Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.
Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.
01 — THE HEADLINE
SA founders hate the talent shortage, but are they actively causing it?
African tech had its best funding year since 2022 last year, with Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt carrying most of it. So the money is back (kind of), but something else has quietly broken, and it isn't ideas, market or capital.
It's leadership.
When Moniepoint CEO Tosin Eniolorunda told a Lagos audience his company struggled to fill 500 vacancies because Nigerian candidates were "not up to global standards," African Twitter went nuclear. But Marcia Ashong-Sam, founder and CEO of TheBoardroom Africa, the continent's most influential executive search and leadership advisory firm, has a sharper take on what's actually happening.
"Founders will tell you in one breath that talent is their biggest challenge, and in the next, allocate the smallest slice of their budget to developing it."
Why founders skip the line item
Leadership development gets treated as a cost centre, not a strategic growth lever. When you're racing to hit targets or close a round, teaching your VP of Product how to make better decisions feels abstract. Product and customer acquisition feel real. Money flows to what feels urgent.
The capital that flooded Africa over the last decade made it worse: Investors measured growth metrics, not leadership capacity, so founders optimised for what they were measured on. And many assumed talent could be hired rather than developed. "That assumption is where the model breaks down," Ashong-Sam warns. "At some point, you have to build capability internally."
Three signals you're hitting a leadership ceiling
When a once-agile company suddenly becomes slow, when simple decisions need multiple sign-offs and teams sit and wait weeks for clarity, you know it’s not a process problem. It's the leadership architecture that’s not working.
You might even start to notice your high performers leaving for reasons other than money. When they stop chasing better packages, they're leaving because they don't feel they're growing or being heard.
The big one: If you stepped away for six months, would the business run, or would it fall apart? If you can’t honestly answer that without actually doing it, you’re hitting a leadership ceiling.
WHAT TO DO NOW
Put a real number on the development line item. If you can't say what percentage of the operating budget goes to building leadership capacity, that's your answer.
Track decision velocity like you track revenue. When it slows, the architecture is what's broken, not the people.
Run the six-month test on your top team this quarter. For each direct report, ask: who replaces them if they walked tomorrow? If the answer involves you stepping back in, you've found the gap.
02 — TOOL OF THE WEEK
One tool shaping how people work
FRONTLINE OPTIMISATION AT SCALE
Digemy turns training into a profit centre
Cape Town's Digemy is the kind of platform Ashong-Sam's argument is built for. It's a neuroscience-powered micro-learning platform with 1 million+ learners globally and a measured NPS of 97/100. The bet: People forget up to 80% of what they're taught within 24 hours, so bite-sized reinforcement, gamification, manager dashboard and evaluation scorecards close the gaps, costing companies millions each year, and answer the question "Is my frontline actually applying their training?"
Founded in 2017 by Kobus Louw and built for organisations with large frontline teams (Food Lover's Market and other major SA brands use it). Mobile-first, AI-assisted content creation; a platform that turns training into an application. SA's most credible answer to "we don't have the budget for proper L&D" and an African Tech Week Tech Icon for 2026.
03 — LEADERSHIP STORY
The ConCourt just made mass retrenchment legally faster to fight
On 29 May, the Constitutional Court delivered a landmark judgment in NUMSA v Industrial Oleo Chemical Products. When a Section 189A facilitation in a mass retrenchment fails, dismissed employees can now refer the dispute directly to the Labour Court. The CCMA conciliation step that's slowed these disputes for over two decades is no longer required.
The implication is plain. Where retrenched workers might previously have spent six months in conciliation before reaching the Labour Court, they can now arrive at court in weeks. For any business contemplating large-scale operational restructuring, the risk profile just shifted — and the time you had to clean up procedural mistakes shrank with it.
“Conciliation is not a jurisdictional precondition. Section 189A(7)(b)(ii) permits direct referral to the Labour Court once facilitation has failed.”
The question worth sitting with: If you had to defend your last retrenchment in the Labour Court next month, would it survive?
04 — THE STAT
620 million
is the number of people Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to add to the global workforce by 2050, according to the World Bank. That's either a dividend or a disaster, depending on who's building the systems to lead them. SA founders who think the talent problem is global are missing the scale of the local one coming.
Source: World Bank, 2026
05 — EVENTS
What’s coming up
11 JUNE 2026 – ONLINE COURSE
Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment
Identifying and ranking workplace hazards before they cause harm: Covering baseline, issue-based and continuous risk assessments under the OHS Act.
12 JUNE 2026 – ONLINE COURSE
Effective Direct, Cross and Re-examination of Witnesses
A full-day Labour Guide course for anyone who chairs or presents at internal disciplinary hearings. Covers how to lead a witness, cross effectively and re-examine without losing the room.
25 JUNE 2026 – FREE ONLINE EVENT
The Next-Gen Engineer: How High-Performing Teams Hire And Grow In The AI Era
OfferZen's Head of Engineering, Nicolaas Van Noordwyk, and Talent Partner, Dinielia Pillay, joined by Tian Schoeman (Impact.com) and Andrew Considine (Pollinate), discuss what separates strong engineers when AI fluency is the new baseline. Useful for anyone hiring, leading or scaling tech teams.
25 JUNE 2026 – FREE ONLINE WORKSHOP
Led By Her Workshop: A New Lens On Money
Hosted by The Lekker Network, a coaching workshop with Sharell Kassim (Head of Chapter Gauteng) and Thandi Kunene on the unconscious narratives shaping how we earn, negotiate, charge and respond to money. Not financial planning; a perception-shifting session for the conversations leaders have with themselves about money.
Got an event SA employers should know about? Reply and tell us.
06 — QUESTION OF THE WEEK
If you stepped away for six months, would the business run or fall apart?
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