Good. Some thoughts. It shouldn’t even be about “diversity” and “inclusion,” especially if motivated primarily by cosmetic reasons. Your sphere of work is one where there is by no means a lack of talent. But understand that there is nothing more demeaning than being a black person seen as a means to an end of “representation” rather than a living, breathing being with agency, opinions that may diverge from yours, the potential to outperform and likely to challenge you, your position and worldview. If you do not appreciate this, you are setting those talented people up for failure, and yourself up for endless talent attrition. A better reason is to acknowledge that if you are going to authentically report and communicate South Africa, you must humble yourself enough to know that there may be lives and perspectives you do not know or understand no matter how much you have read about them. To be truly “South African,” you need the multicultural and multiracial voices of lives which, by no choice of their own, are very influenced by the unevenness of access. It isn’t about quotas. It isn’t about diversity in itself. It’s about authenticity. It’s about truly representing South African experience and its realities. That is why primarily white organisations, especially political parties in a country that is 80% black, do not break ground no matter how hard they try. It is a lack of South African authenticity. And it is easy to tell in how lives not truly known or understood are communicated. Shrug. (I briefly considered doing diversity and inclusion work after leaving politics, to preach this gospel in organisations around the world, but I’m from South Africa, and there is nothing more tiring than screaming into ears unwilling to hear to be understood we have to do. Maybe the exhaustion and trauma will lift one day. My arm can still be twisted though, probably 😂😩.)