Molefe a no-show at conference as further shock claims revealed
ESKOM chief executive Brian Molefe skipped the opening of African Utility Week yesterday amid growing opposition to his reappointment.
Molefe and Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown‚ who were both expected to address delegates at the Cape Town International Convention Centre‚ were no-shows just a day after Molefe returned to his post as boss of the state-owned energy producer under a cloud of controversy.
Calls objecting to Molefe’s reappointment to the post he vacated in November grew even louder yesterday, following an article by the amaBunghane Centre for Investigative Journalism titled “How Brian Molefe ‘helped’ hijack Optimum”.
The article‚ published yesterday‚ detailed claims by former mineral resources minister Ngoako Ramatlhodi that Molefe and Eskom chairman Ben Ngubane allegedly tried to force him to suspend the mining licences of coal supplier Glencore.
This was designed so Gupta-owned Oakbay Resources could buy the Optimum coal mine‚ which supplied coal to Eskom’s Hendrina power station. Oakbay eventually bought the mine from Glencore in December 2015. Ngubane has rejected the allegations. In the AmaBhungane article‚ Ramatlhodi said that at Ngubane’s insistence, he had a meeting with Molefe and Ngubane.
At the meeting‚ the two men allegedly demanded that he suspend all Glencore’s mining licences in South Africa, but he resisted their pressure and was later fired because of this, Ramatlhodi claimed.
Ngubane said his claims were preposterous. “He thinks something that’s impossible‚” Ngubane said on the sidelines of the African Utility Week conference, after delivering the opening address.
“We can’t instruct a minister what to do. We take our problems to the minister [and] we ask for help.” Molefe was scheduled to give a keynote address at the conference but cancelled.
Speaking to eNCA yesterday, Ramatlhodi also detailed how President Jacob Zuma’s son, Duduzane, had tried to convince him to meet Ajay Gupta‚ one of his business partners. He refused.
“One thing‚ since I became minister of mineral resources‚ the Guptas tried to have meetings with me,” he said.
“I refused those meetings. I simply told them to bug off.”
Ramatlhodi was moved to the public service portfolio until he was axed in the president’s cabinet reshuffle in March.
When asked who was the messenger who tried to arrange the meetings‚ Ramatlhodi said: “Duduzane‚ the president’s son.”
The DA said the allegations made by Ramatlhodi were astounding and deserved a full-scale investigation as part of the parliamentary inquiry into Eskom which the party had requested.
The DA had already written to parliament’s Chair of Chairs‚ Cedric Frolick‚ to ask that its public enterprises committee launch a full-scale parliamentary inquiry into Eskom‚ without delay.
Yesterday, it wrote to Frolick to urge that the Ramatlhodi allegations also be investigated in the course of the inquiry.
The ANC and the DA have both condemned Molefe’s reappointment and called for the decision to be reversed.
On Monday, the DA filed an urgent court application for Molefe’s reappointment to be overturned and for him to be blocked from performing his duties as chief executive.
And Brown was summoned to Luthuli House after the ANC called on her to reverse Molefe’s reappointment or dissolve the Eskom board.
The SACP staged a demonstration outside the energy conference yesterday, calling for Molefe’s reinstatement to be reversed and for the Eskom board to be dissolved.
The party’s Western Cape secretary‚ Benson Ngqentsu‚ said Ngubane was a problem who was not “committed to using our stateowned enterprises as a strategic vehicle to build our developmental state”. “Molefe did not resign honestly. He did so knowing he was taking redeployment elsewhere to further loot our public resources. Now that he wasn’t made a minister‚ he has gone back to Eskom to loot.”
Meanwhile, Ngubane warned yesterday of winter power cuts unless the national Treasury urgently signs purchase agreements so Eskom can build up its coal reserves.
He said there had been no planned power cuts over the past two winters because “we had sufficient coal brought in and built up the stocks to more than a million tons”.
“Now we have a problem because Treasury has not yet signed our coal purchase agreements.”