She’s shaking up breakfast and raking in the awards
Presenter Refilwe Moloto smashes the breakfast radio stereotype.
It’s past two in the afternoon and a seemingly tireless Refilwe Moloto, fresh from boxing practice with her trainer, hasn’t had breakfast yet, only green juice. With a packed schedule, she operates at her peak with less sleep than most of us mere mortals require, finally calling it a day only at around 11 at night.
From 3.30am, it’s time to get ready for her morning radio show and a fullon day begins, which includes her “day job” of running her own Ambassador Group interests.
Moloto, an economic and strategic adviser who segued into radio effortlessly after time abroad at Merrill Lynch and in South Africa at Investec Asset Management, has just bagged the Radio Innovation award for the Big Breakfast Broadcast, a three-hour monthly podcast piggybacking on her Breakfast with Refilwe show on CapeTalk.
The podcast is a departure from normal programming, dedicating the full allotment to a single newsworthy topic. Talking points have included the arts, heritage, active citizenry, national security and defence, recycling and the state of South African sport.
The episodes have done phenomenally well for CapeTalk, station manager Tessa van Staden noted in a Facebook post after the awards. She said that in May 2021 there were more than 1.4 million daily page views on the CapeTalk website, which the Big Breakfast Broadcast podcast enables them to use fully.
For a relative novice in the medium, Moloto is not only winning over diverse audiences (or creating a responsive platform for audiences to speak up) and awards, she’s also earned enthusiastic praise from The Big Issue magazine as the “first lady of radio that Africa was waiting for”.
The affirmation is well deserved but Moloto is conscious that it can all become intoxicating. And with a solid frame of reference, she won’t allow it to go to her head.
Moloto says The Cosby Show was an almost perfect reflection of her family, except the parents’ roles were reversed: her mother was the doctor, and her father the attorney. And there are no brothers.
“Like them, we grew up in a black neighbourhood, Umlazi, in a highly educated family, with parents who were constantly teaching lessons about life. We’d sit down for dinner; we were tight-knit. I saw myself as Rudy Huxtable, the youngest in the family, who got a lot of attention, and I was at least as cute as she was.”
Her childhood career choices were driven by the need to be of service, she says. As a young child, it meant having a career where she could earn enough money to buy a Volksie bus, which would drive around picking up homeless people, who would live together in a big house communally.
Then came a passion for human rights. “My dad ... used to tell me about prisoners during apartheid and how they used to contribute by growing their own vegetables or [doing] some kind of economic labour to earn their keep.
“I wanted to take over his practice to protect these people. And he was like, ‘Oh, sweetheart. If we’re doing everything we’re supposed to [do] right, we won’t need human rights lawyers by the time you grow up.’ That was a bad prediction.”
Then, once her maths aptitude became apparent, Moloto wanted to develop a cure for Aids.
After completing her BCom studies at the University of Cape Town, she moved to Joburg, working on the SA economics desk at Merrill Lynch, around the time that MTN was becoming a big force in Nigeria. “Investors in Africa, who were not Afro-pessimists, as South Africans are, needed more information about the market, which senior economists were not interested in. So I started covering Nigeria, which brought me closer to the American clients.”
The head office in the US recognised her talent and reputation with clients, transferring Moloto to Wall Street, on the Merrill Lynch Europe, Middle East and Africa team.
Africa grew to become a special focus area for her, which, once she returned to South Africa, attracted the attention of the Cape Town news desk at Eyewitness News.
“They said to me, you comment quite a lot on Facebook and we feel you have some really great insights and there’s a better platform for that. So I met with the station manager.”
Moloto is not only winning over diverse audiences ... and awards, she’s also earned enthusiastic praise from ‘The Big Issue’ magazine as the ‘first lady of radio that Africa was waiting for’
Starting off with a punchy weekly four-minute business and “eye on Africa” slot, Moloto soon stood in a few times for Bruce Whitfield, before Van Staden offered her a show, Upfront with Refilwe Moloto.
There’s not much difference between working on Wall Street and doing a breakfast show, she says, in so far as both require being pumped with information all the time, disseminating it rapidly and passing on the most important stories to drive the market.
The CapeTalk audience, she says, is “really smart” and very engaged. Moloto admits to learning to take it easier, but while she tells herself to be in bed at nine, she’s still typing on Twitter late into the night.
“This was supposed to be something I did for 18 months to two years. The station manager asked me to ‘shake up breakfast’.”
At heart, Moloto is still driving around in the Volksie of her childhood, trying to foster constructive conversations that build bridges rather than shouting across one another.
“That’s really why I ultimately studied economics and became passionate about development economics. I’ve got this wonderful privilege of great network access in the financial and economic world, and I’m looking forward to the future.”