Leoka tragedy’s lessons for corporate SA

The tragedy of the Thabi Leoka CV drama is that nobody would have cared that she didn’t have a PhD, whether from the London School of Economics or any other institution. Many if not most of SA’s private sector economists have good masters degrees, not doctorates. One has only to look at the award-winning economists who top the lists of the Financial Mail annual analysts awards or the Reuters economist of the year.

There’s plenty of real world research and experience there. There aren’t a lot of doctoral theses. Likewise in the public sector, where SA has world-renowned central bankers and Treasury officials whose macroeconomic expertise is highly regarded, whether they had MSc or PhD after their names.

It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that when companies appointed Leoka to their boards, and the president appointed her to advisory committees, they were looking for her insights, experience and networks, not necessarily what sort of economics degree she had. That makes it all the more inexplicable that she felt the need to call herself doctor and claim a degree of which there is no evidence – and then double down on her claim when the lie emerged. Nor is she the only South African to have felt the need to fake their qualifications even when this was largely immaterial to their job prospects. Names such as Pallo Jordan spring to mind, and there are more recent examples.

They raise questions about why it is that the SA context breeds this sad search for prestige and fancy titles, and this dread of losing face, even at the cost of honesty and integrity.

Integrity is at the heart of the Leoka scandal. The scandal is not just about an individual but also about integrity and probity in corporate SA, in government and the NGO sector. Remgro appointed and then unappointed Leoka. But she served on the boards of Anglo American Platinum and MTN as well on the president’s economic advisory council. She was also on Corruption Watch’s board for years. Nowhere did they vet her qualifications, vetting that would have taken only a phone call or online search, or more simply a request for her to produce copies of certificates. Perhaps her exact qualifications didn’t matter for the job. Corruption Watch said her performance was ‘stellar”, though with hindsight it should have known and done better.

But if large corporates and the presidency are not doing routine checks on CVs, we have to wonder what else they are not checking. In the case of corporate SA, we have to wonder too whether the push for diversity on boards has been at the expense of rigorous scrutiny of the candidates.

The Leoka scandal is a wake-up call for corporate SA, a stark reminder of the need to verify all candidates for high office, whoever they are and whatever the office, in the interests of integrity.

With fraud and corruption as rife as they are in SA, integrity is more important than ever. As Corruption Watch put it: “An across the board culture shift is needed to bolster the standards by which companies, government institutions and civil society organisations alike appoint leaders. It is, after all, by the quality of those leaders that the general public ranks the organisations in question.”