It’s generally accepted that any dream worth fighting for will involve sacrifice. There will be difficult moments and times when the dream seems infinitely unattainable. Many will stumble after the first obstacle; only a very determined few will doggedly keep on. Madoda Mkhabela, an assistant audit manager at the Auditor-General South Africa (AGSA), fits firmly into this category.
It’s thanks to his tenacity that Madoda was able to earn his CA(SA) qualification at the age of 42, having faced one setback after another.
The first of these was financial. Growing up in the Mpumalanga village of Hoyi, Madoda and his schoolmates had little exposure to different career options. Indeed, he had never heard of accounting (let alone considered it as a career) before high school, when a Wits student visited his school to talk about the profession.
‘I fell in love with the idea of this qualification that could open so many doors,’ Madoda says. And so he picked accounting as a subject, worked extremely hard, and finished matric with distinctions in accounting as well as business economics. He proudly showed his father his results but was told that although he had done extremely well, the family could not afford to let him
further his education.
Bloom where you’re planted
Madoda may have been left standing in front of that closed door were it not for the Department of Education, which launched a recruitment programme for unemployed matriculants in a bid to increase the number of teachers in the country. Their search led them to Madoda, and having qualified for the programme, he was granted a bursary to study education at the University of Fort Hare.
This was a pivotal moment. Madoda had sent countless applications for bursaries since matriculating but had received just as many rejections because he had not taken maths as a Grade 11 subject. This was his chance, and he seized it, enrolling in both maths and statistics so that he would be eligible to study accounting as part of his degree.
The new graduate took up his post, teaching EMS for Grades 8 and 9 and accounting and economics to Grades 10, 11 and 12 in 2010. It may not have been his dream – but, says Madoda, ‘I have an ability to bloom where I’m planted.’ It helped, too, that he had nurtured a love of teaching while tutoring fellow students during his school days.
Even so, the idea of becoming a CA had never died – and so when he was invited to attend a speech given by representatives of the AGSA along with some of his students, he leaped at the opportunity. More than that, he seized the chance to speak to one of the senior managers present, telling her how he had always wished to become a member of the organisation. She invited him to share his phone number and, from then, got in touch regularly, urging him to pick up his studies and revisit his goal. ‘Her main message was that I could do this,’ Madoda recalls.
Taking the first step
Madoda had in fact already enrolled for an accounting degree at Unisa. Registering was quite another matter, however; the university’s headquarters were 130 km from his home town and queues were decidedly off-putting. ‘It would have been easy to keep procrastinating, but I knew that I had no time to waste. I was already 31; if I put this off any longer, it would be almost impossible to find the motivation to get started,’ Madoda says. He found the encouragement he needed in a quote from The Lion King: ‘The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.’
That first step of registering taken, Madoda took the next, taking a number of modules home to study and then returning for more. He started following a gruelling timetable, teaching in class, marking scripts and then studying for three hours every day. He became a master at juggling time, carefully scheduling every minute of his teaching plan while also making allowances for the disruptions to the schedule (like strikes) that seemed part of life as a teacher at a rural government school.
A real-world shock
Madoda’s happy ending was not yet in sight: it would take him 10 more years to have his qualification in hand. ‘Completing my degree was easy: I’d study for a test, write and repeat.’ It was when he wrote his CTA that Madoda received his first shock. ‘I fast learned that teaching accounting and actually practising accounting in the real world are two very different things. I got 10% for one of my tests! I couldn’t believe it – I asked myself how this
was possible, since I had prepared so many learners for
this career.’ Madoda found the solution in discipline, religiously setting aside up to four hours for study
every day.
Now he faced the next hurdle: his ITC exams. Again, Madoda felt like he was foundering until after failing for the third time, he decided to change the way he worked. ‘I knew that passing this exam was doable – other people passed all the time, and they had no superpower beyond the way they studied.’ He set up an entirely new routine, going to bed for six hours once he returned from work, then waking at midnight to study for the same amount of time. Happily, this method paid off, but Madoda now found himself with just two months to prepare for the
APC exams. ‘I knew there was no way I could pass,
but I wanted to write anyway so that I could get a feel for the exam.’ As predicted, he failed – but found that the setback galvanised him to work harder than ever before.
‘I told myself that this was it – it was time to have that qualification.’
Bumpy roads
Madoda’s experience has left him convinced that nothing is impossible. ‘It’s as former president Nelson Mandela said: “Anything can seem impossible until it’s done.” If you’re not achieving the results you want, take stock of your life, see where you are going wrong, and set it right.
‘I think few of us are prepared for how difficult it can be to achieve a goal. We might all be travelling to the same destination, but we’ll take different routes to get there – and for some, the road will be bumpier than for others. You need to be determined to see it through. When you suffer a setback, reset, reflect and come back harder.’
Madoda has reached a point which many would consider a pinnacle: he has the qualification he worked so hard for, a career he loves at the AGSA, and a rewarding family life. But he says he is just getting started. ‘I would like to earn my Registered Auditor qualification so that I can perhaps one day set up my own firm, and possibly continue my studies with a master’s and possibly PhD so that I can become a Doctor of Philosophy in Accounting. I love accounting – it’s made me everything I am.’
Author
Lisa Witepski
