According to TechCentral, Vodacom Group has named former Johannesburg Stock Exchange chief executive Leila Fourie as an alternate director to chairman Saki Macozoma, effective 9 October 2026.
An alternate director is a stand-in: the person may attend, speak and vote at board meetings in place of the director they are appointed to, but holds no seat of their own until formally appointed. Fourie will become a full board member when Macozoma retires in July 2027, giving her more than nine months inside Vodacom’s governance structures before the seat becomes hers.
The move is part of a broader reshuffle driven by Vodacom’s self-imposed ten-year cap on board tenure. Macozoma, who joined the board in July 2017, reaches that limit at the group’s AGM on 20 July 2027 and will hand the chair to lead independent director Khumo Shuenyane the following day. Fourie’s elevation to a full seat is timed to the same handover.
Why Fourie’s background matters
Fourie ran the JSE from October 2019 until her retirement on 31 March 2026. During her tenure the exchange saw a turnaround in earnings quality, a more diversified revenue profile and a modernisation of core technology and regulatory settings. Before the JSE she led the Australian Payments Network and earlier was managing director of the card division at Standard Bank Group. She also sits on the boards of Australian payments company Cuscal, the UN Global Compact and WWF South Africa, and holds a PhD in economic and financial sciences from the University of Johannesburg.
Vodacom says those skills will be helpful as the group leans more heavily into financial services. The fintech arm reached 103 million active customers in FY2026, processed US$525.6-billion in transactions and generated R16.8-billion in revenue, representing 12.6% of group service revenue. CEO Shameel Joosub has raised the Vision 2030 target for fintech customers to 130 million from 120 million.
For South African small and medium enterprises, the expansion of Vodacom’s VodaPay platform, insurance and lending products could mean easier access to digital payment solutions and credit. The board’s new composition, with a former exchange chief who oversaw technology upgrades, may accelerate the rollout of such services.
In August the group confirmed additional board changes, including the appointment of former Airtel Africa chief Segun Ogunsanya as an independent non-executive director from 9 October 2026, and the departure of Naspers South Africa chief Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa a day earlier. Vodacom also noted that the board had completed a fit-and-proper assessment of Fourie in line with JSE listing requirements.
What an alternate director actually is
The role is one of the less familiar corners of company law and it is easy to read as either more or less than it is. An alternate director is appointed to act in the place of a specific named director who cannot attend, and while acting, exercises that director’s powers and carries the same duties and the same personal liability. Outside those meetings the alternate holds no seat and no vote. Companies use the mechanism to keep a board quorate and to preserve a particular set of skills in the room when a director travels or is unavailable.
Using it as a succession step is a different application of the same tool, and a deliberate one. It puts an incoming director inside the board’s papers, its committee work and its culture well before they take a seat, which shortens the period after appointment during which a new director is technically responsible for decisions they do not yet have the context to judge. Boards that have watched an appointment go badly tend to favour the overlap, because the alternative is a director arriving cold at the same meeting where the previous chair leaves.
Why boards cap tenure
A self imposed limit on how long a director may serve exists to protect independence. The concern is not competence but familiarity: a director who has sat with the same executives for many years may find it progressively harder to ask the uncomfortable question, and the value of a non executive is very largely the willingness to ask it. South African governance practice treats long tenure as something a board must actively assess rather than assume away, and a fixed cap removes the need to make that judgement about a colleague case by case.
The cost of a cap is that it guarantees turnover, including of directors a board would rather keep, and it can concentrate several departures into the same period if appointments were originally made together. That is why boards operating a cap tend to stagger replacements and name a successor well in advance, and why a lead independent director, whose job includes chairing the process that evaluates and replaces the chair, matters more in that structure than in one without a limit.
The fit and proper assessment referenced in announcements of this kind is a related but separate requirement. It is a formal check that a proposed director is honest, competent and financially sound enough to hold the role, and for a listed company it has to be done and recorded before the appointment stands.
