Raised in Soweto, shaped by faith and strengthened through personal adversity, Dineo Molefe has built a finance career grounded in purpose rather than position. The MTN South Africa CFO reflects on leadership, lifelong learning, balancing motherhood with executive responsibility and why success is ultimately about becoming the person God created her to be.
In an increasingly secular society, finding deeply spiritual people in the higher echelons of corporations is more of an exception than the rule. Chief financial officer of MTN South Africa, Dineo Molefe, is one of those executives who is deeply spiritual.
Explaining how her faith influences her personal and professional choices, Dineo says her relationship with God keeps her grounded and reminds her of her purpose. At a professional level, she regards her work as an extension of God’s assignment in her life.
“I believe that when I work, I am serving God and using the talents that He gave me fully. Therefore, I am responsible and accountable to Him for that. I work because He gave me the talent and the brains to utilise and therefore, I must account for how I use these gifts,” she says.
Dineo’s modesty is attributed to her upbringing in Diepkloof, Soweto by both her mother and grandmother during the turbulent 1980s in a household where education and learning were strongly encouraged. As a teenager, her routine was what her peers would deem as monotonous and devoid of youthful vibrancy: school, home, dance classes and tennis.
“Unlike many households at the time, my mother and grandmother did not put an emphasis on me doing household chores, they wanted me to focus on my studies, and perhaps this explains why I still cannot cook because I didn’t get to practise,” she chuckles.
Being a child who was a voracious reader and had a remarkable aptitude for numbers, mathematics became her favourite subject. It came as no surprise that Dineo matriculated at 16 and became the first in her family to enrol at university even though her family did not have the funds to pay for her tuition. “Because of the funding challenges, I opted to enrol for a BCom degree through long distance learning with Unisa,” she says.
A lifelong learner
Dineo didn’t let her financial constraints limit her studies. Through grit determination and hard work, she managed to complete her first degree at the age of 21 whilst working in one of the major banks and earned a bursary and internship with Grant Thornton which enabled her to obtain her honours in accounting and later qualified as a chartered accountant (CA) SA in 2003.
After obtaining a masters in international accounting from the University of Johannesburg in 2010, she went on to complete an Advanced Management Programme from Wharton Business School, Pennsylvania in 2012.
Dineo describes herself as a lifelong learner, someone who believes that growth does not end with experience, title or tenure. From September to November 2025, her time at Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program provided a valuable platform to engage with senior leaders from across the globe. These interactions reinforced that many of the challenges faced in business are not only local, but global in nature. For her, leadership requires the humility to keep learning, the discipline to keep reflecting and the courage to keep evolving. The experience reinforced her conviction that even seasoned leaders must create space to pause, sharpen their thinking and return with greater clarity.
Her career path traversed diverse industries, from ICT, to investments, to financial services and sitting on various boards.
Dineo is a firm believer in the value of hard work and establishing and nurturing relationships, which she believes are important for a successful career. She points out that though academic excellence is important, it is important to have people over who will support, help you and speak for you in the rooms where you are not present.
Not all roses
“University teaches you technical content and studying comes down to comprehension and interpretation of this content. In contrast to academic studies, there is a lot of relationship building required in the workplace. As a professional you are expected to work well with people, your team, your colleagues, and your stakeholders.”
“When I was serving my articles, I had mentors who took an active interest in my growth. They did this based on the hard work that I was putting in. Without these mentors, things would have been difficult for me. However, to win over the support of your seniors you must put in the work, you can’t simply talk your way through, it is not going to work,” she says.
Despite the support she received from her mentors, Dineo notes that her career progression was not laden with roses. “I became a widow when my children were small, so I was doing everything by myself: studying, taking care of them, working, while going through what I was going through. I went through a cycle of guilt. I am not here, their father is not here, they are all alone. When they told me later in life how proud they are of me, I realised that it was worth it in the end,” she says.
It is through her lived experiences that shaped Dineo’s take on work-life balance and how she juggles the pressures of work, her faith, being a mother and a wife.
“We make choices every day about where we allocate our time and what our energy goes to, the important thing for me is that whatever area of my life that I allocate time to, I maximise that time and ensure that it is effective and impactful,” she says. Dineo notes that a professional with younger children has to juggle most of their time between building a career and spending time with their kids, while the balancing act will be different for a professional with older offsprings.
Creating an ecosystem
“It’s about prioritising and making a conscious choice of what is important at any given moment. What takes precedent now might not be the case tomorrow. For example, if I have a board meeting at 9am on Monday, I will skip church service to prepare for the board meeting, not because fellowship is not important, but because going to the board meeting being fully prepared takes precedence at that particular moment in my life.”
“As a mother and professional who had to juggle working, studying and raising young children, Dineo shares her learnings on how young professionals can navigate and balance these competing priorities,” she says.
She points out that every community has a social structure, whether it’s extended family, friends, colleagues, parents and grandparents, or neighbours that young professionals can lean on for support.
“It’s important to create an ecosystem that ensures that you utilise your time in the most productive way for all these different areas of your life that matter most. Build a support network around you that can help you to do the things that you cannot do.”
Talking about her current role, Dineo says caring remains one of the key values that underpins her decision-making. “For me it is about being objective while having a caring mindset. If you care about the environment that you are in, the sustainability of the business, the people around you, your customers, and yourself as a professional it will show in the decisions that you take.”
One would expect that serving as the CFO of one of the major telecommunications companies would mark the pinnacle of any finance professional’s career. But Dineo disagrees and points out that though she did not imagine that her life would turn out the way it has, she is still on a journey of discovery and growth.
“I am still on a journey of becoming; I am not there yet. And I hope that in my journey of becoming a better version of who God created me to be, of morphing into the fullest version of who He wanted me to be, I hope that someone is inspired, motivated and encouraged. Where you come from does not define your destination; believe in yourself and have courage. There will be no shortage of obstacles, but you must have courage, and resilience,” she concludes.
