‘ATOMIC TINA’: NUCLEAR DEFENDER OR ENABLER?
“Iknow people think I am a Zuma loyalist who was pushing for a nuclear deal,” says Tina Joemat-Pettersson. “But I was not for sale — and I would never sell my country.”
It’s just after 8.30 on a Thursday night and, two years after we first reached out to her, Joemat-Pettersson, the woman who signed SA’s unlawful intergovernmental nuclear agreement with Russia, has finally agreed to speak about her three years as former president Jacob Zuma’s minister of energy.
Though she has been publicly lambasted for her role in Zuma’s aborted nuclear project, many National Treasury and department of energy (DoE) officials have painted a very different picture of the minister once dubbed “Atomic Tina” by the press.
“I think she was put in place by Zuma and Zuma thought she was going to be a pushover and the pressure piled up on her,” says energy expert Chris Yelland. “But in the end, she started digging her heels in.”
A former high-ranking Treasury official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says she believes Joemat-Pettersson “may have played a big role in stopping [the] nuclear [deal], even though she came in with a clear expectation that she would push it”.
“People on the inside of the department of energy will tell you how she eventually became aware of what was actually at stake and the size of the
Had it gone ahead, SA’s ill-fated nuclear deal with Russia would have cost the country R1.2-trillion, with payments of R100bn a year to settle that debt. Though former cabinet minister Tina
Joemat-Pettersson was roundly lambasted for signing the deal, insiders say she may, in fact, have sabotaged it
problem that would be created if she continued with this nuclear [deal] … In the end, she was fighting it.”
Gordon Mackay, the DA’s shadow minister of energy during JoematPettersson’s time in office, says he was told by his party leadership to target her, but he soon began to realise that the minister was doing the opposite of pursuing a pro-nuclear agenda.
“Joemat-Pettersson was ostensibly supposed to be this ‘Zumarite’ and was supposed to be pushing the nuclear deal, but again in her public statements, all the work that she did around the requirements for SA’s energy plan … she seemed to be pushing far harder for renewable energy,” he says.
In 2016, Joemat-Pettersson oversaw the drafting of an integrated resource plan that contended that nuclear energy might only be required in 2037. Such a proposal, if implemented, could have delayed a nuclear new-build programme for years.
Mackay says the draft plan was a “bomb” that confirmed his suspicion that Joemat-Pettersson was not the
pro-nuclear puppet she had been made out to be. It would also cost the minister her job.
Seven years after she signed SA’s nuclear agreement with Russia, Joemat-Pettersson now admits what many officials within the DoE and Treasury had suspected: she was actively creating roadblocks to slow down the Zuma administration’s nuclear plans.
“I don’t even think they realised how much I jeopardised what they were doing,” she says during a telephone conversation. “They assumed that I was so stupid, and that allowed me to delay their things Tina Joemat-Pettersson for as long as possible. For me, it was simply to delay [SA’s nuclear deal with Russia] until the court set it aside … I put all the hurdles in place so that whoever came in after me would first have to unblock all of the blockages I put there until anything could be done.”
From the outset, it needs to be acknowminister
ledged that Joemat-Pettersson is no stranger to controversy. In 2012, as minister of agriculture, forestry & fisheries, she oversaw the granting of an R800m tender to the controversial Iqbal Survé’s Sekunjalo consortium to manage the state’s fishery, research and patrol vessels, even though the company had no experience in that field.
As Daily Maverick writer Rebecca Davis has explained, that contract was later withdrawn, “with the management of the relevant vessels temporarily turned over to the navy, which resulted in a 20-month period of no patrols or research being done off SA’s coast. Poaching was consequently rife.”
For her part in the Sekunjalo contract, Joemat-Pettersson was found guilty of maladministration by then public protector Thuli Madonsela in December 2013.
Madonsela recommended that the be disciplined by Zuma for her “reckless dealing with state money and services, resulting in fruitless and wasteful expenditure, loss of confidence in the fisheries industry in SA, alleged decimation of fisheries resources in SA and delayed quota allocations due to lack of appropriate research”.
Instead, months later, Zuma appointed JoematPettersson energy minister. And just four months into that new job, she was expected to sign an intergovernmental nuclear agreement between Russia and SA.
That agreement, according to a DoE statement, laid “the foundation for the large-scale nuclear power plants procurement and development programme of SA based on the construction in SA of new nuclear power plants with Russian VVER reactors with total installed capacity of up to 9.6GW”.
According to Joemat-Pettersson, the Zuma administration had worked on the terms of the Russia-SA deal during the tenures of her predecessors as minister — Dipuo Peters and Ben Martins — but had failed to conclude it. As a result, she says, there were two versions of the agreement that existed when she came into office.
The version of the deal prepared for Martins was more “far-reaching” and potentially contractually binding than that prepared for Peters, which was the version of the agreement she agreed to sign. What’s more, the nuclear agreement Joemat-Pettersson signed with Russia was remarkably different from similar intergovernmental deals concluded between SA and other countries.
Those differences would result in the Western Cape High Court concluding that SA’s agreement with Russia “stands well outside the category of a broad nuclear co-operation agreement and, at the very least, sets the parties well on their way to a binding, exclusive agreement in relation to the procurement of new reactor plants from that particular country”.
If true, Joemat-Pettersson’s assertion that the version of the deal prepared for Martins went even further in its commitments than the agreement she signed is yet another indication of just how intent the Zuma administration was on buying nuclear reactors from the Kremlin.
But that’s not all. Joemat-Pettersson is adamant that the Russian version of the agreement was, in fact, the so-called Ben Martins agreement. In other words, there were two different nuclear agreements, and the Russian version was far more contractually binding.
“When you sign an intergovernmental agreement, there are two copies of the same agreement. One would be in English and the other would be in that country’s language,” she says. “You bring the English copy home to your country. The second copy is a carbon copy of that, but in the other country’s language. So the copy that I brought back to SA was the English in front and the Russian in the back, and that copy was not in agreement.
“There were two different agreements. They were not carbon copies of each other
I don’t want to say I knew before or I knew after. The two agreements were signed. How they got two agreements, I’m not prepared to say.”
Joemat-Pettersson says she took the English version of the deal, “which was not a contractual agreement”, to cabinet and parliament so it “became the legally binding document for SA”.
She did this against the advice of the state law adviser, who contended, correctly, as the Western Cape High Court found, that the implications of the agreement were too extensive to simply table it in parliament without some form of public engagement.
“I wanted to place it on record that this is what we had actually signed,” she says, adding that she then sought to delay movement on the nuclear deal “until the court ruled on it”.
In a written response, Russia’s state nuclear agency, Rosatom, vehemently denied it had signed any binding contracts with SA. It stressed that the intergovernmental agreement it had signed with SA in September 2014 “was intended for laying the foundation for a strategic partnership, which would focus on the development of a comprehensive nuclear new-build programme”.
It added: “Again, the [intergovernment agreement] is not a contract nor does it guarantee a contract. [It] merely refers to what Russia was willing to provide if chosen as the preferred vendor at that time.”
I don’t even think they realised how much I jeopardised what they were doing. They assumed that I was so stupid, and that allowed me to delay their things for as long as possible. For me, it was simply to delay [SA’s nuclear deal with Russia] until the court set it aside