SA is dying for ethical leadership, says Business Leadership SA (BLSA) CEO Bonang Mohale.
Speaking at the Standard Bank rising star awards on Thursday, Mohale said: "This country is dying for ethical leadership, for critical, conscious and courageous leadership."
He said SA’s challenges had nothing to do with its resources. "We inherited a capitalist system but we refuse to manage it. If you do the maths, there is absolutely no reason why people should go hungry or poor, but we lack the creativity."
Mohale called out SA’s leaders for being greedy, saying it fed into inequality. "Business must be the one to say how can we lift as we rise so that our people’s lives can be better tomorrow than they were yesterday."
He said weak leadership was how SA became vulnerable to state capture and slogans from Bell Pottinger. "Transformation means fundamentally breaking from the past. There’s nothing more radical than transformation, so what is radical economic transformation?"
He said no one would do for Africa what it was not prepared to do for itself. He said SA needed to embrace technology and tap into the potential of youth.
This comes as business and the government’s relationship has been strained in the wake of the midnight cabinet reshuffle and subsequent credit rating downgrades and recession. Mohale has been vocal in recent months about the trust deficit being squarely on the government’s shoulders.
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