The Telegraph published an interesting piece a few days ago about the ongoing Sentebale drama. As I said previously, it only took a couple of days for the tone and tenor around Sophie Chandauka to shift. Initially, the British media took her words at “face value” and piled on Prince Harry, ignoring the fact that Chandauka had nothing to back up her rants. Soon after, people began digging into the bizarreness of this situation and wondering what the hell Chandauka is actually trying to achieve here, other than “adding her voice to the endless cacophony of smears against the Sussexes.” It helps that this Telegraph piece was not written by one of their in-house royalist reporters, it was written by Paul Nuki, the newspaper’s Global Health Security Editor. Nuki did some digging on Chandauka and what he found was worth discussing.
Sentebale is small but important. It does lifesaving work in an area of the world where the HIV-AIDS epidemic is still raging. In the tiny state of Lesotho alone, more than 37,000 children are estimated to be living with HIV, many unaware of their condition. Sentebale works gently with them to break down fear and stigma and encourage testing and treatment. Over the last 20 years it has saved and nurtured many thousands of young lives. The two women in whose memory it was founded – Diana, Princes of Wales and Queen ‘Mamohato Bereng Seeiso of Lesotho – would be immensely proud. Now, however, the charity has fallen victim to a form of inverse snobbery or wokery that has lessons for the entire aid sector.
Insiders say the new chair of the charity, Sophie Chandauka, sought to “de-colonise” the organisation, moving it away from fundraising via celebrity Polo matches and the like but without first establishing alternatives. A hefty bill for consultants said to be in the region of $500,000, a failed bid to bring in replacement donors from the US, and an alleged request by Ms Chandauka for a $300,000 salary for her unpaid position prompted the trustees to ask her to step down. She refused, accusing the charity of “poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny, misogynoir,” sparking this week’s walkout by Prince Harry et al, and leaving the charity’s future looking very dim indeed.
Several senior insiders, including the long serving trustee Dr Kelello Lerotholi, have said that they witnessed no hint of abuse or racism. Claims of “misogynoir”, it seems, are at the intersection of gibberish and claptrap.
For the chair of a charity to refuse to step down having lost the confidence of its long-serving trustees and patrons is bizarre but there again Ms Chandauka is not everything she seems. Yes, she worked briefly for Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, and for a longer period as a senior executive at the financial services firm Morgan Stanley.
But the honorific of “Dr” she uses is not an earned medical or academic title. Instead it derives from an honorary doctorate in Business Administration awarded to her by the University of Coventry in 2023, seemingly in recognition of her diversity campaigning.
The London-based Black British Business Awards Ltd, which she co-founded and which explains the MBE she was awarded in 2021 for “services to diversity in business,” is also struggling, and Ms Chandauka resigned as a director in June last year. The company is in deficit to the tune of £387,000 of which £197,000 is owed to the taxman.
“Whether it is also insolvent depends on who the £462,000 other creditors are in note 7 [of the accounts]”, a senior accountant tells me. “If it is the bank, they are in trouble”.
And Ms Chandauka’s US company, the Delaware registered Nandi Life Sciences, may also turn out to be a triumph of style over substance. She describes it on her LinkedIn profile as “a US-based company creation vehicle with a portfolio of companies that have collectively raised over $50 million since October 2023”. That is as maybe but the Delaware-based firm was set up only two years ago and has not yet published any information I can find regarding capital raised, income or even clients.
And yet Ms Chandauka is not alone. She is not the first globetrotting charity boss to turn away from the sort of fundraising that celebrity Polo matches and Red Nose day bring, deeming it a little patronising and old hat. But this is to lose sight of the main goal – to enhance the lives of those who these charities exist to serve. With America, Britain and many other countries slashing their aid budgets, the need for cash has never been greater.
Modelling published in the Lancet this week suggests there will be between 4.4m to 10.8m additional new HIV infections by the end of this decade in low-and-middle income countries, unless the funding shortfall left by US Aid can be filled. Ms Chandauka should gracefully accept she got her timing wrong and step aside, allowing Sentebale’s original trustees and patrons to return. Prince Harry meanwhile should step back into the breach and sound the horn, or whatever one does to summon their polo chums. They have a lot of fund raising to do for those kids Lesotho and Botswana and beyond.
“For the chair of a charity to refuse to step down having lost the confidence of its long-serving trustees and patrons is bizarre but there again Ms Chandauka is not everything she seems.” I like that methodically goes through what he’s found about her businesses and career (and that was with just a few days of digging). But what I’d like to point out that no one is coming out and saying that the absence of “motive” is extremely telling. WHY is she actually doing all of this? Did she just wake up one day and decide to ruin a small charity doing good work in Africa because of “woke”? Or is something else happening here? As many have pointed out, she’s being “advised” by her newly-appointed Sentebale trustee Iain Rawlinson, who the Financial Times described as “a financier who was previously chair of Prince William’s conservation charity Tusk Trust.”
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
