Tag: accountability

Leaders are often too quick to blame the strategy when a business is not making progress. This instinct is understandable because strategy is visible, discussable and relatively easy to revisit. Execution, however, is harder to interrogate. It forces a more uncomfortable question: did we actually do what we said we were going to do?

Liberation movements once represented hope, unity and the promise of a better future for millions of Africans. However, their performance in government has often raised difficult questions about leadership, accountability and democratic progress. Why Liberation Movements Fail examines this contradiction and challenges readers to reconsider the continent’s political trajectory.

Consider a regulatory institution with an enviable compliance record. Its enabling legislation contains robust independence provisions. Its annual report is filed on time. Furthermore, its external audit is clean. It has a conflict-of-interest policy, a risk management framework, and a signed memorandum of understanding with each of its peer regulators. By many conventional measures, its governance arrangements appear sound.

Hybrid work has transformed how organisations operate, but it has also made disengagement far less visible. The challenge for today's leaders is no longer managing attendance - it's sustaining accountability, purpose and performance when teams are no longer under one roof.

Most South African business leaders did not start their businesses to spend their days managing customer escalations. They also did not expect to second-guess managers or complete work they delegated six months earlier. Yet this is exactly where many of them end up.

In many organisations, operational breakdowns do not stem from incompetence. Instead, they stem from unclear responsibility. When problems arise in the workplace, the most common explanations are predictable: “I thought HR was dealing with that”, “Management should have handled it”, or “That’s not my function”.

Weak accountability, limited skills, and slow consequence management continue to undermine procurement reform. Despite years of regulatory efforts, irregular expenditure and procurement failures persist. These issues have eroded governance and public trust in South Africa.

The IT sector frequently embraces concepts such as the circular economy, sustainability, and ESG. Yet in practice, too many organisations still purchase, deploy, and discard technology with little regard for what follows. The uncomfortable question remains: who takes responsibility for the old equipment when the work is done?

The announcement by Tesla of the 2025 CEO Performance Award for Elon Musk signals nothing less than a reckoning with a fundamental question. What does it really cost to secure not just a top executive, but a visionary? As the board persuades shareholders to “vote yes to robots, and reject robotic voting”, the Tesla CEO pay package forces a stark trade-off.

South Africa has tightened Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations since the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) greylisting in 2023. The country has now been recently removed from the FATF greylist after two years of scrutiny. However, financial crime remains widespread.