The Unshackling Podcast

In the third episode, Zolani Arthur Gxamza, an entrepreneur and business development manager at Maverick Business Solutions talks to Ompha Tshikhudo Malima about youth mentorship in South Africa, leadership, character development and modeling the youth to master themselves. 

We talked about current government and business sector mentorship initiatives and how they could be improved. Zolani Gxamza says mentorship “must be a relationship in which there is willingness from both parties. ...there must be a willingness from the mentor to teach, and there must be a willingness from the mentee to learn.” In outlining what mentorship really is and what it entails, Zolani Gxamza touched on the issue of respecting  a mentee’s individuality and we agreed that there should be a horizontal interaction instead of a top-down approach when mentoring people. Zolani Gxamza believes that “the heart of mentorship is impartation.” We debated about mandatory mentorship and how mentorship can be ingrained into our society as a way to solve most of the problems such as the lack of role models in a predominantly absent fatherhood society. The main focus of the discussion was centred around holistic development as opposed to entrepreneurial or career mentorship. For instance, we touched on the state of society and leadership decay, and how mentorship could play a role.