Mark Vella

CEO Sapientt Human Capital & Performance | Independent Non-Executive Director | Author | Keynote Speaker

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@iamkoshiek @iamkoshiek thank you for posting this. I think few really get absolute mission this is for ordinary people to survive, not just for a few weeks, but for a lifetime, and the pressures and situations this creates. Walk in their shoes, and you understand

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@mteton @mteton agreed, so often the lip service is easy to see through. To much posturing and not enough backbone

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@TVwithThinus @AthleticsSA_ @ComradesRace @SABCPortal @SABC_2 You think previous years were great? Really? Previous broadcasts had loads of sponsor interviews, this one contained them. Previous on course camera and commentary was banal. Sure this broadcast had def sound issues, but overall it brought something fresh and human to the event

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

Drip by drip, the signs are there. What do we focus on, what do we address?

[UFS @UFSweb]

There is growing frustration in South African classrooms. Around 80% of Grade 4 pupils cannot read for meaning, even when they can recognise words. Many learners no longer sustain reading in the way previous generations did. Ask them to work through a long passage and focus often fades within minutes. Yet these same children can spend hours on TikTok, scroll continuously on Instagram, or remain deeply absorbed in a game on a PS5, writes UFS Dr Remeredzayi Gudyanga

Read more: https://t.co/PYIkmGF5bI

#opinion #ReadingForMeaning #Education

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@iamkoshiek @CapitecBankSA Looking forward thank you @iamkoshiek

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@dramadelinquent Natasha hello, hope you are good. I certainly can't speak to her intent and I'm not sure anyone of us can. Words certainly do have impact. And a conversation is always possible, even if its challenging. Wishing you well

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@CollinsMandy @CollinsMandy I look forward to seeing this.

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@sociable_weaver @adamlipschitz It may be dead for you, but the SA running scene was built on an accessible club system you wont find in many other places.

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@adamlipschitz Guys really? No doubt social running is at an all time high, but clubs meet the needs of many for whom social clubs don't. And running clubs are not just in one area. And without them your race calendar will loose many of its best races.

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

A worthy read for reflection...both here and abroad

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

Touching moment, that rings personally too

https://t.co/wVOEayMqyQ

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

It’s time for us, to with character, kindness and courage, model and display the behaviours that we want to see in the world. Not to spend time calling out the ones we don’t.

Its not (fill in here) that must fall, it’s we that must rise. 2/2

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

Folks, now more than ever, it’s upon us to rise. We can doomscroll and buy into the drama, call out fascism/graft/whatever, but if we keep feeding the polarity and loving the drama, then we are simply actors in that same play. 1/2

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@iamkoshiek Thank you for saying this @iamkoshiek. And putting government grant funding in the hands of folks who are not behaviorally capacitated to create value from that funding, doesn't work either.

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@dramadelinquent @Discovery_SA @Vitality_SA I empathize and have to say I agree. It does seem awfully convenient to seeming/conveniently penalize participants, with massive score drops if you are slightly out. This year I'm fittest ever been in years and we didn't even bother.

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

2026 will be more of 2025. The difference will be you.
I hear many say 2025 was tough (I said same). I've heard that each year, for several now.
The 2026 difference will be you; the changes you make, the new skills you learn, the relationships you build anew...

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

After a few years of writing on South Africa’s economic and social stagnation, I’ve learned something: people don’t want to know why things happen. They want to know who is responsible.

For example, when I wrote about how Eskom’s problems stem from its commercialisation in the 1980s, how restructuring a utility for profit created the very incentives that make looting rational, my readers yawned.

That wasn’t the story they wanted to hear. They needed the reason for Eskom’s struggles to be greed and incompetence instead of policy.

This pattern repeats everywhere. If you suggest that deindustrialisation and financialisation explain the country’s stagnation better than government failure, you’ll watch people’s eyes glaze over. But if you mention a corrupt tender, an incompetent minister, a stolen billion, now you have their attention.

All of this is because moral explanations are emotionally satisfying in ways that structural ones can never be.

Moral expositions offer the clarity of heroes and villains, devils and angels. They suggest simple solutions: fire the corrupt, put the thieves in orange jumpsuits, and elect better leaders.

This is human and satisfying because it turns chaos into a relatable story: There’s a thief, catch him.

On the other hand, structural explanations do the opposite. They’re abstract and involve everyone. They suggest that, often, what many observers see as “good policy” might have negative effects and hint that we’re all embedded in systems that reward certain behaviours regardless of individual integrity.

Most of all, they offer no easy fixes and no satisfying release of punishment.

Because what if the theft was made possible long before the thief arrived? What if the system itself was quietly redesigned over the years to turn public goods into private loot? What if the problem isn’t just who stole, but why stealing became so easy, so profitable and so normalised?

I once thought that if I could clearly explain the structural causes, people would understand. Now I realise the resistance isn’t only intellectual, it’s also psychological.

People need culprits because such culprits can be publicly shamed and even removed. But in reality, for any change to happen, systems have to be transformed, and transformation is uncertain and often exceedingly complex.

When I write about deindustrialisation or financialisation, I’m pointing to why. And I’ve noticed how often the response is polite impatience: “Yes, but who’s to blame today?”

This is why mainstream media gives people what they want: corruption scandals, government failures, incompetent officials. Not because journalists are stupid or compromised, they mostly are, yes, but also because that’s the narrative frame that resonates with the public. It gives them someone to blame.

And here’s the strange part: many people who consume and parrot these narratives don’t even trust the media delivering them. This explains why they get excited and feel validated when they hear the same things from a different source, like an independent journalist or analyst, one that makes them feel like independent thinkers rather than passive consumers of mainstream narratives.

At a theoretical level, there’s a deeper pattern at work here, one that the philosopher René Girard spent his career examining. Girard argued that when societies face crisis and unbearable tension, they instinctively resolve it through scapegoating: the community unites by directing all its anxieties and frustrations onto a single figure or group.

The scapegoat doesn’t have to be innocent. They might actually be guilty of something, but their guilt becomes vastly inflated to carry the symbolic weight of everything that’s gone wrong.

This is precisely what’s happening in South Africa’s public discourse.

The crisis is real: economic stagnation, mass unemployment, infrastructure collapse, deep inequality. These create unbearable social tension. But their causes are complex and systemic: colonial extraction, Apartheid’s spatial and economic architecture, global financialisation, policy choices spanning decades and governments, and the behaviour of both public and private actors.

These causes implicate everyone, offering no clear villains and no gratifying resolution.

Enter the scapegoat mechanism: Rather than face that complexity, the collective focuses blame on identifiable culprits: corrupt officials, cadre deployment, state capture, incompetent ministers.

Are these people actually corrupt or incompetent? Often, yes. But their failures become the explanation for everything, bearing a weight far beyond their actual role. They become vessels for all our rage and disappointment.

Notice something crucial here: the corruption narrative unites almost everyone. Business leaders, academics, opposition politicians, and even many ANC supporters all agree on blaming “the corrupt.”

This unanimity should make us suspicious. When everyone agrees on who the villain is, you’re likely witnessing scapegoating rather than analysis.

Real structural analysis is politically divisive precisely because they implicate different actors differently and require us to examine our own complicity.

The scapegoat mechanism explains why structural explanations feel so threatening. When I write about how Eskom’s commercialisation created incentives for looting, or how financialisation extracts value from the productive economy, I’m essentially saying: “It’s not really the scapegoat’s fault, or not mainly.”

Even if this is analytically correct, it’s psychologically intolerable because it removes the mechanism by which society manages its crisis. I’m asking people to face the void again, to sit with complexity and ambiguity and their own implication in broken systems.

The scapegoating mechanism obscures the structural violence of how the economy is organised, who owns what, how financialisation extracts value, how global capital flows work, and how privatisation and commercialisation create opportunities for looting that didn’t exist before.

These uncomfortable truths get buried under the satisfying simplicity of “bad people did greedy things.”

So we end up with a discourse that’s endlessly rich in righteous outrage but structurally impoverished. We know just about every corrupt official by name, but can’t really explain why corruption is systemic.

The country stays stuck, but at least we know who to blame. And perhaps that’s the point. The scapegoat mechanism just makes the crisis bearable by giving it a face, a name, a simple story.

The masses get the emotional satisfaction of moral clarity without the difficult work of structural transformation.

Until we’re willing to move beyond the search for culprits and sit with the discomfort of systemic causation, we’ll keep having the same conversations, blaming the same types of people, and wondering why nothing fundamentally changes.

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

@SizweLo An exceptional post. If we (truly) want a different SA, we need more understanding and addressing structural and systemic issues, and less dopamine hits. And yet, I wonder doe we have in sufficient critical mass, the discipline and sense of responsibility to change?

[Mark Vella @markthementorSA]

Some people still have balls.

The Voyage of Madmen FULL DOCUMENTARY | Sports Documentaries | Robin Kno... https://t.co/YagkueT0Ta via @YouTube