The son of shebeen owners with limited education, Thabane Vincent Maphai has combined careers in academia, business, and public service.

Widely published, Vincent Maphai lectured at the University of the Witwatersrand and chaired the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape. He subsequently joined the Human Sciences Research Council as Executive Director of Social Dynamics. He has held fellowships at Oxford, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford Universities. He has been Professor Extraordinaire in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and Honorary Professor at the University
of Johannesburg.

In the late 1990s he chaired the Presidential Review Commission, reviewing and recommending revisions in South Africa’s public service. He chaired the South African Broadcasting System (1999-2003) and the Council of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (2004-2009). Currently, he serves on the National Planning Commission and chairs the National Responsible Gambling Programme.

In 1998 he became Director of Corporate Affairs at South African Breweries. He left SAB in 2004 to become Executive Chairman of BHP Billiton Southern Africa. In 2009 he returned to SAB as Executive Director of Corporate Affairs and Transformation, a post he held until his retirement in 2013. Currently he is Executive Director at Discovery Health and a Director at several other companies.

His education includes the University of South Africa (BA), the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium where he completed a Bachelor of Philosophy cum laude and a Master’s Degree in Philosophy magna cum laude. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Natal and an honours degree in international politics from UNISA, and he has completed Harvard University’s advanced management programme.