Dr Nomvuselelo Songelwa, also affectionately known as Mvusy, is as an Executive and Leadership Coach, facilitator, and an author of, Life Lessons of a Cattle Herder: reflections from the Boardroom.
At the time of writing her first book in 2020 during the global lockdown, she needed to release her emotional trauma from the life of being a CEO of a company she started from scratch, a public-private initiative by the government and private sector of the Tourism Industry in South Africa to becoming unemployed. When she braved to pioneer the company, in what would have been a permanent position having had a long career of being in the public sector in the Conservation and Tourism industry turned into a nightmare.
In this industry, she was amongst the very first black professionals who joined a national entity that was to be at the coalface and the interface between communities and national parks in South Africa in 1996. She rose to become the very first black woman to occupy the positions of a Regional Manager: Operations, the Managing Executive: Operations, and the Chief Operations Officer in the industry, up until 2019. What was to be the legacy and the epitome of her career was short-lived, after a deliberate silencing and unceremonious ‘push’ by those at the helm of the organization. This experience sparked an idea of documenting ‘The untold Stories of Women in Leadership: Lipstick Chronicles’ firstly as Conversations on Vuka online Radio and now finding expression in this platform.
An ex-Chairperson of the Council of the Nelson Mandela Museum, she currently serves as a Council Member and Member of Strategy and Operations Committee at Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha- South Africa, a board member and Chair of the Social, Ethics, and Transformation Board Committee at Worldwide Fund for Nature-South Africa (WWF-SA). At the dawn of printing this book, she was nominated to be the President of the Visionary Readers Toastmasters Club in Midrand and the very first African Council member of the Institute for Integrative Conservation in the USA. A Hubert-Humphrey Fellow, Ford-Foundation Fellow, and a Women in Science (SA) award recipient, she holds a PhD in Land Agrarian studies from the University of Witwatersrand. Mvusy is a proud mother of five (including-daughter in-laws) and grandmother of seven, whose values are shaped by her cattle herding childhood experience. Mvusy is passionate about community conservation, integrated women empowerment, youth development and leadership.
