OUT OF THE ORDINARY
New Solidarity Fund boss up for the job
The Solidarity Fund is an unusual organisation, set up to help us get through unusual times. It requires, therefore, an unusual person at the helm. Some might have expected a wellknown figurehead to become the new face of the fund when Nomkhita Nqweni stepped down last month. Instead, to its credit, the board appointed Amanda Tandiwe (Tandi) Nzimande, a respected chartered accountant with vast experience in both business and humanitarian initiatives — and a person who has never sought public recognition.
Speaking from her home on Monday night, Nzimande is full of sparkle and enthusiasm even after a 12-hour workday. She’d prefer not to be in the spotlight (“I’ve tended to be a behind-the-scenes person so talking about myself is not that easy”), but she has no qualms about rising to the challenge of this new and demanding position.
“It’s a crazy thing,” she laughs. “My normal self, because of the public profile, would not have put myself up for the job, but it is such an honour to be invited to be part of something that will help carry SA through some of the issues facing us at such a critical point in our history.”
Nzimande points out that an enormous amount of work has been done by those who came before her, and says that as incoming CEO she is stepping into a position where the controls are already programmed.
Self-deprecating
With another naughty giggle she cites her husband’s opinion of the US administration. “He often says — and he’s been proven slightly wrong but not completely wrong — that the way the American machinery is set up in government, it doesn’t often matter who is in charge because the machine works. That’s how I feel about the Solidarity Fund — it is a well-oiled and incredibly well-set-up machine. Governance structures are very strong. A lot of people who are high-powered individuals in their own spaces have given significant time to it and I think, as a result of all those experienced hands on deck, they have set up very strong structures.”
One of the salient qualities she brings to this job, Nzimande says — although in characteristic self-deprecating fashion she is quick to qualify that others have this too — is “the ability to interface with people who don’t have much, and to understand in a particular way the conversation in that space, as well as the ability to interact with all these high-powered individuals on the other side”.
This comes from her life experience. The daughter of teachers, Nzimande had a fairly unique upbringing. Her parents, both from the Eastern Cape, had what she describes as “a wanderlust” and went to teach in schools around Africa, including Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The last-born, Nzimande “arrived in the world when they were teaching in Swaziland. My older sister and brother had the pleasure of going to school in all those other countries. I got stuck with just Swaziland and SA.”
Despite her joke she is glad she grew up there, although life was not easy after her father died when she was an infant and her mother, a school principal, had to raise her youngest daughter on her own.
“My mother was a foreigner in Swaziland, and in those days unmarried women were looked at with a jaundiced eye, but she was a very strong woman. As a teacher she obviously valued education and tried to get the best she could for us, so I ended up going to Waterford Kamhlaba College in Mbabane, a school that without sponsorships and bursaries would have been impossible for me.”
Nzimande credits the school for helping shape her world view. “Maybe after a person has left high school they blow up their memories, but for me, one of the things about Waterford was it tried to truly accommodate a wide range of backgrounds. My one friend’s parents were both unemployed, my other friend’s father was the president. As a result of that grounding I think I have a greater ability to be at ease in very varied spaces.”
The school emphasised community service and the pupils would take turns to visit ill and disabled orphans in a nearby hospital. Nzimande says that even though they weren’t always enthusiastic about this, it proved to be a valuable lesson.
A ray of sunlight
“We were young and it felt like hard work; we never wanted to go but afterwards we always felt fulfilled, like we’d made a difference, even just to shine a ray of sunlight for a short while into somebody’s life.
“I guess that formed a foundation in me, aligned with how my mother interacted with the community. We always had children staying with us who my mother felt might perform better at school if they had a better environment.”
After high school she studied accountancy at the University of Cape Town, which tested her resilience. “My mother was a teacher but a teacher’s salary only goes so far, particularly when you’re teaching in Swaziland, so I got an acceptance to UCT and that was it. I had no place to stay and knew no one. My sister had met somebody on an aeroplane who was from Cape Town and they’d exchanged numbers, so she called that lady to pick me up from the airport. I never saw her again after she dropped me off and I still don’t know her name.
“UCT had a group of us that they looked after and they eventually found us accommodation, but when I think back now, I wonder if I’d let my children go like that. I think the fear levels we have around our children might get to the point of closing off opportunities for them. My mother only saw opportunity, hers was a can-do attitude.”
Nzimande graduated and moved to Johannesburg to do her articles at KPMG. She subsequently worked as a corporate financial adviser at Deutsche Bank, as proprietor of a PostNet franchise, and as chief financial officer of Women’s Development Bank Investment Holdings. She has been a trustee of the Hollard Foundation Trust and the FirstRand Empowerment Foundation and for the past decade has worked through these foundations in programmes to improve Early Childhood Development (ECD) in SA, as well as in the youth employment accelerator programme Harambee.
Nzimande will not be able to channel Solidarity Fund donations into the projects closest to her heart, however. “As much as I love my ECD it is nowhere on the platter,” she says. “I think my specific bent is probably going to lean more towards the humanitarian expression of support, because even before I joined the fund, when it was formed and I heard about it and I knew someone who worked there, my first call to them was about food. What are you guys doing about food? I think that’s where my greatest focus will be.”
One of the experiences that made this her focus was at Harambee. “A group of young adults had not had any food provision prior to assessment and somebody said, ‘Guys, most of the young people coming through to be assessed are hungry, can we maybe feed them?’ So then provision was made, and the range of marks went up by as much as 30% on average.”
Food provision falls under the humanitarian wing of the Solidarity Fund. Its other two pillars are health response and behavioural change. Nzimande thinks that grumblings about the fund being slow to disburse the billions it has received in donations are unfounded. She and colleagues prefer to speak of “allocation” rather than “disbursement” because money is not just handed out willy-nilly.
“There are gates that bring in controls,” she says. “If an amount has been allocated and you are underperforming in what you are expected to deliver then the gate will close and you can’t access additional funds. There are conditions attached, and this is necessary because we want to be able to demonstrate to SA that the money has been well used.
“It’s easy to spend money but when you want to spend money well you do have to be quite considered about it. I think accusations of being slow are very unfair.”
Firepower
At the same time, she says the fund has the ability to effect change far more quickly than government organs are able to. As a partnership between public, private and civil sectors of society, the fund does not have the speed of a sole entrepreneur but is relatively unhampered by slow-moving bureaucracy.
“The firepower that can come from the government far exceeds the Solidarity Fund’s firepower,” Nzimande says, “but the fund can move with agility. If we were in some army or navy, we would be the little forward boat and the big submarine would still be coming.”
She says that apart from controlling spend for maximum impact, part of the reason for not immediately allocating all donations is forward planning. “As I see it right now, we are about to experience a second wave of Covid-19 infections, which might only hit us in winter, so it would be foolhardy for us to spend everything right now and have nothing to offer when that happens. We are looking at our next-phase strategy, a vaccine is one of the big discussions on the table, as are rapid-testing kits. When these things come, whether it is the vaccine first or the second wave first, we need to be in a position to secure assistance for the vast majority of South Africans.”
As for the c-word foremost in every South African’s mind — corruption — Nzimande says the checks and balances embedded from donation to allocation are virtually fail-safe.
“Segregation of duties is a really important concept. Those who identify the beneficiaries or the projects to be supported are different from those who will actually run the monies and those who will press the button. And there are multiple contracts in between, so nothing is fuzzy. There is total transparency.”