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Profile: Dr. Sondlo Leonard Mhlaba Contact Information Sondlo L. Mhlaba,
PhD Tel: 617-964-3657 Dr. Sondlo Leonard Mhlaba, a naturalized American citizen, was born and raised in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa. From 1967 to 1980, he served as an Officer of the Zimbabwe Patriotic Front in North America, helping to win support for Majority Rule in his homeland. When Zimbabwe won its independance under a majority government in 1980, Dr. Mhlaba’s wing of the liberation movement, headed by Joshua Nkomo, lost the election. Although the first few years of independence saw a Government of National Unity, that unity did not last. It was followed by a systematic and violent destruction of the opposition. Thousands of Joshua Nkomo's supporters, and especially Dr. Mhlaba’s ethnic-group members were massacred. The details of these difficult times were reported by the Zimbabwe Catholic Commission for Justice. That report is available at http://www.mthwakazi.org. The internal, Black-on-Black, violence that followed Zimbabwe's independence opened Dr. Mhlaba's eyes to the reality that injustice, bigotry, political opportunism, and corruption know no race, color, religion, nationality, or ideology. Sadly, it appeared that the idealism of the revolutionary struggle had succumbed to common human failings. It was then that Dr. Mhlaba's work for human rights became less self-righteous, less tinged with "us versus them." It was also at this time that he abandoned his prior commitment to procedural and structural democracy championed by the West, in favor of an outcomes-based system of goverance. The Incentive-Based-Franchise (IBF) System was the product of this new perspective. In 1999, Dr. Mhlaba founded The New Franchise Institute (NFI) to promote the IBF approach to global democratization. It is his hope that this effort will become the basis for a new paradigm in democracy, one that can be embraced by all world civilizations in a spirit of genuine equality. A renaissance man by inclination, Dr. Mhlaba studied petroleum technology in Zimbabwe and apprenticed in the oil industry there. In the US, he studied physics at SUNY, New Paltz; international education at UMass, Amherst; city/regional planning studies as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design; and earned the PhD from Northeastern University's interdisciplinary program in law, policy and society. His work has been just as varied: high school principal, international educational exchange executive serving over 50 countries, anti-poverty "warrior," ombudsman and administrator in the Massachusetts state government; college dean, and physics professor. His published papers have ranged from "The Efficacy of International Regulation of Transborder Data Flows" to "What Dr. Goldberg's Mbira Taught Me". He and his wife Nancy, and their daughters,
Lauren, Kymberly, and Julia live in Newton, Massachusetts. The family
dog, Toby Mini Schnauzer, provides endless love and constant entertainment. |