Henley offers MBA and PGDip scholarships to investigative journalists

HENLEY Business School Africa is offering two scholarships honouring those who are speaking truth to power. It is open to investigative journalists and media practitioners who have shown courage and determination in their craft.

The Sol Plaatje scholarship covers all the fees involved in a post graduate diploma in management practice and a Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA).

As Henley Business School Africa dean and director Jon Foster-Pedley explains, the scholarship honours one of South African journalism’s greatest practitioners by giving two current practitioners a once in a lifetime opportunity to step out of the newsroom and into the classroom not just to find new depths within themselves, but also hopefully to emerge with the tools to recalibrate the media industry when they graduate.

“We are living in incredible times; the debt we owe South African journalists for uncovering state capture and its enabling by corporate collusion is overshadowed only by the precarious state of our media. Caught in the vice grip of an economy in recession and an industry in disruption, all legacy news platforms are facing unprecedented budget cuts and disproportionate pressures on their editorial independence, while the new media has yet to find a sustainable business model.

“We hope to provide that opportunity to two potential South African media moguls to come here and help them find and develop the blueprint they need and the toolkit they will use to turn this around and safeguard this incredibly important institution in our society.,” he says.

Sol Plaatje was a crusading journalist best known for his searing polemic, a Native Life in South Africa, which chronicled the depredations wrought by the inhuman Native Land Act of 1913. He was an activist – the first secretary general of the forerunner of today’s ANC – but he was also a newspaper editor and publisher. He founded three newspapers; one in Mahikeng and two in Kimberley, which he tried heroically to nurture and let flourish against all odds. He never stopped fighting for his people’s rights or writing though. He was a polymath; a linguist, a novelist, a polemicist, a dramatist; a very modern man ahead of his time and a very complete human being.

“He epitomises the entrepreneurial spirit always grounded in the community that Henley Business School Africa strives to infuse in our graduates and he reflects the innovation, creativity and agility that we will all need to harness if we are to become victors, and not victims, of the fourth industrial revolution,” says Foster-Pedley.

This scholarship is the latest in a range of innovative scholarships honouring South African icons from Desmond Tutu to Johnny Clegg as Henley Business School Africa seeks to give back and invest in our own community, while developing ground breaking courses and programmes to build the leaders who build the businesses who build Africa.

“We are committed to producing corporate activists who will stand cheek by jowl against state capture and corporate collusion, speaking truth to power in the boardrooms, on the streets – and now in the newsrooms, as we seek as one society to work towards narrowing the Gini co-efficient in this country that shames us all,” says Foster-Pedley.

If you are interested in finding out how to apply to be considered for the Sol Plaatje media scholarship, contact Vivien Spong viviens@henleysa.ac.za

  by 24th May 2019 to apply.

Honouring those who have spoken truth to power, The Henley 2019 MBA and PGDip Sol Plaatje scholarship.