Eskom has appointed telecommunications executive Junaid Munshi as group executive of its distribution division, effective 1 June 2026.
Munshi has 30 years of engineering, marketing and commercial leadership experience across South Africa and several other African markets.
He was most recently chief commercial officer at Cable & Wireless Seychelles, where he oversaw commercial strategy, revenue growth, marketing, sales, customer service and field operations.
The move returns Munshi to Eskom, where he started his career as an engineer. Between 1993 and 2002, he held systems and planning engineering roles at Telkom, MTN and Eskom’s former telecommunications arm, Eskom Telecoms, working on fixed data and voice network upgrades, before switching to marketing and commercial strategy.
He joined Cell C as a senior marketing manager in 2002, then spent more than a decade with Vodacom Group. He ran marketing for Vodacom’s Tanzania and Mozambique operations from 2004, was commercial managing executive at Vodacom Mozambique until 2013 and regional executive for Limpopo.
External hires
In 2015, he took charge of M-Pesa in South Africa – a role that included winding down the mobile money service after it failed to deliver returns – and then commercial strategy across Vodacom’s international markets, including Tanzania, Mozambique, Lesotho and the DRC. He also had a brief spell as commercial director at Digicel in Jamaica in 2008.
Munshi returned to Cell C as chief commercial officer from 2018 to 2020, overseeing its consumer and enterprise segments and fibre-to-the-home growth. In 2020 he became CEO of SA Digital Villages (SADV), the internet service provider now part of Maziv, repositioning it as a prepaid fibre operator.
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He was promoted to Maziv group chief commercial officer in 2023 before relocating to the Seychelles in early 2024 as chief commercial officer of Cable & Wireless Seychelles, a role he held until late 2025.
The appointment comes as Eskom repositions its distribution business for a liberalised electricity market in which the utility no longer holds a monopoly.
“In the reformed, liberalised marketplace, we recognise we are no longer a monopoly and need to compete to retain and expand our customer base and we are making the necessary investments to empower our distribution division teams to do so,” said Eskom group CEO Dan Marokane in a statement on Friday.
Marokane said the utility is augmenting its internal capabilities with external hires where needed to speed up delivery of its strategy.
Munshi holds a BSc in electronic engineering from the University of Cape Town, a graduate diploma in engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand and an MBA from Wits Business School.
The distribution role fell vacant when its previous group executive, Monde Bala, was seconded to the National Transmission Company South Africa (NTCSA) as interim chief executive. He was subsequently appointed NTCSA’s permanent CEO. Agnes Mlambo has held the distribution post in an acting capacity during the search. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
