The SA’s new economic advisor to President Cyril Ramaphosa is a Hammanskraal born and bred, Ms Trudie Makhaya (40) who grew up in Hammanskraal, matriculating in 1996 from St Barnabas College in Bosmont.
She holds a BCom (Law and Economics) and a Masters degree in Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand. Ms Makhaya received a Rhodes scholarship, and went on to get an MBA and an MSc in Development Economics from Oxford University.
Between 2010 to 2014, she was an economist and a member of the executive committee at the Competition Commission of South Africa and in 2015, she founded an advisory firm focused on competition policy and entrepreneurship.
Ms Makhaya has served as an advisor and angel investor in young companies and held non-executive directorships at Vumelana Advisory Fund and MTN South Africa.
She has also held various management consulting and corporate roles at Deloitte South Africa, Genesis Analytics and AngloGold Ashanti.
She is also a writer contributing through leadership articles to some of South African leading newspapers and lectured a course on competition and regulation at Wits University.
Makhaya lives by this motto from an Alice Walker poem: ‘Be nobody’s darling”.
