#17 Linda Mabhena Olagunju - ‘Every Opportunity is an Audition.’

3 Show Notes

01:31 Nkaweni is a remote village in the Eastern Cape, one of South Africa's nine provinces, known for its rugged coastlines, lush forests and rich cultural heritage. It lies outside of Matatiele a quaint rural farming town, known for organic red meat and stunning highland scenery. Over 200,000 people live in the town.

02:25 Mthatha (formerly Umtata) is a bustling, historically rich city in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, and was founded in 1879. Formerly the capital of the Transkei homeland, it acts as the gateway to the scenic Wild Coast and is deeply tied to the legacy of Nelson Mandela, housing the prominent Nelson Mandela Museum, which is the historic Bunga building, previously the seat of the Transkeian parliament. Mthatha's economic development is anchored in its role as a regional administrative, transport, and retail hub. While the economy has historically struggled with poverty and high unemployment, recent investments aim to revitalize industrial capacity, expand the retail sector, and modernize the city's central business district.

02:40 Namibia and Botswana are two distinct, sparsely populated countries in Southern Africa that share borders with South Africa. Famous for their dramatic natural beauty, both nations attract global ecotourism and are characterized by wide-open spaces and rich wildlife. Both countries are widely characterized as highly stable economies, characterised as upper-middle-income countries, and celebrated for strong democratic institutions, robust rule of law, and the effective management of natural resources; though both face distinct socioeconomic challenges like unemployment and income inequality.

03:02 Apartheid was South Africa's system of legalised racial segregation, in force from 1948 to the early 1990s. It classified people by race and used that classification to control where they could live, work, study, travel, and who they could marry, with white South Africans (a minority) holding power over everyone else. It officially ended with the 1994 democratic elections.

05:35 The African National Congress (ANC) is South Africa's oldest political party, founded in 1912 to fight for Black South Africans' rights under colonial and later apartheid rule. It was banned in 1960, operated in exile and underground for thirty years (its armed wing, MK, trained fighters in countries like Angola), and came to power in 1994 when Nelson Mandela became the country's first democratically elected president.

05:39 When the ANC was banned in 1960, its armed wing - Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), meaning Spear of the Nation - had to operate from outside South Africa. Angola became one of its main training bases in the 1970s and 80s because the newly independent Angolan government (itself fighting a civil war against apartheid-backed forces) gave the ANC land, protection, and a place to run military camps far from Pretoria's reach. For many young South Africans who'd slipped across the border, Angola was where they learned to be soldiers.

06:29 The National School of the Arts is a specialist public high school in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, where students take a full academic curriculum alongside intensive training in drama, dance, music, visual art, or design. It's one of the few schools in the country that treats the arts as serious discipline rather than extracurricular. Alumni include some of South Africa's best-known actors, dancers, and musicians, which gives you a sense of what kind of talent passes through those doors, including Charlize Theron (yes, the Oscar winner), the late choreographer Dada Masilo, and jazz vocalist Zoë Modiga.

06:39 Model C schools are a category of South African schools created in the dying days of apartheid (around 1990 to 1991), when formerly whites-only government schools were given the option of becoming semi-private, with parent-elected governing bodies and the right to set their own admissions and fees. The label stuck, even though the official category was scrapped after 1994. Today, when South Africans say "Model C," they usually mean a former whites-only school that's now racially integrated but still well-resourced, often with strong academics and a particular cultural (read rich and advantaged) feel.

06:43 South Africa's first democratic elections, held from 26 to 29 April 1994, in which all South Africans, regardless of race, could vote for the first time. They ended nearly fifty years of apartheid rule and brought Nelson Mandela to power as the country's first Black president. The images of voters standing in queues that stretched for kilometres became one of the defining moments of the late twentieth century, and 27 April is now celebrated annually as Freedom Day.

11:12 The University of Cape Town (UCT) is South Africa's oldest university, founded in 1829, perched dramatically on the slopes of Devil's Peak with views over Cape Town and the ocean. It's consistently ranked as the top university in Africa and has produced five Nobel laureates, including J.M. Coetzee and Desmond Tutu. The law faculty, where Linda studied, is one of the most respected on the continent.

11:16 Bowman Gilfillian, now simply called Bowmans, is one of South Africa's oldest and largest corporate law firms, founded in 1900. It's known for big-ticket commercial work — mergers, banking, energy, mining — and is where many of the country's top corporate lawyers cut their teeth. It's now simply called Bowmans and has offices across Africa, reflecting the shift from a Johannesburg firm to a pan-African one.

13:13 Aberdeen is a coastal city in northeast Scotland, long known as the oil and gas capital of Europe thanks to the North Sea oil boom of the 1970s. As that industry has wound down, the city has been reinventing itself as a hub for offshore wind and renewable energy, which is exactly the transition Linda found herself working on. It's also famously grey, both in weather and in the granite the city is built from, which earned it the nickname "the Granite City."

19:29 An Environmental Impact Assessment, or EIA, is a formal study required before any major development (a wind farm, a mine, a highway) can go ahead, looking at how the project will affect the surrounding environment, wildlife, water, air, and nearby communities. It usually involves public consultation and can take months or years. In Linda's case at Aberdeen, the EIA meant proving the wind farm wouldn't unduly disturb things like the 300-odd species of sea mammals living in that stretch of ocean.

24:40 Mulilo is a South African renewable energy developer and Independent Power Producer, founded in 2008, and is widely considered one of the country's biggest homegrown success stories in clean energy. It develops, builds, and operates large-scale wind, solar, and battery storage projects, and in 2023 it became serious international news when Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, the world's leading renewable energy private equity investor, acquired a majority shareholding. Linda's company DLO is a shareholder alongside Mulilo in the De Aar Wind Farm in the Northern Cape.

40:39 Norton Rose Fulbright is a global law firm with roots going back to nineteenth-century London, now operating in over fifty cities worldwide including a major office in Johannesburg. It's a heavyweight in project finance and energy deals, which is why the closing of a multi-billion rand wind farm transaction would happen in their boardrooms. The firm was formed through a series of mergers, most notably the 2013 tie-up between London's Norton Rose and the American firm Fulbright & Jaworski.

44:55 Black Economic Empowerment, usually shortened to BEE or B-BBEE (Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment), is a South African government policy introduced in 2003 to redress the economic exclusion of Black South Africans under apartheid. It requires companies to score points across areas like ownership, management, skills development, and procurement, with better scores improving their chances of winning government contracts and licences. It's been both celebrated as essential for transformation and criticised for sometimes enriching a small elite rather than driving broader change, which is exactly the tension Linda touches on when she talks about needing to move beyond pure shareholding towards real skills transfer.

46:24 The DLO Africa Power Roundtable is an annual invitation-only convening that Linda founded to bring together energy ministers, investors, developers, and stakeholders from across the continent to talk seriously about how to attract investment into Africa's power sector. It's now in its eighth-plus year and has expanded beyond Africa to London, reflecting growing global interest in African energy markets. The Roundtable is also one of the ways Linda kept the lights on financially in the years before the wind farm started generating revenue.

57:28 Dr Judy Dlamini is one of South Africa's most prominent businesswomen, a qualified medical doctor turned entrepreneur who founded the Mbekani Group in 1996, a diversified holding company with interests in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, luxury fashion (the Luminance store chain), and property. She is also Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand and the author of several books, including the bestseller Equal but Different, which examines how race and gender shape leadership journeys.

57:32 Founded by Zanele Mbeki, former First Lady of South Africa and a long-time activist for women's rights, the Zanele Mbeki Development Trust is a non-profit dedicated to advancing African feminist leadership. Its flagship programme, the Zanele Mbeki Fellowship, brings together cohorts of young African women leaders between the ages of 25 and 35 for a year-long programme exploring feminism, leadership, and personal growth. Mrs Mbeki has been quietly building infrastructure for African women for decades, including co-founding South Africa's Women's Development Bank back in 1993.

01:01:09 The Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the precursor to today's African Union, was founded in Addis Ababa in 1963 by a group of newly independent African leaders determined to throw off the last of colonial rule and forge a united continent. The most often cited "founding fathers" include Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (the most prominent voice for full political union), Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (who hosted the founding summit), Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, and Sékou Touré of Guinea. Thomas Sankara came a generation later as the radical young president of Burkina Faso in the 1980s, but is often included in the same lineage of pan-African dreamers.

01:09:03 The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a vast Central African country, the second largest on the continent by area, sitting on some of the richest mineral deposits in the world: cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds, and the coltan that powers nearly every smartphone and electric vehicle on the planet. Despite this wealth, it has been ravaged by decades of conflict, particularly in its eastern provinces, where a complex web of armed groups, foreign interests, and corporate actors have fuelled what is often called the deadliest war since World War Two.

01:13:52 The DLO Skills Initiative is a training programme Linda set up to make sure African youth and women aren't left behind in the renewable energy transition. Rather than offering generic education, it focuses on job-ready, sector-specific skills like solar panel cleaning, maintenance, and fault detection, alongside basic entrepreneurship modules to help graduates start their own green businesses. Its first cohort trained 100 unemployed young people in De Aar (where Linda's wind farm is located) in partnership with Chinese renewable energy company Longyuan, which is significant given that youth unemployment in the Northern Cape sits at around forty-two percent.

01:17:59 Julius Malema is one of South Africa's most divisive and visible political figures, the founder and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a left-wing populist party launched in 2013 after he was expelled from the ANC Youth League. Known for his red beret, fiery oratory, and uncompromising calls for land expropriation without compensation and the nationalisation of mines and banks, he occupies a peculiar space in South African politics: a champion of the poor whose own wealth and lifestyle have drawn ongoing scrutiny.

59