Master of Ceremonies, ladies and gentlemen,

On behalf of Kagiso Media and the Kagiso Group family, it is indeed an honour for me to stand before you to declare my/our acceptance of the award bestowed upon us in recognition of our continued efforts giving our best time, energy and commitment to the progressive agenda of transformation for which our constitution had laid the critical foundation in 1994.

While awards are important for incentivizing us to continue on the path of transformation, they cannot/should never be the sole reason for why we have to do the right thing. At Kagiso Media, and within the Kagiso Group we constantly have to ask ourselves the question of why we have to wake up every morning to do the things we do? Why do you go to work?

Fortunately for us at Kagiso the answer to that question lies in our history. It is indeed a history I bought into when I took up the role of CEO at Kagiso Media. A history which was shaped by some of the greatest sons and daughters that this country has produced . For that, everyone in the company understands the fact that we have a great responsibility to be true to the values and ethos bequeathed us by the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dr Beyers Naude, Dr Max Coleman, and Mr Eric Molobi, to name but a few.

Born out of a rich legacy of struggle against apartheid, transformation for us has always been the only option to building not only a successful company but a society in which the virtues and values extolled in our constitution are lived.

Today, as it turns out, is the anniversary of the passing of our much loved chairman and champion of black economic empowerment, Eric Molobi. Eric, may his soul rest in peace, lived long enough to bequeath us these words of foresight and inspiration, describing our purpose: “We have a purpose, and that is that Kagiso has to outgrow us as individuals. Years from now, when I am a qualified ancestor, it must still be there. It must be serving people”.

With these words, Eric was joining a long lineage of illustrious protagonists of transformation and freedom who up till this day, remain for me beacons of the necessary change society must undergo for future generations to inherit a better world. With your permission MC, I’d like to bring into our midst the ideas of great minds, to add to the words of Eric Molobi, and hopefully to help us understand what the true purpose of a transformation agent is.

104 years ago in 1906, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a former ANC president and founder writing on The Regeneration of Africa, noted among the people “ …general desire for progress, and for cooperation, because cooperation will facilitate and secure progress”. He further emphasized that “cooperation is the key and the watchword which opens the door, the everlasting door which leads to national success…” and that “the greatest success shall come when man has learned to cooperate not only with his own kith and kin, but with all people and with all life”!

Two years later in 1908 (102 years ago), Mohandas Gandhi, having come into South Africa and experiencing the ravages of colonial oppression, and echoing Ka-Seme’s sentiments as he tried gaze deep into the future, said “looking into the future, wouldn’t it be a great heritage to leave to posterity a future where all races can intermingle?” And years later in 1947, with even more resonance with the challenges we are faced with today, and talking about the dilemmas we face as individuals and organizations, said we must always “recall the face of the poorest man you have seen, and ask whether what you are about to do, will make his life any better?”

Or, am I going too far back into the receding realms of history to find meaning in what our purpose and priorities should be today? Well, lets fast forward to September 2009, and commune with the insights of one of the leading scholars in a post apartheid South Africa, Njabulo S Ndebele. I am sure he’ll be happy to know that I’m sharing with you as copious as I can from the deep well of insights about the issues afflicting our society, which he deals with in a way that should give a fresh and interesting perspective on any debate about transformation. Some of you may have read his article in the M & G entitled “Of Pretence and Protest”. What he basically addressed is the interplay between various aspects of social behavior, around the aspect of transformation and the attendant intended and unintended consequences flowing there-from.

After introducing the subject of the anguish afflicting us as South Africans today, itself a product of our trying to find an answer to a critical question he poses : “… on what basis can we achieve a new social cohesion that enables us to find the most enabling human environment that can accord us, as South Africans, a sustainable human capacity to solve our toughest problems in the social domain and in a far less harsh and more permissive political environment?

But, as Njabulo observes, “it seems as if instead of setting out to create a new reality, we worked merely to inherit an old one. Perhaps in retrospect some of the elements of the negotiated settlement that led to the historic elections of 1994 served to subvert the higher order mission. Redistribution was given priority over creation and invention. That way, we reaffirmed the structures of inequality by seeking to work within their inherent logic…..

While the new political elites were incorporated into the structures of corporate reward and incentive cultures, millions of other South Africans were demobilized by social grants and truth commission reparations, some aspects of which are difficult not to see as material rewards for surviving the horrors of apartheid. This may have engendered an unintended expectation that the world will yield its rewards to me without an attendant obligation on my part to be engaged in changing my relationship with the world under the steam of my own leadership.” And…

“From time to time I will make demands on that world and this may include calling on white people to change without a concomitant obligation on my part to do the same. I may say from time to time that whites are ungrateful. They still have everything, yet they continue to disrespect me. When I say so, I may forget I was part of the agreement that led to the current state of affairs in which I am intimately implicated and that the future may require other kinds of agreements for which I am obliged to provide leadership.”

This award today places my company in a situation where it has to carefully consider how it responds to the question Njabulo Ndebele asked about leadership today : “To lead and create a world, or to protest endlessly, that is the question!?” This, I agree with Njabulo, presents us with a “higher order challenge” and concomitant responsibility requiring that we rigorously understand the “complexities and ambiguities of managing a modern state” and its related public and private sector institutions and organisations. There will be no straight line in mastering this complexity.

You today are called upon to give leadership in dealing with the complexities attendant to questions such as:

- compliance vs commitment to transformation?

- what really are the critical elements we need to prioritise when considering what it really means to say black people, in this instance black managers, are empowered. No slogans please.

But then MC, having said all this, it important to understand at all times that the history we are also involved in shaping, is indeed a history that is full of proud traditions, values and principles, a history which James Baldwin had once said, “Is not a procession of illustrious people…,”but one which is “…about what happens to a people, millions of anonymous people”.

With this in mind, in revising our mission at Kagiso Media, we arrived at the conclusion, captured in our vision and mission statement that: “WE BUILD COMMUNITIES FOR GOOD”. That is the yardstick with which we seek to measure success in everything we do. And I have no doubt in my mind of its consistency with the overall ethos that defines the character of the Kagiso group of companies, especially when considered against the backdrop of the overarching constitutional imperative of nation building.