The duo taking Camaku Transaction Advisory to new heights

Muziwakhe Zwane and Athenkosi Peteni are fervently passionate about helping their clients make the right decisions–and they are determined to do it with expertise, knowledge, and quality.

The founder with a vision for sustained success

Muziwakhe Zwane's journey has been shaped by curiosity, discipline, and a desire to make complex ideas useful. His post-graduate studies at the University of Cape Town drew him to the intersection of law, business, and people, leading to a career in commercial law and business rescue.

With 10 years of professional experience behind him, Muzi has learned some valuable lessons, all of which have influenced his approach to clients and leadership.

"Clients encounter legal advice at moments of pressure and consequence, not as an academic exercise. Technical excellence is therefore only the starting point; advice must be clear, practical, and decisive. Difficult matters also require dis-ciplined collaboration across legal, financial, and operational teams," Muzi shares.

"This has shaped my leadership philo-sophy: set clear standards, give people meaningful responsibility, support them under pressure, and remain accountable. Consistency and honest communication are what ultimately build trust."

Muzi's interest in insolvency, restructuring, and business rescue began during his postgraduate studies, where his LLM research examined the balance between affected persons' competing interests in rescue proceedings.

The field appealed to him because it combines law, commerce, finance, and strategy and it remains rewarding because each mandate requires swift judgment, an understanding of the business, and careful management of stakeholders.

The opportunity to preserve value and create a viable path through distress con-tinues to make the work both challenging and meaningful.

Muzi co-founded Camaku in 2019 with his partner, Athi, and established its Insolvency and Restructuring Department. Since then, the firm and practice have grown tremendously.

Camaku provides a comprehensive range of legal and transaction advisory services to listed and unlisted companies, financial institutions, investors, entrepreneurs, public sector entities and community organisations.

The firm’s expertise spans mergers and acquisitions, investments and capital raising, black economic empowerment transactions, corporate restructuring, business rescue and turnaround strategies, corporate governance, corporate and project finance, exchange listings, fund formation, tax advisory, pension fund matters, intellectual property, competition law and regulatory and administrative law.

This multidisciplinary expertise enables Camaku to guide clients through every stage of a transaction, from initial structuring and due diligence to implementation and regu-latory compliance.

He explains: "From the beginning we aimed to build an insolvency and restructuring practice that could be trusted with difficult mandates. The department now advises across the full distress cycle, from early-stage restructuring and business rescue to contested insolvency, recoveries, and distressed transactions.

"I am proud of the confidence placed in the team, but particularly of the lawyers we are developing and the practice's growing reputation for dependable execution."

Having advised banks, business rescue practitioners, shareholders, and other stake-holders, Muzi believes that Camaku moves comfortably between legal analysis and commercial implementation.

"In distressed situations, advice must account for liquidity, timing, stakeholder dynamics, and operational constraints. We first understand the business and the client's objective, then develop a practical legal strategy. Our experience advising banks,

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practitioners, shareholders, and other stake-holders gives us a broad perspective, while our hands-on approach, responsiveness, and personal accountability distinguish the service we provide," he states.

In terms of Camaku's growth and evol-ution, Muzi shares that it has all been deliberate.

From the start, Athi and Muzi set out to combine technical capability with access-ibility, responsiveness, and commercial understanding. This has meant that the firm has strengthened its market position through consistent execution, complex mandates, and opportunities for professionals to lead and specialise.

"Retaining an entrepreneurial mindset while building institutional discipline has allowed Camaku to remain agile, personally accountable, and sustainable," Muzi insists.

Looking ahead, Muzi's vision is for the Insolvency and Restructuring practice to become a leading South African team for sophisticated mandates across advisory work, negotiation, and litigation.

"The next phase should deepen our team, sector experience, and collaboration with other specialists. Camaku's wider growth should remain deliberate, values-led, and supported by investment in people, tech-nology, and knowledge.

"I want the firm to be measured not only by its size, but by the calibre of its work, the people it develops, and the difference it makes, while retaining the accessibility and accountability on which Athi and I founded it," Muzi concludes.

Camaku's stalwart with an eye on quality

Athenkosi Peteni's journey into corporate and commercial law was driven by his interest in business, strategy, and problem-solving.

He was drawn to the way this area of law sits at the intersection of legal analysis and commercial decision-making, while M&A appealed to him in particular because every transaction is dynamic in nature - requiring technical precision, commercial judgment, and the ability to manage risk while helping clients achieve their strategic objectives.

"Over the years, I have become much more commercial and prac-tical in the way I advise clients. Earlier in one's career, you focus heav-ily on knowing the law. With experience, you realise that clients need more than legal theory - they need clear judg-ment, confidence, and advice they can actually use. My approach has now become more solu-tion-driven and more focused on helping clients make decisions, not just understand risks," Athi shares.

Athi's experience spans M&A, corporate restructurings, BEE, listings, fund form-ations, corporate finance, and tax - and this wealth of knowledge and expertise allows him to see transactions from different angles.

"A deal is rarely just an M&A issue - it can involve tax, BEE, governance, finance, restructuring, and regulatory considerations all at once. That exposure helps me connect the dots and give clients advice that is more holistic. In a boutique firm like Camaku, that is especially important because clients expect us to be agile, hands-on, and able to deliver the same quality they would expect from a large firm," he says.

Having advised on a number of significant and complex South African trans-actions, Athi says that the most rewarding part is seeing complex transactions come together, especially when Camaku has played a meaningful role in helping clients unlock investment, restructure businesses, support empowerment objectives or achieve strategic growth.

"For me, it is also rewarding because every successful transaction challenges the misconception that sophisticated corporate work can only be done by large firms. At Camaku, we are constantly proving that a young, black-led boutique firm can sit at the same table, handle complex work and deliver at the highest level," he continues.

Despite South African businesses facing real challenges - economic pressure, infrastruc-ture constraints, funding diffi-culties, and regulatory complexity, Athi believes that those challenges also create opportunities for restructuring, conso-lidation, investment, transformation, and strategic partnerships.

From an M&A perspective, Athi believes businesses that are agile and willing to rethink their models will find opportunities even in a difficult market.

"For firms like Camaku, the opportunity is also to show that new players can bring fresh thinking, strong technical ability, and real commercial value to the market," he insists.

As a co-founder of Camaku, Athi has played an important role in the firm’s growth in confidence, capability and market presence.

What differentiates Camaku, according to Athi, is that they are a boutique firm, but they do not have a boutique mindset when it comes to quality.

"We are able to bring large-firm quality, but with boutique-firm responsiveness, senior attention and a deeper appreciation of each client's commercial realities. We operate in an area where the market often expects firms like ours to fail or remain on the margins, but we are breaking those barriers by consistently delivering soph-isticated, commercially rel-evant advice," he continues.

Looking to the future, Athi sees Camaku continuing to grow as a serious player in corporate law.

"The opportunity is to keep building a firm that competes on quality, not size, and that continues to challenge old assumptions about who gets to do sophisticated legal work. My role is to help strengthen that vision - by delivering excellent work, buil-ding client trust, mentoring young prof-essionals, and contributing to a culture where we strive for perfection even in an industry that may expect us to fall short," Athi concludes.

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