A ‘Numbers' Girl

Financial journalist, broadcaster, corporate speaker and KayaBizz’s award-winning presenter Gugulethu Mfuphi, 31, on her remarkable career journey, lessons from death and how she stays kicking a**!

- Kemong Mopedi

I finished high school at a time when every black girl doing maths and science was encouraged to become a Chartered Accountant. Luckily, commerce subjects were always a key area of interest for me. I knew in the first six months of my Accounting Degree at the University of Johannesburg that I didn’t fully resonate with the course, but proceeded to complete it anyway. While studying, a friend of mine worked as a newsreader at UJFM, so I told her I wanted to give radio a bash because I excelled in public speaking in high school. I grew to become a presenter and producer — UJFM provided the perfect training ground. Following that, half of my peers were gunning to get into Y FM’s Y Academy and I also applied. But, I ended up getting approached by 702 Talk Radio in 2010 — they were looking for an overnight newsreader. I grew up listening to the station with my dad and leaped at the opportunity. Little did I know that the off-air conversations I used to have with some of the avid listeners would lead me to my next job as a journalist at Moneyweb.

Moneyweb was where I learnt that journalism is really about storytelling. I couldn’t write to save my life when I interviewed for the job. I remember walking into the Moneyweb offices and being intimidated by the Bloomberg stats on their screens. They had all these ticker tapes of company results, share prices, serious anchors talking about the aftermath of the global economic crisis and how companies were looking to recover, as well as financial acronyms I knew nothing about. I walked in there, spoke my best English and tried to be myself. The founder of the company at the time, Alec Hogg, was very accommodating in explaining what the organization and financial journalism were about. Alec took a chance on me and that’s where the foundation of my career in financial journalism began.