5 Breakfast

Dr Nomhle Ngwenya became the youngest person to earn a PhD in Wits University’s Faculty of Science, completing it at 25. She also became the first Black woman at Wits to progress directly from an honours degree into a PhD. Today, as CEO of the Science, Technology and Innovation Business Forum, she works at the intersection of science, business, academia and government. The interview should not be a CV walk-through. The central question is: What happens after you become the first?

He and two brothers built an island without water and a death without burial, For this, the real jailers answered fiction with handcuffs and violence, Decades later, another imagined land borrowed his tongue and called it home.

BUZZWORD: | FEAT

Each day a buzzword is announced, and 5 questions are asked to a listener, all of which will contain the buzzword.

This weekend, the nominees for the 2026 South African Social Media Awards were unveiled in Rosebank, and the list tells a much bigger story than simply who might leave with a trophy in November. 

Creators are now building audiences and businesses across education, gaming, podcasting, fashion, food, sport, photography, radio and kasi content. In a country where almost one in every two young people in the labour market cannot find work, social media is becoming more than somewhere to be seen. For some South Africans, it is becoming a workplace, a storefront, a production studio and an entry point into the economy. 

But how much of the creator economy is a sustainable industry, and how much of it is still built on unpredictable algorithms, unpaid labour and the hope that something goes viral?

Joining 5 Breakfast is media entrepreneur, voice-over artist and Co-Founder and Director of the South African Social Media Awards, WEZA MATOMANE.