Koko back under electric grill
● Former acting Eskom CEO Matshela Koko’s woes are not over. He is due to be questioned in parliament on Wednesday when the inquiry into the alleged capture of the power utility resumes.
Koko has been lined up to appear before the National Assembly’s public enterprises portfolio committee.
Following the Christmas break, the committee will resume its inquiry into the governance and management failures at Eskom.
The hearing will come a fortnight after Koko’s return to his job as the head of power generation at Eskom following his exoneration of wrongdoing at the utility.
He had been accused, among other things, of using his position to influence the awarding of contracts worth R1-billion to an engineering company, Impulse, where his stepdaughter was a shareholder.
Another senior Eskom executive, suspended chief financial officer Anoj Singh, is due to appear too. Singh will be questioned on his role in the alleged capture of the parastatal by the Gupta family.
Singh was sent packing by the committee last year after he angered MPs with a 400page submission tabled the day before his scheduled appearance in December. This did not give MPs enough time to study the documents before questioning him.
Once MPs have questioned Koko and Singh, they will ask former chairman Ben Ngubane about his tenure at Megawatt Park, Eskom’s Johannesburg headquarters.
The Sunday Times understands that Ngubane is scheduled to be on the parliamentary witness list only next week.
Ngubane appeared before a similar inquiry in 2016 when parliament investigated mismanagement at the SABC. The inquiry wanted to know about Ngubane’s time as chairman of the SABC board.
Deputy Minister of Public Enterprises Ben Martins is due to appear at the Eskom inquiry on January 31. He was implicated, by Eskom’s legal services head, Suzanne Daniels, in alleged state capture. Daniels is currently suspended.
Daniels told MPs last year that Martins had been in a meeting with one of the Gupta brothers. The Gupta brother claimed to have contacts at the office of the judge president of the High Court in Pretoria who could influence the court case of former Eskom CEO Brian Molefe.
Molefe was attempting to retain a R30million Eskom pension.
Those privy to the proceedings of the Eskom inquiry have indicated that the committee did not intend calling Martins, but MPs changed their minds when he publicly attacked them and the process.
Committee sources also said that members of the Gupta family and some of their associates, among them Salim Essa and President Jacob Zuma’s son Duduzane, were likely to be called only at the last stages of the inquiry, once all key Eskom figures had been interviewed.
In a separate but related matter, parliament has yet to start proceedings against State Security Minister Bongani Bongo.
The evidence leader of the Eskom inquiry, Ntuthuzelo Vanara, claimed that Bongo had offered him a bribe in exchange for ending the investigation.
National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete last year asked the ethics committee to investigate the matter but the body that monitors the ethical conduct of MPs has yet to move on this.