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Tweak the education system to cure the challenge - Xolile Sizani

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Xolile Sizani,CEO of Servest.
Xolile Sizani,CEO of Servest.

The dusty streets of Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape are known for producing some of the country’s most well-known boxers. But for Xolile Sizani, it was football and books to which he gave equal time and passion. In turn, his community made him feel like he was very clever and his need to not disappoint this community carried him throughout his schooling and working life.

The result of always wanting to succeed has put Sizani in the highest office of facilities management giant Servest, where he has been CEO since October last year. While he has had great career opportunities, it is the passion with which the trained engineer articulates leadership and education matters that has earned him respect outside his sector.

City Press caught up with the executive at Servest’s offices in Midrand, and talked about his journey and what kept him away from the bad things young people often find themselves caught up in. A passionate football player, it was the game and his schoolwork that kept him out of trouble.

“Football and school protected me from so many bad things. Some of my peers did drugs and went astray,” he said.

But he admits that he was not always clear about his career ambitions.

The eldest of three siblings, he was raised by a father who was a clerk and a mother who was a nurse. The family lived an ordinary township life and he completed all his basic education in the neighbourhood. He started school at Equleni Junior Primary, before moving to Langelitsha Primary. Then he went to Mfundo Senior Primary and matriculated from Wongalethu High School.

His community’s belief in his academic ability was a burden of expectation that steered him well into his working life.

“I am from a community where people said I was clever and, over time, as I reflect, I realised they were just being kind. But with that came expectations,” he said.

After matriculating, he headed to the University of Cape Town (UCT) to study engineering with a bursary from energy and chemical company Sasol. First, as he had not obtained the required entry pass for the engineering degree, Sizani had to enrol for a bridging programme called Aspect – the Academic Support Programme for Engineers in Cape Town.

“What all these big companies did through Aspect was great work because what it meant was that if Sasol believed I had potential, even if I didn’t make the cut to get into UCT, through the programme, which was funded by these companies, I would go to additional lessons and qualify for entry.”

Sizani confessed that, although that first year was difficult, it was the thought of disappointing people who had high expectations of him that kept him going.

“I have always carried that burden because, even throughout my career, I have had a number of firsts. So I just continued working hard and persevering. In my first year at UCT, which was my second year in Cape Town, I managed to get the dean’s merit award because of my performance. I was completely focused. In the five years that I was at UCT, I only went to Khayelitsha in year five because I always had the mentality that I was there for school and nothing else.”

Having like-minded friends from similar backgrounds made the university hardships bearable.

It was while at UCT that soccer became less of a priority for him, unlike when he was still in high school.

Experience is great, but if you top it with education, you can do much better.

After graduating from UCT, Sizani was offered an opportunity to do a master’s degree at Stellenbosch University, which was also funded by Sasol. After bagging his master’s, he headed off to join Sasol in Secunda as an assistant engineer in 2000.

“I was scared when I had to go to work because my friends and I called ourselves ‘abasolvi [the solvers]’ because we prided ourselves on solving problems. My fear was not knowing what would happen if I went to work and was not able to solve problems. So I had a chat with my professor at Stellenbosch and he was the one who calmed my nerves,” he said.

At Sasol, he fell in love with the process of generating ideas instead of merely being an implementer of ideas generated by the company’s big bosses.

After four years, he joined food and drink processing company Nestlé SA in Estcourt in KwaZulu-Natal as an assistant factory engineer, where he remained for two years.

He then joined gases, engineering and technology company Afrox as an engineer manager, and that is where he hit a number of notable milestones, including a three-year stint in Germany as part of Afrox mother company Linde Group’s team programme to save costs. The eight-person management team, based in Munich, was tasked with saving the company up to €800 million across its operations in 100 countries over four years.

Sizani returned to South Africa in 2012 and became the general manager of Afrox’s high-performance office in charge of implementing the global strategy in Africa. He later moved to a smaller role of heading the company’s healthcare unit.

After a decade at Afrox, during which he also studied and obtained a Master of Business Leadership degree from Unisa, Sizani branched out and joined pharmaceutical group MediPost as group chief executive.

“That job was satisfying because you directly changed people’s lives through timeous delivery of medicines, and also through transformation because that sector did not have an industry charter like other sectors,” he said.

From MediPost, Sizani became Servest’s first black chief executive. As a leader, he is proud that he wants to surround himself with people who are better than him and has found that to be best practice in leadership.

“I always tell my team that I am an educationist. Experience is great, but if you top it with education, you can do much better.

Our problem as a country is that we have too many challenges. What we have to do is create centres of excellence in our education system that will cross-pollinate without adding more costs to the system

“I am not threatened by being around people who are better than me. In fact, that is important because, when I leave this company, my successor must come from this company and that is something I once told my board. I want to measure my own success against that,” he said, adding that a number of his executives were PhD candidates.

Passionate about development, Sizani says he believes that, through educational centres of excellence, the country can tackle its long list of socioeconomic challenges.

“Our problem as a country is that we have too many challenges. What we have to do is create centres of excellence in our education system that will cross-pollinate without adding [more costs to the system]. It’s called osmosis because you must have movement from the side of high concentration to low concentration, and the same can be done with universities.”

When he’s not running, the husband and father of three prefers to spend time indoors browsing social media sites, which he refers to as the “wisdom of the crowd”, as well as travelling with his family.


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