Could Exxaro's Head Of Coal Become Its First Female CEO?

Nombasa Tsengwa is one of very few female executives in the mining industry and although she’s not aiming for the top job just yet, it’s important to her to make a difference.

- David McKay

The line between environmentalists and the mining executive is normally a clear, decisive one. Unless, of course, you’re Nombasa Tsengwa, who is both coal mining leader and a trained botanist, specialising in agronomy. That is to say, crops and grasses, and not the type that has been legalised recently.

But she was a teacher first. That’s quite some CV. “To be honest, my late father would have never allowed me to do my first degree at varsity without a teacher’s diploma,” said Tsengwa in an interview with finweek. “For him, it was a fall-back option in the event that his girl children did not succeed studying for a degree.”

He needn’t have worried. Not only did his daughter manage a degree – not so incidentally, the agronomy was taken at PhD level at the University of Maryland – but she also went on to become head of coal for Johannesburg-listed Exxaro Resources, one of the largest producers of the fuel in the country.