One of Walter Mokoena’s earliest memories is of milking a cow before dawn and herding it back to the kraal in the evening after finishing all the other chores expected of preschool boys in rural Mpumalanga.
He says it instilled a sense of responsibility that still drives him. But things could have gone wrong. Between the ages of five and nine, he was essentially on his own. His great-grandmother had died, his father was away working and his mother was a domestic worker in Hazyview who came home once a month.
He started school at age five and the same year stabbed a classmate with a pen. “The teacher told me not to come back without my parents, but my parents were not around. So I would go and sit in the forest until school came out.”
He fell in with children who drank alcohol and became a victim of abuse and molestation. “It’s a miracle, when I look back. It was a harsh experience that maybe helped build me, but I could have been lost in the system, as many others were.”
When he was 10, the family moved to Middelburg, where Mokoena encountered running water and TV for the first time. He was president of his high school’s SRC at 16, matriculated at 17 and joined a casting agency, hitchhiking to Joburg and back each day for presentation classes.
In 1998, with the only other option being work on the mines, he boarded a bus to Cape Town with a pair of Reebok soccer boots in a Checkers packet, and went to try out for local Premier League team Spurs.
“I was a decent footballer but I’m not sure I had anywhere near the talent required at that level. I told my parents if it didn’t work out I’d try broadcasting.”
Spurs didn’t take him, so he talked his way into an unpaid internship at P4 Radio. It started paying him a stipend when, through a combination of chance and chutzpah, a national newspaper commissioned Mokoena to interview Benni McCarthy’s family after the Bafana Bafana star scored four goals against Namibia in the Africa Cup of Nations.
“I needed one chance to come right. If I was a striker, I would need just one chance to score a goal.”
Then Kaya FM called him to Joburg and his broadcasting career took off.
“I couldn’t believe it. I’m 20 years old, I’m squatting with friends in Hillbrow, and I’m on the breakfast show with Lawrence Dube and Ernest Pillay, whom I idolised. Then I’m hosting a show with Jomo Sono.”
I needed one chance to come right. If I was a striker, I would need just one chance to score a goal
Next stop the SABC, where in August 2000 he replaced Martin Locke as head of sports show Mabaleng. He went on to host Blow By Blow, Laduma and The Live Football Show. He covered Wimbledon, the Athens Olympics and the 2010 Fifa World Cup. He also wrote for a clutch of media titles and started his own publications: Soccer Life, Football Arena and The Joburg Post.
After his mother died in 2011, Mokoena needed “a reset”. He went to Paris, took French classes, and persuaded global water company Suez to hire him for a year. “I wanted a new skill, something tangible. I had long been curious about the water industry and why there are places in South Africa that still have no running water.”
Back home, he continued his research for a master’s degree in water governance and diplomacy. Still paying the bills through broadcasting, he joined the Water War Room, putting together business models for entities in the water sector. In 2016 he attended the Singapore International Water Week.
“In Singapore, every drop of water gets captured, cleaned and put back into the system. Water is a foundation of any national economy, but in South Africa the public and private sectors were not talking to each other. I saw an opportunity for a platform that brings together all role-players. You have to involve citizens and communities to help shape localised solutions.”
After years of germination, his water fascination flourished and became South Africa International Water Week, an independent organisation with three pillars: research and innovation; skills development; and finance/investment. In 2026 it will hold the first water indaba, an investment summit, in Durban.
Despite being nicknamed “Walter Water”, Mokoena insists he is merely a middle man. “I’m not coming with a solution. I’m just bringing the voices together to have these conversations. I started this thing with no funds, no backing. I said whatever support I find will come along the way, I’m not waiting for a perfect moment to start building it. They say the moment always finds the man.”
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