Lucky breaks saved Lesego Sennelo from having to sing for her supper

• Published: June 07
• Author: Renee Bonorchis

Meet Lesego Sennelo, the singing accountant. She is one of only 259 South African black women who are qualified chartered accountants. There are 25528 chartered accountants in SA.

More than 22550 are white and white women make up 4889 of that number. Whichever way you look at it, Sennelo, who turned 29 last week, is a rare commodity. But the system did not spot her. She made the system work in her favour.

Sennelo, who meets me at JB Rivers in Melrose Arch, Johannesburg, says her first passion was music and singing. Her mom was a Sunday-school teacher and Sennelo still sings in the church choir in Vosloorus every Sunday. But she realised that singing was not going to be financially viable.

“I didn’t want to die a pauper and I wanted my children to have opportunities,” she says.

An alternative career choice presented itself when she was lucky enough to stumble upon an accounts teacher in high school who inspired her to take the subject further.

But just making it to the right high school was difficult. Sennelo was brought up in Pimville, Soweto. She attended a local primary school, but her parents were determined she would not be held back by a poor education. Just before high school she spent a year at a school that was set up to help township kids handle the transition into a multiracial school with more advanced educational facilities.

Sennelo was almost forced to stay back for a year because her Afrikaans, thanks to the absence of an Afrikaans teacher at primary school, was poor. She refused to repeat a grade and instead dropped French to take on extra Afrikaans lessons.

After successfully getting into high school, Maryvale College, she discovered accountancy.

“I wasn’t an ‘A’ student. I just worked very hard,” says Sennelo about the start of her love affair with accountancy.

Her enthusiasm went beyond her subjects. She was also an active drum majorette and she played hockey, tennis and netball at school, while maintaining an active church life.

She came out of matric with a C aggregate and opted to further her studies through the University of SA (Unisa).

Sennelo had already set a goal and knew the date on which she had decided she must pass the board exams and become a chartered accountant. With this in mind she piled on the subjects, determined to finish the Unisa course in record time.

“Set goals, know what you want and don’t let people deter you,” she says to me across the table in the busy restaurant. In between Sennelo’s passionate exhortations, we find time to order. She opts for grilled chicken breasts with chips and salad while I ask for mine to be smothered with avocado and feta. The service is good despite the crowd and Sennelo’s red Grapetiser keeps my still water company.

For her tertiary qualifications, Sennelo studied full time and her parents struggled to help her. By her second year the situation looked bleak and she could not pay her fees. She was studying on what was known then as Allenby Campus.

“I used to fight with the security guards at the gate. I used to say, ‘How do you expect me to pass if you don’t let me in’,” she says. “That was the year I started tithing and I trusted God for a miracle.”

Whether or not you believe in miracles, Sennelo seems to have been on the receiving end of one. In her second year someone paid her fees and she says she still does not know who it was. Her first name, Lesego, means “lucky” and that her fees were paid was a lucky break. Her studies continued and by her third year she had managed to obtain a bursary from Deloitte after working for the firm in her holidays.

With good marks in tow, Deloitte agreed to send her to do an honours year at what is now the University of Johannesburg. Sennelo says she worked harder than ever but failed that year. It was a blow to her schedule and to her dreams.

“I don’t regret it. It made me stronger,” she says.

After the disappointing results she had no option but to start work at Deloitte. She was still aiming to pass her honours and write the board exams in record time. She reckoned she would have to take unpaid leave to study hard enough.

But when she started with Deloitte in 2000, the firm launched a programme whereby people like Sennelo, who were working towards passing their honours and ultimately becoming a chartered accountant, could take a year off to study while being paid 80% of their salary.

The only stumbling block, as Sennelo saw it, was that to take the board exam you had to have six months’ work experience. So she asked Deloitte if she could work until June and then study for six months rather than the whole year.

The gamble worked and she passed her honours.

The board exam was not so easy and Sennelo, like many accountants, failed it the first time around. But with her second attempt she passed — all those years of planning resulted in her end goal.

“By then I was tired. I was doing some soul-searching. I was wondering what was the next goal,” she says.

Deloitte was able to provide her with some unexpected experiences.

Having worked on the South African Airways (SAA) account (she was one of the accountants who crunched the numbers on SAA’s huge hedging loss in 2003) she was seconded to the US to help with audits on two US airlines.

Based in Milwaukee, she was off on a plane every weekend to explore and seems to have seen more of the US in her two-and-a-half-month secondment than many Americans do in a lifetime. Her only regret is that she never made it to Disneyworld. But Sennelo is resourceful. She is saving up to take her family to Disneyworld soon.

Sennelo is no longer with Deloitte, though she is in contact with her mentor and her friends at the firm. In 2004, with an offer from FNB, she decided to learn about banking. She is responsible for supporting more than 70 branches in Gauteng with their budgeting, forecasting and resourcing needs.

But banking will not be the end of the line for Sennelo.

Her new goal is to be like Oprah Winfrey. She is not aiming to be a talk-show host, but she does want to be the consummate businesswoman. She wants to become a director, sit on boards, influence companies and have a positive impact on corporate governance in SA. And she wants to do all of this while giving back to her community and helping people who are walking the same difficult road she has walked.

“It is my duty to pull people along with me,” she says.

One step she has already taken is to become an active member of the African Women Chartered Accountants (Awca) forum. It was set up in 2000 and its president is Sindi Koyana (previously Mabaso). Though other accountancy bodies did not feel the need for another organisation to be created, Sennelo is convinced women’s issues are different and that women in the industry, particularly those that are black, need an organisation that understands their issues. Awca has 400 women on its database and works closely with other industry bodies.

It’s not all work for Sennelo, however.

Having been “discovered” as a singer at a Deloitte function in her first year with the audit firm when the rookies put on a performance for the staff, she now lands paying gigs.

There is no CD on the way just yet and no board seats on the horizon, but as our lunch comes to an end I get the sense that this is not going to be the last I hear of Lucky Sennelo.