Singh hand-picked to help drive Eskom’s turnaround
ESKOM boss Brian Molefe is building an empire of trusted lieutenants as he braces himself for a total takeover of the trouble-prone power utility.
After just three months in his job as acting chief executive, Molefe has turned to one of his old confidantes in Transnet, Anoj Singh, who was yesterday announced by the Eskom board as a secondment from Transnet. He will take over as the power utility’s group chief financial officer from next month in an acting capacity.
Singh will be in Eskom for six months, presiding over a R250 billion funding plan, and attending board of directors meetings together with Molefe as representatives of the group executive.
Business Report can reveal that Molefe personally asked for Singh to be moved over to Eskom in June, forcing the Transnet board to hold an unscheduled meeting to deliberate on the matter.
Even though the request was formally passed on to Transnet chairwoman Linda Mabaso by her Eskom counterpart, Ben Ngubane, the plan to raid the transport and logistics giant’s trusted personnel came from Molefe.
The Transnet board agreed to release Singh, allowing the process of getting Public Enterprise Minister Lynne Brown’s buy-in before the appointment could be made public to begin.
Sources, who are knowledgeable of the dealings within the two parastatals, said Molefe wanted to start with a clean slate and a new executive that would buy into his vision.
They said Molefe trusted Singh, whom he had worked with at Transnet for four years.
“Brian [Molefe] is not the (kind of) guy who would be comfortable with an executive that he had not hand-picked,” said one.
“He is a good businessman but he also wants a strategist he can trust to turn Eskom around. And after looking from within Eskom he realised that he could not trust some of the people he was working with, so Singh became the best option for his vision.”
Bold steps
A senior ANC member claimed that the party and Brown were getting impatient with the never-ending problems at Eskom. The member said the utility had become an embarrassment and needed to be stabilised so that it could implement its mandate of keeping the lights on.
“That is why Molefe was seconded in the first place. So you cannot tell him to fix Eskom but at the same time deny him the kind of personnel that can help him… So Singh’s secondment is in line with our thinking that the government needs to take bold steps to fix Eskom once and for all.”
At Transnet, Singh will be succeeded by Garry Pita, a chartered accountant who has worked with Transnet over the last 10 years.
Singh’s appointment came just hours after the board decided to extend Molefe’s stay by another three months in order to give him time to implement his turnaround strategy and to ensure the utility’s financial and operational sustainability.
It also comes in the wake of startling attempts by the board to force suppliers that do business with Eskom to give it a 30 percent equity stake for free and relinquish their intellectual property rights to Rotek, a little known subsidiary that appears to be involved in every project that the utility is involved in.
On Wednesday, Eskom also cleared the four executives that were suspended in March of any wrongdoing, saying that it had received a presentation following an investigation.
The board said this had paved the way for the head of the technology and commercial division, Matshela Koko, the only one of the executives who refused to accept a golden handshake, to return to work with immediate effect.
Yesterday Eskom released a statement saying that Singh would be seconded for six months effective from August 1.