As a student of Norkem Park High School in Kempton Park Johannesburg, the introspective Craig Miller could not think of anything worse than a career that would require expressive writing and public speaking. It chased him into the numerical arms of accounting, a career he believed would afford him and his calculator serenity and solitude.
“I am more of an entrepreneur than an accountant,” affirms André du Plessis.
Besides an interest in business studies, André had a juvenile fascination with trees and harboured ambitions of studying forestry. But when he encountered the idea of chartered accountancy in the ninth grade, his career path was sealed.
Abigail Mukhuba might have entered the world of finance by chance, but once she got started there was no stopping this woman with the steely resolve. She had set herself the goal to become the finance director of a JSE-listed company by the age of 40, which she achieved when she was appointed chief financial officer of Africa Rainbow Minerals (ARM) in December 2017.
The offer of a full scholarship to pursue a degree in engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was an attractive prospect for Harmony CFO Boipelo Lekubo. After all, she was quite good at both mathematics and sciences.
There are probably very few, if any, chief financial officers of South Africa’s top companies who have ever had to go to bed hungry. Aarti Takoordeen may be the CFO of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) today, but she still has vivid memories of the hunger she experienced growing up in Ladysmith in a family of four with a single parent.