I wonder what Brian Molefe’s doing…
tears – publicly – as he sought to explain why he could have been in Saxonwold. He said there was a shebeen – an unlicensed pub or tavern in perhaps one of the most affluent suburbs in South Africa – two streets away from the Gupta compound.
Within hours, thanks to the cauldron that is social media, the Saxonwold Shebeen had taken on a life of its own – it had become Twitter shorthand for Chez Gupta, with Molefe a regular tippler.
The verbal gymnastics, though, paled into absolute insignificance with the kind of machinations that would follow: Molefe resigned as Eskom chief executive officer, only for his backers to inveigle him into Parliament via a vacancy on an ANC North West candidate list, even though many in that province only knew him in the abstract.
Sceptics thought it was a ruse to have him, admittedly one of the brightest stars within the party galaxy with a proven track record in Treasury as a senior official, as a pliant minister of finance, or at least a deputy minister foiling Pravin Gordhan’s Herculean efforts to keep sticky fingers out of the Treasury.
It never happened. What did emerge, though, was news of a pension payout of R30 million, when Molefe quit his Megawatt Park office. Cue public outrage in a country where entire families wouldn’t earn that cumulatively over several generations and lifetimes.
The ANC exerted its influence on government, government squeezed the energy ministry and then we were treated to contortions that eclipsed the kinds of thing you’d see at the Cirque du Soleil. Given what was at stake, it was more like the Kama Sutra, except – if the end result was anything to go by – there was a helluva lot of effort for very little pleasure, but a whole lot of shafting.
He hadn’t quit, he’d retired, we were told. Then someone pointed out that he wasn’t even 50 and the Eskom pension fund rules state that you’ve got to be 55 to even begin to qualify. Then, notwithstanding his own public resignation last year, we were told he’d been retrenched.
As the golden handshake threatened to overshadow everything else in the country, we were treated to a new fiction – that Molefe had been on unpaid leave from the utility when he was sworn in as an MP, as a ruse to get him back to the very job that he’d stepped down from in November.
South Africa, though, is a very different place six months later.
This week, Energy Minister Lynne Brown was told to instruct the Eskom board to rescind their decision to re-appoint Molefe – a week-and-a-half after he’d been back in the office.
There were rumours that he might get redeployed as a public servant, maybe even to Treasury as director-general, where there happens to be a vacancy. Even the wording around this latest departure was carefully crafted – “mistakes had been in good faith” announced Justice Minister Michael Masutha, much like Pontius Pilate might have said to an interviewer trying to explain away the crucifixion.
The act of absolution on the Life of Brian didn’t end there: apparently Brown had not been aware of the board’s arrangements with Molefe, said Masutha. Nor was the Megawatt Park merry-go-round any reflection of Molefe’s undoubted abilities.
And, you know what? Masutha’s probably right. It’s all so much bigger than Molefe, if the scale and the volume of what is now being dubbed Gupta-leaks are anything to go by. Indeed, Molefe’s been unbelievably pushed to the back of the queue, right off the front pages, off entire editions altogether. He might have been thrown under the bus, but he’ll be back.
Perhaps he shouldn’t send out any e-mails though. Standing in a shebeen, he might have the urge to SMSm, though, something like “J.O.B. is required.”
On second thoughts, perhaps he shouldn’t.