It’s fake news, says Gordhan

CONSPIRACY THEORIES: ENERGY PLAN AIMED AT BENEFITTING POLITICALLY CONNECTED PEOPLE

Jeff Radebe and Patrice Motsepe among those named as beneficiaries.

Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan has rubbished conspiracy theories that Eskom’s plans to involve independent power producers (IPPs) in electricity generation are aimed at benefitting politically connected individuals.

He dubbed the theories “fake news” and said South Africa needed to develop a new business culture that relied on competence as opposed to connections.

After “connecting the dots”, some members of the public believe people such as Minister of Energy Jeff Radebe and billionaire mining businessperson Patrice Motsepe, among others, stand to benefit from the proposed unbundling of the nation’s power utility and the subsequent introduction of IPPs.

Radebe, Motsepe and president Cyril Ramaphosa are all related by marriage and Motsepe is the single biggest South African investor in renewable energy.

eNCA’s Peter Bruce and Karima Brown posed this and other questions to Pravin Gordhan, who rubbished the “connect the dots” theory as it has come to be known. “Let me make it absolutely clear, we are not interested in either those conspiracies or all those connections of one kind or another. We’re there to do a serious piece of work and that work is, as far as I’m concerned, in the national interest,” said Gordhan. He went on to say that we are “living in the age of fake news” and, as such, widely publicised conspiracy theories are to be expected.

When asked what was being done to ensure that contracts are

We are living in an age of fake news.

awarded fairly, Gordhan chalked it up to good governance and transparency.

“You know, I don’t give the con- tracts but Eskom does. So our job is to make sure we have the right systems of governance, we have the right levels of transparency as far as the tendering processes are concerned and there’s a lot more that can be done in that regard,” he said.–