About the Team
Dr Greg Mills
Dr Mills is a strategic advisor to several African leaders, holds fellowships at the University of Navarra and the Royal United Services Institute, and is member of the Creative Team at the Chalke History Festival.
Prior to establishing his own advisory firm, he served as the Director of Studies and National Director of the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) from 1994-2005, and then for 20 years as the founding director of the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation.
Born in Cape Town, he was a member of faculty of the NATO Higher Defence College in Rome for 15 years, and has lectured at institutions world-wide from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Chilean Naval Academy and across Africa, Europe and East Asia. He served four deployments to the International Security Force in Afghanistan as the advisor to the commander, was a member of the Danish Africa Commission and the African Development Bank’s High-Level Panel on Fragile States, has directed numerous reform projects with more than two dozen African heads of government, and has conducted field- and policy-work in combat zones from Tigray to Ukraine. He is a regular contributor to international journals and newspapers and the author of numerous books including the best-selling Why Africa Is Poor, Rich State, Poor State, The Art of War and Peace and The Essence of Success. During his career he has engaged with nearly 200 heads of government, and around twice that number of ministers. He has rowed and raced cars internationally, and is a South African national.
Emanuele Pirro
Pirro is a five-time winner of the Le Mans 24-Hour endurance race, and a member of various bodies within motorsport’s global governing body, the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile). This provides him with a unique perspective as a team-player and manager, and facilitator of technology.
An Italian national, he was born in Rome in 1962. He has raced in Formula One, touring cars and in endurance races. In addition to his five Le Mans victories (2000, 2001, 2002, 2006 and 2007), he was world champion with Lancia, is a two-time American Le Mans Series champion (2001, 2005), two-time winner of the 12 Hours of Sebring (2000, 2007), three-time winner of Petit Le Mans (2001, 2005, 2008), winner of the 24-Hour of Nürburgring (1989) and 24-Hours of Daytona, two-time winner of the Macau Guia Race (1991, 1992) and twice winner of the Goodwood RAC Historic TT. He finished on the podium at Le Mans for a record nine times consecutively between 1999 and 2007. He was a factory driver for BMW for nine years and for Audi for 17 years, has acted as a brand ambassador for both Audi and Lamborghini, and headed McLaren’s young talent programme. He is the president of the Grand Prix Drivers Club, founded by Juan Manuel Fangio in 1962, and an expert in the development of young talent and teams.
Robin Auld
Auld was born in Lusaka, Zambia to Scots parents, Robin's childhood was spent alternating between southern Africa and Scotland; a journey reflected in the African and Celtic influences in his music. He has released over 18 albums, from his early career in the 1980s yielding several national pop-rock hits, to his current contemporary catalogue of roots and blues-based albums.
Based in Cape Town, he has performed and recorded in New York, London, Glasgow and Nashville, performing at festivals such as Cambridge Folk Festival, Tartan Hearts, Gold Coast Ocean Fest, Chalke, and Womad. He learned to play the guitar by listening to Hendrix, Ry Cooder and Neil Young, also absorbing influences from the various guitarists of southern Africa. In recent years he has broadened his focus to include production and management.
His association with Greg Mills started with a collaboration in 2015 to promote How South Africa works and can do better, co-writing a song for a single and a video called ‘This is how it works’. Since then, they have collaborated on ten songs and videos, performing the songs at launches and events across Africa in Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Senegal and others, and across the globe in New York, London, Ukraine, Poland, France, Spain and Portugal amongst others.
Their various collaborations with opposition figure Bobi Wine in Uganda have garnered tens of millions of hits across Africa and the world.
Robin’s focus within GMA is to assist in opening a broader appeal through music and video channels, and helping with the technical aspects of integrating these elements into events and publicity campaigns.
Ray Hartley
Hartley is a strategic communications specialist, and commentator on politics and the economy. The former Research Director of the Brenthurst Foundation and previously edited the Sunday Times, The Times, Rand Daily Mail and BusinessLIVE. He is the author of Ragged Glory: The Rainbow Nation in Black and White, The Big Fix, and Ramaphosa: The Man Who Would be King among other works.
Born and educated in Queenstown and at Rhodes University, he is a South African national.
Janet Wilson
Wilson was born in King Williamstown in 1968. She holds a BA Fine Art degree from UCT and an MA in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand. The recipient of a Wits University Council Postgraduate Scholarship (1996), Wits University Sports Council Bursary (1996), University of Cape Town Entrance Scholarship (1988) and a UCT Medal for Fine Art (1990), Janet has participated in over a dozen art exhibitions, including a series of portraits of President Nelson Mandela. Her work hangs in various public venues including the SA embassy in The Hague, the Arg in Afghanistan and several US and UK institutions.
A key sportswoman, Janet started rowing on her arrival at UCT in 1988. She quickly made the first 8, being promoted to stroking the boat for the university’s victorious Boat Race in 1990. Perhaps more famously, however, she was arrested (and beaten by the police) during the Purple March in Cape Town in 1989, being detained and thus missing rowing practice much to the chagrin of her crew-mates. She met her husband on a rowing tour to Henley in 1992. From then until 2000 she was selected for the national women’s squad, representing South Africa at the 1995 World Cup in the single-scull and 1996 World Championships in the lightweight pair. She was also the first SA woman to win an international FISA regatta, taking the honours in the lightweight sculls of the FISA Villach and Sarnen regattas in 1994, and received a bronze medal at the FISA Lucerne Regatta in the lightweight pair in 1996. She also won the Africa Championships on two occasions in the single scull, along with a multitude of SA and other championships during this time.
Janet retired from international rowing to start a family. In addition to her role on the board and teaching at Salvazione, Janet has been a locum teacher for art and maths at several schools in Johannesburg. She remains an enthusiastic cyclist and in 2024 won a gold medal in the World Veteran’s Championship in the single-scull on her return to the sport. She is a dual South African/British national.
Richard Harper
Harper is a dual South African/British national. A former member of an elite military combat unit, he has worked both in logistics and as a photographer and film-maker since leaving the army, including in Ukraine, Afghanistan and across Africa. He was responsible for the bulk of video material produced by the Brenthurst Foundation from 2015.
Tendai Biti
Biti born in 1966, Tendai Biti is a human rights lawyer and one of the founders of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in Zimbabwe. He became finance minister in the coalition government in 2009, in which position he served until the July 2013 election. He is credited for the stabilisation of the period of 500 billion percent hyperinflation, by dollarising the economy. A past visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development in Washington, he is a co-author of several books including Democracy Works and In the Name of the People, and is viewed as a global expert on matching theory with practice in arresting state failure.
Eerik-Niiles Kross
A graduate of the Universities of Tartu and London, Eerik-Niiles Kross has, since 2015, been a Member of the Estonian Parliament, where he serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Previously a diplomat to the United Nations, Washington and London, he has served as Chief of Intelligence and National Security Adviser to the President. Between 2003-04, he worked in Baghdad as, first, Director in the Security Ministry of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Baghdad, Iraq, and later as an adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Defence on Command, Control, Communications and IT Systems. Since 2012 he has been a Member of Estonia’s Ministry of Defence Advisory Board. From2015 he has been both the head and deputy head of the Estonian Delegation to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, and in 2018-19, was a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Kline Centre for Internet and Society. Fluent in Estonian, English, German, Russian, and Finnish, he has been intimately involved in ongoing reforms in the Estonian Intelligence Service for more than 25 years.
Alberto Trejos
Alberto Trejos served as the Minister of Foreign Trade of Costa Rica between 2002-04, and as Director of the National Council for Financial Supervision of Costa Rica between 1998-2000. Educated at the University of Costa Rica and the University of Pennsylvania from where he earned a PhD in 1994, he has been a member of faculty of INCAE Business School, Alajuela, Costa Rica since 1997, having served as Full Professor, Dean and Director of the Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development.
He taught at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois for five years from 1994, and was a visiting fellow at the University of California at San Diego, School of Global Policy and Strategy (2018), University of Michigan, Gerald Ford School of Public Policy (2008-14), University of Miami, Center for Hemispheric Policy (2007-08), Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (1995-96), and Institut de Anàlisi Econòmica de Barcelona (1994-97).
The author of many scholarly and popular articles, he has served in several private sector roles principally in the financial sector and as an advisor to more than 60 governments including several across Africa. He was a panel judge on the World Trade Organization’s Dispute Solution Understanding (2018-21), and President of the Board of the Arias Foundation for Peace and Democracy (2013-19) and from 2004-10, the CINDE (Costa Rican Investment Agency).
Abbasali Haji
Abbasali Haji is a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford and INSEAD. He founded East Africa Capital in 2014 and continues to advise investors, companies and public sector stakeholders on an ongoing basis. He brings a wealth of experience from working with public and private companies with a particular focus on Africa and frontier markets in general.
David MacGregor
David is an attorney and notary, and acts for global and national corporations and also high value private clients in both commercial transactions and litigation matters. His commercial work covers the spectrum of business transactions and includes advising on, structuring, negotiating and drafting transactions locally and internationally. He litigates in the South African High Court and the Supreme Court of Appeal, and has also run cases in the Superior Courts abroad, including in England, the Netherlands, France, Estonia, Azerbaijan and the United States. He has acted in matters in which new law has been made both in South Africa and abroad, and he has drafted legislation for countries abroad. Outside purely legal matters, he also advises on organisational setup, business operations, strategy, risk assessment and, management, intellectual capital mobilisation, policy and innovation.
Outside legal practice, David has both profit and non-profit projects. He co-founded four charities which focus respectively on community upliftment, educational development, sport for young people and tertiary education, and he serves as a director and trustee on various companies and trusts. He is an enthusiastic Anglican, ardent reader of prose and poetry alike, passionate rugby and boxing fan and devotee of classical music and its most suitable companions, fine wine and whiskey.
Alfonso Prat-Gay
Alfonso Prat-Gay was Minister of Treasury and Finance of Argentina between 2015-16. Previously, he was a member of Congress (2009-13), and president of the Central Bank of Argentina (2002-04).
Alfonso earned a degree in economics from the Universidad Católica Argentina in 1989 (cum laude). He is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Master´s Degree in Economics in 1994. Shortly afterwards, he joined JPMorgan in New York and went on to work for the bank in its Buenos Aires and London branches until 2001. Back in Buenos Aires, he co-founded APL Economía, an economic consulting firm.
In December 2002, at the age of 37, he was named president of the Central Bank of Argentina. He won the 2004 Euromoney Central Bank Governor of the Year award for his work for having reduced the inflation from 40% to 4% while maintaining an economic growth of 8%. In the 2009 congressional election, he led the Civic Coalition’s party list for the city of Buenos Aires and was elected to the House. In Congress, he worked on projects such as increasing banking security, preventing money laundering and drug trafficking, and an extensive deregulation of the Argentine financial system.
In his role as Finance Minister he is remembered for removing capital controls, healing the National Statistics Institute, ending ten years of sovereign default and designing a tax amnesty that formalised assets and savings worth 20% of GDP (a world record), all of which earned him Euromoney’s Finance Minister of the Year Award (2016).
Currently he is Executive Vice-Chairman of Prestige Auto, the exclusive distributor of Mercedes-Benz cars and manufacturer of the Sprinter vans for Argentina and the region, and serves on several local and international advisory boards.