Our Board of Directors
Guiding Our Mission
Leadership Excellence
The Board of Directors is responsible for providing overall strategic direction and policy approval, financial oversight and accountability, organisational sustainability, and networking. It currently consists of the following Directors:
Mr Seana Nkhahle
Mr Seana Nkhahle holds a Bachelor of Science with Honours Degree in Town and Regional Planning (BSc TRP, Hons) from the University of Witwatersrand. He also has a Master’s Degree in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Stellenbosch. He has written, contributed to and led numerous publications relating to the built environment in South Africa.
Mr Nkhahle is currently the Portfolio Head for the Built Environment at the South African Local Government Association (SALGA). The portfolio includes Development & Spatial Planning, Infrastructure Planning & Investment, Roads & Transport and Human Settlement. He has worked in various capacities in Local Government, Civil Society, Academia and Private Consultancy.
Besides the leadership roles linked to his career, he has also played numerous other leadership roles. He returned to Planact where he started his formal employment in the year 2000 to become a non-executive board member. He became the chairperson of Planact in 2010. He is an inaugural member of the board of directors of the Green Buildings Council of South Africa (GBCSA) which was established in 2007 to lead the transformation of the built environment towards sustainable development. He became the chairperson of the board in 2014.
In his various roles Seana seeks to contribute to the ongoing transformation of the way we design, build and manage our cities and towns to make them work better for people and the planet.
Ms Jackie Sejenamane
Ms Jacqueline Mantsolu Sejanamane is a public policy practitioner with extensive experience working with and in local government. She has held strategic positions working in political offices and administration balancing and navigating political priorities and assessing and capacitating the administration to meet the prioritised and non-prioritised needs of both politics and communities being served.
Ms Sejanamane has worked with underserved and vulnerable communities to develop and find articulation for the community voice in government platforms. She is a public participation and community development trainer and facilitator, a role which necessitates ability to deal with and resolve conflict of interests between service providers and those in need of those services.
Professor Steven Friedman
Professor Steven Friedman is Research Professor in the Humanities Faculty of the University of Johannesburg.
He is a political scientist who has specialized in the study of democracy. He researched and wrote widely on the South African transition to democracy both before and after the elections of 1994 and has, over the past decade, largely written on the relationship between democracy on the one hand, social inequality and economic growth on the other. In particular, he has stressed the role of citizen voice in strengthening democracy and promoting equality. He has a particular interest in political theory which he is currently applying to key topics of public controversy such as the decolonisation of higher education.
He is the author of Building Tomorrow Today, a study of the South African trade union movement and the implications of its growth for democracy, and the editor of The Long Journey and The Small Miracle (with Doreen Atkinson), which presented the outcome of two research projects on the South African transition. His current work focuses on the theory and practice of democracy. His study of South African radical thought Race, Class and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid was published in 2015 and his examination of democratic theory, Power in Action: Democracy, Citizenship and Social Justice in 2018. In 2021, he published two books. Prisoners of the Past: South African Democracy and the Legacy of Minority Rule discussed the development of post-1994 South Africa and argues that it is marked by a path dependence which ensures that core patterns of period of minority rule persist in the new order. One Virus, Two Countries argues that South Africa’s response to Covid-19 was shaped by this path dependence which explains why the virus’s impact on the country was more severe than that in any other African country.
He is currently working on two books. One discusses changes in the way racial bigotry defends itself and the other analyses the way in which phrases regularly used in political discussion undermines democracy.
He has written numerous columns and articles for newspapers, journals and magazines.
Associate Professor Geci Karuri-Sebina
Professor Geci Karuri-Sebina, PhD, is a scholar-practitioner based in Johannesburg working in the intersection between people, place and technological change. She is an Associate Professor at the Wits School of Governance where she is hosting the Civic Tech Innovation Network and coordinating establishment of a new African Centre of Excellence in Digital Governance. She is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities and an Associate of South African Cities Network.
Geci currently serves as a Board member of Planact, a founding director of the Southern African Node of the Millennium Project, and as the Vice-Chairperson of AfricaLICS (the community of innovation scholars in Africa).
Geci is recognised and published in the fields of development planning, policy, foresight, and innovation and is involved in editorial roles in several leading journals in the fields of futures and innovation. She previously held positions at the Council for Scientific Research, the Human Sciences Research Council, and South Africa’s National Treasury.
Geci holds Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Sociology (Iowa); Master’s Degree in Urban Planning and Architecture from UCLA (Los Angeles); and a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg).
Professor Marie Huchzermeyer
Professor Marie Huchzermeyer is a Professor in the field of housing and urban studies at the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University. Her research on housing policy, informal settlements and policy on the upgrading of these settlements, private rental housing and more recently the right to the city and the right to development. She has accompanied and documented the trajectory of several informal settlement communities in Gauteng over more than a decade, assisting in their endeavour to secure upgrading. Her research and publications have spanned South Africa, Brazil, Kenya and other African countries.
From her base at Wits University, she has engaged in the policy discourse in South Africa, consistently advocating for a participatory, democratic approach to dealing with informal settlements and other urban challenges. She published extensively, as co-edited several books and is the author of Unlawful Occupation: Informal Settlements and Urban Policy in South Africa and Brazil (AWP, 2004), From Informal Settlement Eradication to a Right to the City in Africa (UCT Press, 2011) and Tenement Cities: From 19th Century Berlin to 21st Century Nairobi (AWP, 2011).
Mr Michael Kihato
Michael Kihato has worked in urban development for over 15 years, with national and local governments in over 8 countries to develop growing, efficient, climate resilient and inclusive urban economies. His area of specialisation is developing legislative and regulatory frameworks for the built environment. He has been extensively involved in developing legal frameworks for local and national land use management systems in South Africa. He is currently developing similar legislative frameworks for Sierra Leone.
In this work, Mr Kihato has been an advocate for rights-based approaches to urban land access and enhancing tenure security for the poor, including investigations into illegal urban evictions. Michael’s other area of practice is building institutional capacity for urban public transport institutions. His last five years of work have been helping establish a public transport authority in the larger Nairobi Metropolitan area in Kenya. He also spent another five years in the South African National Treasury, running a support program for the public transport function for the eight largest metropolitan cities in South Africa. Michael has advanced degrees in both law and urban planning.