Female Fortitude

22nd August 2014

By: Tracy Hancock

Creamer Media Contributing Editor

  

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Dr Lulu Gwagwa, newly elected chairperson of the board of directors of Aurecon South Africa, talks to Tracy Hancock of Engineering News about how she fell into town planning and  the tough decisions she had to make as a working mother to  get where she is today.

Being a working mother, Lereko Investments CEO Dr Lulu Gwagwa has had to make difficult decisions that have sculpted her career.

The new chairperson of the board of directors of Aurecon South Africa, a global engineering, management and specialist technical services provider, says people see women who have made it to the top and romanticise their journey, not realising how tough it was and continues to be for women to get to where they are today and that it is even harder to stay there. “Society still hasn’t grasped that real progress requires that we make full use of the capabilities of both men and women. The workplace is still not geared for the reality of a working mother,” she says.

“While we celebrate women this month, we must think of the sacrifices they make,” notes Gwagwa, pointing out that when her daughter was three days old, she was asked to serve on the Commission for the Delineation and Demarcation of Provincial Boundaries.

“That was a very hard decision to make,” says the mother of two who, at the time, battled with whether she would be selfish towards her child if she went, or lose out on the opportunity to make a contribution to South Africa if she did not. “In the end, I decided to go and travelled with her, breastfeeding her ‘on the road’ for 18 months.” She had to leave her 15-month-old son at home.

Her newborn baby was ten days old when Gwagwa arrived at the World Trade Centre, in Johannesburg, in May 1993. Now she was faced with a new dilemma; how she would breastfeed her daughter while making an intelligent contribution in a meeting.

For Gwagwa, running to the bathroom would be too cumbersome. Therefore, she decided to breastfeed her child at the boardroom table. But she still wondered if her peers would take her seriously.

“But, by the second week, that baby was being passed around the boardroom table and was recognised as ‘the thirteenth commissioner’. When the World Trade Centre was attacked by Eugene Terreblanche and his crew, I was there with that baby and everyone’s first reaction was: ‘What are we going to do with our baby?”

Gwagwa says, prior to having children, she saw life in black and white. However, being a woman with children always redefines who you are, because, suddenly you are responsible for other lives, she explains.

“Having children softened me and as they grow up, grey hair has started to creep in,” she notes, adding that, regardless of how liberal your husband may be, your children will always ask for Mommy.

“I have had to sacrifice so many times,” she emphasises, adding that while she was CEO of the Independent Development Trust, her son was admitted to hospital with pneumonia the day before she was required to make a presentation to the Parliamentary portfolio committee.

“If you are not in the portfolio committee meeting, MPs take serious offence and sometimes drive your team away. What was I to do? I had been trying to decide the whole night whether or not to attend the meeting until 04.00 when I was supposed to leave for the airport. At that point, I said the portfolio committee will have to wait – I have to stay with my child. Was I happy with that decision? No. I wanted to be there to present because I wanted to be taken seriously. It is not easy for women rising to the top,”Gwagwa adds, noting, however, that once your career has progressed, things do get better.

What would she do if Aurecon was having a board meeting and she was unable to attend because either her son or daughter was ill? “I could quite confidently say: ‘I am not coming to the meeting because my child is sick’,” explains Gwagwa. She joined Aurecon in 2004 as a serving board member prior to her appointment as chairperson.

Now, she has been appointed to chair the board of directors of Aurecon South Africa, she says, stating that her appointment is an opportunity to lead a company with a great depth of technical capability, at a strategic level, and ensure that “we do the best we know how”.

“Aurecon is in my area of expertise, because it is involved in the built environment [and] I am a town planner by training.

“Infrastructure in South Africa, and Africa, in general, is key to improving the quality of people’s lives as it is a catalyst for social and economic development. As a professional in the built environment, as a citizen of this continent, but also as a mother, infrastructure is core,” stresses Gwagwa.

Beginnings of a Strong Woman

Born on April 10, 1959, Gwagwa grew up in Kromhoek, a small village in KwaZulu-Natal, which was then still part of the Transkei, in the Eastern Cape.

Coming from a large extended family of 25, an environment where “you had to fend for yourself and do your many chores”, she became accustomed to group work, as well as looking out for her interests, at an early age.

As a child, Gwagwa aspired to be a doctor.

“When I was young, my mother was very sickly and we would take turns accompanying her to hospital,” she says, recalling hearing announcements over the hospital intercom, paging doctors, and how she imagined the announcement saying: “Dr Gwagwa, Dr Gawgwa ,outside call, please”. It was about “being announced”, she says.

However, Gwagwa did not realise her dream of becoming a medical doctor, as her Grade 11 class didn’t have a mathematics teacher for the first six months of the year. “Come June, my father said, ‘That’s it, you are moving to geography because clearly you are going to fail.’ So, that’s how my ambition of being a medical doctor passed me by. But I managed to compensate by marrying a medical doctor,” she quips.

Gwagwa explains that not having that mathematics teacher didn’t define her; it changed her course completely.

“I was in my final year at the University of Fort Hare, [in Alice, Eastern Cape], doing geography, when the University of Natal came to recruit black students to study town planning. I was asked by Professor Margaret Marker to go for an assessment and I ended up being the student who received the scholarship.”

Truth be told, she did not know what town planning was, noting that she went to the University of Natal for three reasons: “I got a scholarship, didn’t want to be a teacher, and it was the University of Natal, which was a white university and you could only go there if you were studying something that was not offered by any of the ‘black universities’ at the time”.

This was a journey that led her to more opportunities, such as studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), in the UK, which was another defining moment in her life and she “got there by default”.

“I was running away from the security police in South Africa, and the late Justice Pius Langa, who was a close family friend, organised a scholarship for me at LSE”, where she received her MSc cum laude, followed by her PhD from University College London.

The former deputy director-general of the Department of Public Works notes that a lot of who she is today is thanks to studying at LSE. “I was allowed to be myself. I wasn’t black, I wasn’t white, I was a student there,” she says, pointing out that the head of her master’s programme, Caroline Moser “saw something in me” and pushed her. As a result, Gwagwa’s confidence grew and she became more articulate and more reflective.

“It was useful for me to look at South Africa from a distance [during the apartheid era]. Sometimes South Africans overstretch the uniqueness of the country and sitting on the outside [during those tough times] in an academic, cosmopolitan environment, you start to listen to what is happening in other parts of the world and look at [the world] in the context of South Africa, and start being a lot more objective. Being in London in the late 80s and early 90s was probably the best time of my life.”

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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