Choose your eats and CEO with care
Iwas taken aback on Wednesday when the presidency posted pictures of Cyril Ramaphosa arriving for a Russia-Africa summit in Sochi, Russia.
The first thing he did as he stepped off the plane was expose himself to possible poisoning by Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was offered a loaf of the local bread and picked a piece off and ate it, for crying out loud.
Vlad the Impaler is not beyond a little rough stuff, as we know, and Ramaphosa ruined a nice play Putin had been making in SA by getting Jacob “AtomikaRuski” Zuma out of office a little before his time.
Not only that, but the Russians sent two Tupolev Tu-160 bombers (look them up, they’re the biggest bombers ever to be capable of reaching speeds beyond twice the speed of sound and with a range of more than 12,000km) to Waterkloof outside Pretoria on Wednesday. The bread was probably more dangerous.
We need Ramaphosa functional, thank you. There’s still a lot to do in October. There’s the medium-term budget policy statement, which the last ratings agency to give us any love, Moody’s Investors Service, is waiting to see, finger quivering over its outlook button. There’s a statement on the future of Eskom’s debt and, vitally, there’s a new Eskom CEO to appoint.
That call gets made by Ramaphosa and Pravin Gordhan, public enterprises minister, scourge of the corrupt and also on that flight to Sochi. Eskom board members interviewed candidates back in September.
In one version, only one name was sent up to the two of them by Eskom board chair Jabu Mabuza. In another, talk has been that three names went up to Ramaphosa: Andy Calitz, Dan Marokane and Jacob Maroga. But Maroga, a former Eskom CEO, fell out with the board in 2010 and resigned. He then said he hadn’t resigned and claimed R85m from the courts in compensation. He lost and I doubt he’s a contender.
The remaining two on my list are also former Eskom officers. Marokane was head of group capital at Eskom, in charge of big-build projects such as Medupi and Ingula. He joined in 2010, after the failures at Medupi and Kusile had already been hard-wired into the projects, but he made an impact nonetheless.
He had worked at Mossgas and PetroSA and colleagues remember him fondly. Whenever the person responsible for making sure there was enough diesel in the system to fire up Eskom’s emergency diesel generators in the Cape forgot to tell anyone there was no fuel left, Marokane knew enough about the petroleum business to hit the phones and get diesel delivered.
“He could get tankers on the high seas to change course for us,” one former colleague remembers.
But people I’ve spoken to look away when you raise the prospect of him running a dying but critical company with 45,000 employees. “He’s great with a small team given tough jobs,” said one.
There’s also a small matter of a quite generous payout Marokane took from Eskom after he was suspended along with CEO Tshediso Matona and others in one of Eskom’s more disgraceful moments of the past decade. He, like Matona, had done nothing wrong, but the board was under Gupta control by then and they wanted Brian Molefe to run the utility. He eventually parted amicably, and richer, and is now with Tongaat Hulett as an oddly named “executive official”.
Calitz, an electrical engineer, is also ex-Eskom, who left in the late 1990s as GM in charge of transmission. No small job. Shell hired him in 1996 and he started working on gas projects in India and South America. Like many SA managers abroad, he proved adaptable and worked for Shell on every continent, ending up as CEO of LNG Canada, a $30bn Shell-Petronas-PetroChinaKogas-Mitsubishi joint venture to export liquefied natural gas and the biggest private sector investment in Canada’s history.
He now lives in London, twiddling his thumbs. He has other offers but is waiting to hear about Eskom. He wants the job and he’s the only person to say so in public. If Gordhan and Ramaphosa want to save Eskom and, at the same time, split it up, I reckon Calitz is their guy. If there’s really only been one name put to them by Mabuza, I hope it’s his.
Running very large and complex organisations is beyond most of us and this time, with this organisation, we cannot afford to try any more experiments or make any more mistakes. And let’s hope that Russian bread was OK.
MAROKANE COULD GET TANKERS ON THE HIGH SEAS TO CHANGE COURSE FOR US, ONE FORMER COLLEAGUE REMEMBERS
CALITZ HAS OTHER OFFERS BUT IS WAITING TO HEAR ABOUT ESKOM. HE WANTS THE JOB AND IS THE ONLY PERSON TO SAY SO IN PUBLIC