The Man Who Keeps Becoming
I have watched Dr Mathews Phosa for decades. What strikes me is not what he has achieved — it is that he has never once stopped growing.
ON LEADERSHIP
The Man Who Keeps Becoming
I have watched Dr Mathews Phosa for decades. What strikes me is not what he has achieved — it is that he has never once stopped growing.
By Adriaan Groenewald
I have spent twenty-five years studying leaders — interviewing them, writing about them, working alongside them, trying to understand why some rise and others stall. In that time, I have watched a great many people reach a summit and then quietly stop. The achievement becomes the identity. The growing ends.
Dr Mathews Phosa has been in my line of sight for most of those decades, and he is one of the rare ones who has never done that. He is now in his seventies, and he is still becoming. That is what I want to write about — not the curriculum vitae, remarkable as it is, but the pattern underneath it.
The boy from Mbombela Township
He was born in 1952 in Mbombela Township outside Nelspruit and grew up in a rural area near Potgietersrus, now Mokopane. He was schooled at Maripi in Acornhoek and matriculated at Orhovelani in Thulamahashe. Nothing in that starting point promised what followed.
He studied law at the University of the North and, in 1981, opened the first black-owned legal practice in Nelspruit. Consider what that required in 1981 — not the legal skill, but the nerve. He was building something inside a country whose entire architecture existed to prevent it.
In 1985 — the year I matriculated — he was forced into exile. He underwent political and military training, and by 1986 he was regional commander of uMkhonto weSizwe in Mozambique.
Read that sequence again. Attorney. Then exile. Then commander. Most people are given one life. He was already living his third, and he was thirty-four years old.
The negotiator
When the ANC was unbanned in 1990, Phosa was one of the first four members sent back into South Africa to prepare the way for negotiations. Four men, walking back into the country they had fled, to talk to the people who had driven them out.
He became head of the ANC's legal department, helped draft the Groote Schuur and Pretoria Minutes, served on the Constitutional Committee and the National Negotiations Commission, and played a central role at CODESA. He clashed publicly and fiercely with the minister of law and order over the investigation into Chris Hani's death.
And here is the detail I find most revealing. In an era that would have justified permanent bitterness, this man — driven into exile by an Afrikaner government — became one of the leading figures in Nelson Mandela's reconciliation with the Afrikaans-speaking community. He learned the language and developed a deep affinity for it. He has been criticised for that love, and for employing white South Africans in his businesses. He did it anyway.
That is not weakness or naivety. That is a man who understood, before most, that a country is not built by defeating your opponents but by including them. Inclusivity was never his tactic. It is his character.
Premier, and the long detour
In 1994 Nelson Mandela appointed him the first Premier of Mpumalanga, a post he held until 1999. He pioneered genuine engagement between government and the private sector, and was among the instigators of the Maputo Corridor — thinking, even then, across borders rather than within them. Boston University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1995.
Then, in 1999, he stepped away from Parliament into business — and not long after came the unfounded accusation of plotting against President Mbeki. He and his co-accused were cleared; the allegation was proven false. He was pushed to the margins for years all the same.
This is the part of a life that reveals a person. Many leaders never recover from a wound like that; they harden, or they vanish into grievance. He built businesses. He served — chairing Unisa's Council from 2003 to 2015, steering it through the enormously difficult merger of three institutions, becoming one of South Africa's longest-serving university council chairs. He took up the cause of Special Olympics South Africa, working for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, and has stayed with it since 2005. And in 2007 he returned to national office as Treasurer-General of the ANC, serving until 2012.
He has lost and he has won, repeatedly, and neither has stopped him. That is the pattern.
The poet who speaks nine languages
There is something else, and I think it explains more than the rest of the record combined. Mathews Phosa is a published poet. His first volume, Deur die oog van 'n naald — Through the Eye of a Needle — appeared in 1999, written in Afrikaans. A second collection, Chants of Freedom, followed. Some of his poetry has been prescribed in the national matric syllabus, which means South African schoolchildren have studied the words of a man who once commanded an army against the state that wrote their curriculum.
He speaks nine languages. He has also written his political memoir, Witness to Power.
A man who writes poetry in the language of those who exiled him, and who can speak to nine different peoples in their own tongue, is not a politician who learned diplomacy. He is a human being who genuinely wants to reach other human beings — and language is how he does it.
In my experience that is the rarest quality in senior leadership. Most leaders learn to project. Very few keep learning how to connect.
The Chair, and what it asks of Africa
Nelson Mandela University has established the Dr Mathews Phosa Chair for Diplomacy, International Relations and Leadership. It would have been entirely reasonable for a man with his history to treat such a thing as a well-earned honour — a title, a portrait, a graceful final chapter. He has done the opposite.
The Chair is built on a conviction that Africa's future depends on developing a new generation of leaders who are ethically grounded, socially conscious, digitally fluent, globally engaged, and committed to inclusive and sustainable development. Read that list again and notice what it is not. It is not a list of qualifications. It is a description of a kind of human being.
That is the standard, and the standard is his own life. As he has put it: power is meaningless without service — and he has said he lives by that every day. Anyone who has watched him for as long as I have knows it is not a slogan. It is simply an accurate description of the man.
His values were never stated. They were demonstrated, across seven decades — ethical leadership, public service, Pan-Africanism, reconciliation, nation-building, and the rejection of corruption as a personal standard rather than a political position.
And then, artificial intelligence
In his eighth decade, holding a university Chair that would satisfy most people as a legacy, Dr Phosa turned his attention to artificial intelligence. I have had the privilege of working with him on this, and what strikes me is not that he is interested in AI — many leaders profess that. It is the speed with which he saw what most people miss. He did not ask how AI might make institutions more efficient. He asked what it will do to our people, and what it will require of them.
When he encountered the idea that artificial intelligence could be used to develop human beings at scale rather than replace them, he grasped the connection to Ubuntu immediately — that a technology built on ‘I am because we are’ is a fundamentally different proposition from one built on individual advantage and human redundancy.
He saw in a single step what takes most people several conversations to reach: that Africa's oldest philosophy may be exactly what the world's newest technology most desperately needs.
He now serves as ambassador to a major forum in Dakar dedicated to the challenges of artificial intelligence in Africa — working to bring African heads of state, African youth and African thinking into a conversation the continent has too often been left out of. His instinct, as always, is continental, not just national, inclusive rather than narrow.
What I have learned watching him
I have interviewed hundreds of leaders, and I have come to believe that the most reliable predictor of a leader's long-term relevance is not intellect, charisma, or even integrity, important as those are. It is whether they keep growing and serving actively after they have already succeeded.
Mathews Phosa keeps arriving somewhere new. Attorney. Exile. Commander. Negotiator. Premier. Businessman. Treasurer-General. University council chair. Poet. Memoirist. Advocate for people with intellectual disabilities. And now, at an age when most men are content to be remembered, a serious and urgent voice on how Africa must meet artificial intelligence.
He does not remain relevant because he chases relevance. He remains relevant because he never stops asking what is needed next — and then goes and learns it.
There is also something in him I can only call a sense of destiny — not the arrogant kind, but the settled kind. A quiet conviction that his work is not finished, that South Africa and Africa still require something from him, and that resting would be a form of abandonment. I have watched him for decades and I have never once seen him behave as though he had done enough.
A closing word
We spend a great deal of energy in this country searching for leaders. And that is important. I would suggest we look more carefully at the ones who are still, quietly, becoming.
Dr Phosa carries the scars of exile, false accusation and political exclusion, and none of them have made him smaller or more bitter. He carries the honours of a Premiership, a national office, a university Chair in his own name, and decades of service — and none of them have made him complacent. He writes poetry in the language of former adversaries. He speaks to nine peoples in their own words. And he is now bending a formidable will toward ensuring that Africa leads on artificial intelligence rather than being led by it.
He will not rest in his quest to uplift South Africa and Africa. I do not believe he knows how.
It is a privilege to work alongside him — and, frankly, an education. Twenty-five years of studying leadership teaches you to recognise the real thing when you see it. This is the real thing.
Adriaan Groenewald has interviewed hundreds of leaders over twenty-five years and is the founder of Me-Vision Academy Human Advancement Infrastructure, building 24/7 personal AI development partners for leaders and learners.
adriaan@mevisionacademy.com · www.mevisionacademy.com