Winning Women: Smart, sassy and buzzing with ideas

The sparkling new, ultramodern offices of Sanlam in the Sandton CBD seem to be exclusively filled with pale males until Azola Zuma strides confidently into the glassed meeting room, her rich colour the perfect foil for a bright, white dress.

In other words, she is unmissable.

The newly appointed CEO of Sanlam Investment Management (SIM) Business has been entrusted with the task of not only maintaining its highly successful current position, but also growing it.

“It’s a challenge, but I’ve done this kind of work before – albeit in a far smaller firm,” says Zuma.

She was executive director and head of business development at Vunani Fund Managers until she left them for Sanlam in June this year.

At SIM, currently ranked among the top five investment managers in the country, “the numbers are far larger and we’re tasked with growing it between three- and fourfold in the next five to seven years”.

The most challenging aspect of growing funds totalling billions of rands will, believes Zuma, “be the attitude of the portfolio managers, the analysts, those who do the day-to-day job of managing the money we’ve been entrusted with”.

She’s not suggesting that, “optimism is the Holy Grail. But if you have the fundamentals in place, which I believe we have here, then it is attitude that will get us over the line.”

She adds frankly: “Does it scare me? Absolutely.” Then she adds, “Sometimes.” We both laugh.

She’s fully aware that Sanlam is perceived as an Afrikaner male-dominated monolith, “but this is changing”. Her perspective that South Africa needs to craft investment policies “that will future-proof this economy” is testament to that.

“The notion of long-term capital being allocated as though we’re a First World economy is disappointing. We’re a developing economy, with an acute unemployment problem, an infrastructure crisis in terms of housing and health facilities, and an inadequate railway system.

“We have arable land lying fallow in spite of SA and the world experiencing a food security problem.”

She wonders why regulators, allocators of long-term capital and their advisers are not getting together to craft investment policies that will help address our problems and thus grow the economy.

She’s an ardent advocate of creating entrepreneurs and new businesses, “for which we need venture capital. Yet that’s almost a swear word here. South Africa has no appetite for capital loss.”

She compares that with the US, “where the word ‘failure’ is almost celebrated, because through it we can learn”.

Zuma spent the first 11 years of her life in the Eastern Cape before her single mother, “our father was largely absent”, moved them to KwaZulu-Natal for better prospects.

Determined to lift her family out of its dire circumstances, she chose to study a Bachelor of Business Science (finance honours) at the University of Cape Town. She followed that with a “double degree”.

She did a Master of Business Administration in International Business and Management at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, while simultaneously doing a Master of Arts in International Business at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK.

Then, in 2015, she was made a Fellow of the International Women’s Forum, based in Washington. It meant that, for a year, she studied both at Harvard Business School in Boston as well as at the Insead Graduate Business School in Fontainebleau, France.

The result is a thirtysomething, widely travelled, hugely knowledgeable person, who has achieved her aim of supporting her family and professional nurse mother.

This self-confident woman, who will be married later this month, is very distantly related to President Jacob Zuma.

She ends our interview emphasising that the first step to creating trust is to “have integrity with yourself”.