Afrirent CFO Shadi Makhuvele is preparing to deliver the Seven Sayings sermon this Good Friday, balancing her executive duties with deep community commitment. While the upcoming Easter period brings no real break for her family, the holiday offers a chance to reset together – complete with soccer, braais, and oxtail on Sunday.
The Seven Sayings sermon, also known as Jesus Christ’s last words before he died on the cross, is coming up on Good Friday and Afrirent’s CFO Shadi Makhuvele will be the one delivering it at her local parish.
For Shadi, church work is as much of a responsibility as preparing the quarterly board pack or reviewing fuel hedging strategies against petrol price shocks.
“Easter is not really a break for us,” she says, matter-of-factly, referring to the upcoming quarterly holidays. “But the nice thing is that I do it with my family, and we do it together so we get to reset a little bit.”
Shadi’s commitment to her faith is evident in her hands-on approach, from delivering the sermon on Good Friday, to helping her congregation organise the Easter event calendar which includes additional services from visiting pastors to organising artists for entertainment. Then the family will have a communal lunch at the church.
The Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is reserved as family fun-day. Some extended family members join Shadi and her two sons, aged 10 and seven for a family game of soccer and a braai, weather permitting.
On Sunday morning, they will return to church for worship before heading home for lunch. “This year I am making oxtail, so that is what is on my table." she says.
Easter or not, Shadi’s daily life begins at five in the morning with a prayer. Next, she packs lunchboxes for school, something she insists on doing, despite hiring a live-in helper. After bidding goodbye to her sons for the day, Shadi hits the road for a run or heads to the gym, depending on her mood. “If I leave it for the evening, it doesn’t work,” she says.
Then, she heads to the office, with a strong cup of sugarless, black coffee.
Civil servant at heart
Now at Afrirent, Shadi has found herself in the middle of a massive contract with a clear mandate. “Do things well, it’s the average South African that is benefitting. When they call the police, the vehicle must be there on time. When somebody’s sick, the ambulance must be there on time,” Shadi says firmly. “So at the heart of it, public service touches the core of who I am.”
From working in Eskom Enterprises to Broadband Infraco to the City of Johannesburg’s Pikitup and the CSIR, Shadi’s calling in public service is underpinned by one objective: serving the average South African.
At the CSIR, Shadi helped navigate the institution during the lockdown. “It meant rethinking capital allocation entirely. That urgency, figuring out the full construct under pressure, pushed me past traditional finance into real strategic partnership,” Shadi says.
Her tenure at waste management entity Pikitup is also credited as a highlight in her career. “When I arrived at Pikitup, it was a loss-making entity, and because of my understanding of operations, I partnered very closely with the operations department to turn it around,” recalls Shadi. By the time she left Pikitup, the entity had recovered financially and was in a surplus.
Integrating passion with duties
Whether it’s balancing the books of a church, delivering financial results or building a team, integration and inclusivity defines Shadi’s approach to leadership.
“You can’t separate the person from the role that they are in, particularly if you find they are passionate about something particular in their job,” explains Shadi.
Shadi references a young computer science graduate who recently joined Afrirent. “She’d landed in procurement because they needed help with data,” Shadi explains. “I spent time with her to ask about her passion and she said it is in technology. Then I told her she is well-positioned to find her passion within that role because technology is an enabler of business, she just needs to bring that skill alive in procurement."
Shadi says there is a triangular approach to getting the most from staff. First, it's the person’s values, then the organisational needs and fair compensation. This triangle resolves only when all three are acknowledged. “You may not get 100 percent of them, but if you invest a little time in somebody’s personal development, it helps us retain them. Two, we get the most out of them.”
Retrenchments and redirection
For all the turnaround victories she has had in her career, Shadi has had to lead corporate retrenchments twice so far.
Her first experience with retrenchments gutted her. The second time around, while at a different company, she swore to handle differently. “I was very intentional from the beginning.” Shadi mapped every activity and redistributed where she could. “It’s hard to look at people losing their jobs,” she says.
The retrenchment-process fatigue runs deeper than headcount. "Transformation in itself comes with fatigue. There are days where people cannot see the qualiformative elements or the foundational elements of transformation, and they are not necessarily tangible, you find that it’s harder to rally people around,” she explains.
Shadi rallies anyway. “I allow people to speak and I listen.” Then she holds the line, sometimes even against her own executives. “There were so many times that I would fight back saying I will not do certain things, because it’s going to make me look inconsistent,” she says.
Soccer mum as counterweight
Shadi is a permanent fixture on the periphery of the soccer pitch. She takes time out to watch her sons play a sport she had once played too. “I played it at high school, and then my parents felt like there were no girls who were playing soccer, so I had to stop.”
As a mother herself, she takes a different approach. Last year, whatever it took included a tournament in Spain. Shadi accompanied her son and watched his performance from the sidelines. Later the two talked about the game and strategies on what aspects he needed further training on.
Soccer, though, doesn’t represent escapism. Instead, it’s woven into the fabric of their daily lives. “My sons appreciate that I was a soccer player, by the way, so we’ve got a love, a neat, tight family thing when it comes to soccer.” The family are ardent Orlando Pirates, Arsenal and Barcelona fans.
Now, Shadi is eyeing a new goal: running the Comrades Marathon. “I still want to run Comrades,” she says. “I remember when I was writing my exams, I said to one of the lecturers that training stretched my brain and the Comrades is also a mental thing.”
Shadi has run up to 32km so far, and plans to reposition her training to align with an old, unfinished desire to run the iconic Comrades Marathon in the future.
