SHOOTING THE MESSENGER

Along with André de Ruyter, the FM’s former deputy editor probably had the worst job in SA. His exit leaves the utility poorer

Eskom feels all the more brittle now that its spokesperson, Sikonathi Mantshantsha, has left the utility, a week after CEO André de Ruyter. Mantshantsha, who until 2019 was the FM’s deputy editor, filled a vital role at Eskom as the interface between the public and a company that has become easy to despise.

He is universally respected among journalists as someone who clawed his way to the top of his profession and showed willingness to risk everything in pursuit of the truth.

His ascent is all the more remarkable for how it began: on the Transkei coast, brought up by three grandmothers and a grandfather, whose only exposure to the media was through an old transistor radio. His ambition then was to join the army, and use this as a passage into the legal fraternity.

Things didn’t work out as planned — his mother brought him to Daveyton, in Gauteng, where he endured a school where the teachers were absent more often than not. After school, he took a few jobs (like gardening for R50 a day and as a bank teller) before landing a gig as a messenger for Brait Securities.

“To get to work, I needed to wake up at 3am from Daveyton, catch a taxi and an hour later I’d catch a train from Daveyton station which would take another two hours to drop me at Park Station, and then I’d sprint across to the old Johannesburg Stock Exchange. With some luck, I’d be there at 8.15,” he told Bruce Whitfield some years ago.

Though he earned R900 a month after transport costs, he saved enough to do a computer course. “By the time I got retrenched at Brait, I was already trading equities and bonds — I’d taught myself, with the help of the people that worked there, [and] I could now get a job at UBS Investment Bank,” he said.

Retrenched later from UBS, he landed a job as a data capturer at Media24. But Mantshantsha, nothing if not bold, immediately hit up Rikus Delport, then the editor of Finance Week, for a job.

“He asked me, ‘Can you write?’ And I said: ‘Maybe, but I’ve been reading your magazine for the past five years. I didn’t understand what you were writing about, but I understood a thing or two about shares.’”

From there a famous career began. He joined Bloomberg in 2010 and moved to Times Media in 2012 before becoming investment editor at the FM in 2015 and deputy editor a year later. Thanks to his excoriating Eskom exposés, warning about the exact problems now keeping the country in darkness, he was awarded business media’s highest accolade, Sanlam Financial Journalist of the Year, in 2017. As Whitfield wryly observed: “No wonder CEOs get paid so much, because they’ve got to take calls from people like Sikonathi.”

But this, also, is why he was perhaps De Ruyter’s smartest appointment and why the utility is all the poorer for his exit.

Here was a man who infuriated Eskom’s former top brass by spilling the beans on what was happening during state capture ex-CEO Matshela Koko complained to the press ombudsman about his FM cover story detailing the secret Dentons report in 2017, (“The Rot Inside Eskom”), but Mantshantsha doubled down, revealing even more damning antics.

De Ruyter, by turning Eskom’s most lacerating critic into its public advocate, saw the chance to demonstrate his bona fides.

It was a strategy that served Eskom well until last week. We all know how De Ruyter’s tenure ended: ousted by a supine board for daring to suggest the utility represented a “feeding trough” for the ANC, and acting “disrespectfully” to a shareholder whose behaviour, by any rational standard, warrants little respect. As luck would have it, Mantshantsha’s three-year contract ended at the same time. But he wouldn’t have stayed anyway.

It was a merciless job: quantifying to the public, on a daily basis, by how many megawatts his company was short of being able to provide the service it was supposed to. Few people have been required to confront state failure, on such a visceral basis, every day.

Mantshantsha, while driving to his family home in the Transkei this week, told the FM that his time at Eskom was the “greatest learning curve”.

What he got from being inside the beast was corroboration of the worst things he’d suspected: criminal gangs, political meddling and Olympic-level corruption.

“What I learnt is that everything I ever wrote about Eskom remains as true today as it was when I wrote it,” he says.

As for what he’ll do next, he’ll spend some time in the Eastern Cape, then come back and “find a job”.

So what will Eskom do now that he’s gone? Its acting spokesperson is Daphne Mokwena, who was previously operations and maintenance manager. The board, in the rare moments when it’s not bending over backwards to appease the shareholder, will surely want to address this.

But as dire as load-shedding became, Eskom could put on a brave front thanks to Mantshantsha’s phlegmatism. It recalls the era of relative calm when the equally well-respected Hilary Joffe (now Business Day editor-at-large) was spokesperson during the Brian Dames years.

Communication during a crisis is critical, and with luck Eskom has learnt not to offer false hope. On this score, Mantshantsha was exemplary, epitomising George Washington’s sentiment that it’s better to offer no excuse than a bad one.

If only our ministers had taken this on board, rather than surround themselves with sycophants whose career progression is proportional to their ability to massage the truth for the haughty egotists they report to.