PIC saga was handled inappropriately
Should we be worried that the man who commands R2trillion — more than any other asset manager in SA — spied on his executives?
Or that in the past few months he has parted ways with three senior employees and another has her head on the chopping block? I’m talking about Dan Matjila, the CE of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC).
Internal disputes between employees and employers are difficult to write about. There is often a lot that the parties say off the record that can’t be proven but that they hope will influence you to take their side. However, in most cases where internal disciplinary disputes suddenly spike, they are an indication that something is dysfunctional.
Matjila has been a successful asset manager. We know that over the past four years he has been subject to extreme political pressure because he has money to hand out. Unlike a bank, which makes its assessment purely on risk, Matjila has another mandate as well: transformation.
Compared to other institutions established for this purpose, such as the National Empowerment Fund, the PIC is so much bigger, better and more powerful. The PIC can do things at scale. So it does matter what Matjila thinks and how he behaves.
Last September, with his board having only the most general knowledge of what he was doing, Matjila commissioned a company to provide him with details of the e-mails of six of his executives.
This happened in the midst of a politically orchestrated attempt to remove him. Someone had dug up some alleged dirt on him and e-mailed it to the PIC board and executives. The person went under the name of “James Nogu”.
Nogu’s e-mail had all the hallmarks of the fake intelligence reports so popular in the Jacob Zuma era. As well as being e-mailed, the allegations were also publicised on the website WeeklyXposé, run by Zuma supporter Kenny Kunene.
Like most fake reports, it was part true and part false. What was true is that Matjila had met and helped a woman called Pretty Louw, who on that occasion was acting as an agent for a company the PIC had funded in the past. What wasn’t true is that it was her company or that she had anything to do with the original loan amount.
Three versions of how Louw got to meet Matjila have come to the fore from various sources. The first is that Louw arrived at the offices of the PIC, where she amazingly secured a meeting with the most powerful man in the economy and proposed that together they buy a coal mine. The second version is that Louw was Matjila’s girlfriend, and so he was doing all he could to help her using PIC funds. The third is that Matjila was asked to help Louw by a powerful member of the Jacob Zuma executive. After his initial rebuttal of Louw’s proposal, the politician continued to pressure him.
At the time, Matjila was under siege at the PIC. New finance minister Malusi Gigaba had appointed his deputy, Sfiso Buthelezi, as chairman of the PIC and the air was thick with suspicion and intrigue. Things moved from there.
This time there are two versions. The first is that Matjila, via WhatsApp, asked an executive of a company he had recently funded to settle the debts of Louw’s beauty company, which had been attached by the sheriff of the court. The second is that he
WE KNOW THAT OVER THE PAST FOUR YEARS HE HAS BEEN SUBJECT TO EXTREME POLITICAL PRESSURE BECAUSE HE HAS MONEY TO HAND OUT
asked the company if it could make use of Louw as a supplier. The person he had contacted then took it upon himself to sort out Louw’s financial problems.
Now, add another leg to the intrigue. At the request of Matjila, who wanted to find the source of the e-mails, newly employed IT head of security Simphiwe Mayisela reported the e-mails to the police. Off their own bat, it seems, the police decided it was the content of the e-mails and not who sent them that really mattered.
Mayisela was then recruited by the police to help investigate Matjila, which he freely admits he then did.
In a different environment this could be perceived as innocent, but the combination of events set Matjila off on a campaign to neutralise those he perceived to be his enemies. He should have left the whole mess for others to deal with.
He didn’t. But just because he was paranoid doesn’t mean someone wasn’t out to get him.