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The Governor of Kaduna State in Nigeria, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, has appointed 2011 Tutu Fellow Muhammad Sani Dattijo as his new Chief of Staff. Previously, he served as the Commissioner of Planning and Budget and was also the Director of Strategy for the Governor’s 2019 re-election campaign. In 2015, he joined the Kaduna State Excecutive Council as its youngest member. 

As budget czar, he was acknowledged as a champion of reform and was instrumental in moving Kaduna state to commence the implementation of  the Open Governance Partnership and presenting and delivering budgets ahead of time to the state legislature.

2013 Tutu Fellow Monica Musonda is joining the Ethics and Governance committee of the Confederation of African Football during a time of turmoil.  Monica was nominated to that position by the Football Association of Zambia delegation at the CAF congress and appointed by CAF to serve on the committee in July.  The Zambian lawyer and founder of Java Foods serves on a number of boards of prominent African companies, and chairs the board of Airtel Networks Zambia Plc. 

CAF is the administrative and controlling body for African football.  As such, it runs continental, national and club competitions and controls prize money, regulations and media rights to those competitions.

2009 Tutu Fellow Geci Karuri-Sebina PhD has been appointed to the Fourth Industrial Revolution - 4IR - Task Team by Naledi Pandor, the former South African Minister of Higher Education & Training. Geci had coordinated for South Africa an African Development Bank study on the 4th Industrial Revolution and the Future of Work in Africa. The appointment was one of Naledi's last acts as Minister before relinquishing the portfolio when President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed his new cabinet.  Geci forms part of an eight-member team with the task of providing advice on managing both the threats and the opportunities provided by the fourth industrial revolution.

4IR is a term that refers to the confluence of technologies that will impact how people live and work and includes artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, genetic engineering, quantum computing, and other technologies.

2019 Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow Simbarashe Mhuriro has recently been appointed to the Board of Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe as a Non-Executive Director. The Standard Bank Group, of which Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe is a member, is the largest African banking group. It has a presence in 20 different countries.  Mhuriro is the founder and managing director of Oxygen Africa, which is a Zimbabwean investment company with interests in precious metals, renewable energy, and agriculture. Sincee 2013, Oxygen Africa has been committed to developing utility scale power plants, industrial rooftop, and commercial solar photovoltaic projects. 

Simbarashe was appointed to the board in May of this year.

2017 Tutu Fellow Mitoha Ondo'o Ayekaba, has published his first novel, titled Claro de Luna, at an event of the Association of Spanish Writers and Artists, in Madrid, Spain. The presentation ceremony took place on June 13 and counted amongst the audience personalities from the Spanish cultural and political world. Guillermina Mekuy, a local writer and businesswoman, read from the novel together with Emilio Porta, the Deputy Secretary of the Association of Spanish Writers and Artists.  During the reading, the two gave voice to the characters in the novel.

2016 Tutu Fellow Peter Biar Ajak had his day in court today in Juba, South Sudan, after being detained for almost a year.  He was arrested on 28 July 2018, allegedly for treason.  However, the treason charges were thrown out by a court in April.

In court today, he was sentenced to two years for allegedly disturbing the peace and violence for giving interviews to foreign media that were critical of the government.  His lawyer is contesting the sentence as freedom of speech is constitutionally protected in South Sudan. His term was backdated to the day he was detained, so he still faces a year in prison for his peace activism.

To Peter, Sean, Jacob, Jackie, Jessica, Charles, Lord Hacking, Ronnie, Karen, Allen, and the rest of the faculty:

You called upon us to embark on a journey into the realm of human possibilities. In this short yet intense adventure, we stopped at many stations. We traversed the rich and complex jungles of leadership, negotiating between the charismatic and the inspirational, and wondered whether something “straight” would come out of the “crooked timber of humanity”. We encountered, with thoughts raised high, the wicked problems of how to effect change at the continent, pondered over “Africa’s critical choices”, and explored opportunities to use trade to bring prosperity to our continent.

The first workshop of the 2019 Archbishop Tutu Leadership Programme was held at the Mont Fleur Conference Centre from the 27th April to the 4th of May, 2019. The 23 Fellowship candidates came from some 250 nominees of outstanding excellence from over 30 African countries, and represented 11 different African countries - Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Gabon, Mali, South Africa, the Gambia, Tanzania, Ghana and Madagascar.

It was a memorable time of learning, introspection, forging deep relationships with peers and lots of laughter!

The African Leadership Institute has a very strong cohort of emerging African leaders for the prestigious Tutu Leadership Fellowship for 2019. Amongst nearly 250 nominees of outstanding quality from more than 30 African countries, 23 of Africa’s highest potential young leaders were selected to take part in the programme. Including the candidates nominated by our sponsoring organisations, the candidates represent 12 different African countries, ranging in age 25 to 39 years of age, and span several industries. The selected candidates demonstrate the incredible wealth and breadth of leadership talent that exists in Africa’s youth.

The biographies of the 2019 candidates follow:

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa extended an invitation to 2013 Fellow and human rights activist Catherine Constantinides to attend the SADC Saharawi Summit in South Africa in March 2019. Catherine has for years worked on behalf of the Saharawi, who live in territory occupied illegally by Morocco. 

The SADC Solidarity Conference with the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic started with a call for unity to ensure the right to freedom and self-determination of the people of the Western Sahara. It was attended by several heads of state, who took a stand for the Saharawi and expressed their support for decolonisation of the region and self-determination for Western Sahara on the basis of the values and principles that have guided the quest for independence throughout Africa.

2006 Fellow Palesa Kadi has been appointed to chair the ICASA hearings on sport broadcasting rights. Palesa is a media activist, researcher and has worked as a regulator in the broadcasting and telecommunications space, where she serves as an ICASA councillor. ICASA is South Africa's broadcast regulator. 

The hearings - and issue - is politically sensitive, as big-draw sport is currently mainly broadcast on expensive pay channels, locking out many ordinary South Africans from being able to watch sport on free-to-air TV.

A piece I first began drafting when I served as an Ibrahim Leadership Fellow is appearing in the print edition of Africa Policy Journal on pan-African migration.  Titled How Africa Can Adopt a Pan-African Migration and Development Agenda, AFLI has permission to share ahead of the journal's appearance, the abstract of the piece. 

It looks at the potential upsides to allowing intra-African migration, which is largely seen in a negative light, if the continent adopted constructive policies around migration for development.  Currently Africa has restrictive policies on migration.

Wakanda is a fictional East African paradise made famous by the 2018 blockbuster film ‘Black Panther’. It is a well-developed, high-tech, highly functional country inhabited by warriors who possess mystical powers through a special substance only found in Wakanda called vibranium. Wakanda is a powerful and well-governed country. It is a proud nation which has its own official African language. As a result, it has garnered the respect of countries far outside of its borders.

Back on the real African continent, one struggles to find a country that matches the description of Wakanda in all respects. If anything, there is a growing instability around the continent that is unsettling.