Siyakhula is a Director in the Assurance division at SNG Grant Thornton. He has held this position for the past 15 months. Siyakhula is a Chartered Accountant and a Registered Auditor. He has a total of 22 years of auditing experience which spans all facets of private and public sectors and a wide range of industries.
Siyakhula served his articles with one of the ‘big 4’ audit firms. After his articles, he was retained to serve as an assistant manager in the Internal Audit Division of the firm. After 3 years and 5 months in the audit firm, Siyakhula was appointed as an Internal Audit Manager at City Power (the then biggest subsidiary of the City of Johannesburg). He was responsible for all financial and compliance internal audits. During his tenure at City Power, Siyakhula won several awards for high performance. Given his high performance and excellent work ethic, he was requested to act as Head of Internal Audit for six months when the vacancy arose. Even though Siyakhula was doing well as an Internal Audit Manager at City Power, he still wanted to further develop and sharpen his external auditing skills. He then served for three years in the Internal Audit Division of City Power and left them for an external auditing position at the Auditor General of South Africa (AG) Gauteng Province. In this position, Siyakhula was the Head of the Gauteng AG office, responsible for all 92 Gauteng Province AG audits. Effectively, Siyakhula was the AG of Gauteng Province. He served in this position for just under two years.
After seven years at the AG, Siyakhula was appointed as Chief Audit Executive for South African Airways (SAA), including three subsidiaries (SAA Technical, Airchefs, and SAA Travel centre). Before his appointment, SAA's internal audit function was completely outsourced. Siyakhula’s task was to drive a process of insourcing the internal audit function by building an effective in-house internal audit function. He did that successfully; this was evidenced by obtaining a Generally Comply rating after an independent assessment of the internal audit function initiated by the SAA Board and the Audit Committee.
He achieved this within a period of four years. Other than conducting critical financial and compliance audits, Siyakhula was also responsible for all forensic investigations.
After eight years at SAA, Siyakhula was appointed as a director at SNG Grant Thornton where he is the lead engagement director for one of our biggest and platinum clients, Eskom Holdings Limited audit. Other than being a lead engagement director for Eskom audit, he is the engagement director of other several SNG Grant Thornton clients across different industries.
