Dr. Ongama Mtimka is a political risk expert and the Founder & Director of Lawula Investments, a premier African consultancy that transforms complex challenges into actionablestrategies for sustainable growth. 

With a career spanning nearly two decades, he provides strategic advisory, political-economic analysis, and development facilitation to a diverse clientele, including global corporations, development agencies, and governments. 

His hands-on expertise encompasses writing business plans, conducting feasibility studies, and leading public participation processes, contributing to tangible outcomes across the continent.

In addition to his corporate leadership, Ongama serves as a Senior Lecturer at Nelson

Mandela University, where he contributes to the academic disciplines of South African Politics and Political Economy.

He is also the President of the South African Association of Political Studies, where he advocates for the discipline’s relevance in policy and investment decision-making. 

He holds a PhD in Political Economy, a Master’s in South African Politics and Political Economy, and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, underpinning his integrated approach to research, strategy, and development. 

He has presented at international conferences in Brazil and the United States of America in recent years, represented the Eastern Cape at the International Trade Centre in Geneva Switzerland, and conducted an investment promotion trip to Bangalore, India.

Some of South Africa's most important conversations are happening at the intersection of faith, justice and community. Mbongeni Allan Magubane works exactly at this intersection.

He is a social justice practitioner, mediator, educator and researcher, currently completing his Master's at the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion & Social Justice at the University of the Western Cape. His research interrogates the conditions that produce social breakdown and explores the structural role of love, faith and community in building more just institutions.

As National Project Manager of the National Emerging Scholars Programme (NESP) at Rhodes University and a Research Associate for the Anglican Board of Education for Southern Africa, he works at the intersection of scholarship, policy and practice - bringing rigorous thinking into spaces where it is often most needed and least expected.

A professionally accredited Community Mediator through Mediators Beyond Borders International, Allan has facilitated complex dialogues across schools, universities, churches, civil society organisations and public institutions. His work ranges from restorative justice processes and institutional transformation to leadership development, conflict resolution and national education reform.

His work asks the questions that sit beneath the headlines: What does society owe its most vulnerable members? How do faith institutions move from comfort to transformation? What does justice actually require us to build?

He brings those questions—and the hard-won insights that accompany them - to academic forums, leadership programmes and public conversations, with a rare ability to hold the academy, the street and the sanctuary in the same conversation.

His work has earned national recognition, including being named among the Mail & Guardian Top 200 Young South Africans in the Education category. His scholarship and practice have also found international expression through engagements across Africa and the United States, including as a Mandela Institute for Development Studies alumnus and a Summer School Fellow at the Centre on Religion, Culture and Conflict at Drew University in New Jersey. Throughout his career he has remained committed to building institutions that are intellectually rigorous, morally courageous and deeply human.