Honest leaders key to our survival

IT WOULD seem that the executives and the board at PetroSA have abandoned their mandate to run an efficient government firm and decided to see it as a cash cow for themselves instead.

At the weekend, the Sunday Times reported that the board at PetroSA had approved the payment of bonuses to failed executives for failed projects.

These failed projects have reportedly contributed to a loss of R14.5billion in the 2015 financial year for PetroSA! This is shocking! It is dereliction of duty of the highest level.

To make matters worse, this payment of bonuses to executives happens at a time when PetroSA is embarking on a cost-saving exercise which has resulted in 250 jobs losses.

This is a figure which is reportedly planned to increase to 720 job losses.

It was also reported that for the past two years, employees have not been paid any bonuses.

All of this makes this board sanctioned payment of whopping bonuses to a handful of people so insensitive that it almost defies belief.

The actions show just how far removed the board and its “fat cat” executives at PetroSA are from reality.

The fact that some “legal opinion” could be cited as the reason to overturn the board’s own earlier decision not to pay bonuses shows just how intentional the board was about subverting the very code they are supposed to operate under.

It reminds me of the “legal opinion” which has defiantly kept Hlaudi Motsoeneng at the SABC to this day.

The board which executed the SABC’s “legal opinion” has since crumbled. Only the lone chairman of the now chronically inquorate board, Professor Mhulaheni Maghuve remains, defiantly fighting a ludicrous survival battle.

In PetroSA’s 2016 annual report, the remuneration philosophy apparently clearly states that short-term incentive payments are not guaranteed and will depend on the firm’s performance.

The fact that the board tasked Mokgaetsi Sebothoma to even seek legal advice on the matter shows that the board was simply looking for a way to pay out the bonuses.

Can such a board be trusted? Has it performed its fiduciary duties? I think not! The most painful aspect of what is happening at PetroSA is that it is not an isolated case. Indeed it seems to have become a trend that our state-owned firms are turned into cash-generating entities for the chosen and politically connected elite.

But these firms belong to the state, so they actually belong to the citizens. The boards are supposed to watch over these entities on our behalf.

What we have instead is boards with such skewed understanding and such a lack of moral backbone that they seem to think they are entitled to violate our trust along with the policies of the entities they oversee, not to mention common norms of decency, and pay themselves obscene amounts at a time when it is completely inappropriate to do so.

How is it possible that we have strayed so far from the ideals that we once espoused as a society.

Going forward, what are we to expect when it has become fashionable for those who we entrust to exercise our greatest responsibilities to betray us instead, and to do so completely?

What hope do we have when the priorities or the motives of relatively skilled and educated people are so out of kilter with our reality.

What are we to do if the boards and executives of our state firms refuse to honestly do what they are tasked and paid to do? What hope do we have that anything will be accomplished on our behalf?

Such a state of affairs in our country is both disempowering and debilitating.

The entrenched culture of dishonesty and self-enrichment among the elites in government and at state enterprises guarantees points to one thing only, ruin.

This is the trampling over of all the sacrifice that has been made by so many, of the lifelong dedication, the intentions and the dream that South Africa will be a viable and a prosperous country. This is intolerable! The bottom line is that it matters not what sort of ideologies or systems we come up with, if we allow them to be populated by crooked individuals who lack both skill and integrity and are interested only in their own stomachs we are doomed to fail.

Having honest and upright people in positions of leadership, is therefore not a luxury, but a matter of our survival.