On stewardship, the creative economy and building what comes next.
What does it mean to lead an organisation at a moment when the creative economy itself is changing?
For Nizenande Machi, the appointed Chairperson of Business and Arts South Africa (BASA), the answer begins with stewardship.
A business strategist by profession, Machi brings to the role a perspective shaped by the worlds of business, leadership and strategy, alongside a deep appreciation for the imagination and cultural power of the creative sector. She sees BASA’s next chapter not simply as an opportunity to do more, but to become more deliberate about the role it plays in the ecosystem: connecting people, enabling partnerships, generating intelligence and helping move investment and opportunity towards those creating value.
In this conversation, Machi reflects on what it means to lead BASA at this point in its journey, why the creative economy must be understood as an economy, and why the relationship between business and the arts needs to move beyond patronage towards genuine partnership.
She speaks candidly about the need to put money into creatives’ hands, the danger of romanticising resilience, the African export opportunity and the responsibility to build an ecosystem in which creatives can do more than survive they can build sustainable careers, businesses and wealth.
At the heart of it all is a question that increasingly defines her vision for BASA: what becomes possible when business and the creative sector genuinely recognise the value in one another?
- 01 — Congratulations on your appointment! What does stepping into the role of BASA Chairperson mean to you at this moment?
It feels both weighty and deeply meaningful. I have always believed that leadership is ultimately an act of stewardship. You are entrusted with something that existed before you, something that matters to people beyond you, and your responsibility is to leave it stronger than you found it. That is how I feel about BASA.
I stepped into the Chairperson role at an important moment in the organisation’s life. We have done significant work to clarify where BASA is going, strengthen its leadership and governance, and think carefully about the role we need to play in a creative economy that is itself changing.
So, I don’t experience this appointment primarily as an accolade. I experience it as an assignment. There is work to do, and I feel enormously privileged to be doing it alongside a strong Board, our CEO and team, and a community of artists, creatives, businesses and partners who care deeply about this sector.
And, personally, I love that I get to do this work here. I am a business strategist by profession, but I have always been drawn to the imagination, courage and beauty of creatives. BASA sits at this wonderful intersection between institutional thinking and human creativity, and that feels very much like home to me. - 02 — What is your vision for BASA as it enters its next chapter?
I want BASA to become increasingly indispensable to the creative economy. Not simply because of the programmes we run, but because of the connections we enable, the intelligence we generate, the conversations we convene, and the capital and opportunity we help move through the ecosystem. The relationship between business and the arts has to mature beyond the idea that business has resources and the arts need help. Creative and cultural industries create enormous economic, social and cultural value. Artists are entrepreneurs. Creative organisations are institutions. Intellectual property is an asset. Culture shapes markets, identities and even how countries understand themselves.So, the interesting question for me is: what becomes possible when business and the creative sector genuinely recognise the value in one another? I see BASA becoming a powerful ecosystem builder and systems enabler that creates the conditions in which those relationships can flourish, and in which South African creative talent can build sustainable enterprises and careers. - 03 — What part of BASA’s work makes you think, “Yes, this is why we matter”?
Putting money into creatives’ hands.
It sounds almost too simple, but I care deeply about that. Creative people cannot build sustainable careers and businesses on applause and recognition alone. At some point, value has to translate into economic opportunity.When I see BASA helping unlock funding, business partnerships and opportunities that allow a creative to make the work, employ someone, grow an enterprise or simply keep going, I think, yes, this is why we are here.Because ultimately, a thriving creative economy has to mean that more of the people creating the value can actually make a living from it. And if BASA can help make that happen, practically and consistently, then we are doing work that matters. - 04 — How do you see BASA’s role evolving within South Africa’s creative and cultural ecosystem?
I think we are moving from being understood predominantly as an organisation that facilitates and implements business and arts initiatives, towards becoming a much stronger ecosystem builder and intermediary institution that is helping shape the sector. That distinction is important. South Africa does not lack creative talent. We have it in astonishing abundance. What we sometimes lack are the enabling systems around that talent: access to capital, markets, business capability, networks, research, policy support and pathways that allow creative work to become sustainable enterprise.BASA cannot solve all of that, nor should we try to. But we can become very good at understanding where the ecosystem is fragmented and asking ourselves: What role are we uniquely positioned to play here? Who needs to be connected to one another as amplifiers of creativity? What knowledge is missing or not being adequately disseminated? What conversation needs our convening and platform? Where can business participate more substantively in the sector? That evolution excites me. - 05 — What do you believe are the most critical opportunities for the creative economy right now?
The first is that we need to recognise the creative economy as an economy. There is an important shift that happens when we stop seeing creativity only through the language of passion, talent and expression, and begin also speaking about intellectual property, enterprise development, investment, exports, jobs, ownership and markets.
The second is the African export opportunity. Our stories, aesthetics, music, fashion, design, film and cultural expressions are already travelling globally. The question is whether African creatives will also own the businesses, platforms, intellectual property and infrastructure through which that value travels.And then there is technology. It presents enormous opportunity, and equally enormous questions about ownership, access and how creative work is valued.
For me, all three lead back to the same question: how do we ensure that the people creating the value participate meaningfully in the prosperity that that value generates?
I no longer want to see South African artists dying “broke”. And so that is one of the defining questions for the sector. - 06 — What inspires you about South Africa’s creative sector and the people working in it?
The audacity! South African creatives make things out of almost nothing. Sometimes with inadequate financial resources, difficult infrastructure and very little certainty, and still somehow they produce work that is beautiful, provocative, funny, uncomfortable, world-class and unmistakably ours. I find that extraordinary.
But I also want us to be careful about romanticising resilience. I don’t want our artists to have to struggle in order for us to consider their work authentic.
I want extraordinary South African creatives who are also well-paid, commercially sophisticated, globally competitive and able to build wealth from their work. There is nothing noble about talent being perpetually under-resourced.So, I am inspired by the resilience of our creative community, absolutely. But I am even more interested in helping to build an ecosystem in which they don’t have to rely on resilience quite so much.
What comes next for BASA? - 07 — What priorities do you believe BASA should focus on in the coming years?
Our strategy gives us a strong foundation for the next chapter, and for me the priority now is disciplined execution.
We need to continue strengthening BASA as an institution — financially, operationally and strategically — because a strong ecosystem requires strong institutions within it.
Externally, I am particularly interested in deepening our role as a connector between creative talent, business, capital, markets and opportunity; strengthening our research and thought leadership; continuing to build meaningful partnerships; and creating platforms through which the sector can think together about its future.I also want us to keep widening the lens beyond individual projects towards the broader conditions required for creative and cultural industries to thrive.
There will always be more good ideas than any one organisation has the capacity to pursue, so part of leadership is having the discipline to know which work is ours to do and then doing it exceptionally well. - 08 — How do you hope to strengthen the relationship between business and the arts through your leadership?
I would like us to change the premise of the relationship in our minds as an ecosystem. I don’t think the most interesting conversation is, “How do we persuade business to support the arts?” I think it should be: “What can business and the creative sector build together that neither could build alone?”
That immediately creates a different relationship. It moves us from patronage towards partnership.Creative people understand imagination, culture, narrative, identity and human behaviour in ways businesses desperately need. Business brings capital, scale, systems, markets and commercial capability that creative enterprises need. Those are complementary forms of intelligence.
My hope is that BASA can create more spaces in which both sectors encounter each other as peers who are curious about what the other knows, and serious about the value they can create together. - 09 — What values or leadership principles will guide you in this role?
Stewardship first. My work as an entrepreneur and business leadership strategist often makes me ask myself, my teams and my clients what responsible leadership requires in moments of consequence. Not what is easiest, or what makes me look good, nor what has always been done. But rather, what does the institution, its people and its future require of us now?I also believe strongly that kindness is power tempered by love. You can have difficult conversations without diminishing people. You can insist on accountability and still leave someone’s dignity intact. You can be ambitious without becoming careless about people.
And finally, I believe leadership should birth leaders and expand the leadership landscape. If everything depends on me as Chairperson, then I wouldn’t have chaired very well.My responsibility is to help create the clarity, trust, governance and conditions within which our Board, CEO, team and partners can do their best work.
That, to me, is what stewardship looks like.Beyond the Boardroom
Some of the most revealing conversations about leadership happen outside the boardroom. What we read, watch, listen to and remember often tells us as much about how we see the world as our professional credentials do.
For Machi, the arts have a way of returning to us at different points in our lives, sometimes carrying an entirely different meaning the second time around. - 10 — What’s one creative experience, artwork, performance or moment that recently stayed with you?
There are two that have stayed with me across different seasons of my life: Can Themba’s The Suit and John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth.
I first watched Nothing but the Truth when I was about twelve, with John Kani and Pamela Nomvete. I encountered it again in 2025, and I was struck by how differently the same work meets you when you have lived a little more life. The questions of family, loss, memory and what we inherit landed differently for me as an adult.
And then there is The Suit, which I first knew as a high school setwork. In 2025, I went to visit my late father’s grave, as I have done for a decade, and somehow noticed for the first time that about two graves beside his is Can Themba’s.That moment stopped me.
There was something quite beautiful about realising that a writer I had encountered as a schoolgirl had, unknowingly, been lying beside my father all these years.
It reminded me that art doesn’t always stay where we first encounter it. Sometimes it follows us through life, gathering meaning as we do.
Great creative work does that. It waits for us to become old enough to meet it again. - 11 — If you weren’t working in leadership and strategy, which creative field would you explore for fun?
Writing, without question!
Words have always fascinated me. The fact that you can rearrange the same twenty-six letters and make someone laugh, reconsider their life, fall in love, change their mind or feel understood is slightly miraculous to me.
I suspect even if I stopped doing strategy, though, I would eventually start strategising about writing, so there may be no escape! - 12 — If you could collaborate with any creative, alive or historical, to reimagine the future of the arts, who would it be and why?
Brenda Fassie. Without hesitation.
I was too young when Brenda was alive to fully understand what I was witnessing. I knew the music, the personality, the wildness of her. What I didn’t yet have language for was her politics, her feminism, her freedom, and just how radically she was expanding the possibilities of what a Black African woman could be in public.
I would love to meet her now, as an adult, and ask: What were you trying to tell us that we weren’t yet ready to hear?
And then I would want to build something with her for young creative girls and women. Something that says: your creativity does not have to become smaller to make other people comfortable.You can be commercially successful and culturally disruptive. You can be complicated. You can experiment, provoke, change your mind and take up space. Brenda helped shape a cultural epoch precisely because she could not easily be contained. I think there is something powerful in taking that spirit and asking what it could unlock for the next generation of African women creatives.
A Sit down with Sinenhlanhla Mdiya, BASA Marketing & Communications Manager
