Respect, Power and Accountability with Mteto Nyati

Mteto Nyati, former CEO of Altron and MTN South Africa and now chairman of Eskom, joins Colin Iles for a Henley Leadership Series conversation on respect, power and accountability. The sharpest thread running through it: in Nyati's own culture, respect is granted automatically by seniority rather than earned, and he argues that habit is exactly what stops ordinary people from holding their leaders accountable.

Respect by seniority, not by right: why accountability breaks down

Nyati opens by distinguishing between cultures where respect must be earned and can be withdrawn, and his own, where it is granted by position or age regardless of conduct. He says that in his culture, respect "does not always come from a situation where one has to earn it," but comes with "the position that you've got, or whether you are older than me or not." He argues this creates a barrier to accountability: people defer to authority rather than challenge it, which makes it harder for communities to hold leaders responsible for their actions. He frames cracking this as both South Africa's central leadership problem and its biggest opportunity, since fixing it would let communities start lifting themselves out of the challenges they face.

The trading store at 4:30am: how a family business shaped his work ethic

Nyati grew up in a family of ten children in the Eastern Cape, the first-born of his father's second marriage. With that many mouths to feed on a teacher's income, his mother cashed out her own pension to start a trading store, which ended up putting almost all of the siblings through university. Nyati worked behind the counter before school, waking at 4:30am to collect fresh produce so the shop had stock ready by the time it opened at 6am, a habit he still keeps today. He credits watching his mother run that shop and learning directly from customers as the root of his own leadership style: going to the ground at Eskom to hear from the people closest to the problem rather than assuming management already knows.

Choosing the jobs nobody wants: the logic behind Afrox, Microsoft and Eskom

Nyati describes a deliberate pattern across his career: seeking out roles other people avoid, from Afrox in 1986 to the Microsoft South Africa turnaround, to Altron, to the Eskom chairmanship. He says the strategy only works if it matches genuine self-knowledge of your strengths and weaknesses, not as generic advice to copy, and for him it comes down to disliking competition: "by choosing, by going to those jobs where everybody does not want... you're just all by yourself." At Afrox, which he joined in 1986 before South Africa's political transition, he was mentored by a manager named Neil Greenfield, who exposed him to Japanese-style total quality management, root-cause problem solving ("five whys") and statistical process control, tools he says he still applies when diagnosing problems at Eskom today. He later applied the same turnaround instinct at Microsoft South Africa, where the business faced government threats to switch to open source and pressure to sell a 30% stake to black shareholders. When growth stalled at Microsoft, the constraint turned out to be a shortage of local IT skills, so his team trained and placed roughly 7,000 unemployed young people into the Microsoft partner ecosystem through demand-led training.

Triangulating the truth: how Eskom's board learned what was really happening on the ground

Nyati explains how the Eskom board avoided relying only on management's version of events. Facing a national crisis, the board committed to visiting power stations directly and brought general managers together at Megawatt Park, explicitly creating what he called a safe environment to surface problems without consequence. He describes the resulting gap as stark: "what you've been hearing and what you are hearing now, a big disconnect." His method for filtering input is to "triangulate" what clients, investors, partners and staff are each saying, and to deliberately seek out quieter, introverted voices over the loudest self-promoters, since the loudest voices are often pushing their own interests.

Overlooked and silent: the meeting habit that changed his career trajectory

Nyati says he went through a period early in his career at Afrox when he felt overlooked, watching less capable colleagues advance faster than he did. The cause, he concluded, wasn't only external: raised in an environment where "children should be seen but not heard," he carried that silence into meetings while colleagues who spoke up got noticed. He forced himself to change the behavior directly, committing to say something, ask a question, or contribute in every meeting. That single change, he says, altered the trajectory of his career, because people cannot read minds and silence gets mistaken for having nothing to offer.

Why does Nyati say respect isn't earned in his culture?

Nyati says that in his own culture, respect is typically granted automatically based on seniority, age or position rather than through demonstrated conduct, unlike cultures where respect can be withdrawn if someone stops deserving it. He argues this makes people defer to authority instead of holding leaders accountable, which he sees as a significant barrier to the kind of scrutiny South African institutions need.

How did Microsoft South Africa solve its skills shortage?

Facing government pressure and a stalling market, Microsoft South Africa identified a shortage of local IT skills as the biggest constraint on growth. The local team responded by training and placing close to 7,000 unemployed young people directly into the Microsoft partner ecosystem, matching training to what partner companies actually needed rather than generic IT courses.

Is Nyati optimistic about South Africa's leadership outlook?

Nyati describes himself as cautiously positive. He points to the absence of one dominant political force as a forcing function for collaboration between people "driven by the heart," "the head," and "the hand," citing Budget 3.0 as an example of the contestation he believes the country needs after 30 years of an approach that, in his words, "has not worked."