‘I Work 24×7’

It’s surprisingly effortless engaging in a long conversation with Pilisiwe Twala-Tau, wife of Johannesburg’s executive mayor Parks Tau. Long after the meeting, one remembers her for her disarming smile and simple elegance. But behind this simple exterior is a mind that is constantly ticking, day and night.

“The earliest I sleep is 2AM,” says the First Lady of the city of Johannesburg. “I never get tired, I work 24×7.”

Tau is CEO of the Gauteng Enterprise Propeller (GEP), a provincial government agency established in 2005 under the auspices of the Department of Economic Development to benefit Small Medium and Micro Entrepreneurs (SMMEs) in South Africa’s Gauteng province.

Twala-Tau speaks about GEP’s larger role in empowering youth and women, making sure women are brought into mainstream business.

Her own growth trajectory has had many “highlights”, as she calls them. In her previous jobs, she left her indelible stamp on the city, urban development being an area of interest.

In 1997, as Executive Director for Economic Development in the Metropolitan Council, she was instrumental in declaring Braamfontein, a central suburb in Johannesburg, a non-trading area for hawkers, and revitalizing it into the cultural hub it is today.

“I was personally responsible for it. This is how we got Braamfontein cleaned up,” she says. For this, she worked tirelessly alongside another female colleague and powerhouse Li Pernegger, who she regards highly.

“We wanted the informal traders to still trade, so we started registering them. I thought about how we could work with them in a manner that will be productive for them to grow into the mainstream economy.”

Another project she is proud of is developing the tourism trail for Soweto, a township in Gauteng.

“[The trail] started from Cape Town, where the Freedom Charter was drafted, and went all the way to Orlando West and Vilakazi Street, and finished off at the Oppenheimer Tower. We managed to have the Hector Pieterson memorial developed. [Earlier], people would go there, and see this little stone, and say, this is where it happened, and it would end there. I mobilized R16 million ($1.3 million today) – at the time, it was a lot of money – and got Phil Mashabane, the architect, to develop it.”

Twala-Tau has been the Executive Director: Community Development and Regional Director of the City of Johannesburg’s Region 3 – the economic hub of Johannesburg. Here, she was instrumental in establishing business improvement districts.

But Twala-Tau’s true calling, she says, is community development. An example she quotes is of developing the city’s libraries.

“We moved from being library services to becoming library information services…Instead of giving books only, we started doing programs. We started going to the prisons and ran library information programs there…And then we went to the old age homes, and started doing big print books for them. And then we thought, in our libraries, we don’t have access to people who are blind, so we did braille and audio. I found I really liked to do things with communities,” says Twala-Tau, who had first started her career in finance.

After finishing her bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Lesotho in 1990, Twala-Tau had had stints at Ernst & Young and Standard Chartered.

“After that, I decided I needed to come back, so I came back to Dube in Soweto.”

Twala-Tau’s resume includes the National Rural Development Forum, where she was responsible for finance and administration and the Independent Examinations Board where she was a policy coordinator. She was also Executive Director for Economic Empowerment at the Greater Pretoria Metropolitan Council.

“I realized I didn’t want to do finance. I didn’t want to look at books and crunch numbers. I wanted to work with people, make a difference, and do things that are tangible.”

Twala-Tau went to the Wits Business School in Johannesburg and enrolled for a number of key courses in strategy that helped her realize her calling. A post graduate degree in public management at Regenesys Business School also followed.

“My dad [who was a teacher and journalist] was very clear education was important. And education didn’t include being a nurse or a teacher or a policeman. You had to be either an accountant or a lawyer or a scientist. So all of us [siblings] did [just] that,” says Twala-Tau.

Other career highlights include being instrumental in opening a day care center for senior citizens in Soweto and a drug rehabilitation center in the Northgate suburb.

“My life is drawn from my own experiences, my mentors and my awesome parents. They did things nobody said could be possible. At some point, there were 18 people in our house. How did they make it work?”

Twala-Tau’s family were African National Congress supporters and hence had to move to Swaziland from South Africa during the days of the liberation struggle. Her learnings started as a young activist herself.

For now at GEP, she says it’s a space for innovative ideas where “ordinary people do extraordinary things”. She also runs a number of youth development programs and pushes entrepreneurship at every level. Much needs to be done and she is not backing down.