Board Members

Author, thought leader, political risk analyst and public speaker

Dr Mzukisi Qobo advises organisations on mitigating political risks and helps them to capture opportunities from regulation. He previously worked at the Department of Trade and Industry as chief director for trade policy, and drafted the current South African trade policy and strategy framework.

Until recently he taught international political economy at the University of Pretoria, where he was deputy director at the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation. He is a senior associate at Tutwa Consulting and a research associate affiliated with the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria. He is a regular columnist for Business Day and appears regularly on domestic and international media. He obtained his PhD from the University of Warwick, United Kingdom; MA from the University of Stellenbosch; and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Cape Town.

He is author of The Fall of the ANC: What Next?, published by Pan Macmillan (Picador Africa). Mzukisi is currently working on a book focusing on The New Contours of Transformational Leadership in South Africa.

Declaration of interests:

Mzukisi Qobo

back to top

Fiscal transparency pioneer

Zukiswa Kota is currently the programme head for South Africa at the Public Service Accountability Monitor at Rhodes University. She has extensive experience supporting various social and budget justice interventions including the coordination of a civil society coalition working with the National Treasury to develop a pioneer budget portal to deepen public participation, transparency, and fiscal accountability.

In recent years she has contributed to deepening anti-corruption and fiscal transparency in the public sector. She has been a member of South Africa’s interim steering committee for the Open Government Partnership led by the Department of Public Service and Administration. She serves on the board of trustees of the Equal Education Law Centre and My Vote Counts as well as on the advisory board of the Public Economy Project at Wits University. She is a founding chairperson of the Budget Justice Coalition and the Imali Yethu Coalition for Open Budgets.

Declaration of interests:

To follow

back to top

Social transformation expert

Bridgette Mdangayi is an experienced cross-sectoral project and programme management professional, with 15 years’ experience drawn from a wide range of segments across the southern, eastern, and western African regions. Her career has been driven by the aim of leveraging socio-economic transformation, impact, and sustainable practices. Her expertise lies in project formulation/development, fundraising management, capacity building, contract and grants management, social advocacy and development communications, strategic planning, and stakeholder management.

She is currently the head of social transformation at the National Business Institute, where she leads in driving the strategy on addressing the challenging and urgent societal issues of exclusion and inequity and social sustainability.

Declaration of interests:

To follow.

back to top

Senior lecturer, University of Cape Town

Marianne Camerer Giddy is a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town‘s (UCT) Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, where she focuses on ethics, leadership, and accountability, teaching on the leadership modules of the school’s part-time and full-time masters programme in Development Policy and Practice. She also supervises masters and PhD students in the area of leadership, accountability and anti-corruption.

She holds Masters’ degrees in Public Policy and Political Philosophy from Oxford and the University of Stellenbosch, and a PhD in Political Studies (University of Witwatersrand). She was selected as a 2005 Yale World Fellow, a prestigious fellowship awarded to emerging leaders from around the world.

Giddy is regarded as an expert on anti-corruption issues. She co-founded the international NGO Global Integrity and served as international director and on the board for ten years (2005-2015). She was a founding director of the Open Democracy Advice Center (ODAC), an NGO monitoring the implementation and encouraging the use of access to information and whistleblower protection laws in South Africa. She has recently been appointed a Trustee of the Institute for Security Studies.

Declaration of interests:

Marianne Giddy

Communications specialist

Themba Maseko started his career in 1990 as the assistant general secretary, and then the general secretary, of the National Education Coordinating Committee. He served as an MP in the National Assembly from 1994 to 1995, and from 1995 to 2000 was superintendent-general of the Gauteng Department of Education. He was director-general of the Department of Public Works from February 2003 until his appointment in 2008 as CEO of the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) and spokesperson for the government of South Africa, succeeding Joel Netshitenzhe.

Maseko left the public service in 2011 and has since served in various positions in the private sector and academia. Currently he is the founder and director  of Ricopart, an investment company focusing on property, mining, and strategic communications. He is the author of For my Country, published in 2021. In August 2018 he gave testimony relating to GCIS at the state capture commission.

He holds a BA in sociology and law and an LLB from the University of the Witwatersrand, and an MBA from De Montfort University in the UK. He has also completed the Senior Executive Programme at the Harvard and Wits business schools.

Declaration of interests:

Themba Maseko

back to top