Ntombifuthi Mtoba grew up in Swaziland. She enrolled at the University of Botswana and Swaziland for a BA in Economics and later moved to South Africa where she obtained her Honours in Economics, a B Com Honours, a Higher Diploma in Banking Law, and qualified as a Chartered Account. She joined Deloitte & Touche in 1988 and become the first black female partner at one of the larger accounting firm in South Africa as well as the first female deputy chairman at Deloitte Southern Africa. She has also been appointed the first female president of the Association for the Advancement of Black Accountants of Southern Africa (ABASA), a body dedicated to nurturing emerging black accountants where she was the visionary behind the Nkuhlu Subvention Fund which subsidises the salaries of black chartered accountants who lecture at previously disadvantaged universities.

She is the President of Business Unity South Africa (BUSA) and was appointed as chairperson of Council of the University of Pretoria in 2008. She is a member of the Business Foundation of NEPAD. She is a Member of the Board of the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest voluntary corporate citizenship initiative. The Global Compact strives to be the world’s most inclusive voluntary initiative to promote responsible corporate citizenship, ensuring that business, in partnership with other social actors, plays its essential part in achieving the United Nation’s vision of a more sustainable and inclusive global economy and therefore achieving the Millennium Development Goals. She is a founder of TEACH South Africa, a programme which recruits graduates who have majored in Maths, Science, English or IT and contracts them for a two‑year period to teach at identified schools in formerly disadvantaged communities. This programme is supported by the Private Sector and the Department of Education.

Mtoba was named “2004 Business Women of the Year” by the Businesswomen’s Association and Nedbank.