On family road trips from the Eastern Cape, a young Jolly Mokorosi kept an exercise book with names of rivers, statues and towns. Her parents had taught Mokorosi and her five siblings that history was attached to many of those landmarks, and that behind each one there was a story.
That curiosity drove her to ask questions to the point of exhausting her mother, a teacher, and her father, a doctor. “I always had an interest in why some people and some families have money and others don’t,” Mokorosi says in an interview conducted for Today’s Trustee. “What is the reason? What does it take to move out of poverty? What is the cost of things? It would drive my parents crazy — I’d ask [for] the cost of everything.”
That hunger turned into an interest in shares and investments, grounded in watching her father pore over the Sunday newspaper market pages and listening to him explain how his unit trust portfolios performed and how they worked. It also led to a career of more than 22 years. It took her from Momentum, where she was employed as an investment researcher at its FundsAtWork division, and Old Mutual, where she was a corporate sales consultant, to founding her own business, Mokorosi Financial Consulting, in 2007.
Today Mokorosi is chair of the Sanlam Umbrella Fund (SUF), one of the country’s biggest umbrella funds with more than R160bn in assets where, in April 2025, she became the first woman to hold the post. She also sits on the board of agribusiness TWK Group.
But it is as deputy chair of Batseta’s Asset Owners Forum, a grouping of retirement funds set up by the industry body, that she sits at the centre of one of the industry’s oldest arguments: prescribed assets, under which the state can compel investors to finance infrastructure such as power, roads, rail and water.
Mokorosi supports the idea of putting pension money to work in big projects. Used appropriately, “you can get a good return — not just an OK return, a good return — and you’ll be changing the lives of members,” she says. It is no use retiring and having money when everything around you is crumbling, she argues.
Mokorosi points to the N3 between Durban and Joburg. “Pension money built the N3,” she says. “The pension funds that supported that investment have had very good returns.”
But she is adamant that trustees, not the state, should decide where that money flows — or members will pay the price. Only about 25% of South Africans can afford to retire at 65, Sanlam’s member data shows, and the average worker will replace barely 25% of their final salary.
Besides, prescription doesn’t have a good history in South Africa. From 1956, the apartheid government forced pension funds to hold about 53% of their assets in government- and state-owned paper. By the late 1980s, a review found those assets had delivered thin real returns in the 1960s and lost money throughout the 1970s and 1980s, far behind equities. Prescription was scrapped in 1989.
The spectre has never quite gone away. Andrew Donaldson, a former National Treasury deputy director-general, takes a different view. His 2026 paper for the Bureau for Economic Research, Contractual Savings and Public Investment: Are Our Retirement Funds Misallocated?, notes that funds have spent 40 years shifting out of government bonds into equities and offshore assets. Yet over the decade to 2023, those funds on average earned less than long-term government bonds.
Cosatu pension and provident fund co-ordinator Jan Mahlangu has for years warned trustees that if pension funds do not invest more in infrastructure to uplift the lives of communities, “people are going to come and impose prescribed assets, whether you like it or not”.
Yet it isn’t prescribed assets, regulations or returns that gnaw at Mokorosi most. Members’ needs must come first.
“For me, it’s the duty to care,” she says.
When rules surpass service
Her worry is that compliance is crowding out funds’ ability to focus on members’ needs and everyday realities. While many of these requirements are “absolutely necessary”, funds can spend so much time meeting technical obligations that the member — the human whose retirement is at stake — becomes an abstraction.
Mokorosi, whose faith shapes much of what she does, cites Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that without love, our gifts amount to nothing. “If I say you need to love your members — oh man, that would be considered a radical teaching. But how do you care for what you don’t love?”
Take, for example, a member shifting benefits between funds. The law is met and the signatures obtained — but the paperwork may arrive in Afrikaans, then English, to a worker who speaks neither as a first language. “The person just has to trust that you’re doing the right thing. But I want them to have confidence in what they’re reading.”
As chair of the Sanlam fund’s transformation committee, she presses the same point. “It’s not about quotas, because you can have equality without having equity.”
Transformation, for her, isn’t about financial sector codes or representivity. “We can tick all those codes and comply, without achieving what the codes were put there for. There’s the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. The letter can be achieved without any of the spirit.”
A moving target
The ground beneath trustees is constantly shifting, and at the same time they’re having more and more rules shoved onto them, however well-intentioned those rules may be. The Conduct of Financial Institutions Bill, for example, is set to consolidate decades of old laws into one. It will move away from a rigid box-ticking registration system for financial services firms to an ongoing, behaviour-based licensing regime under the Financial Sector Conduct Authority.
The bill demands stricter accountability from institutional leadership, including tougher fit-and-proper tests for retirement fund trustees, to ensure fair customer outcomes across the board. The first draft was published in December 2018. The cabinet approved the bill for tabling in April, but it has yet to reach parliament.
Are trustees keeping up? “The majority of trustees are doing their level best, but the environment we find ourselves in is one of rapid change,” Mokorosi says.
Risk management a decade ago was “such a fluffy concept”. Today, she says, “I promise you, many trustees aren’t sleeping at night”.
Mokorosi credits industry veteran Kobus Hanekom with setting up the right kinds of structures to take some of the pressure off boards. Hanekom, whose textbooks she studied, was the principal officer of the SUF from 2008 to March 2023.
Nearly a decade ago, the fund started pushing much of the board’s work down to committees even though some in the industry, she says, called the structure overcomplicated. The fund now runs 11 committees and holds three board meetings a year. “If you can still run a board with no more than four meetings a year and several committees, then you must pat yourself on the back; you have an incredible delegation structure.”
March from Mthatha to the boardroom
Mokorosi’s instinct to always ask the next question was bred in a boisterous household in Mthatha run by two academics. Her mother, who holds two master’s degrees, taught history and geography at Mokorosi’s own school. Her father, Prof Jimmy Chandia — a doctor and lecturer of international standing — spent much of his life on HIV/Aids research. He died last year.
A sense of community has also helped shape her relationships and outlook on building strong institutions. She met her husband, Sam, when they were 11, and they went to Umtata High School together. They dated briefly as teenagers and picked the relationship up again at university, surviving what she calls “a few attempted breakups”.
“If it wasn’t for the community around us, we would have broken up a long time ago because we’re two very stubborn people,” she says. Sam, head of origination and deals at the JSE, wrote her a song for their 20th anniversary called Tell Your Mama We Made It, and is now back in the recording studio.
It is her father’s work that shapes how she thinks about infrastructure. When he qualified as a doctor in the Eastern Cape, there was one doctor for every 50,000 people. “That’s infrastructure,” she says.
Mokorosi chairs Vumbuka Trust, the empowerment partner in one of TWK’s businesses, which provides social and economic support around eMkhondo (formerly Piet Retief) in Mpumalanga.
At a school with 750 pupils in eMkhondo, toilets have been broken for a long time. Children use the bushes or go home, from 10am many don’t come back. “Do you know what that does for matric marks and scores?” The principal applied to the trust for funding to resolve the issue, and it is now being released.
“If you don’t care, you will never be able to change things.”
