Reflections from the Women in Leadership (WiL) Class of 2024 Certification Ceremony
The Women in Leadership (WiL) Programme is one of the flagship leadership-development initiatives of Universities South Africa (USAf), delivered through Higher Education Leadership and Management (HELM) located in Universities South Africa. Established to strengthen leadership capacity across the university sector, WiL focuses on developing women in senior and middle management positions, equipping them with the skills, confidence and community needed to navigate the complexities of higher education. Since its inception in 2018, more than 160 women from South Africa’s 26 public universities have completed the programme, forming an active alumni network that continues to influence institutional transformation and gender equity in higher education leadership.
A WiL graduation is never merely a graduation. It is a collective affirmation of resilience, intellect, and sisterhood. The graduation held in September 2025 was no exception, witnessing the convergence of graduates, coaches, and alumni who had previously participated in the WiL programme.
After the opening round of welcomes and the introduction of Prof Mbati who is the new Director of HELM, came a unique poetry reading. Instead of the usual line-up of speeches and slides, the afternoon featured verses written by the participants themselves. The poems, composed during their final sessions, distilled months of introspection into fragments of wisdom gained. One spoke of “the curiosity to explore unfamiliar territories, the sphere of the unknown.” Another described leadership as “a big mountain still to climb.” A third spoke of a longing “to turn into something slow” — a plea for stillness in a world demanding constant acceleration. Their words traced the difficult architecture of leadership — its fear, fatigue, beauty and defiance. As one graduate put it, “Forget about time. Don’t have to be in control all the time. No more clouds. Seeing the rainbow.”
These were acts of testimony — voices reclaiming the texture of women’s labour in the academy, the complexity of holding together teaching, caregiving, administration and transformation work, often under relentless scrutiny.
Armed love
The central input came from Dr Muki Moeng, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching at Nelson Mandela University. Her address, titled Leading Through Complexity, Ambiguity, and Turmoil, became the intellectual and emotional heart of the event.
South Africa, she began, is living through an era of profound governance and ethical crisis. “Higher education,” she noted, “is not immune.” Universities, once sanctuaries of scholarship, now find themselves entangled in global geopolitical tensions, accountability failures, and debates about academic integrity. In such times, she argued, the world requires what Paulo Freire once called armed love — “the fighting love of those committed to denouncing injustice.”
Armed love, for her, is not sentimental affection. It is disciplined courage — the determination to confront inequality without surrendering empathy. It is leadership as moral clarity: speaking for the silent, but also creating spaces where the silenced can speak for themselves.
Dr Moeng urged the newly certified women to reject the social scripts that confine them to being “submissive, polite, and nice.” Society, she argued, often feels uncomfortable when faced with bold, confident women. Yet, it is precisely that discomfort that signals transformation. “We must normalise,” she said, “the idea of women possessing a strategic visionary voice.” Leadership, in her view, demands discernment — the ability to make decisions ethically even when policy frameworks offer no comfort.
She spoke too of resilience — not the mute stoicism often demanded of women, but a more supple strength: the capacity to remain focused amid pressure and change, to learn from setbacks, and to lead with both agility and emotional intelligence. “In such times,” she said, “people look to us for direction and decisive action.” Her message resonated with the ceremony’s theme of reflection. Every poem, every testimonial, seemed to echo her call to balance courage with compassion. One participant, Professor Tholaine Matadi, captured it succinctly: “Know yourself better before knowing others. It’s just a role, not who you are. It’s okay to be vulnerable.”
When Dr Moeng concluded, Prof Denise Zinn, the programme leader, reminded the audience that Nelson Mandela University itself embodies the possibilities of women’s leadership: six of its seven deans are women, as is its DVC for Learning and Teaching. The WiL programme, offered through USAf’s Higher Education Leadership and Management (HELM) initiative, is not only producing individual graduates (166 to date) but reshaping institutional cultures.
The ceremony proceeded into the conferral of certificates. Professor Sathorar called out each name, while the DVC smiled warmly as screens flickered with faces holding up their certificates. The moment might have felt mechanical, but the cumulative effect was moving — thirty-four women from across the country, each representing a site of struggle and renewal within South African higher education. Their universities ranged from Limpopo to Cape Town, from Sol Plaatje University in the Northern Cape to the University of Zululand on the east coast. Behind every name was a story of persistence — of leading departments with limited resources, of mentoring students in precarious conditions, of navigating the emotional politics of transformation.
Acknowledgements
Dr Marcia Lebambo
Then came the acknowledgements, reframed not as protocol but as gratitude. Dr Marcia Lebambo spoke for the class of 2024. Her voice carried both humour and insight. She recalled how, in their first session, participants introduced themselves with adjectives that mirrored their aspirations, she remembered how each meeting began with a song — laughter, rhythm, and movement breaking down the stiffness of hierarchy. “It wasn’t all serious,” she smiled. “We sang. We danced. We healed.” She recounted how facilitators had guided them with care: how Professor Schreiber reminded them that “access without support is not opportunity,” how another mentor taught them that learning to say no is sometimes the most radical act of leadership, and how the coaching sessions felt “like therapy or a spiritual journey.”
Dr Birgit Schreiber followed with a closing note on behalf of the HELM team: “Each of you has brought strength, grit, and drive to your leadership journey,” she said. “You are shaping not only your own paths but the context within our institutions to be more gender-fair and equitable.”
The WiL programme, now in its fifth cohort, has evolved into a movement, a network of more than 160 women who have taken Freire’s armed love as both shield and compass.
In universities still wrestling with patriarchal cultures and bureaucratic inertia, such love becomes a political act. It resists cynicism, insists on ethical leadership, and reclaims the moral imagination necessary for public institutions to serve society’s most vulnerable.
Leadership, as the DVC reminded them, is not about control but about presence — about “remaining focused amid pressure, change and adversity.” In this sense, the ceremony was not an ending but a relay: each cohort carrying forward a language of leadership that is critical, compassionate and, above all, communal.
The programme closed with John O’Donohue’s A Blessing for One Who Holds Power, read by Prof Denise Zinn. The poem’s lines — “May your power never become a shell wherein your heart would silently atrophy” summed up many of the contributions of the ceremony.
Recruitment for the next WiL cohort is already under way. The call has gone out across the country’s 26 universities, inviting a new generation of senior women leaders to join the network. The 2025 group will enter at a time when the demands on higher education are intensifying — financially, politically and ethically. Yet, as past cohorts have shown, the programme’s value lies not only in its content but in the community it creates. Each intake extends the lineage of women who choose to lead with both intellect and empathy, continuing the work of reimagining what power, purpose and public good can mean within South African universities.