Seacom’s board has placed CEO Alpheus Mangale on special leave and appointed an independent third party to investigate allegations it received about how the company was being run, chairman Pieter Uys told TechCentral on Wednesday.
Chief financial officer Charl Slabbert is standing in as interim CEO of the subsea and terrestrial fibre operator.
Uys said the board had received allegations about the running of the company in which Mangale’s name was mentioned. He would not disclose what they related to.
The board decided “to be on the safe side” and follow good governance by sending Mangale on special leave while an independent party looked into the matter, he said.
“It’s just a precaution,” said Uys. “There’s nothing that says he’s guilty of anything.”
The board has asked the investigator to report back within about a month, and Uys said he hoped Mangale would be able to return to the office soon.
Earlier on Wednesday, Seacom group chief marketing officer Mandisa Ntloko-Petersen confirmed to TechCentral that Mangale had been on an extended leave of absence for three weeks, but would not say whether he had been suspended and declined to comment further.
Critical time for Seacom
TechCentral was unable to reach Mangale for comment on his mobile phone.
Mangale has led Seacom since 1 April 2023, when he succeeded Oliver Fortuin as CEO.
His leave comes at a critical time for the company. Seacom is trying to raise between US$1.5-billion and $2-billion for Seacom 2.0, a 25 000km subsea cable system linking Africa, Asia and Europe, and has been targeting the fourth quarter of 2026 to reach financial close. Mangale has been the public face of the project since it was unveiled in September 2025, setting out its 2 000Tbit/s design capacity and late-2029 to early-2030 launch target in an interview with TechCentral shortly afterwards.
Slabbert joined Seacom as CFO in April 2025. He previously held senior finance and strategy roles at Vodacom and Cell C.
Before joining Seacom, Mangale spent almost five years at Standard Bank, where he was group CIO and later head of IT engineering. He resigned with immediate effect in June 2022 after a series of system outages, with the bank describing him as “the senior executive responsible for the stability of our IT system”.
Earlier in his career, he spent more than 15 years at Dimension Data, where he served as chief technology officer and chief operating officer, before leading Cisco’s South African operations and becoming chief enterprise officer at MTN South Africa.
Seacom, which landed the first privately owned subsea cable on Africa’s east coast in 2009, is part-owned by Remgro and Andile Ngcaba’s Convergence Partners. Its earnings have recovered sharply after the 2024 Red Sea cable breaks that took five months to repair. In Remgro’s results for the year to 30 June 2026, published on 18 September, Seacom’s contribution to Remgro’s headline earnings rose to R71-million from R12-million. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
