Legal team size: Four

Major legal advisers/ external counsel: Commercial & Energy Law Practice, Templars, Alliance Law Firm

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

The Head of Legal being a member of the leadership team is critical to providing strategic legal support to the business during periods of instability or crises. Being present at leadership meetings as well as Board meetings enables you to be at the forefront of discussions on such issues, giving you a proper understanding of the issues and enables you to appropriately align the structure and focus of the legal team to provide the required support to the business. Furthermore, the legal perspective can be taken into consideration in development of necessary plans and strategies with input and guidance having been provided at the point of development. All legal goals and plans will therefore flow from the defined corporate direction.

In your opinion, what are the main trends affecting your work now (these can be legal, political, economic or business-based)?

A key topic is the energy deficiency in Africa and the need to come up with strategies to get to energy sufficiency, in the light of the global energy transition focus. The business is being strategic to grow its domestic gas supply that drives power plants and provides feedstock to gas-based industries which will in turn improve lives generally.

What strategic priorities are guiding your legal team into 2025?

A key priority for the team will be a team restructuring to better position to the team to provide superior quality legal services and support to the business.