Civic leadership, activism in the age of rising authoritarianism
ON 25 March 2025, Heart and Soul Television (HSTV) published an interview that I had with Alpha Media Holdings (AMH) Chairperson Trevor Ncube on his popular weekly show ‘ In Conversation with Trevor.’ Thanking me for coming being on the show on X, Trevor described the interview as ‘One of our best shows ever.’
I have him to thank for the invitation and the good work that AMH is doing in covering civic engagement on its platforms. AMH are the publishers of the Newsday, The Standard and the Zimbabwe Independent. They are a force in the media space. Many influential media personalities in Zimbabwe have been shaped by this group and many continue to do good work in different civic and business spaces.
It is not lost to me that the show In Conversation with Trevor does attract a lot of attention but mainly from the business community. Indeed, our world has paid more attention to business leadership than it does to civic leadership. I therefore do not take it for granted when a well-established media group like AMH pays attention to civic leadership. I am indebted.
I believe in civic leadership.
I believe civic leadership is just as important as business leadership and it is a big deal when the media takes time to dig deep and reflect on civic leadership. These are not conversations that you find in many spaces. When business leaders wrote to me and said, ‘I enjoyed the conversation’, I was pleased. I thanked God for the grace to serve in this space. I pray that one day, in my lifetime, civic leadership conversations and literature will become mainstream, just as business leadership is. I continue to pray that one day, our society will invest equally or even more in civic leadership as it does in business leadership. We have seen the rise in transformational business leadership, thanks to the consciousness that our world as developed, there are great stories of success that we hear every day, despite the few bad apples.
In almost every university, you will find the school of business, teaching business leadership. Business is what it is because the world has paid attention and invested in leadership. And as John Maxwell says, ‘Everything rises and falls on leadership.’ With similar zeal, I pray that every university considers establishing the School of Civic