Business Leadership SA’s Busi Mavuso: We’re naive to think we can achieve stability in the face of inequality

First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

In the wake of days of rioting and fear, Busi Mavuso agreed to a frank-talking interview last week to explore more about her past, but also to answer questions on her role as a black woman in a white man’s business world.

Mavuso is a fairly familiar face in the media. She’s articulate, informed and occasionally outspoken. Although she is now in the top corporate echelons as the CEO of Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA), she still has the manner of an activist. So we begin our conversation with what she thinks are her formative influences, starting with her mother.

Mavuso grew up in White City, Jabavu, in Soweto. She was a child, then a schoolgirl, in one of the epicentres of the anti-apartheid struggle during the last 16 tumultuous years that took us to freedom in 1994.

Her mother, Veronica Khosi Mavuso, was a teacher who had been widowed at a young age. On a teacher’s low salary, Veronica was the breadwinner for her four children.

Despite the odds, Mavuso, a bright child, completed her matric at Lofentse Girls High School in Orlando East “with flying colours at the tender age of 16. But because of the family’s financial constraints I had to immediately find a job.”

Her aspiration was to be a chartered accountant (CA), which may explain why her first job was in banking. She had offers of places at university “and was very clear that I wanted to be a CA because I was good at maths”, but she had to work. So she studied through Unisa, a degree that took her nine years to complete.

“I found the transition [to university] very difficult” because there was little support for students coming from an environment like mine, where no one had been to university before. When my mum died at the age of 62 in 2012, she was still trying to get an undergraduate degree. I had no point of reference. You sit with this burden of being the first.”

“Then, just as quickly, I find myself in a corporate culture but how do you assimilate, how do you navigate this corporate culture?

“My 14-year-old daughter doesn’t understand when I tell her that this was the first time I interacted with a computer! I was so scared to touch that damn thing. I was afraid, my mum was dependent on me – if I break this damn thing, these white people are going to fire me.”

Later, she went on to start a postgraduate Certificate in the Theory of Accounting (CTA), “but I failed that dismally”. She says she hadn’t understood the need to do articles “somewhere in between” but, anyway, “I couldn’t afford to do that!”

Eventually, Mavuso qualified as a chartered accountant through distance learning with the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants in the UK.

“So, then I attained my childhood dream of being an accountant … 23 years after leaving school.”

Although she now lives in the suburbs of Johannesburg, Mavuso’s family still live in Soweto.

She explains that what her experience taught her was that “the most gifted of us cannot escape the limitations our environment imposes on us, of where we come from”.

“This is where the activist in me comes in… I have been given opportunities where many are so stuck, I’m still an outlier. How many who come from where I have come from have had the luck?

“It doesn’t have to be like that”, she says firmly, but without rancour.

In this context, she describes her interest in “advancing the young black African women’s agenda and the broader women’s agenda”.

“We need a strong cohort of women. Tragically, most impoverished women inadvertently give birth to kids with greatly reduced opportunities, and let’s be clear I’m not just talking about material poverty…

“I’m talking about being denied access to thinking … initiative … knowledge … and, for millions of children, this reproduces cycles of poverty and inequality.

“As women we are often the primary caregivers… We do our best to raise … nurture…

“We groom and we conscientise! That’s why I believe in the empowerment of women. The vital role they play in shaping human beings. We need to make women less poor in this country.”

Into the lion’s den

In 2009, Mavuso left banking to become part of the Black Management Forum (BMF), eventually rising to become its managing director. She resigned in 2018 to become the chief operating officer of Business Leadership South Africa, under her mentor, business high flyer and chancellor of the University of the Free State, Bonang Mohale.

“My nine years at the BMF cemented my belief that transformation is not a nice-to-have, but a must. We are naive to think we can sit with such high levels of inequality and still achieve stability.”

As proof she refers to the recent riots and “anarchy” that in the days before we talked had shaken South Africa.

“Domestic inequality, people’s helplessness is way too much and way too palpable.

“There has to be a serious intervention that deals with the structural inequalities we have.”

And this is where our conversation shifts gear! I want to know how, given her background, has she allowed herself to become the face of what many would call White Monopoly Capital? Isn’t there a contradiction? Shouldn’t a person with her beliefs and background be in government or civil society?

Mavuso is unrepentant. She says she had “precisely that internal battle”, but knows what she’s doing.

She quotes a discussion she had with Mohale who told her “business needs us because business in South Africa needs to transform.

“It will take our kind of thinking. In business, you are given an opportunity to not only speak truth to power but to speak truth to your own constituency.”

But in addition she says that “conditions for people to prosper are not God-given, they are created through policy”.

At this point her frank talk surprises me.

She argues strongly that the root of the problem is that the government has failed to insist on transformation by business; that it has failed to be “intentional about driving a particular agenda”.

She argues that it should be “dragging White Monopoly Capital kicking and screaming” on to a path that it doesn’t realise is in its own best interests, comparing it to a child that resists parental discipline.

In this regard she talks approvingly of the way the apartheid government created a conducive environment for white business interests and the white poor after 1948.

She tells me that capital doesn’t have a conscience, “it doesn’t care”.

“It’s like water, it goes where it’s easiest. If you make it difficult to operate in an environment, it just goes elsewhere to an environment where it’s more conducive to do what it’s meant to do.”

There are only 120,000 people earning more than R1,5-million per annum… Seven million people are carrying 18 million people who are dependent on social grants… We can’t continue to overtax seven million to feed 18 million.