About
Lelo Skosana — public affairs strategist and political economy analyst.
Africa does not have a resources problem. It has a strategic coherence problem. Most of my work sits inside that gap: understanding how regulation, politics, and institutional dynamics shape business outcomes in South Africa and across the continent — and what companies and investors should do differently because of it.
As Managing Director and Head of Public Affairs for South Africa at FTI Consulting, I advise multinational companies and investors on navigating regulatory complexity, shaping engagement with government, and managing political risk in contested operating environments. The sectors vary — energy, mining, infrastructure, financial services — but the challenge is consistent: how to operate effectively when the rules are unclear, contested, or changing. Firms that treat politics as background noise work from an inaccurate map of the terrain. Firms that account for it build more durable value.
My core areas of interest — investment, industrial policy, infrastructure reform, state capacity, and market structure — are not independent topics. They are dimensions of a single question: how the institutional frameworks of African economies enable or constrain growth, and where the leverage points for change actually sit.
I hold a Master of Commerce in Development Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand and an Executive Global Master's in Management from the London School of Economics. The first gave me a rigorous framework for understanding how economies work. The second gave me a framework for understanding how organisations navigate them. The gap between the two is where most of the interesting problems live.
Read the analysis
Published commentary on African political economy