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experience’ He didn t he last has, a year. we should Now, not expect any difficulty in him executing the task at hand.” his successor, the good Dr Sishi, stands accused, almost immediately upon starting the job, of trying to offload R400m worth of advisory work to the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA).

“He unilaterally and secretly negotiated an agreement that allows (the DBSA) to extract management fees in excess of R400m for proposing and developing infrastructure projects for Prasa,” says a report.

Do not expect Sishi to stick around for long.

The story was broken by one of SA’s most meticulous forensic journalists, Pieter-Louis Myburgh (of the Ace Magashule book fame), and one of the most tenacious, Sikonathi Mantshantsha, for the Daily Maverick.

But what were Sishi and the other guy doing running a broken rail service in the first place? Mantshantsha reports new first-quarter figures showing that Metrorail had conducted 40.7-million paying passenger trips. The carrier ’ s target was 59.9-million. Of course, it got worse. Not a single item in either man’s CV suggests they were suitable candidates to take a dying rail business and turn it around so trains could run on time and profitably. But surely that is the job? Both were appointed by Blade Nzimande.

For his part, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan’s most recent appointment — a former Treasury bureaucrat to run Eskom’s office of chief restructuring officer (go figure) — is equally weak.

This can’t go on. Surely, senior ministers in a Ramaphosa cabinet know someone who has taken over a loss-making firm and turned it around? There’s only one way to do that, yes? It should simply be impossible for a politician to appoint anyone to run an SOE who does not have evidence that they have run, or been a senior part of running (and never in marketing or human resources!), a complex business and, in the process, produced a profit for their labours. If you can’t do that, you can’t help.

All around this country people run difficult businesses. Often they are white men, and an astonishing number used to work at the best business school in the hemisphere — SA Breweries. They made and sold beer profitably in countries with impossible languages, such as Poland and China, because they stuck to the basics.

Executives like Graham Mackay and Norman Adami taught them. They are in demand, but not from the state. But they could fix the mess and produce profits for the state. And if you tell them they can’t fire anyone in the process, they’ll do that too.

Former Post Office CEO Mark Barnes put it well in his Business Day column this week: “Experts, born out of experience from past failure don and’successes, t interrupt them, risk-takers they have and judgment-makers, are the rulers of [the] commercial world. Don’t mess with them, a tough enough time making good in the competitive worlds they have to survive in. They fight for capital, they compete for talent, they’re obliged to play within the rules. But they make money, they employ people and they pay tax.”

What more do you need? The politicians too often seem to want people running SOEs who agree with their withering insights on capital allocation or whatever, but at some point, even the most virtuous politician gets out of his or her depth in a business. You want to run a mixed economy? Fine, it can be done. But you’ll screw it up unless you appoint experienced and honest people to run it — and provided you know when to leave the room.

● Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.