South Africa does not lack for clever plans or eloquent speeches. What we lack, in far too many institutions, is a reproducible way of growing leaders who are ethical, accountable, self-aware and capable of widening the circle of belonging.
That is the promise of conscious leadership, and the place to manufacture it at scale is our education system, broadly defined to include schools, colleges, universities, after-school programmes, tutoring networks and practice-based learning in the workplace.
If we want a different quality of leadership in the country, we will not legislate our way to it, nor outrage our way to it. We will have to teach our way to it.
One’s framework is a practical starting point. It insists that ethics, assertive empathy and self-awareness are not soft add-ons, but first principles; that the rot we see, weak accountability and self-interest over the public good, must be confronted inside leaders and institutions, not outsourced to communications strategies; and that the outcome we seek is a renewed culture of belonging that repairs trust rather than merely managing reputation.
In our context, those principles translate into three disciplined habits: cultivating inclusive mindsets that name and manage bias; building authentic connections that privilege relational integrity over hierarchy; and creating environments where contribution and accountability go together.
In South Africa I believe this approach is now mission critical. Our present, often corrosive deficit is ethical, not technical or financial. Too often rules are treated as suggestions, conflicts of interest are explained away, small dishonesties are excused as survival tactics, and big ones are buried in process.
From the traffic stop to the tender room to the board meeting, “just this once” has become a habit, and that habit has bred a trust recession that taxes every transaction, pushes up the cost of capital, scares off investment and hardens public cynicism.
State Capture not only looted the fiscus, it also left a muscle memory of impunity that still twitches in institutions large and small. We know what good looks like, we have codes, audits, and policies in abundance, but without consequence they are theatre. South Africa does not have a knowledge problem, it has a consequence problem.
So why put education at the heart of this? Because education is where leadership behaviours are rehearsed daily, not performed occasionally.
Practising attention, agency, dialogue and respect
A Grade 3 classroom that learns to read for meaning is not only mastering a skill; it is practising attention, agency, dialogue and respect — muscles any healthy democracy needs.
A principal who gets real mentoring rather than a compliance checklist learns to lead through data and relationships, not fear. A TVET campus that measures graduate placement, not just enrolment, internalises the idea that outcomes matter. This is the grind of conscious leadership in action.
The good news is that South Africa already has proof points to build on. Across the country, a quiet architecture of leadership is taking shape inside education. Pairing school leaders with experienced mentors, treating the school as a community hub, and reopening channels to parents and local business turns “school improvement” into leadership formation: listening before deciding, convening the right people, executing using clear data.
In classrooms, practical coaching for early grade literacy and numeracy, with usable materials and honest measurement, builds the foundations that lower the drop-out risk, raise lifetime learnings and grow citizens who can sift truth from noise.
Routine and feedback, not heroics, create a culture where excellence is for everyone.
The same logic runs up the pipeline. Wrap bursaries with mentoring, academic support and real work exposure, and you aren’t just funding students, you are cultivating professionals who will pay it forward.
Design paid, mentored first-job experiences at scale, and you shorten the bridge between learning and earning. Even contested reforms in public schooling point to shared accountability as the real discipline: clear roles, transparent measurement and the courage to change what is not working. Taken together, these practices show how education can manufacture the kind of ethical, competent leadership South Africa needs.
Thread these examples back to the framework and a practical agenda starts to emerge.
First, make every school a leadership laboratory. Principals should be matched with experienced mentors and communities of practice. Teachers should get regular, respectful, in-classroom coaching, not sporadic workshops. Learners should practise agency through meaningful student leadership, service learning and entrepreneurship clubs that solve local problems.
These are the places where inclusive mindsets and authentic connections are modelled, not preached.
Second, declare early grade reading and numeracy a unity project. Put provincial budgets, corporate social investment and donor funds behind interventions with compelling evidence: structured pedagogy in home language, consistent materials that reach every child, on-site coaching, honest measurement and public reporting.
If we are serious about belonging, we must start by ensuring that most eight-year-olds can read and reason; nothing else compounds as quickly.
Third, refurbish the bridge between schools, TVET colleges and first jobs. Employers cannot lament a skills mismatch while offering only unpaid internships or generic learnerships. A national compact here would be simple: every participating firm commits a slice of procurement to paid, mentored work-integrated learning; every TVET campus deepens at least three anchor partnerships with local industry; and success is measured by placement and retention, not headcount at graduation.
Invite scrutiny
Fourth, institutionalise ethics learning in the public service and link it to progression. Ethics cannot be a once-off induction module. It must be habitual: conflict-of-interest drills, procurement walk-throughs, transparent audit trails and brave consequence management. The most trusted public leaders are not saints; they are people who keep receipts and invite scrutiny. Train for that, measure that, reward that.
Fifth, build a light-touch citizen tutoring corps. Thousands of South Africans already give afternoons and weekends to help children read, pass maths, or craft CVs. What they lack is coordination, safeguarding standards, decent materials and a way to measure impact.
A national backbone that supports local initiatives would multiply what already exists, and, crucially, knit social capital across class and race lines. That is assertive empathy made operational.
Finally, connect all of this to the National Dialogue. If the dialogue becomes another round of crisis commentary, it will deepen cynicism. If, instead, it is treated as a commitment device, a public promise to practise the habits of conscious leadership in schools, colleges, municipalities and departments, then it can reset expectations.
The test will be whether leaders are willing to look inward first, to name their biases, to rebuild authentic connections and to invite accountability for outcomes that matter.
None of this pretends the challenges are small. It is a refusal, however, to let failure dominate our story. Conscious leadership is not performative. It is slow, cumulative work. It shows up in a principal who learns to listen differently; in a Grade 3 class that discovers it can decode meaning; in a Saturday maths group where excellence becomes ordinary; in a bursary cohort that turns gratitude into responsibility; and in a first job that becomes a career because a manager chose to mentor.
Education is how a nation learns to lead. If we commit to it, the South Africa we want won’t just be a dream — it will be a plan with real dates and steps. DM