Speakers
Bulelwa Ngewana
Executive Director, The Open Society Foundation for South Africa (OSF-SA)
Bulelwa Ngewana is the Executive Director of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa (OSF-SA). Prior to joining OSF-SA, Bulelwa held leadership positions at a number of organisations, including the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Philippi Strategy Project, and the Cape Town Partnership. Bulelwa holds a master’s degree in Town and Regional Planning from the University of Kwazulu-Natal
Anthea Garman
Head of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University
Professor Anthea Garman is Acting Head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies. She chairs the Highway Africa steering committee and leads the NRF-funded project Licence to Talk which investigates the mediated South African public sphere. She teaches journalism writing, multimedia storytelling and academic writing.
Harry Dugmore
Senior Lecturer in Communication at the University of the Sunshine Coast’s new Moreton Bay campus, in Brisbane, Australia
Harry Dugmore was Associate Professor at Rhodes University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies (JMS) for all of the 2010s, and was on the board of Grocott’s Mail, South Africa’s oldest independent newspaper for 10 years while at the JMS. He was also involved with the annual Highway Africa conference in various capacities for a decade. Harry is the author of the 2018 report Paying the Piper: The sustainability of the news industry and journalism in South Africa in a time of digital transformation and political uncertainty. Harry is currently Senior Lecturer in Communication at the University of the Sunshine Coast’s new Moreton Bay campus, in Brisbane, Australia.
Sbu Ngalwa
SANEF Chairperson
Sbu Ngalwa is an experienced journalist with 18 years experience. Sbu has previously held a number of senior positions at various publications – including as Politics Editor at the Sunday Times and Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Dispatch and DispatchLive.
He has also worked as a Parliamentary Correspondent for Independent Newspapers. He is currently the Politics Editor at Newzroom Afrika – DStv Channel 405.
Francis Mdlongwa
Director Sol Plaatje Media Leadership Institute, Rhodes University
Francis heads Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatje Institute (SPI) for Media Leadership. He joined the SPI – Africa’s only university-level institute which educates and trains graduates and editors in media leadership and management – in 2004.
Mdlongwa distinguished himself as an international desk editor, bureau chief and senior roving international correspondent of Reuters, the world’s leading news and information agency, which employed him in several world capitals, including London, Nairobi and Harare, in the 1980s and 1990s.
He broke the story of the 1991 overthrow of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and covered Africa’s civil wars and peace in diverse countries stretching from Sudan and Ethiopia in the North to Angola and Lesotho in the South. He reported on landmark elections in the 1990s which ushered in multi-party democracy in countries such as South Africa, Malawi and Kenya.
Mdlongwa has headed several African media. He has been Group Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers, publishers of Zimbabwe’s Daily News, which was banned by the government in 2003; he was Editor-in-Chief of the Financial Gazette, an authoritative financial newspaper based in Harare, for nearly a decade; and he was head of news and current affairs at Channel Africa, the external news service of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).
He is a media consultant who has run journalism and media management training programmes in the former Eastern Bloc nations of Serbia and Montenegro, and in African countries such as Botswana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Zimbabwe, working on behalf of the International Research & Exchanges Board based in Washington DC, and the Reuters Foundation.
For four years since 2004, he taught journalism courses such as news and features writing; news analysis and editorial and opinion pieces; and economics, business and financial reporting in Addis Ababa University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Between 2009 and 2010, he led a team of international academics which designed and established the first media management postgraduate course in the Middle East. Based at Cairo University – Egypt’s oldest university – the course was taught by several international academics, including Mdlongwa. He holds an MBA in Global Management from Durham University in the United Kingdom.