Nolitha Fakude’s career is about to acquire a new dimension of influence. She has served two-thirds of a three-year term as the first female president of the Black Management Forum (BMF). At the beginning of this month, she took up her position as executive director for human resources and strategy at chemical giant Sasol.
Last week, in her BMF role, she hosted a two-day conference where the role of the black -middle class was discussed. Stellenbosch academic Sampie Terblanche accused the new custodians of wealth of avarice and -myopia.
Fakude told delegates the new rich set needs to exhibit ‘social solidarity”.
‘It is important for the black middle class not to lose context,” she said, presumably referring to the times we live in. She urged back professionals and entrepreneurs to ‘spend more time in the community”, not only watching the weekend soccer match, but giving back to the community. She said the group needed to ‘be sensitive to the fact that we live among the jobless and the poor” and ‘sensibly balance” conspicuous material consumption.
Ah, that means they should take offence, like Cyril Ramaphosa did, if they are mistakenly assumed to own a R3-million Maybach 62.
At her office this week Fakude conceded the black middle class was probably a disparate group of individuals whose collective action fuels economic phenomena such as, say, the spending boom of the past two years.
Conferences like last week’s ‘form part of a discourse to forge a common socio-economic vision”. She added that the class thrives in an African country in a capitalist system, but for its survival it has to integrate into a multiracial middle class and bridge the gap between the first and second economies.
At Sasol, she is still admiring the art work that adorns its headquarters in Rosebank, Johannesburg, but this week she made her first field trip to the synfuels plant in Secunda, -Mpumalanga.
It’s early days, but one cannot help but try to find out how much insight Fakude has gleaned into the group strategy — such as whether there is a plan B should the proposed merger with Engen’s liquid-fuel business to form Uhambo Oil not be approved.
‘I don’t know,” she said, protesting that she is still in the orientation phase.
The process of prising her from Nedbank was set in motion not too long after Pat Davies and Trevor Munday were appointed Sasol CEO and deputy CEO in January.
So what attracted her to the opportunity? ‘As a corporate -activist” — she utters the oxymoron without batting an eyelid — ‘I feel that the private sector needs people who are operational.”
The opportunity to transform in the country’s largest locally domiciled company was not to be passed over, purely because of its potential impact. Fakude joins -Munday and Davies as the top three at Sasol. Their executive team has 17% representation of blacks and women. At senior management level the figure is 18%; this rises to 43% for middle management.
So, what would she have liked to achieve in, say, five years?
‘My agenda is transformation,” she said. ‘I want to ensure that we have the right people in place in all the countries we operate in.”
I imagine her walking into a Muslim state where Sasol has operations and telling the government that women deserve to be given opportunities to advance — a good place to start would be allowing them to drive.
Fakude has prepared for the HR part of her portfolio through 15 years in retail, management and banking. She held a senior post at Woolworths, before joining the BMF as its MD. That was before joining Nedbank in the period leading up to the group hitting ‘challenging times”. Now she prepares for turbulence of a different kind.