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Dr Linda Makuleni stops me in the corridor of the SA Weather Service’s offices to introduce herself, believing I’m a new staff member, perhaps one of the 500 who work in any of 23 regional offices across the country.
She makes a point of meeting everyone. Her spontaneous greeting conveys the wisdom of more than a thousand business manuals on effective leadership.
Soon, we’re ensconced in her airy, large, windowed office surrounded by indigenous trees outside and African art inside.
As she expounds on the expanse and magnitude of her weather work, she quips: “It’s broader than just the minimum and maximum temperatures.”
Indeed it is. For the next hour, she discusses climate change, natural-disaster management, agriculture, health, water affairs, air flights, and social and economic issues.
The weather service has an effect on all these and other areas too numerous to list. And not just in South Africa either, as the service works with Africa and Europe too.
“Think of the effects on farmers of hail, tumultuous rainstorms or drought. We need to warn them, and that also applies to insurance companies,” she explains.
Extreme dry heat and winds can result in people suffering from hay fever, so clinics might need to increase stocks of antihistamines.
“In poverty-stricken areas without adequate toilet facilities, people defecate wherever they can,” she says. “But rains wash that into the rivers from which people drink, often with dire consequences, such as diarrhoea.”
So the weather service also interacts with the health, water and environmental affairs departments.
If drought is being forecast, “then socioeconomic factors will come into play. The milk yield from dairy farmers may decrease, while chickens can drink far more water than they usually do. If it becomes unbearably hot, farmers sometimes need air-conditioning for their animals, all of which results in a cost to the economy,” says Makuleni.
Another consequence of drought can be the movement of people from rural areas – where they can no longer eke out a living – to cities, with all the attendant knock-on effects.
“We also provide early warnings for the Southern African Development Community region about floods or severe thunderstorms, and we continuously update our website.”
Every aircraft that lifts off or lands in South Africa needs to take cognisance of weather reports.
So it’s not surprising that Makuleni is a member of the evaluation and audit advisory committee of the International Aviation Organisation.
She has also been an executive council member of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) since 2007. Shortly after, she was asked to join the SA Weather Service.
She was working at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute as a fully qualified vet – she was CEO of its biotechnology centre – at the time.
“We were working on a vaccine for bluetongue disease in sheep, which was also spreading in Europe because of climate change.
“I approached the weather service for weather-pattern information and they invited me to join its board.”
When the then CEO resigned, Makuleni was offered the job and, within a week of starting, was told to attend the annual WMO congress in Geneva. To her astonishment, she was asked to stand for election as one of the world body’s executive council members.
A clearly impressed US delegate told her: “We know your background because we’ve done our research on you.”
Handling governance issues is one of Makuleni’s strong points, as is her background in biotechnology. She was elected with an overwhelming majority and has been on the WMO board ever since.
She has an MBA from the Gordon Institute of Business Science, as well as postgraduate certificates in the management advancement programme offered by the Wits Business School.
Makuleni also did an international executive advancement programme through the Wits, London and Peking University business schools.
“I am a businesswoman,” she declares, “who can work with meteorologists and the pharmaceutical industry.”
She believes passionately about empowering women in the workplace and has won several awards for doing precisely that.
Indeed, she speaks so compassionately about the duality of women’s home and work responsibilities that I almost believe she’s a softie – until she fixes a firm gaze on me, saying: “I can be extremely tough.”
It’s a good word to describe her humble background in the second-largest township in South Africa, Mdantsane. There, she and her three sisters were raised by their mother and grandmother, both of whom were domestic workers.
Makuleni’s enquiring mind and endless questioning as a child led her beloved grandmother to remark that “it was a sign of intellect”.
“I’ve never forgotten that,” says Makuleni.
“We never felt poor, yet it was poverty that drove me. I wanted to be a chemical engineer, but the opportunities for educational bursaries were in veterinary science.”
Shortly after she began earning a vet’s salary, this quietly empowering woman paid for the education of her siblings and seven cousins, as well as four children from a township school.
She has two nearly adult children of her own now, and relaxes with them by going to movies and dinner, as well as cooking “and making sorghum beer”.
She has made a point of not forgetting her roots, as well as the strong women who formed the bedrock of her outstanding career.
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