The woman running South Africa’s biggest fast food franchise
Akhona Qengqe went from dropping out of her accounting degree to running South Africa’s largest fast food chain, KFC.
Qengqe’s career journey has not been straightforward by any means. However, her approach of taking every opportunity that comes her way has paid off in spades.
The ability to pivot began even before she started her first job. According to Qengqe, what she studied wasn’t exactly her own choice.
When she received her matric results from Queenstown Girls’ High School, her father realised that she did exceptionally well in maths and accounting. So he recommended that she become an accountant.
“I was in matric and had no idea what a chartered accountant did,” Qengqe said on the Leaders in Conversation with Nomazibulo Tshanga show.
“I had no interest in accounting. I think I’d just been lucky throughout my high school career, that I just seem to do well in accounting and maths.”
Despite her uncertainty, she enrolled for BCom Chartered Accounting at the University of Cape Town.
By the end of her first year, she had figured out two important things: first, she finally understood what chartered accountants actually do; second, she realised she definitely didn’t want to become one.
“I decided this type of route, with my personality, is not going to work,” she explained. Qengqe couldn’t imagine herself sitting all day, going through audits, and crunching numbers.
“It just didn’t seem as glamorous as I had imagined my life would turn out.” So, she decided to switch her course of study, without telling her parents.
She knew she wanted to study commerce and settled on a BCom in Economics, Politics, and Philosophy. Since she loved reading, writing, and talking, she thought it was better suited to her personality.
She didn’t know much about economics, apart from what she had learned in her first year, but figured, “It’s graphs, what’s the worst thing that could happen?”. Fortunately, she loved her new degree.
The generalist

After graduating, Qengqe landed a graduate job as a business analyst in the retail strategy department at Shell Petroleum.
“When I got in, even though I was a graduate, I decided that I would do whatever the organisation wanted out of me, because I wanted to learn as much as I could,” she said.
It wasn’t clear what a strategy analyst role entailed at the company, and she didn’t know what she was meant to analyse. Nevertheless, she made the most of her position.
The leadership team started involving her in conversations with the Executive Committee. She would take minutes during the meetings and then chase people down to see if they were doing what they had promised.
Another part of her job was analysing sales data, drawing insights, and coming up with solutions. That, she said, really opened her eyes to operations, the heart of the business.
“I then got an opportunity to move into our Ops business, which was fantastic, and it was my first taste of being in a franchise environment.” In this role, she analysed balance sheets and advised franchisees to grow their business.
She went on to raise her hand for another opportunity as a property manager in the company. In this position, she managed a large property portfolio, negotiated leases, and bought new properties for the brand.
Qengqe said she knew nothing about this. “But I did as much as I could in that time to learn about the property landscape.”
“Little did I know that those skills that I was gaining then were going to be quite crucial and fundamental in my career journey later on.”
She then went on to work in a marketing position – a field which she also didn’t have knowledge about going into it. Fortunately, there was a marketing manager who was happy to teach her.
KFC

Qengqe joined Yum! Brands, KFC Africa, in 2015 as the director for franchise development in Africa. In this role, she focused on expanding the brand’s footprint across the continent.
Eventually, she felt the urge to do something new. It just so happened that the company was considering how to implement transformation as a strategic imperative at the time.
So, in 2017, Qengqe was promoted to lead the brand’s Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (EI&B) agenda, where she was responsible for making the business more inclusive.
In 2020, she became the chief people officer (CPO) for Africa. She was later appointed to the group’s chief development officer, before being made KFC’s General Manager for Africa in April 2023.
“Akhona has spent the better part of her eight years at KFC as an intrinsic part of the KFC leadership team in Africa,” said Sabir Sami, KFC global CEO.
Sami explained that she has worked closely with the team to ensure the sustainability of the business and the growth of local female talent.
“In fact, she has been instrumental in the team achieving diverse talent, with the Africa L12+ leader population now transformed at 50% women,” he said.
“We’ve never really had a general manager who looks like the majority of our customers,” she told The CEO Magazine.
“Now, for the first time, not only do I look like the majority of our customers, but I also look like the majority of our workforce.”
One of her primary focuses after being made General Manager was ensuring that the business remained investable for its franchisees.
This meant looking at local and global challenges as opportunities. For example, she explained on eNCA that load-shedding and the pending water crisis were opportunities to make the business more cost-effective and efficient.
“My career was never curated,” Qengqe said. “What I did want to do, though, was to one day become a really impactful business leader, and what I was really deliberate about was saying yes to every opportunity that came my way.”
This is because her biggest belief was that if she was going to become a big business leader, it wouldn’t be about how quickly she rose through the ranks.
Instead, it was about how much knowledge she could amass within different functions. So, she took every opportunity she could, even if it wasn’t an upward move.
“I kept asking myself, what skills am I going to get? What sort of exposure am I going to get? What am I going to learn? How is this going to contribute to my vision of one day becoming a big business leader?”
KFC then and now









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