R68.8 million is not salary for showing up with a tie and a good spreadsheet. It is the price of being the person who has to keep a giant telecom balance sheet moving while currencies jump around, regulators pull in different directions, and one bad capital decision can sit in the accounts for years.
Raisibe Morathi gets paid to do that job at Vodacom Group. The number attached to her name for the 2026 financial year is eye-watering, but the real question is simpler and more useful: what does a CFO at that level actually do to earn that kind of money?
The job is the numbers before the story
A serious group CFO does not just file reports and nod in meetings. She sits in the middle of the decisions that determine whether the company compounds value or leaks it.
At Vodacom’s scale, that means weighing network spend against return, deciding how much debt the group can carry, tracking foreign exchange exposure across multiple markets, and making sure the cash generated in one place can be used intelligently somewhere else. Telecom is a capital-hungry business. Towers, spectrum, fibre, systems, acquisitions, compliance—all of it chews money before it throws money back.
A CFO decides what gets funded, what gets delayed, what gets bought and what gets cut loose. In a group with operations and stakes across the continent, one sloppy call on capital allocation can become a very expensive lesson.
Morathi’s remit is not limited to South Africa either. Vodacom’s footprint includes markets with very different currencies, politics and operating rhythms. The local business still has to make money, but the finance person has to keep the whole machine from getting ragged at the edges.
Her route to the corner office was anything but linear
Morathi did not arrive in a boardroom by drifting there. She moved fast early, skipped Grade 9, finished school in four years and kept going until she qualified as a Chartered Accountant, CA(SA). She later added multiple postgraduate qualifications.
In South African corporate life, CA(SA) is still one of the clearest passports into heavyweight finance leadership. It tells a board that the person understands the accounting, the controls, the governance and the discipline behind the numbers. The extra qualifications matter too, because once you get beyond basic reporting, the job becomes part finance, part strategy, part politics.
Plenty of people can explain the numbers after the fact. Fewer can use them to make a decision before the market, the board or the competition forces the issue.
Morathi’s career path suggests that she understood that early. Fast academic progress gets attention, but the more useful trait is pace under pressure. That skill later shows up in acquisition modelling, funding structures, risk calls and the ugly business of making sure optimism does not outrun cash.
The Egypt deal was the sort of work that justifies a big cheque
Vodacom’s 55 percent acquisition of Vodafone Egypt was exactly the kind of transaction that turns a finance chief from administrator into operator. The deal was huge, complex and strategically obvious. It widened Vodacom’s footprint, added scale and gave the group a stronger position in North Africa.
A CFO’s role in a transaction like that goes far beyond signing off the paperwork. She has to help structure the funding, test the valuation, judge the balance sheet impact, manage investor expectations and deal with the knock-on effects after closing. If the numbers are wrong, the business spends years explaining itself. If they are right, the deal becomes part of the group’s growth story.
Vodafone Egypt also brought more than 43 million subscribers into the wider group at the time of the transaction. That kind of scale changes the shape of the business. It changes revenue mix, operational complexity and the way the group thinks about growth outside its home market.
Acquisitions are never just about size. They are about whether the new asset improves the quality of the earnings base and whether management can integrate it without turning the back office into a swamp.
The board seats and the award say the same thing
Morathi sits on the boards of Vodacom Group and Safaricom. This shows how the business sees her. Board work at that level is not ceremonial. It is a governance role, but it is also a strategic one. You are there to test the assumptions, interrogate the risks and keep the group from telling itself fairy tales about its own growth.
She has also picked up industry recognition, including the 2024 CFO of the Year Award. Awards are not balance sheet items, but they do tell you something about how peers and judges read a career. In her case, the message is straightforward. She is seen as more than a bean counter. She is seen as someone who has helped steer real outcomes.
Many people miss this part when they look at executive pay and recoil. Top-end remuneration is not just a reward for seniority. At this level, a CFO is being paid for judgment under pressure. The pay package is tied to the cost of being wrong at scale.
So does R68.8 million make sense
If you only look at the number, it looks absurd. If you look at the job, the number starts to look like the market pricing a rare mix of technical depth, deal experience and operational control.
Vodacom is not paying for spreadsheet neatness. It is paying for someone who can help keep capital productive across a complex, cross-border business while big moves are still being made. That is a very different job from finance in a smaller listed company, or in a business where the worst outcome is a messy month-end close.
The figure reported for Morathi is based on publicly available company disclosures and can shift when future financial results are published. But the broader picture is unlikely to change. The people who run the money at the top of a serious telecom group are not being paid for ceremony. They are being paid for decisions that move cash, debt, risk and growth in the same direction.
