Throughout her professional career and her life so far, Dineo Molefe has always been guided by values. ‘Once we have scaled the corporate heights, have made the money we will make and held the positions we will hold, it will all boil down to whether or not we have made a difference to humanity,’ the CFO of telecommunications giant MTN South Africa says. ‘That is what is important; that is what we should keep in mind in all our endeavours.’
In high school Dineo loved accounting and she was quite good at it. This made her choice of degree quite straightforward when she joined University of South Africa in 1994. She graduated with BCompt Honours in Accounting in 1999 and joined Grant Thornton Johannesburg for a training contract – a requirement to qualify as a Chartered Accountant (CA). Given that she had to work while studying part time to ensure her study fees were paid, Dineo considers meeting all the requirements to qualify as CA as one of the greatest achievements of her life.
At the start of her career Dineo moved around a lot, setting clear targets for herself and learning as much as possible at each institution. She joined Gobodo Incorporated in 2000 where she worked as an audit supervisor for a year before joining the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) as a Senior Internal Auditor. She was appointed as a Senior Financial Advisor at Eskom in 2004, a position she held until 2006 when she joined Sizwe Ntsaluba VSP for a brief stint as a Senior Manager.
In 2007, Dineo joined Thebe Investments Corporation, a group of companies with interests in multiple of sectors, including petrochemicals, infrastructure, tourism, media and agriculture. She worked as Group Financial Manager for two years before being promoted to Group Finance Director in April 2010.
In July 2014, Dineo left the CFO position at Thebe and joined Vodacom as a Finance Executive. Her role at the telecommunications company entailed financial planning and analysis, which she didn’t find as stimulating as she had hoped and consequently, she spent just under two years at the company.
In May 2016, Dineo accepted an offer to join T-Systems South Africa (TSSA) as CFO. The company was as subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, a national ICT services company with clients in both the public and private sectors.
After two years as CFO, Dineo was promoted to Managing Director of TSSA. Having held finance roles previously, this was a new challenge for her as she was charged with repositioning the business for growth and sustainability. She had to draw on some of the lessons learnt in 2012 when she completed an Advanced Management Program at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
‘My plan was to take time off from a permanent role after the sale of TSSA, and only serve in the non-executive director positions I had at Thebe and the Spur Group,’ Dineo reveals. ‘But when MTN approached me about the CFO position for the South African operations, I simply had to consider it. I found it a very attractive prospect to join a giant Pan-African organisation which, at its heart, has the agenda of fostering the economic growth of the continent and serving its people.’
This article is an extract from the Masters of Money book by KC Rottok Chesaina (JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS)
