interest in its reputation, its fama, but that is a materially weaker, more defeasible interest than dignity, and one that must be weighed against, not simply asserted over, the public’s right to know.

Defence of reasonable publication

Even setting the dignity point aside, Unisa still had to overcome a defence that our law built precisely for cases such as this one.

Because Naidu is a media defendant, he is entitled to raise the defence of reasonable publication established in National Media Ltd v Bogoshi and endorsed by the Constitutional Court in Khumalo.

This defence is not available to non-media defendants, and is one the Supreme Court of Appeal (in Bogoshi) designed specifically to stop the chilling effect that would follow if publishers could be held strictly liable every time a defamatory allegation later turned out to be unprovable.

Under Bogoshi, publication of even a false defamatory allegation is not wrongful if, considering all the circumstances, it was reasonable to publish the particular facts in the particular way at the particular time.

Relevant considerations are: the nature, extent and tone of the allegations; the nature and reliability of the sources; the steps taken to verify the information; whether the person or institution concerned was given the opportunity to respond; and the pressing need to publish before the truth could be established beyond doubt.

Unisa would simply not be able to argue around any of these on paper in an urgent application. It is precisely the kind of factual, evidence-tested inquiry an interdict is designed to avoid. Reaching for an interdict lets an applicant sidestep the very test the law created to protect exactly this kind of reporting.

Why Unisa tried to skip steps

There is a further reason Unisa’s papers asked the court to skip a step it is not entitled to skip. Our courts have long held that reportage on matters of serious public concern is granted greater latitude, with the burden falling on the plaintiff, not the publisher, to show that publication was unreasonable.

In Holomisa v Argus Newspapers, the high court held that defamatory statements on matters of legitimate public interest are constitutionally protected unless the person suing can show that the publication itself was unreasonable in the circumstances. The plaintiff carries that onus, not the journalist.

In the context of the Unisa case under discussion, staff deaths, hospitalisations and burnout at the country’s largest public university, funded substantially by public money and answerable to Parliament, sit squarely within that category of public concern; there is no principled reason this “greater latitude” should apply to political reportage but not to reporting on the working conditions that are, quite literally, costing Unisa’s own staff their health.

If Unisa wanted to overcome that latitude, it would have had to prove unreasonableness at trial. It cannot simply assert dignity and expect a court to skip the inquiry altogether.

The remedy Unisa chose also deserves scrutiny. An interdict restraining publication is, traditionally, a prospective remedy – in other words, something sought before defamatory material is published, to prevent a harm that has not yet occurred.

Unisa’s application went further: the three articles were already in the public domain, so what was actually being sought was a mandatory order compelling their removal and a permanent prohibition on Naidu ever again linking the university to the wellbeing of its own staff.

That is a materially heavier intrusion on speech than an ordinary anticipatory interdict, which our law is cautious about granting in the first place, and it is precisely why our courts have historically been reluctant to restrain publication at all, reserving that remedy for exceptional cases – not for institutions that would simply rather not be written about.

Public sector and court processes

This case is not really about three articles. It is about whether public institutions can use the machinery of urgent court processes to do what they cannot do through argument or through the ordinary defamation defences the law affords them.

It is, instead, an attempt to make an uncomfortable story disappear before it had even been tested. If Unisa had succeeded, every organ of state with a bruised reputation and a functioning legal budget would have a template: file an application urgently, argue dignity, skip the Bogoshi inquiry and let the interim order do the silencing while the merits wait.

Unisa matter struck off the roll

Ultimately, this approach did not succeed, as the court struck the matter off the roll for lacking urgency. This outcome, even though achieved on procedural grounds, is an important one for upholding and protecting media freedom. But the issues the case raises remind us of the importance of reaffirming that dignity belongs to people, that public bodies answer to the public they serve through defences that must actually be tested, and that a free press does not exist by the grace of the institutions it reports on.

Public bodies exist to be scrutinised. A university that can reach for a prior restraint every time a journalist asks uncomfortable questions about workloads, contracts or staff wellbeing does not need to win its case to succeed; it only needs to make the asking expensive and frightening enough that the next journalist doesn’t bother.

That is precisely the “chilling effect” our courts have warned against since Bogoshi, and precisely why the reasonable-publication defence and the public-interest latitude recognised in Holomisa exist in the first place – not as technicalities for a court to work around on urgent papers, but as the very balance the Constitution requires between dignity and expression.

This article was first published in the Daily Maverick.

©Higher Education Media Services

We tell young people that if they believe in themselves and work hard enough, they can do anything. We say it because we mean well.

I have said versions of it myself, but I no longer think it is true.

That does not mean I believe the game is fixed or that effort is pointless. I have spent a career watching hard work change lives, including my own. What I no longer believe is that hard work operates in a vacuum.

My first arena was sport. Long before business, boardrooms or advertising, I competed seriously enough to understand what it means to be measured, selected, overlooked and given another chance.

Sport taught me something I understood properly only later: talent can get you selected, but it does not always get you seen. Ability matters, but so does knowing who is watching, recognising which opportunities matter and being ready when your window of opportunity opens.

The same principle follows us into education, careers and business. Some people are born closer to opportunity than others. They grow up with good schools, financial security, useful networks and an understanding of how institutions work before they ever enter them.

Others have to discover those things for themselves, sometimes after the consequences of not knowing them have already begun to show.

None of this diminishes the hard work of someone who begins with those advantages. It does mean that effort can produce different returns depending on where you begin.

The field is not level. And, perhaps even more simply, the world is not fair.

In South Africa, the numbers make that difficult to ignore. We rightly celebrated the Class of 2025 achieving an 88% National Senior Certificate pass rate, the highest in our history. Yet about 1.2 million children entered Grade 1 in 2014, while the full-time Grade 12 class in 2025 contained around 778 000 learners.

Of those who reached matric, only 34% wrote Mathematics. The pass rate tells us how learners who reached matric and wrote the examination performed. It does not tell us how many of the children who began that journey made it to the finish line.

Go further back. The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study found that 81% of South African Grade 4 learners did not reach the lowest international reading benchmark. Then consider what waits on the other side of school. In the second quarter of 2026, South Africa’s official unemployment rate stood at 33.6%. Among young people aged 15 to 34, it was 47.4%.

Against that reality, telling a young South African that desire alone determines the life they can build becomes difficult to defend.

A young person can study, pass, apply, show up and work extraordinarily hard, and still find that effort is not enough to overcome the advantages somebody else began with.

If we tell somebody that hard work conquers every obstacle, the conclusion waiting for them is that perhaps they simply did not try hard enough.

My own life has taught me something different. Where you begin shapes what becomes possible, but it does not decide it. Even on an unequal field, there is still room to move.

You cannot believe your way out of a structure. But you can learn where its seams are.

Agency, to me, lies in understanding the field well enough to see the openings others walk past. It means learning which doors are only nominally closed, which rules go unwritten, and where the official path and the real one, part company. It means noticing the opportunity no one thought to point you towards and being ready to move the moment it appears.

When my life as a sportsman ended, the obvious route was to remain around sport. Instead, I walked into advertising. I had no obvious claim on the industry and no map for navigating it, but I brought discipline, curiosity and a willingness to contribute, in rooms where I was not necessarily expected.

What I discovered was that the door had never actually been locked. It had simply been communicated, implicitly and explicitly, as a door that was probably not meant for people like me.

Exclusion does not always require somebody at the entrance telling you that you cannot come in. Sometimes nobody tells you the entrance exists. The language, rituals, networks and confidence of those already inside can be enough to make you believe you do not belong.

Fifteen years later, I run the company. It would make a satisfyingly neat story if I attributed that outcome entirely to hard work, but I cannot.

Hard work mattered enormously. So did discipline and curiosity. But people opened doors for me. Timing mattered. Opportunity mattered. Luck played a part, and I had to be ready when those things arrived.

Eventually, you may become the person who knows how the room works. You can make the call, recommend somebody, hire somebody or give someone their first chance. Then you have to decide what happens to the person coming behind you.

You can explain rules that were never explained to you. You can point people towards opportunities they might never otherwise see.

And if you are in a position to influence institutions, you can start asking why success required quite so much luck in the first place.

Agency gets you through the door. Leadership changes who gets through after you.

If you escape an unfair structure and pull the ladder up behind you, you have not defeated it. You have joined it.

So, I am reluctant to tell a young person that they can become anything they want to be simply by believing hard enough. I cannot promise them that.

Where they start matters. Their education matters. Money matters. Networks matter. Timing and luck matter too. Recognising that does not diminish effort. It puts effort in its proper place.

You have more room than they told you and less than they promised.

The message I would rather give them is harder, but more useful: learn how the field works. Become excellent. Take opportunities when they appear and walk through doors you were never encouraged to see as yours.

And if one day you find yourself on the other side of one of those doors, remember how you got there. Hold it open, and if you gain enough influence, start making the door easier to find in the first place.

Because the measure of a successful life cannot only be how far you managed to travel from your own starting point. Some of it must surely lie in whether the person coming after you has a better place from which to begin.

Ray Langa is Group CEO, Leagas Delaney South Africa.

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South African households are counting every rand, but the retailers competing for their money have a formidable advantage: they understand how people shop, often better than shoppers understand themselves.

From the moment customers collect a trolley, they enter an environment carefully designed to influence where they walk, what they notice and how much they spend. Store layouts, shelf positions, scents, sounds, prices and loyalty programmes all play a part.

“We always think we are in full control of our free will when we walk through those doors with a trolley, but in reality, we are entering a highly calculated, scientific obstacle course,” says Prof. Roland Goldberg, an expert in consumer behaviour, retail and place marketing at the North-West University (NWU).

Even the location of everyday essentials is deliberate.

“Bread and milk are what we call destination products. People go to the store specifically to buy them. If they were placed at the entrance, customers could be in and out within two minutes, and the retailer would earn very little from that visit,” says Goldberg.

By placing these products towards the back of the store, retailers force customers to pass shelves filled with temptation.

“The store layout can also leave shoppers slightly disorientated, encouraging them to abandon their clear purpose and begin browsing instead. Even the trolley plays a role. Trolleys are much larger than they used to be, and an almost empty trolley can make us feel that we have not bought enough.”

Then there is one of retail’s golden rules: eye level is buy level.

Retailers use detailed visual maps, known as planograms, to determine exactly where products should be placed. The most valuable position is directly in an adult shopper’s line of sight, about 1.5 metres from the floor.

“People generally follow the path of least resistance and grab what is directly in front of them. Manufacturers are prepared to pay substantial slotting fees for that shelf space because they know how valuable it is,” Goldberg explains.

Consumers who are prepared to bend down may be rewarded.

“Bargains, bulk packs and the store’s own cheaper house brands are often placed closer to ankle height, while premium niche products tend to sit above eye level. Looking beyond the most convenient shelf can save you money.”

The calculation changes when children enter the aisle. Colourful cereals, sweets and other profitable products are positioned lower down, directly within a child’s field of vision.

“Look at the cartoon characters on cereal boxes. Their eyes are often angled downwards so that they appear to make eye contact with a child walking beside the trolley or sitting inside it,” says Goldberg.

“That eye contact creates an emotional connection. The child begins pleading for the product, and the retailer knows that an exhausted parent shopping after work may eventually give in simply to keep the peace.”

By the time shoppers reach the till, they have made hundreds of small decisions and may be experiencing decision fatigue.

“At that point, the brain is looking for a quick reward. That is precisely why chocolates and sweets are placed there,” Goldberg says.

“The checkout area is also an ‘oh-no-I-forgot’ station, stocked with batteries, razor blades, plasters and chewing gum. You are confined to a narrow space and cannot easily turn around or put something back.”

Retailers also appeal to the senses. Flowers at the entrance create an impression of freshness, while the smell of coffee or bread from an in-store bakery makes shoppers feel at home – and hungry.

“Scent is powerful because it connects closely with emotion. A hungry customer is also likely to spend considerably more than someone who has eaten before shopping,” says Goldberg.

Even the floor may influence behaviour.

“Near expensive wines or beauty products, the floor tiles may become smaller. The trolley wheels click more quickly, the brain concludes that you are moving too fast, and you unconsciously slow down. Very few shoppers realise that something as ordinary as a floor can influence how long they remain in an aisle.”

Pricing provides another psychological lever. A high price is displayed, struck through and replaced with a lower one.

“The brain anchors itself to that first figure, so the new price feels like a victory, even if the product remains expensive,” Goldberg explains.

Purchase limits can be equally persuasive. A sign declaring “only four per customer” creates an impression of scarcity and exceptional value.

“The shopper may buy four items they did not need at all. The best defence is to ignore the excitement and compare the unit price – the price per 100 grams or per litre. That is the cold, hard mathematics behind the marketing.”

Loyalty programmes offer genuine relief when food prices are high, but the discount forms part of an exchange: customers provide data about what they buy and when.

“Use the discount to protect your wallet, but never allow the game or the chase for points to determine what enters your trolley,” Goldberg advises.

His strongest advice remains simple: eat before shopping, take a list and follow it, compare unit prices and look beyond the shelves at eye level.

“Every tactic works because it operates below our conscious awareness. The moment you can recognise it and name it, much of its power disappears.”

• Your supermarket is not a neutral space. From the size of your trolley to the position of the milk, almost everything is designed to make you spend more.

• Eye level is buy level – but shoppers willing to bend down may find cheaper house brands, bulk packs and genuine bargains.

• Cartoon characters on cereal boxes may be looking down for a reason: to make eye contact with children and turn them into powerful shopping influencers.

• Smaller floor tiles near expensive products can make trolley wheels click faster, subtly encouraging shoppers to slow down and spend longer in the aisle.

• Loyalty programmes may save you money, but the discount comes with an exchange: retailers gain valuable data about what you buy and when.

  ©Higher Education Media Services.

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This distinctive white mushroom, known scientifically as Hericium erinaceus, has been used for centuries as both food and traditional remedy in parts of Asia. Today, it is attracting fresh attention among people looking for natural, food-based ways to support focus, mental clarity, mood and immune resilience.

The interest is understandable. Modern life asks a great deal of the brain with long workdays, constant digital input and rising stress levels making cognitive wellbeing a more everyday concern.

For many consumers, the appeal of Lion’s Mane lies in its simplicity. It is a functional mushroom with a long history of use, now available in convenient supplement formats that make it easier to include in a daily routine. As with any supplement, however, the real value lies in understanding what it is, how it is used and what to look for in a quality product.

Lion’s Mane gets its name from its striking appearance. Rather than the familiar cap-and-stem shape of many mushrooms, it grows in soft white strands that resemble a lion’s mane. In cooking, it is valued for its delicate texture and mild, savoury taste. In the supplement category, it is valued for its natural compounds, particularly hericenones and erinacines, which have become the focus of research into brain and nervous system support.

One of the reasons Lion’s Mane has become so closely linked with cognitive health is its relationship with nerve growth factor. This is a protein involved in the growth, maintenance and survival of nerve cells. Researchers are interested in whether compounds in Lion’s Mane may help support these pathways, which are linked to healthy brain function over time.

This is where Lion’s Mane differs from many ingredients that promise quick stimulation. It is not typically positioned in the same way as caffeine or energy products. The interest sits closer to long-term support: focus, mental clarity and the body’s natural systems that help the brain function well. For anyone trying to build a steadier wellness routine, that distinction is useful.

Focus is often the starting point. Many reach for supplements when they feel foggy, distracted or mentally stretched. Lion’s Mane is frequently described as a natural nootropic, a term used for substances that may support mental performance. In more everyday language, people are looking for help with concentration, clear thinking and feeling better able to stay with a task.

The science is still developing, particularly in human studies, but the early interest around Lion’s Mane is strong enough to explain why it has moved from specialist wellness shelves into mainstream supplement conversations. It speaks to a need many people recognise: the desire to feel sharper without relying on short bursts of stimulation that can leave them feeling depleted later.

Mood support is another part of the Lion’s Mane story. Brain health and emotional wellbeing are closely connected, and researchers have begun exploring how Lion’s Mane may relate to stress and mood through its effects on the nervous system, inflammation and the gut-brain axis. For consumers, this places Lion’s Mane in a broader category of supplements that support resilience rather than chasing quick fixes.

The gut-brain axis is especially relevant because it reflects how interconnected wellbeing can be. The digestive system and brain are in constant communication and shifts in one can influence the other. Lion’s Mane has long been valued in traditional practices for digestive support, and modern interest in the mushroom often considers both the brain and gut as part of the same wider picture.

Immune support adds another dimension. Lion’s Mane contains polysaccharides, including beta-glucans, which are natural compounds found in several functional mushrooms.

These compounds have been studied for their role in immune function, particularly in supporting the immune system’s ability to respond appropriately. For people already paying attention to nutrition, sleep and seasonal health routines, Lion’s Mane can sit comfortably within a wider immune-supporting approach.

But let’s not forget that Lion’s Mane is a food before it is a supplement. Fresh Lion’s Mane can be cooked and eaten, and is often used in soups, stir-fries or pan-fried dishes. Whole-food use offers nutritional variety and connects the mushroom to its natural source.

Supplements, however, offer something different: consistency. Most people do not have easy access to fresh Lion’s Mane, and even when they do, the active compound content can vary. A supplement format allows for a measured daily intake, which is one of the reasons capsules and extracts have become popular.

When choosing a Lion’s Mane supplement, format and serving size are worth understanding. Research and general consumer guidance use a wide range of daily intakes, often from around 750mg to 3g per day, depending on whether the product is a dried mushroom powder, a concentrated extract or another format. This makes like-for-like comparison difficult, as a gram of whole mushroom powder is not the same as a gram of standardised extract.

For that reason, the strength and standardisation of the supplement are as important as the number of milligrams on the label. FoodGrown’s Lion’s Mane follows the extract route, with a formulation standardised to 40% polysaccharides and a recommended serving of two capsules per day, taken with a meal. This gives consumers a consistent daily serving in a convenient format, while keeping use aligned with the product directions.

As interest in functional mushrooms grows, Lion’s Mane also raises a broader question about how people think about supplements. The strongest routines are rarely built around one product. They are built around habits that support the body each day, with supplements used to fill a specific role. Lion’s Mane may be relevant for people who want to support focus, mood and cognitive wellbeing, but it works best as part of a wider commitment to health.

That means pairing it with the basics that continue to count: enough sleep, balanced meals, regular movement, hydration and stress management. A supplement can support a routine, but it cannot replace one. This is not a limitation. It is the most sensible way to think about nutritional support.

Lion’s Mane is generally well tolerated by many adults, particularly when eaten as food, although individual responses can differ. Anyone who is pregnant, breastfeeding, managing a medical condition, taking chronic medication or unsure whether a supplement is suitable should speak to a healthcare professional before adding it to their routine.

For now, Lion’s Mane’s strongest appeal lies in its combination of tradition, nutritional interest and growing research. It is a functional mushroom with a story that feels both old and current: rooted in food, linked to the brain and increasingly relevant to the way people are trying to support their wellbeing.

For consumers navigating a crowded supplement shelf, Lion’s Mane offers an opportunity to make a more informed choice. Look past the buzz, read the label and choose a product that explains what it contains. Used thoughtfully, it may become a valuable addition to a daily routine built around focus, resilience and long-term brain health.

Andy Moore (MSc Dietetics), is Research & Development and Quality Control Manager at FoodGrown.

©Higher Education Media Services.

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Amid ongoing National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) challenges and other sagas, Higher Education and Training Minister Buti Manamela has marked his first year in office with a stark reality. While he inherited a sector burdened by deep structural problems, his own tenure has also been shaped by governance controversies, ongoing crises and mounting pressure to deliver meaningful reform.

Taking office in July 2025 after years serving as deputy minister, Manamela arrived with a rare advantage: an intimate understanding of the post-school education and training (PSET) landscape.

But a year and a month later, the question confronting the sector is whether that institutional knowledge can translate into the sweeping reforms needed to stabilise a system grappling with funding challenges, governance failures and growing demand.

One does not underestimate the scale of the task. Universities, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges and Community Education and Training (CET) institutions continue to struggle with limited capacity, uneven performance, infrastructure backlogs, student accommodation shortages, graduate unemployment and persistent inequalities.

At the centre of many debates remains the long-standing imbalance between universities and the underdeveloped TVET and CET sectors, often described as South Africa’s “inverted pyramid” challenge. This mismatch has created a paradoxical situation in which graduate unemployment coexists with critical skills shortages across the economy.

Adding to the pressure is a constrained national fiscus, weak economic growth, a challenging political context, and growing concern about governance across institutions. Universities increasingly report being affected by criminal syndicates, extortion networks, procurement interference and factionalism, while many continue to bear the financial burden of compensating for failing municipal services.

Against this backdrop, observers argue that assessing Manamela’s first year requires balancing his reform agenda against the realities of a distressed system. Manamela inherited a weak higher education and PSET bureaucracy. To his advantage, he arrived in the portfolio with greater institutional knowledge than any of his predecessors could claim. Despite troublesome governance decisions, he leaves his first year in office having made genuine commitments to systemic reform and having been unusually honest about the sector’s failures.

One of the minister’s earliest moves was to set out an ambitious vision for the sector. In his inaugural policy statement in August 2025, he outlined six priorities: creating a more integrated post-school system, expanding equitable access, improving responsiveness to economic needs, strengthening quality, enhancing governance and securing sustainable funding. His longer-term objective, he said, is to “engineer the system for the next 30 to 50 years”.

That vision has won support from many stakeholders, particularly his emphasis on strengthening TVET colleges, improving graduate employability and aligning skills development with economic needs. Those priorities are consistent with Manamela’s own educational journey. Before completing postgraduate studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, he studied at Mamelodi TVET College. This background has informed his long-standing advocacy for vocational education as a driver of economic growth and inclusion.

Yet policy ambition has collided with operational reality. The minister’s first year was overshadowed by controversies involving Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs), including disputed appointments and decisions to place some entities under administration. Critics questioned whether proper consultation and governance processes had been followed, while concerns emerged about perceptions of political patronage.

The disputes reignited long-standing debates about accountability and oversight within the skills development system. NSFAS has presented an even greater challenge.

The student funding scheme, which supports more than 800,000 students, remains one of the department’s most influential institutions. While it has dramatically expanded access to higher education for poor and working-class South Africans, it has also been plagued by governance and operational failures, payment delays and recurring instability.

Observers differ on whether NSFAS has improved or deteriorated during Manamela’s first year. What is undisputed is that the institution remains a major source of risk for the sector.

Manamela has publicly acknowledged NSFAS’s shortcomings and signalled the need for substantial reforms. However, analysts argue that the coming years will require more than incremental fixes, potentially including a fundamental rethink of the student funding model itself. The minister needs to fix this and keep an open mind on whether NSFAS is fit for purpose.

Despite these challenges, the broader sector has shown further evidence of governance lapses, as well as examples of positive performance. One notable example is the Chemical Industries Education and Training Authority (CHIETA), which has established Smart Skills Centres across all nine provinces. The impact on rural youth enjoying access to the Fourth Industrial Revolution speaks to impact in a manner few SETAs have managed. At the latest count, more than 90 000 rural youth have visited CHIETA-funded smart centres, developed through partnerships with TVET colleges, industry and community institutions. The centres provide digital training opportunities, career guidance and skills development programmes, particularly in underserved communities.

The initiative is increasingly viewed as a model of how SETAs can deliver measurable impact when governance and strategic direction are aligned. For supporters, one of Manamela’s key strengths has been his willingness to confront uncomfortable truths.

Unlike many political leaders, he has openly spoken about systemic weaknesses in higher education and acknowledged that reform will require difficult choices. His critics, however, argue that leadership is ultimately measured by implementation rather than intention.

Questions remain about departmental capacity, execution of policy priorities and whether governance concerns can be addressed quickly enough to restore confidence in the sector. In addition, the sector seems to lack a diverse, yet coherent, medium-to-long-term social and intellectual direction. The real test lies ahead.

Though Manamela has helped stabilise the sector and demonstrated a serious commitment to reform, he cautions that long-term success will depend on rebuilding institutional credibility and strengthening governance. That may ultimately define the minister’s legacy.

A year and a month into the job, Manamela appears well suited to the portfolio because of his sector knowledge, courage, policy grasp and commitment to structural reform. Yet those strengths alone will not be enough. The PSET system remains beset by crises that require what the minister can offer: decisive leadership, effective administration and tangible results.

For now, the foundations for improvement may have been laid. Whether they can be transformed into lasting change remains the central challenge confronting the minister at the start of his second year in office.

Pro­fessor Keet is Research Chair in Crit­ical Stud­ies on Higher Edu­ca­tion Trans­form­a­tion, Man­dela Uni­versity. Naidu is head of Higher Edu­ca­tion Media Ser­vices, pub­lisher of www.ednews.africa

©Higher Education Media Services.

Dedicated to MOKGOTHU ALETTA MTHENJANE : 10 April 1925 ~ 2 November 2001 and all the women held in the cells of the Fort Prison with their babies still against their skins. The most exposed frontline of the 1956 Women's March. 

There is a photograph that circles endlessly in the archive of that decade, a woman's spine, straight as a rifle, a child's fist curled into the fabric knotted across her back, and behind her, thousands more spines just as straight.  

That's the visuals I remember of 9 August 1956, when more than 20,000 women marched  into Pretoria carrying thousands of  signatures and the unbearable weight of what they were asking for.  One of their  grievances,  highlighted, was to  move through their own country without a idompaas tucked against their skin like a leash.  

It is said that the then Prime Minister arranged to be elsewhere. He sent a secretary to receive what he could not face, the accumulated fury of women he probably cared less about  

What followed that day, and in the anti-apartheid  campaigns that boiled through the years after 1956 , was the violence of what  followed  protesters that is rarely written about. 

The  battered bodies of women choosing, again and again, to dodge attacks by the security police of an Apartheid state.   Children confronted by a state that had already shown it was willing to set dogs indiscriminately to disperse  crowds. 

Fact! There were women who   marched on that day in 1956 who  were dragged into custody, attacked by police dogs, mothers with milk still in their breasts, held inside the cold stone geometry of Number Four at the Old Fort Prison, a building designed to break the spirit of the oppressed, detained women with their babies.  

What has never been fully reckoned with, is what those weeks cost and what they built. Behind those walls, lullabies had to do the work that lawyers can't  do. These women steadied their children, who were too young to understand why their worlds  had been narrowed to a cell. It was in that narrowed world that Mandela & Tambo, the country's first Black-owned law firm, based in Chancellor House, Ferreiradorp in Johannesbug. These revolutionary men stepped at no charge into  their story.  

 70 years later, I ask that we pause  long enough for those mothers detained at the Fort Prison to be remembered and  what it meant for those women interrogated with a baby crying against their ribs, or what it was like for those women to return home afterwards and still keep going, raising their children , hide the next comrade and protest again.  

This is the history that has gone largely unwritten. Did HerStory,  lack weight, or have we not thought to weigh it? 

here's to THE   MOTHERS  

WHO  DREAMED  OF  FREEDOM  

 women  wrapped  babies 

against their  backs 

walked together 

twenty thousand plus 

teachers, washerwomen, nurses, 

domestic workers

who left  

their madam's dishes  

unwashed, 

mothers on swollen feet, 

walking, carrying  babies 

as they carry everything else

on their backs,  

close to their heartbeats, 

so their children 

would know the sound 

of a woman refusing, revolting  

right to the front door  

of the oppressors  

and they left 

thousands signatures  

on petitions 

Strijdom would not receive , 

signed by hands 

that scrubbed his floors. 

and when the crowd  

dispersed, they let loose dogs. 

let's remember

 their dogs 

their teeth 

ripping through flesh of women moving through crowds 

like water  finding every crack, 

our mothers, 

pulling their children tighter 

into their spines, 

running,  with the weight 

of their babies, still gentle  

on their backs  

even as the boots 

the brutality came down. 

bodies  banged  into police vans  

and off to the Fort, Number four 

for fourteen days, 

in cells built for punishment, 

they rocked  their babies  

on  concrete floors 

and  taught their daughters 

their sons,  that a woman's back 

is meant to carry, stand straight 

even after being

beaten,  broken  

they are not alone. 

i stand  

in their shadows, their blaze, 

breastfed by revolutionary warrior women  

i stand  

with these women  

whose names history hides 

and to children  

on those women's hips 

whose cries became 

part of the record no one wrote down. 

do not reduce our mothers 

to widows of history. 

do not forget those on  their backs 

do not forget 

oMama bethu, 

owancancisa uvukelo 

History sometimes has this weird  way of standing at the podium and forgetting who built the stage. We know the names of the four who led that march to the Union Buildings, Ngoyi, Joseph, Moosa, Williams-De Bruyn, because oftentimes  leadership photographs well and  a name at the front of a line is easy to record. But a woman interrogated in a cell with an infant's cry as her only witness leaves no minutes with her signature underlined.  

She leaves nothing the archive knows how to hold, this  poem is  dedicated to those women. We should demand that   historical records record these facts. So, without a name, a date, a verified fact, poetry is permitted to hold what cannot be disputed, the weight, the courage of a woman who was never asked to lead anything yet led anyway,  by refusing to put her baby down. 

This poem  is not offered as a substitute for the record, it is offered for everything the record left out. If the organizers gave the 1956 march its face, then it was these women, the women detained in the Fort Prison who gave the August 9, 1956 March its cost.  

This poem does not ask anyone to choose between remembering the leaders or remembering the mothers in those prison cells. It demands that we understand that we cannot honestly remember the first without the second. The frontline can never only be where the cameras pointed, but wherever a woman stood between her child and the state security police . History that only follows the camera is not history. I'm reminded of an African Proverb “maji yaliyomwagika hayazoleki “ spilled water cannot be scooped back up. We can undo decades of distorted history by refusing to spill it the same way again. We all know too well what happens once a truth is poured out crooked,

“When we say from protest to power, we are describing mama Emma’s life, and we are also describing our country,” she said in her keynote, reflecting on the theme of the lecture “From Protest to Power: 70 Years of Women’s Struggles for Freedom, Justice, and Democratic Renewal in South Africa.“

This is how Zingiswa Losi, President of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), described the late Emma Mashinini at the second annual public lecture in her name. The event took place on Tuesday, 25 August 2026 at the Sun International Auditorium, Auckland Park Bunting Road Campus.

She continued: “We are describing the difficult journey that you, the young women (and men), must complete. This is not a polite commemoration, Mama Emma did not like polite politics, she liked honest politics, militant politics, working class politics. So today we will not simply praise her, but rather we will ask ourselves, are we worthy of her?”

Forced to leave school at the tender age of 14, Emma Mashinini found herself working on factory floors exposed to discrimination and exploitation.

“That is where Mama Emma found her university. The shop floor taught Mama Emma that exploitation has an address, and that it can be fought. She did not become a leader by appointment, she became a leader by struggling and learning the hard work of organising.”

Losi emphasised the need to honour Emma Mashinini and her contributions to the labour movement in South Africa.

“The clothing unions were the backbone of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), a predecessor of Cosatu. SACTU taught us that collective bargaining without national liberation is incomplete, and that national liberation without collective bargaining is a lie.”

Losi questioned the current trade union movement’s commitment to the working class, comparing it to Mashinini’s dedication. She highlighted on the impact of SACTU’s ban and exile on the labour movement and how Mashinini continued to organise on the factory floor.

Losi’s address recounted the historic launch of Cosatu in 1985 and Mashinini’s presence at the event. She emphasised the importance of women in the labour movement and how Mashinini’s advocacy for women’s rights and inclusion was an invaluable part of the movement’s identity.

Losi also detailed Mashinini’s founding of the Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union (today SACCAWU) in 1975, a time of significant repression under Apartheid. Mashinini’s leadership in organising black workers in the retail, hotel and catering sectors was highlighted, including battles against major retail monopolies in securing maternity leave and recognition as a union.

Losi reflected on Mashinini’s detention – a six-month solitary confinement – and the physical and psychological torture she endured. She connected Mashinini’s resilience and commitment to fighting oppression to the democratic breakthrough of the first elections in 1994. Losi outlined the key labour laws and constitutional provisions that were won through the struggle, including the right to form and join a trade union, collective bargaining and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act.

While acknowledging the progress made for women in the labour movement, ongoing challenges of gender- based violence and the fear faced by women in the workplace remain.

Losi called for continued vigilance and action to address these issues.

To address the challenges posed by the fourth industrial revolution and artificial intelligence, Losi said there was a need to create an act to protect workers.

“We need a new labour relations act for the digital age. We need a right to reskill, and we need a tax on machines that are replacing workers to fund the retraining. Mama Emma fought for a non-racial South Africa, and she believed that workers – black and white – have more in common than they think.”

She concluded by calling for the return to the basics of trade unionism, focusing on job security, wages and collective bargaining. She urged a reconnection with student movements and advocated for non-racialism and class solidarity to honour the legacy of Emma Mashinini.

Professor Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel, a distinguished political scientist based at the Center for Conflict Studies at Marburg University in Germany, served as the primary respondent and discussant. Her connection to Mashinini is that of family as she is her granddaughter.

She discussed the complexities of Mashinini’s life, her roles as a mother, trade unionist, and activist and the challenges she faced during apartheid. She also emphasised the intergenerational dialogue encouraged by Mashinini and touched on the historical connections between different social and political movements, particularly the link between 1956 and 1976, and the need for contemporary activists to navigate similar struggles.

Professor Kammila Naidoo, Executive Dean for the Faculty of Humanities, highlighted UJ’s commitment to social justice, educational access, and leadership development, emphasising the need for collective action to address persistent inequalities. The lecture series aims to foster critical dialogue and transformative scholarship, reflecting UJ’s mission to produce knowledge that transforms lives and contributes to South Africa’s democratic future.

“This lecture has reminded us that the freedoms and democratic rights we enjoy today were shaped by generations of women who refused to accept injustice as inevitable. We are posed with the questions – how do we transform courage into institutions, representation into meaningful participation and political freedom into social and economic justice – that is the challenge for all of us. These remain urgent questions for our country.”

The public lecture was organised by the Faculty of Humanities and the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class (CSRGC), in partnership with the Emma Mashinini Foundation.

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When I was a first-year university student, my late father used to tell me: “Nobody can take away your education. Work hard and get that degree. I want you to have a better life than I did.”

Having come from humble beginnings, I understood that acquiring a degree was an escape out of my socio-economic situation. My father managed to pay for my studies from his meagre weekly wages. I had to work hard because I understood what he was sacrificing for me. Getting out of economic hardship was a non-negotiable for me.

I wanted a spacious house, a car and the financial freedom that came with a good job.

Several years later, with four qualifications, I did benefit from a university education. My qualifications opened doors for me and changed the trajectory of my life.

But the world has changed.

Tragically, South Africa’s youth unemployment rate is now 47.4%: almost one in every two young people cannot find a job, according to Statistics SA. Furthermore, five million young people aged 15 to 34 were unemployed in the second quarter of 2026. High joblessness shrinks South Africa’s tax base while forcing the government to spend more on social grants and welfare.

A consequence is that generations remain trapped in poverty and young people cannot earn money or afford to study further.

From this, I would argue that there needs to be an urgent rethinking of the way young people move from school to work and to higher qualifications.

At a recent Council on Higher Education (CHE) Colloquium on “Shifting participation trends in South African higher education”, Professor Denyse Webbstock, senior director for institutional planning, evaluation and monitoring at the University of Johannesburg, spoke about changing patterns in higher education globally.

She referred to a British Social Attitudes Survey showing that the belief that a university degree is necessarily the answer to everything is no longer as widely held. The survey considered whether a degree was worth the money and time invested in it, with a significant proportion of respondents questioning its value.

Yet in South Africa, a university degree remains highly valued. For many young people and their families, it is still seen as the desired route to a better life, as Prof Webbstock explained.

The challenge is that the South African higher education sector cannot absorb every matriculant who qualifies for university entrance, while the labour market is struggling to absorb many of those who do graduate. Simultaneously, there is a mismatch between what some graduates have learnt, and the skills employers require. Research presented at the colloquium pointed to the growing importance of practical skills, digital competence, problem-solving abilities, experience and workplace readiness. And then there are academics who do not have industry experience but are teaching university students.

This presents South Africa with a difficult question: What happens to the young person who cannot immediately enter university, or who obtains a qualification but cannot find employment?

We need to create more pathways to jobs and post-school qualifications. South Africa needs to introduce a properly recognised and quality-assured framework for microcredentials that enables young people to acquire specific, relevant skills to enter the labour market and continue studying towards formal qualifications.

Microcredentials are short, focused learning programmes that enable people to develop competencies that employers are looking for.

Picture this: a matriculant cannot access higher education due to financial constraints. Instead of spending months or years waiting for a job, he or she could complete a recognised microcredential in digital literacy, followed by one in data analytics, and use those skills to seek entry-level employment.

While working, he or she could complete further microcredentials and, where appropriate, accumulate credits towards a higher certificate, diploma and eventually a degree.

Some income is better than no income. Earning an income while studying can give a young person a sense of independence, dignity and purpose while allowing them to continue building their qualifications.

On the other hand, an unemployed graduate could acquire skills after completing a degree by doing microcredentials. Someone already in the workplace could reskill or an older adult who was retrenched could take on microcredentials to reskill and find a job.

This could help break the cycle in which young people feel they must first obtain a qualification before they can work, while employers say they need experience and practical skills before they will employ them.

At the CHE colloquium, Dr Mandi Joubert, Executive Head of Academics at Eduvos (one of the largest private providers of higher education in South Africa, which offers 20 undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications), pointed out that the traditional trajectory of the school leaver has been “linear”: school leaver, degree-first, one annual intake, continuous study and full-time participation.

However, routes to qualifications are changing.

The private higher education sector’s student population increasingly includes delayed-entry students, students balancing work and study, lifelong learners and students seeking reskilling opportunities. Dr Joubert explained that alternative pathways are not merely academic pathways; they are also financial pathways. This makes flexibility in both pathways and timing increasingly important.

Data presented by Eduvos reinforces this changing pattern. Not all students enter higher education immediately after matric, while some enter through alternative admission routes, enrol outside the traditional intake cycle or interrupt and later resume their studies.

A university education provides much more than technical skills. It teaches students to analyse, question, research and solve complex problems. It exposes them to different disciplines, ideas and perspectives and helps develop judgement and ethical reasoning.

For many South Africans, particularly those from communities historically excluded from economic opportunity, a university education remains an important route to social mobility.

A short course may teach someone how to perform a particular task. A university education should prepare someone to understand the world in which that task exists.

Universities themselves, however, also have a responsibility to respond to a changing economy.

They need stronger partnerships with industry, more opportunities for work-integrated learning, greater support for entrepreneurship and curricula that respond to technological change, including artificial intelligence.

There is also a need to strengthen the connection between academic knowledge and the world of work. Academic qualifications remain important, but students also need opportunities to acquire practical experience and understand how their knowledge is applied beyond the university.

My father was right.

Nobody can take away your education. But education cannot be caught up in a time warp. The degree that opened the door for me to have a better life might not be the door that younger generations are able to enter. There should be other doors to qualifications and jobs.

Alicia James is a higher education writer.

©Higher Education Media Services.

For a 96-year-old actor, playwright, poet and mentor
We buried Bra Sol Rachilo at the Heroes Acre in Westpark cemetery on Tuesday.

There were more police, traffic officers and government officials than mourners.
Everything that needs to be said about Bra Sol has been. Anything said that will be said from now on will be repetition. There is nothing more to say.

Nothing that needs to be said has been left unsaid.
It will be difficult to find new words.

Steve Biko said: You are either alive and proud. Or you are dead. And when you are dead, you cannot care, anyway. And your method of death can be a politicising thing.

We were gathered at The Market Theater to remember a man who was alive and proud. He lived 96 years. But he is dead now. What we had to say will not make a difference to his life.

Life prepares us for Death. Death teaches us Life, how to Live.

Now that we are here, we must teach and relearn some things.

For me, Bra Sol was an image and definition of a truly liberated man. He was not a victim. He knew who he was. He knew what he was doing. And did not seek approval.

Rough and tough as life was, spending his last days in a lonely shack and a furnace of fire that burnt him to death, he survived. He kept on walking and working to sustain himself.

He was a multi-talented artist. A complex yet simple human being. A man with the courage to be ordinary. Yet do extra ordinary things.

If you met him once, you remember. Not because he smelled like good expensive perfume or wore stylish shirts and suits like Cat Matlala. You felt his aura. He spoke like a man who had read widely and thought deeply.

Above all, he carried himself like a man who was alive and proud. A man who knew that art was not entertainment, it was work. Serious, disciplined, spiritual work. National consciousness-raising.

One widely abused word to describe Bra Sol in this society, 'resilience.'

In this era of freedom and democracy, he lived a life that would have made many others bitter. And suicidal. He knew what it meant to work without support. He knew what it meant to create without funding. He knew what it meant to walk back home because there was no taxi fare.

Many artists and producers wait for funding and conditions to be conducive. They are immobilized and paralyzed. He never waited. He worked with what he had. And he had nothing.

But lack of material support never deterred him. In fact, it deepened his determination. He was not afraid to face his fate in an unequal cowntry where funding is by who you know.

His eyes were not on himself. His eyes were on the young. Who are the future.
He believed, truly believed, that the job of an elder over 65 years was not to complain to people who knew what the problem is.

From 1977, he wanted to draw youth away from drugs, alcoholism and hopelessness. And he did. For seven decades, especially the last 50 years.
How many young people between 25 and 40 are here today? How many young people did he inspire and guide to redirect their time and energies to creative work? To take responsibility for their fate and future?

He was more spirit than body. His body grew old, as all bodies must, 96 years is a long time to carry a black body, but his spirit never aged. It stayed curious. It stayed generous. It stayed committed to the idea that South Africa will be saved not by tenders, but by imagination. By self determination. By creative artists.

He understood something many have forgotten. That a country without poets is a country without memory. That a country without writers and playwrights is a country without a mirror. That a country without mentors for its children has no future.
We have seen democracy eat its children.

He refused to let that happen. So he mentored.

He did not coach for money. He did not mentor for fame. He coached and mentored because he knew that if he did not, the future was bleak and dark. And he was determined that the young would not die.

Today we say: Salute Bra SolRha! Rest, now. But I think he would ask us not to rest.
He would ask us: What are you doing to help the young to help themselves? Nobody is coming to save them.

Are you opening a door? Are you lending a book? Are you releasing those funds that he never had, so that the next veteran does not have to be so resilient just to survive?

96 years. What a gift. What a long, stubborn, beautiful act of resistance.
He lived through apartheid, through the return of exile, through democracy, through political betrayal and disappointment, through hope and heartbreak.

And through it all, he kept one thing intact: his commitment to inspire. To be true to himself.

So let us not just mourn him. Let us imitate him, do as he did, where we can. He was a truly liberated taxpayer who did not wait for government to make things happen. Or give him money.

Let us be resilient and do what we must do where we can do it. It is much easier to be cynical.

If we do what he did, then he will not have lived in vain. He will be in every young artists voice that finds courage because an old man once said, "This is your Life. Be true to Yourself."

Hamba kahle, Bra Sol.
Tata. Poet. Playwright. Actor. Mentor.
You have finished your shift. We will take it from here. Lala ngoxolo.

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The world has recognised South Africa as one country that has the most progressive constitutions in the world.

Our Constitution prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also provides a framework for recognising the dignity and humanity of all people, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation. Yet nearly three decades into democracy, a troubling question remains: why have our attitudes not changed at the same pace as our laws?

Today, information about people with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI) identities is more accessible than ever before. Schools, universities, social media platforms, television programmes, academic research, religious debates and public policy discussions have all contributed to greater visibility of sexual and gender diversity.

Most South Africans have encountered information about transgender, non-binary, queer and gender-diverse people in ways that previous generations never did. Yet violence, discrimination and exclusion towards LGBTQI people still persist.

Recent events highlight that the society has negative attitudes towards people with LGBTQI. For example, on 19 March 2026, a transgender woman, Buhlebendalo Mthombeni, alleged mistreatment at Universitas Academic Hospital in the Free State while seeking healthcare, raising concerns about the treatment and well-being of transgender individuals within South Africa’s public health system.

In the same month, Hermina Khoza, a 38-year-old queer woman from Bekkersdal, Gauteng, was murdered under circumstances that raised fears of a hate crime, highlighting the persistent vulnerability of sexual and gender minorities to violence.

These incidents prompted the National Task Team on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Expression and Sex Characteristics (SOGIESC) to warn of a growing safety crisis affecting LGBTQI communities during a meeting held in Pretoria on 30 March 2026.

Yet discrimination is not only expressed through violence or institutional practices. It is also sustained through public discourse that continues to portray non-normative identities as morally inferior or socially undesirable.

This was evident when Cape Town pastor Oscar Bougardt, who had previously been found guilty of LGBTQI hate speech by the Equality Court, reignited controversy through a series of anti-LGBTQI + social media posts.

In these posts, he described homosexuality as contrary to scripture, opposed same-sex parenting and transgender identities, and linked LGBTQI people to what he called ‘societal decay’.

Although Bougardt defended his comments as expressions of sincerely held religious beliefs, the episode demonstrated how negative attitudes towards sexual and gender diversity continue to be normalised in public spaces.

Taken together, these incidents reveal a troubling reality: South Africans are not lacking information about people with LGBTQI. Information about sexual and gender diversity is more accessible today than at any other point in our democratic history.

Rather, these incidents suggest that knowledge alone is insufficient to transform entrenched beliefs, prejudices and emotional responses towards people whose identities challenge dominant social, cultural and religious norms.

The persistence of negative attitudes raises difficult questions. Why do some people continue to reject identities that do not directly affect their own lives? Why does exposure to information not necessarily result in greater understanding? Why do constitutional values of equality and human dignity remain disconnected from everyday social interactions?

Part of the answer may lie in the fact that prejudice is rarely based solely on ignorance. People often hold beliefs about gender and sexuality that are shaped by culture, religion, family traditions, political ideologies and social norms.

When these beliefs are challenged, information alone may not be enough to change minds. Individuals can know about LGBTQI identities while still viewing them as threatening to their understanding of morality, family or social order.

This is why legal reform, although necessary, is insufficient. Laws can prohibit discrimination, but they cannot force acceptance. Policies can protect rights, but they cannot manufacture empathy. Educational guidelines can promote inclusion, but they cannot automatically transform attitudes that have been reinforced over generations.

The challenge is evident within educational institutions. Universities often celebrate diversity and transformation, yet research continues to show that transgender and gender-diverse students experience exclusion, marginalisation and institutional barriers.

These realities demonstrate that inclusion is not simply about opening the doors of institutions. It is about changing the cultures, assumptions and attitudes that shape people’s experiences once they enter those doors.

This brings us to what may be the most important question facing South Africa today: What must be done to change how people think and feel about non-normative sexual and gender identities?

The answer cannot be reduced to legislation, awareness campaigns or policy documents alone. Genuine social transformation requires opportunities for dialogue, meaningful encounters across differences and the cultivation of empathy.

Research consistently shows that prejudice often decreases when people have personal relationships with those whom they perceive as different. Humanising stories can sometimes achieve what legal documents cannot.

Perhaps the challenge is not that South Africans do not know enough about people with LGBTQI identities. Maybe the constraint is that the majority of people with heterosexual and cisgender people have not yet learned to see themselves in the humanity of those who are different from them.

As debates continue about school guidelines, Pride flags and competing understandings of family values, we should remember that democracy is not only about protecting rights. It is also about building a society capable of respecting differences.

Constitutional change has already occurred. The unfinished project is social change. Therefore, until we confront the attitudes, fears and prejudices that continue to shape public perceptions of people with non-normative identities, equality will remain a constitutional promise rather than a lived reality.

Dr Johannes Buthelezi is Lecturer: Inclusive Education in the Department of Education Foundations, University of the Free State.

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In August 1956, more than 20,000 women marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest the hated pass laws. Their courage was monumental, their unity unprecedented, and their slogan unforgettable: “Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo” – “You strike a woman, you strike a rock.”

Yet, at the time, the mainstream press – particularly white-owned newspapers – dismissed them as “agitators”, “communist-inspired troublemakers” and “defiant natives”. Their bravery was obscured by headlines that framed them as threats to “law and order” rather than fighters for dignity and justice.

Fast forward to post-1994 South Africa, and those same women are celebrated annually as icons of resistance. Take the case of 88-year-old Sophie Williams-De Bruyn, the last surviving leader. She gets interviewed every Women’s Month and lauded as an icon that she is.

Her comrades who have since passed – Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, and Rahima Moosa – are remembered today as heroines who stood tall against oppression. But the hypocrisy is glaring: the very media that once vilified them now scramble to honour them.

For these courageous women, recognition came late, but it came nonetheless.

Sadly in 2026, history is repeating itself. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma and Princy Mthombeni – leaders of March and March and South Africa for Constitutional Reform (SACR), are being vilified by the present government and its captured media for highlighting uncomfortable truths and rattling their cage.

Instead of being celebrated as women who care about the poor and marginalised who also have their support, are falsely portrayed as vigilantes, xenophobes, and afrophobes who have brought violence to illegal immigrants in this country.

The parallels with the 1956 march are undeniable where the apartheid press worked hand in glove with the state, deploying silencing tactics to diminish the voices of women who were fighting for the rights of the majority.

Even the now-famous slogan of the 1956 march, widely used now in mainstream media, survived only through oral tradition, protest theatre, and liberation movements.

Research shows that only Drum Magazine had the courage to use the slogan on its front page when Es’kia Mphahlele reported on the historic march to the Union Buildings where he profiled march leader Lilian Ngoyi.

However, today, apartheid tactics are being deployed against Ngobese-Zuma and Mthombeni, also known as MaDuma. Ngobese-Zuma’s message – that undocumented migrants are overwhelming South Africa’s already strained resources, and MaDuma’s efforts for constitutional reform – are being drowned by headlines painting them as dangerous radicals.

Much as Ngoyi was said to be funded by foreign forces, Ngobese-Zuma is accused of spreading false narratives. Much as Joseph and Moosa were dismissed as destabilising troublemakers, MaDuma is accused of targeting the Constitution with warnings that this is just a ruse as her targets are the foreign-sponsored NGOs.

The adjectives may have changed, but the strategy remains the same: vilify and destroy women who dare to speak uncomfortable truths to power. They used the same modus operandi on struggle stalwart Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

Ngobese-Zuma has repeatedly explained that South Africans are marching against the invasion of illegal and undocumented migrants who are crowding South African children out of classrooms and forcing locals to wait years for emergency medical procedures because public health systems are overwhelmed.

Poor migrants compete with poor locals for everything on sight, including jobs. The result is unacceptable for a country that has an almost 50% unemployment rate among its youth – its future.

History Repeating Itself

Ngobese-Zuma’s struggle is not a denial of human dignity. It is a cry for fairness. Yet the ruling elites, their sponsors in White Monopoly Capital, and the mainstream media have joined forces to make Ngobese-Zuma and MaDuma villains.

Stratcom-style tactics – fake reports, false narratives, and bad press – are used to silence these current-day women leaders. The parallels with apartheid-era propaganda are chilling.

When traces of foreign funding could not be found in SACR, the media shifted tactics, accusing MaDuma of using the constitution as a ruse while her true target was foreign-funded NGOs.

But who funds these NGOs? Who benefits from their endless flow of foreign money when funding to our country’s health services has been terminated by America under Donald Trump? What is their agenda?

Too often these media critics and their fellow travellers, the foreign-funded NGOs, serve to protect white privilege and the status quo, taking the government to court for failing to provide services to illegal immigrants while ignoring the structural burden of the millions of undocumented migrants on the fiscus.

When South Africans fund their own leaders to advance their cause, the media attacks, labelling them with the same apartheid-era vocabulary of character assassination.

The hypocrisy is staggering. The same media that once called Ngoyi a troublemaker now celebrates her as a heroine. Some members from the same government that once jailed Joseph now honours her memory.

Today, Ngobese-Zuma and MaDuma are dismissed as vigilantes and anti-democratic forces. Yet history teaches us that those demonised today will be celebrated tomorrow. The question is: how long will it take this time and what will it take for us to realise that our struggle is far from over and rally behind those who are fighting for meaningful change?

There is a saying: “History will keep repeating itself until we learn lessons from our past.” South Africa seems determined not to learn anything from its sordid colonial and apartheid past.

This August, we celebrate women’s achievements in business, education, science, and media in the name of the sacrifices of the 1956 marchers and the 1976 generation. Yet we ignore the women marchers of 2026 who are fighting for change. We embrace the past while silencing the present.

Ngobese-Zuma and MaDuma must take heart and learn from their predecessors, keep fighting for the poor and the voiceless.

Ngoyi, Joseph, Moosa, and Williams-De Bruyn were hated and hounded, accused of being destabilising forces, and dismissed as agitators. Yet history rewarded them. Their courage was eventually celebrated, their sacrifices honoured. They too must not lose heart.

South Africa needs young women leaders. Those of us who are still marginalised, need the young lionesses of the calibre of Ngobese-Zuma and Mthombeni to carry the baton and keep fighting for our rights and the future of an African child in this country

The ruling elites have allowed themselves to be bought by White Monopoly Capital, leaving ordinary citizens out in the cold as landless modern-day slaves. The media, once a tool of apartheid, now serves the interests of the status quo.

But Ngobese-Zuma and MaDuma represent a new generation of leaders who refuse to be silenced. Their bravery, their tenacity, and their commitment to the poor must be saluted.

As we celebrate Women’s Month, let us not repeat the mistakes of the past and allow ourselves to be fooled by those who don’t have our interests at heart. Let us recognise that those demonised now will be celebrated later. And let us ensure that it does not take another 30 years for their sacrifices to be acknowledged.

South Africa must learn from its past and recognise the courage of women who fight for the poor and the landless, even when their message is uncomfortable. Only then will we truly honour the spirit of “Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo.”

The Oped was first published in IOL, IOS and Saturday Star.

Zingisa Mkhuma is Editor - ednews.africa.

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By Professor Linda Meyer

Seventy years ago, some 20,000 women marched to the Union Buildings to take a stand against a proposed law that would strip them of their freedom of movement and ownership of self, forcing them to carry passes that dictated where they could live, work and exist.

This Women’s Month commemorates their legacy of defiance against subjugation. And while 32 years of democracy have brought change, how far has South Africa really come on women’s empowerment and equality? On paper the Constitution guarantees equality, dignity and freedom from discrimination for every woman. In practice, those rights still unravel in the pay slip, the boardroom, the home and the job interview before they fulfil their promise.

Gender Pay gap

Women’s rights may be enshrined in South Africa’s Constitution, but pay equality tells a different story once you look beyond the formal job market. In registered, tax-paying jobs, women earn about 78c for every rand men earn as of 2021, down from 89c in 2008.

This is a gap that has actually widened over time, according to researchers using SARS administrative tax data. But step into the informal economy, where many South African women work as street traders, domestic workers, or in unregistered small businesses, and the gap balloons to 56.1%.

Formal-sector protections like the Employment Equity Act cover only part of the workforce, and administrative tax records can’t even see informal work, since it isn’t reported to SARS at all.

“The constitutional promise of equal pay unravels fastest precisely where it’s hardest to measure, in the informal economy, leaving many of South Africa’s most vulnerable working women furthest from equality in practice,” says Prof Linda Meyer, MD at Rosebank International and Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University.

The Executive Glass Ceiling

South Africa punches above its weight at the middle of the corporate ladder, with women holding 47.3% of senior management roles. This is well ahead of the 32.9% global average and one of the few countries reporting zero all‑male senior management teams. However, that progress stalls near the top where women occupy around 31% of executive committee roles.

The Just Share JSE Top 40 Women in Leadership finds that omen hold roughly 38% of board seats but only about 27–28% of executive roles, with three female CEOs of the JSE Top 40 and just five of forty board chairs.

However, representation has not extended to authority. Women are strongly represented in CFO and HR leadership roles but remain far less visible in senior decision‑making positions that control revenue and strategy, the seats that most directly shape a company’s direction and succession pipeline.

Today’s figures still mark real progress from a low base where just 4.5% of JSE CEOs were women in 2010, but with women only reaching about 22–25% of executive director roles now, the numbers point to a persistent, structural ceiling rather than a simple pipeline problem.

Homemaker Trap

Unpaid care work creates a gendered labour-market disadvantage in South Africa, where mothers absorb most of the childcare and household responsibilities and pay a direct price in earnings, promotion prospects and job security. This exposes a stark gap between constitutional rights and everyday reality.

Time-use and gender statistics show that women spend three to four times as many hours on unpaid domestic and care work as men, with women devoting about 64% of their time to unpaid domestic and care activities compared to just 18.8% for men.

Counting Women’s Work research finds South African women perform around 30.5 hours of unpaid care and housework per week versus 12.2 hours for men, meaning women shoulder roughly 72–81% of all unpaid care time nationally.

Of the 2.4 million people who cite “homemaker” as their reason for not being in the labour force, 2.1 million or 88.2% are women, underscoring a homemaker trap that turns constitutional rights into unpaid obligations.

The Commission for Gender Equality’s Women in the South African Economy report shows this burden falls especially on Black women, who often juggle low-paid jobs with extensive childcare and household responsibilities, a pattern that depresses their labour-market participation and career progression and underpins what economists call the “motherhood penalty.”

Policy frameworks have not caught up with this reality, reinforcing a second “daughterhood penalty” — the career and income cost women absorb later in life when they become primary carers for ageing parents, a role daughters are far more likely to shoulder than sons.

There is also no dedicated, universal system of publicly funded long-term care, forcing families to rely on unpaid domestic arrangements. Often Black grandmothers provide daily childcare so that younger adults can remain in paid work, effectively subsidising both the state and private employers, as highlighted by the Commission for Gender Equality.

Ageism and sexism in the workplace

Ageism combined with gender bias creates a distinct “double penalty” for older women in South Africa, even though both age and gender are explicitly protected grounds under the Constitution and the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998. Labour‑law guidance and compliance analyses show that older employees frequently encounter subtle but pervasive discrimination through retirement policies, succession planning and performance assessments that treat age as a proxy for declining value despite clear statutory prohibitions on direct and indirect age discrimination in recruitment, promotion, training and dismissal.

Research on ageism in Gauteng’s public service similarly finds that South African women face workplace inequalities including unequal pay, sexual harassment and age‑based exclusion, with older women experiencing compounded disadvantage because their gender and age intersect in how they are seen and treated at work.

“This double penalty is reinforced by how organisations respond to mid‑life transitions and skills narratives. Studies on unpaid care and labour‑market trajectories show that women’s peak caregiving years, for both children and ageing relatives, often overlap with the stage when employers expect continuous availability and “limitless” flexibility, yet offer little formal support for care responsibilities or for biological transitions such as menopause,” says Prof Meyer.

At the same time, older workers, and older women in particular, are routinely stereotyped in management literature as less adaptable to new technologies or hybrid work arrangements, even though empirical studies find that digital skills and adaptability vary more by access and training than by age alone.

In law, discriminatory practices that push older women out of promotion pools or into early exit can be challenged as automatically unfair, but in practice these biases often operate through culture and informal decision‑making rather than explicit policy, making age and gender discrimination harder to see and easier to deny. It is the same pattern seen across pay, leadership and unpaid care. Rights promised in law but not fully lived.

The march continues

The women who marched on the Union Buildings in 1956 forced South Africa to confront an unjust law. Democracy has since introduced better protections. Yet equality on paper has not yielded equality in practice.

Closing that gap means putting the law into practice, through policy that counts unpaid care as real work, boardrooms that give women real decision-making power, and workplaces that stop treating age and motherhood as liabilities.

Professor Linda Meyer is Managing Director of Rosebank College.

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By Dr Shahiem Patel

Women hold 38% of board positions in South Africa’s JSE Top 40 companies. Yet they occupy only 27% of executive positions. Among the JSE Top 200, just 8% of CEOs are women. This should make everyone feel uncomfortable.

South Africa has made measurable progress in bringing women into the boardroom. The figures further down the executive pipeline, however, show that board representation has yet to translate into equivalent opportunities to lead organisations.

As South Africa marks Women’s Month and reflects on National Women’s Day, we should celebrate how far we have come while asking a more difficult question: where in the leadership pipeline are talented women still being lost?

The data suggests that South African business still struggles to progress women into its most senior leadership positions.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s 2025 Sustainability Report records encouraging progress. Women held 38% of board positions in JSE Top 40 companies in 2025, up from 36% in 2024. Women’s representation in executive positions also increased, from 23% to 27%.

By international standards, South Africa performs relatively well on board representation. The same JSE report notes that women occupy 33% of board seats among the top 100 JSE-listed companies, compared with a G20 average of 23%. That progress deserves recognition, although it tells only part of the leadership story.

The gap becomes much more pronounced as we move towards positions carrying direct executive authority. PwC’s 2025 Directors Remuneration and Trends Report, analysing the JSE Top 200, found that women account for only 8% of CEOs. Female representation among CFOs is considerably stronger at 25%, having risen from 18% in 2024.

South African companies have demonstrated that board composition can change. The much harder question is why that progress thins so sharply when executive authority is at stake.

Every August, South Africa rightly celebrates women through conferences, profiles, corporate campaigns and recognition programmes, while social media fills with messages about women’s resilience and leadership.

These activities have value. Visibility, credible role models and recognition all contribute to changing perceptions of who belongs in leadership.

Their impact will remain limited, however, if the organisational systems responsible for developing, sponsoring and promoting talented women fail them during the other eleven months of the year.

Women’s Month can carry greater weight when celebration is tied deliberately to institutional action, beginning with what happens long before a CEO is appointed.

The questions begin much earlier: who receives the assignments that create executive experience? Profit-and-loss responsibility, sponsorship from influential leaders, succession planning and access to career-defining roles all shape who will eventually be considered “ready” for the top job.

By the time a board begins interviewing candidates for a CEO position, much of the outcome has already been determined by years of decisions further down the leadership pipeline.

That is where organisations must look, but another problem deserves scrutiny.

For years, organisations have responded to gender inequality by creating programmes designed to make women better prepared for leadership. There is certainly a place for leadership development. As an educator, I believe in developing human capability.

We should, however, be careful about the assumption embedded within some of these interventions: that underrepresentation persists because women themselves somehow need fixing.

Another leadership programme will achieve little if a talented woman returns to an organisation in which succession decisions remain opaque, sponsorship is informal and the most career-defining opportunities continue to circulate through established networks.

That question needs to change. Instead of asking, “How do we prepare more women for leadership?”, organisations should also ask, “What is it about our leadership system that prevents capable women from progressing?”

This places greater responsibility on the institution without removing individual agency, and makes gender representation a governance issue rather than simply a human resources initiative.

Vague commitments to “empower women” will achieve little unless South African businesses can demonstrate measurable progress through their leadership pipelines.

Boards should require management to identify gender representation at every significant transition point in the organisation: entry into management, promotion into senior management, appointment into executive roles and inclusion in CEO and C-suite succession pools.

A more revealing measure is where women disappear from the leadership pipeline, and why, rather than the total number employed or represented on the board.

Leadership development should then be linked directly to those pipelines. High-potential women should have access to training, sponsorship, operational responsibility, strategic assignments and roles that build credible pathways towards executive leadership.

The JSE already requires listed companies to adopt policies promoting broader diversity at board level and to report on them annually. The same level of scrutiny now needs to extend deeper into executive succession.

Women’s Month creates a valuable period of national attention around gender equality.

Corporate South Africa can use that attention to examine who is being prepared to run its organisations five years from now, who receives the opportunities that build executive credibility and where talented women are being lost along the way.

South Africa can rightly point to progress, with women now occupying 38% of board positions in the JSE Top 40. Yet when only 8% of CEOs in the JSE Top 200 are women, the figures show how much work remains beyond the boardroom.

The real test will be found in succession plans: in whether the women now taking their seats at boardroom tables are also being given a credible path to executive authority.

Dr Shahiem Patel (Dean at Regent Business School). Born and bred in Johannesburg, he holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Law, an Honours degree in Business Management, a Master of Commerce in Leadership Studies and a Doctor of Philosophy in Leadership.

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GQEBERHA – Leading investment executive Sonja De Bruyn believes South Africa already has the ingredients for success. What it lacks is strong ethical leadership.

The challenge, she says, is finding people with the courage and conviction to unlock the country’s potential.

Drawing on almost three decades in investment banking, private equity and corporate governance, De Bruyn says the qualities of effective leadership become even more important during times of uncertainty.

De Bruyn, co-founder and principal partner of the Johannesburg-based, women-led investment firm Identity Capital Partners, delivered Nelson Mandela University’s annual Raymond Mhlaba Institutional Public Lecture in Gqeberha on 12 August.

In her address, Ubuntu, Governance and Shared Prosperity: Building an Economy that Works for All, she argued that South Africa’s greatest challenge is not a shortage of opportunity, but the leadership needed to nurture it.

“Good and strong leadership has a vision and a plan for getting from point A to point B, even if it’s not in a straight line,” says De Bruyn. “It has resilience, it has courage and it has adaptability.”

Leadership, she argues, is not about having all the answers, but about having the confidence to make difficult decisions and stay focused on the bigger picture.

“You don’t always have perfect information, and you don’t always know what the outcome is going to be. But you’ve got to make decisions, as best you can with the information at hand … and keep moving.”

Opening doors for others

The good news, she says, is that South Africa’s people are one of its greatest strengths – together with sound financial infrastructure, abundant natural resources and a resilient economy.

The nation’s diversity, generosity of spirit and deep-rooted sense of Ubuntu set it apart – even in the face of significant challenges, such as weak leadership and unemployment.

“South Africa is such an interesting country, full of opportunities, and I believe we have the most amazing people.

“People think maybe Ubuntu is a cliché. It’s not. We even talk to strangers! If we’re abroad, some people (even) think we’re too friendly – (but) that’s how we are.”

For De Bruyn, those qualities are far more than feel-good attributes. They are the foundation on which stronger businesses, communities and institutions are built.

Equally, potential is not enough, she argues. Turning that potential into progress requires brave leaders who make difficult decisions, inspire confidence and create opportunities for others.

Growing future leaders

For De Bruyn, leadership is measured not only by the decisions leaders make, but by the people they inspire, encourage and help to succeed. Those who reach positions of influence have a responsibility to develop the next generation of leaders, rather than protecting their own success.

Women, in particular, have an important role to play in supporting one another – and meaningful progress depends on closing opportunity gaps for those who follow.

“When you get into the room, hold the door open for the next woman. Don’t close it behind you,” she says.

De Bruyn believes that investing in people is one of the most powerful ways to strengthen organisations and, ultimately, the country itself. Creating opportunities, sharing experience and mentoring others are all part of building the confident, capable leadership South Africa needs.

During her lecture, De Bruyn confronted some hard realities behind South Africa’s stalled potential, particularly unemployment, weak growth and failures in energy, freight and municipal services.

She argued that the unemployment crisis was structural rather than temporary, driven by low growth and investment, infrastructure failures, weak state capacity, corruption and shortcomings in education and the transition from school to work.

Governance remained critical to turning this around. De Bruyn linked stronger institutions and trustworthy custodianship of public resources to investment, growth and jobs, arguing that fighting corruption went beyond recovering stolen money, and weakened institutions and investor sentiment.

South Africa needed more ambitious standards, while good governance demanded the courage to lead well.

Although based in Johannesburg, De Bruyn has never lost her connection with the Eastern Cape. Both her parents were born and raised in the province and she continues to visit family there regularly, making her return to Gqeberha for the Raymond Mhlaba Annual lecture particularly meaningful.

The corporate finance executive was also in the city for a Mandela University student masterclass, hosted by the Raymond Mhlaba Centre for Governance and Leadership, where she discussed the country’s transformation policies, examining the obstacles and opportunities facing young South Africans.

Support for South Africa

Responding to the address, Ambassador Nozipho January-Bardill, former Chairperson of Nelson Mandela University Council, said Ubuntu also had to translate into institutions that worked for people. Failures in basic services such as water, sanitation, electricity and waste management increased the country’s vulnerability and prevented communities from reaching their potential.

Nelson Mandela University Vice-Chancellor Professor Sibongile Muthwa said the annual lecture had built a reputation for attracting distinguished thought leaders who challenged conventional thinking and inspired dialogue, making it an honour to have De Bruyn headline this year’s event.

Faculty of Humanities Executive Dean Professor Pamela Maseko highlighted De Bruyn’s contribution as a Black woman in South Africa’s economy and the importance of African women occupying influential spaces in business and leadership.

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A university should never cross borders simply to admire how another institution operates. The true power of benchmarking lies in what happens when we return home – armed not with photographs and impressions, but with sharper questions, fresh perspectives and the courage to challenge the way we have always done things.

The recent benchmarking visit by the North-West University (NWU) to the University of Arizona in Tucson was exactly that kind of journey. It was more than a visit to another university; it was an opportunity to step outside our familiar environment, see higher education through a different lens and return home prepared to look critically at ourselves.

Because sometimes, to see where you need to go, you first need to see how others are getting there.

The visit brought together discussions on residences, catering, campus operations, information technology, student services and internationalisation. At first glance, these may seem like separate areas of university administration. However, one important lesson connected them all: students experience one university, not a collection of departments.

A student does not necessarily care which department is responsible for a problem. If accommodation is not working, communication is poor, a digital system is difficult to use or a campus service fails, the student simply experiences it as a university problem. This should make all of us in higher education think differently about how we operate.

We may have clearly defined departments, responsibilities and reporting structures, but the student experience cuts across all of them. Our challenge is therefore not only to ensure that individual units perform well, but also to make sure that they work together.

That requires collaboration, information sharing and, increasingly, technology.

Technology must serve people

One of the valuable discussions during the visit was about StarRez and its use in the residence environment. Digital platforms have the potential to transform how universities manage accommodation, communicate with students, analyse information and plan for future demand.

But technology alone does not solve institutional problems. A university can have an impressive digital system and still struggle if its processes are fragmented or if people are not properly equipped to use the system. The real question is not whether we have technology. The question is whether we are using technology to improve people’s lives.

As an ICT strategist, I believe this distinction is critical. Digital transformation is not about acquiring the latest system. It is about using technology to make institutions more responsive, efficient and intelligent.

Our systems should help us understand what is happening on our campuses, identify emerging challenges and make better decisions.

Data can change the way universities lead

This is particularly important when it comes to institutional data. Universities collect vast amounts of information every day. Yet collecting data is not the same as using it effectively. Information about residence occupancy, student demand, facilities, service requests and operational pressures can provide valuable insight into what is happening across an institution.

The opportunity is to move from simply reporting what happened to asking what the information is telling us about what may happen next. That shift can help universities become more proactive.

Instead of waiting for problems to escalate, we can identify trends earlier, allocate resources more effectively and respond to students more quickly. That is where technology and leadership meet.

Internationalisation must include our professional staff

The Arizona visit also challenged the traditional understanding of internationalisation.

When we talk about internationalisation, we often think about students travelling abroad, academic exchanges and research partnerships. Those remain important. But internationalisation can also be about professional learning.

A residence official can learn from the accommodation practices of another university. An ICT professional can exchange ideas about digital transformation. Facilities teams can learn from different approaches to campus management. Student support professionals can compare strategies for improving the student experience.

This kind of exchange can strengthen our institutions from within. International partnerships should therefore not exist only at the level of agreements and ceremonies.

They should create opportunities for people across the university to learn from one another. We should learn, not copy. There is also an important warning that comes with benchmarking.

We should never assume that what works in Arizona will automatically work in South Africa. Universities operate in different financial, regulatory, cultural and social environments.

The objective is not to copy another institution. It is to ask: What can we learn, what can we adapt and what can we do differently? That distinction matters.

Benchmarking should provide us with an external perspective, while our own institutional knowledge provides the context. Our staff understand our students, our campuses and our challenges. Their knowledge must be part of the conversation.

The real test begins after the visit

The success of a benchmarking visit cannot be measured by the number of meetings attended or facilities visited. The real test begins when we return home. What do we share with our colleagues? What conversations do we start? What practices do we question? What opportunities do we identify? And, most importantly, what changes? If the lessons from Arizona remain with the people who travelled, then we have missed an important opportunity.

The knowledge must be brought back into the institution and shared with colleagues across residences and catering, campus operations, ICT, facilities and maintenance, student life, internationalisation and other areas. Benchmarking should become a collective learning process.

Building the university we want

For me, one of the strongest lessons from this visit is that the university of the future will need to be both digitally capable and deeply people-centred.

Technology will continue to reshape higher education. Data will increasingly influence decision-making. International partnerships will create new opportunities for learning. But none of these things should distract us from the most important question: Does what we are doing improve the experience of our students and staff?

That must remain our compass. The University of Arizona did not provide us with a blueprint for the NWU. It provided us with a mirror. And sometimes, that is exactly what an institution needs – the opportunity to step outside its familiar environment and see itself differently.

Benchmarking is therefore not about becoming another university. It is about learning from others so that we can become better at being ourselves. The true measure of our Arizona experience will not be what we saw in Tucson. It will be what we do when we return home.

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A green-and-gold jersey bearing the leaping springbok. It is synonymous not only with South Africa’s national rugby team, but with the country as a whole. The jersey can be seen in stadiums, pubs and public spaces across the globe.

The Springboks are more than a rugby team; they are one of South Africa’s most recognisable symbols. Think of iconic moments such as Nelson Mandela presenting the Webb Ellis Cup to Francois Pienaar at Ellis Park after the 1995 Rugby World Cup final, John Smit lifting the trophy in 2007 and Siya Kolisi raising it in 2019 and 2023. Think of Clint Eastwood’s Invictus and the Chasing the Sun documentaries.

The team, especially under the guidance of Rassie Erasmus, generates enormous goodwill towards and curiosity about South Africa. Yet considerable potential remains to turn Springbok glory into tourism gold.

“The Bokke are synonymous with rugby, but, more than this, they represent a destination filled with promise and experiences,” says Prof. Elmarie Slabbert, director of the Tourism Research in Economics, Environs and Society (TREES) research unit at the North-West University (NWU).

The Springbok brand’s commercial strength and international reach are measurable. According to Brand Finance’s South Africa 100 2025 report, it was valued at R2.2 billion and ranked as the strongest South African sports team across all sporting codes, with a Brand Strength Index score of 91.9 out of 100. Its research also found that 56% of South African sports fans regarded the Springboks as their favourite team.

Their reach extends well beyond South Africa. World Rugby’s audience research found that the 2023 Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand generated 94 million viewing hours globally – more than any other match during the most-viewed rugby tournament in history.

“The value of world-renowned brands such as the Bokke extends beyond the sporting environment. They create an identity, emotional attachment and specific associations, generating tourism opportunities.

The Bokke have an international presence and reach markets that traditional tourism campaigns do not. This expands the range of potential visitors who might consider travelling to South Africa,” Prof. Slabbert explains.

Sporting brands can also be valuable assets that contribute to tourism awareness, shape perceptions of destinations and encourage both first-time and repeat visits. According to Prof. Slabbert, the Springboks’ success creates awareness of South Africa and its people while stimulating curiosity about the home of the world champions.

“Strong brand associations make destinations easier to recall and distinguish from their competitors. It is important to remain top of mind. The positive associations surrounding the Springbok brand strengthen South Africa’s international appeal and make tourists more inclined to choose the country over alternative destinations.”

New Zealand has already demonstrated how a successful national rugby team can become a permanent tourism attraction. The All Blacks Experience, which opened in central Auckland in 2020, is a joint venture between New Zealand Rugby and Ngāi Tahu Tourism. Through immersive technology, visitors experience the haka, enter recreations of the team’s changing room and players’ tunnel, hear stories from former players and test their own rugby skills.

The attraction also explores Māori and Pasifika culture and houses an extensive official merchandise store. In this way, New Zealand has transformed the All Blacks from a team that people watch into a national story that visitors can experience throughout the year.

“We are, however, not doing enough to capitalise on the Springbok brand. We need to offer more frequent stadium tours, establish a world-class immersive multimedia interpretation centre – perhaps called the Home of the Bokke, the Green and Gold Experience or the Bokke Experience – create fan zones and expand the range of available merchandise.

“The first official Springbok store opened in Sandton in 2025, extending the brand into a retail tourism experience. Since then, a second dedicated store has opened. We need more stores of this kind to capitalise on the brand. Merchandise carries the Springbok identity into other countries, further extending its value.

“We need to build more permanent tourism experiences around the brand so that travellers can experience both the Springbok story and the story of South Africa through rugby – a sport that has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to bring South Africans together and connect the country with other nations,” she says.

The Springboks have already built the reputation, emotional connection and global audience. South Africa’s challenge is to give international supporters somewhere to experience that story long after the final whistle.

The Value of the Sprinboks in summary:

• Valued at R2.2 billion, the Springboks are South Africa’s strongest sporting brand and one of its most powerful international calling cards.

• The record 94 million viewing hours generated by the 2023 Rugby World Cup final reveal the enormous global audience within South Africa’s tourism reach.

• Springbok success creates goodwill towards South Africa, strengthens its international appeal and stimulates curiosity about the home of the world champions.

• New Zealand has transformed the All Blacks into a year-round visitor experience, offering South Africa a compelling blueprint for rugby tourism.

• Despite its extraordinary global reach, South Africa is not doing enough to turn the Springbok brand into permanent, year-round tourism experiences.

• “The value of world-renowned brands such as the Bokke extends beyond the sporting environment. They create an identity, emotional attachment and specific associations, generating tourism opportunities. The Bokke have an international presence and reach markets that traditional tourism campaigns do not.” – Prof. Elmarie Slabbert.

• Follow the link to the published article here: https://news.nwu.ac.za/springboks-are-south-africas-sporting-brand-par-excellence

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Cybersecurity has become one of the biggest priorities for organisations across South Africa. Businesses continue to invest in security platforms, monitoring tools and threat detection technologies in an effort to strengthen their cyber resilience.

Yet despite these investments, many organisations remain uncertain about how prepared they really are to respond when a cyber incident occurs.

According to Dell Technologies’ Global Cyber Resilience Insights research, 63% of practitioners believe leadership overestimates their organisation’s readiness for a major cyber event.

That gap between perceived readiness and actual recovery capability highlights an important challenge for organisations as they strengthen their cyber resilience strategies.

According to Musa Masungwini, Security and Resiliency Platforms Specialist at Dell Technologies South Africa, the issue is not necessarily a lack of visibility.

“Most organisations already have extensive security capabilities in place and generate significant volumes of security data every day,” says Masungwini. “The challenge is that much of this information exists in isolation.

“When signals cannot be connected and interpreted together, organisations often lose valuable time deciding whether they are facing a genuine threat or simply another alert.”

This confidence gap is becoming increasingly significant as cyberattacks grow in sophistication and speed. While security teams receive thousands of alerts across multiple platforms, the real challenge lies in determining which signals require immediate action and which represent normal operational activity.

Detection is no longer the biggest challenge

Many organisations believe that improving cyber resilience requires more monitoring tools or more sophisticated detection capabilities. In reality, enterprise environments already generate enormous amounts of security-relevant information.

Primary storage platforms monitor unusual behaviour. Backup environments detect unexpected changes in data, while object storage platforms identify abnormal access requests. Individually, these events may appear insignificant. Together, however, they can reveal the early stages of a developing cyberattack.

“The problem isn’t detecting activity,” explains Masungwini. “The real challenge is having sufficient confidence in what those signals collectively mean. Without that confidence, organisations often delay action until the threat has already escalated.”

Why the storage and data layer matters

Cyber resilience discussions often focus on networks, endpoints and security operations centres. However, the storage and data layer is where critical business information resides and where many of the earliest indicators of compromise first become visible.

Rather than treating storage as passive infrastructure, organisations should recognise its role as an active participant in cyber resilience. When intelligence from storage, backup and data protection environments can be viewed together, security teams gain a far clearer understanding of what is happening across the organisation.

Turning isolated alerts into meaningful intelligence

The growing complexity of modern IT environments means different infrastructure platforms often generate alerts independently of one another. While each platform may identify unusual behaviour, none has sufficient context to determine whether those events are connected.

A cyber resilience control plane addresses this challenge by normalising and correlating signals across the storage and data layer before they reach existing security platforms. Rather than presenting security teams with multiple isolated alerts, it provides a contextual assessment based on correlated activity across systems.

“Cyber resilience isn’t about replacing the security investments organisations have already made,” says Masungwini. “It’s about enabling those technologies to work together more intelligently so that organisations can respond with greater confidence.”

From detection to coordinated response

Correlating signals is only part of the equation. Equally important is the ability to coordinate protective actions when a developing threat is identified. As confidence increases that an attack is taking place, organisations can automatically initiate appropriate defensive measures, including protecting critical recovery points, preserving snapshots and restricting access where necessary.

By coordinating actions across production and protection environments, organisations can reduce the delay between detecting suspicious activity and taking meaningful action, improving their ability to recover quickly should an attack occur.

Building greater confidence

As cyber threats continue to evolve, organisations are recognising that resilience is no longer measured by the number of security tools deployed. Instead, it depends on how effectively those technologies work together to provide actionable intelligence and enable timely decision-making.

“Cyber resilience is ultimately about confidence,” concludes Masungwini. “When organisations can understand what their infrastructure is telling them and respond before threats escalate, they move from reacting to cyber incidents to actively strengthening their resilience.”

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer an emerging technology confined to research laboratories or technology companies. It has become an integral part of managerial decision-making across organisations worldwide, including South Africa.

According to PwC’s Africa Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey (2025), 91% of South African senior executives who used AI during the previous year reported that it had improved the quality of their work, while 64% of employees across Africa reported using AI in the workplace, exceeding the global average of 54%.

These statistics demonstrate that AI has moved beyond experimentation and is becoming embedded in everyday business practice.

What has not kept pace, however, is the development of AI literacy, governance and critical evaluation skills required to ensure that AI-assisted decisions remain accurate, ethical and accountable.

The public debate surrounding AI often centres on whether it will replace human jobs. While this remains an important discussion, it overlooks a more immediate organisational risk.

Managers are making strategic, operational and financial decisions based on AI-generated recommendations without fully understanding how those recommendations are produced, their inherent limitations or the circumstances under which they may be inaccurate. This is not primarily a technology problem; it is a management problem.

The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), developed by Davis (1989), provides a useful explanation for why AI has been adopted so quickly. As discussed in my doctoral research, TAM proposes that individuals are more likely to adopt new technologies when they perceive them to be useful and easy to use (Davis, 1989; Lai, 2017; Granić & Marangunić, 2019). S

ubsequent developments of the model by Venkatesh and Davis (2000) and Venkatesh and Bala (2008) further demonstrate that behavioural intention is strengthened by organisational context, social influence, experience and facilitating conditions.

These developments have made TAM one of the most influential theoretical frameworks for explaining technology adoption across multiple industries. Generative AI satisfies these conditions exceptionally well.

Managers can generate reports, analyse financial data, draft policies, develop marketing strategies, summarise research, write presentations and produce business correspondence within seconds using natural language prompts.

For organisations operating in competitive environments, AI offers immediate productivity gains while requiring relatively little technical expertise. From a TAM perspective, its widespread adoption is therefore unsurprising. However, TAM explains why managers adopt AI, not whether managers understand AI.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT do not reason in the same manner as experienced managers or subject matter experts. Rather, they generate statistically probable responses based on patterns learned from vast quantities of training data.

They do not possess organisational memory, contextual understanding, intentionality or professional accountability. Although AI frequently produces convincing outputs, those outputs remain susceptible to hallucinations, incomplete reasoning, outdated information and inherited biases within the underlying training data.

Consequently, AI should not be viewed as an autonomous decision-maker but rather as a sophisticated decision-support tool.

This distinction is reinforced by Herbert Simon’s theory of bounded rationality. Simon (1957) argued that managers rarely make decisions under conditions of complete information.

Instead, they operate within environments characterised by uncertainty, competing organisational priorities, stakeholder expectations and limited time. Rather than identifying theoretically optimal decisions, managers use professional judgement to arrive at decisions that are practical, ethical and strategically appropriate.

AI can dramatically improve the availability and processing of information, but it cannot replace managerial judgement.

Strategic decisions concerning acquisitions, restructuring, regulatory compliance, organisational culture or corporate reputation require contextual understanding that extends beyond pattern recognition. They require experience, ethical reasoning and accountability, qualities that remain uniquely human.

Research into automation bias further highlights why organisations should approach AI adoption with caution. Parasuraman and Riley (1997) describe automation bias as the tendency for individuals to place excessive confidence in recommendations generated by automated systems, particularly when those systems have previously demonstrated high levels of accuracy.

Similarly, Goddard, Roudsari and Wyatt (2012) found that decision-makers frequently overlook contradictory evidence once an automated recommendation has been presented.

AI will occasionally produce incorrect recommendations. The real risk is that managers gradually lose the habit of questioning the ones that look plausible. This represents an important limitation of existing technology acceptance theories. Managers may readily adopt AI because it is useful and easy to use while simultaneously lacking sufficient AI literacy to critically evaluate the outputs it generates. Technology acceptance should therefore never be confused with technology understanding.

Stakeholder Theory provides an additional perspective on this challenge. Freeman (1984; 2004) argues that organisations exist to create value for multiple stakeholders to maximise organisational efficiency alone. Donaldson and Preston (1995) further demonstrate that effective management requires balancing competing stakeholder interests through informed managerial judgement rather than mechanistic decision-making.

AI can undoubtedly assist managers by analysing stakeholder information, identifying trends and evaluating alternative scenarios. However, it cannot determine which stakeholder interests should take precedence within a particular organisational context. Nor can it assume responsibility for the ethical or legal consequences of those decisions. That responsibility remains with managers.

For South African organisations, the question is no longer whether managers will adopt AI. That has already been answered. What needs to be addressed now is whether organisations are developing managers who understand both the capabilities and limitations of AI, which calls for three practical interventions.

First, AI literacy should become a core component of management education. MBA programmes, executive education initiatives and postgraduate business qualifications should equip future leaders with an understanding of how Large Language Models generate outputs, where their limitations lie and how AI-generated recommendations should be critically evaluated. Managers do not need to become data scientists, but they must become informed users of AI.

Second, organisations should establish Human-in-the-Loop governance. High-impact decisions involving finance, recruitment, healthcare, legal compliance, strategy or enterprise risk should require documented human review before implementation. AI should support managerial decision-making rather than replace managerial accountability.

Third, boards should recognise AI governance as a strategic organisational risk. Just as boards oversee cybersecurity, enterprise risk management and ESG performance, they should also receive regular reporting on AI governance frameworks, executive AI capability, AI-related risks and organisational safeguards. AI governance should sit within corporate governance as a whole not be treated as an information technology matter alone.

AI is undoubtedly one of the most significant technologies of this generation. Organisations that fail to embrace it risk falling behind competitors. However, organisations that embrace AI without simultaneously investing in governance, critical thinking and managerial capability may expose themselves to an entirely different form of competitive disadvantage.

AI can generate answers in seconds. Producing sound judgement still takes longer, and it still depends on people. For South African organisations, that is where the competitive advantage will sit: with managers who know when to trust AI’s recommendations, when to challenge them and when to override them altogether. Information is now abundant and easy to reach. What remains scarce is the discipline to think critically about what it produces.

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