SOS for SOEs — send in business experts
Surely we can fix this? Our state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are killing our national wealth, but it doesn’t have to be so. Where they’re not monopolies like Eskom, they’re potentially innovative and valuable, like Denel. There are luxuries like SAA, and potential lifesavers like the SA Post Office.
They all do different things and all need different strategies. But they have a lot in common. They all need experienced and battle-hardened leadership. They all need to make profits because their role in a developmental state should be development. They are not job creators. They are there to provide dividends for the state.
It is clear our SOEs need less political interference. Cyril Ramaphosa should manage the transition. His cabinet colleagues have done a broadly solid job of clearing out the thieves. But that doesn’t mean they know what to do next. It shouldn’t be their job.
Take Prasa, the passenger rail agency; a perfect catastrophe. We need the state to run rail. In the UK, privatised rail is failing. So after state capture is halted in its tracks, Prasa is rid of its rotten executives and gets new ones. One of them, new CEO Nkosinathi Sishi, is a public servant seconded from the department of transport earlier in 2019 after the early departure of another bureaucrat who used to run the Durban municipality, who had in his turn been welcomed into the Prasa job in 2018 by its chair with a stirring “we cannot over-emphasise what our expectation as a board is from the CEO.
“Fortunately, with the kind of