ON THE POSITIVE SIDE OF CHANGE IN CONVERSATION WITH BONANG MOHALE,
Bonang Francis Mohale was appointed the Chief Executive Officer of
EX-CEO OF BUSINESS LEADERSHIP SOUTH AFRICA
Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) in July 2017 after serving
BY RYLAND FISHER
African Petroleum Refineries (SAPREF), Drake and Scull, Sanlam,
in senior positions in several corporates including Shell, the South South African Airways, and Otis. Mohale studied at Wits Medical School for four years before spending the early part of his career in the pharmaceutical industry. He has served many organisations, including the Black Management Forum, where he was president from 2012 to 2015. He has won several awards for his nation-building work and business skills, and still serves as a director on several boards. “When we took over the organisation in July 2017, we realised that we had to make sure that it would serve 57-million South Africans; that is why we embarked on the strategy based on three pillars. “The first pillar we derived directly out of the National Development Plan (NDP) Vision 2030. It talks about inclusive socio-economic growth and transformation. The second pillar is about the protection of key state institutions – and the third is about positioning business as a national asset.”
“WHEN THE ECONOMY GROWS, WE CAN THEN TALK ABOUT THE REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AND NOT THE REDISTRIBUTION OF POVERTY” Mohale says that the last decade has been extremely hard for South Africans. “A lot of it was precipitated by the industrial-scale looting called state capture, where about R100-billion per annum was siphoned off to benefit only two families. “Can you imagine how many Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses we could have built, how many hospitals, how many schools, how many pit latrines could have been eliminated, and how much could have been done in improving the quality of life of the majority of South Africans? “The challenge is to take the bottom half into the middle class. If we did only that, all of us would sleep better at night.”
20 TOP500 10th Edition
