For Dumo Mfini, success has never been about taking the easy route. The Tiger Brands culinary division MD grew up in Bizana, in the deep rural Eastern Cape. His home had no running water or electricity.
“It was the typical South African rural boy story,” he tells the FM. As a child he herded cattle, fetched water from the river and walked several kilometres to school, often without shoes.
Today Mfini, 38, is a chartered accountant and senior leader at one of the country’s largest food companies. He knows that hard times can prepare you for achievement later.
Mfini attended Mariazell High School, a boarding school with a sterling reputation near Matatiele. The school’s resources were scarce, however — pupils shared textbooks, there were no computers and pupils had to heat water for themselves. Still, Mfini and his twin brother, who both had chosen higher-grade mathematics and science as subjects, consistently ranked among the top scorers in their class. Motivated pupils taught one another after school. “I think we did well, given the resources we had,” Mfini says.
An accounting qualification was not initially part of his plan. He wanted to become a doctor or study science, engineering or pharmaceutical subjects. He had dropped accounting at school because he found it too easy.
That attitude changed in Mfini’s matric year. After making numerous unsuccessful applications for bursaries to study medicine, he remembered a presentation by the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants at his school about a bursary programme aimed at increasing the number of black CAs. He travelled by bus to Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) to attend a selection process and emerged as one of the top five candidates.
The bursary took him to the University of Cape Town, where libraries, computers, textbooks and a broader social environment were all new to him. He failed his first accounting test but worked to understand what he had missed. Once the fundamentals clicked, accounting became a passion and he began tutoring and mentoring fellow students. That commitment to helping others succeed has remained central to his career.
After qualifying, Mfini joined PepsiCo and later Tiger Brands, where over and above his normal duties he sought opportunities to develop young talent. He pushed to establish a CA training programme despite being told that Tiger Brands had unsuccessfully pursued accreditation for such training for 11 years. He secured support and helped launch the course for the first cohort in 2018.
Mfini believes leadership is about creating the conditions in which people can perform. He describes his style as agile and adaptive. He coaches or collaborates where appropriate, but is always fair and firm. “I’m very hard on driving for results,” he says.
This approach informs his current role. Under his leadership, Tiger Brands has transformed its Paarl culinary facility into what he calls a “megasite”. A R200m-plus investment in the site, which was established in 1903, has boosted supply security and product quality by bringing the production of Mrs Ball’s chutney in-house, securing vinegar supply and improving packaging. This marks the first phase of a broader commitment to invest about R1.5bn annually in capital expenditure nationally for the next three years, with peak investment reaching R2bn.
It has restored confidence among employees who had been uncertain about the Paarl facility’s future. For Mfini, the improvement in morale matters as much as the commercial investment.
His career has also been shaped by difficult assignments. As finance director of Tiger Brands’ Enterprise Foods business, he helped manage the division through the crisis caused by a listeriosis outbreak in 2017 and contributed towards preparing it for disposal. Rather than viewing the crisis as something to escape, he saw the black swan event as a chance to learn.
“I knew before I qualified that there were more than 30,000 CAs in the country,” he says. “What was going to set me apart?”
Among other actions, he personally helped sell frozen pork, preventing what might otherwise have resulted in a R150m loss, and recovered about R120m. Across several initiatives over seven years, he calculates that he created or saved more than R700m for Tiger Brands.
Mfini’s parents have been his role models. His father progressed from underground mine work to an administration role in human resources, while his mother sacrificed her own education and career to raise six sons. In 2009 the family established the Dumekhaya Foundation, which is run voluntarily by his mother and has helped more than 300 young people towards higher education.
Based in Joburg, he is married and has three young children with whom he enjoys spending “fatherly time”.
His advice to young people who want to get ahead is simple: “Don’t be scared to raise your hand. Do work others may avoid, add value beyond expectations, and recognise that the toughest challenges can become the experiences that set you apart."
