Maseko leaves behind a success story at Telkom as outgoing chief executive
Clear and credible succession plan put in place at state-owned firm
“Fall fast... fall forward... don’t give half yeses... don’t carry the energy of the previous meeting into the next meeting... you can’t wait for the 12th round to throw a killer punch, you may not reach the 12th round...”
These might sound like clichés, but they helped shaped one man – an epitome of black excellence: Sipho Maseko, the outgoing CEO of Telkom.
He leaves Telkom in mid2022 with a sterling record of having delivered successive profits and a dividend to the government (the other significant shareholder) – over and above billions of taxes – with a clear and credible succession plan: a rare feat for state-owned enterprises these days, which are a slaughterhouse for black talent.
A month ago, the Telkom board announced that Serame Taukobong, Maseko’s excellent recruit, would be his successor, and last Friday Maseko announced that one of his best recruits, Lunga Siyo, would be the next CEO of Telkom Consumer, a significant Telkom operation.
Unlike many mediocre CEOs, Maseko, formerly a CEO of the oil major BP, leaves an SOE ready to box in a premier league.
Maseko, formerly the COO of mobile company Vodacom, leaves Telkom in an enviable position: No 3 after Vodacom and MTN; and with 15 million customers. And he departs with Telkom as a credible price contender to the duopoly.
With SA littered with a long list of black CEOs who have not succeeded (not failed, a formulation we use deliberately), what made Maseko succeed? A few factors.
At the outset, we shouldn’t forget how hard his path to today’s glossy has been. In 2009, Maria Ramos left Transnet for Absa, the banking group, and the board of the SOE scrambled to find a successor. Pravin Gordhan, formerly the head of the SA Revenue Service and now public enterprises minister, was picked as her successor, only to be told by Jacob Zuma, who was president at the time, that he would be the choice for political head of the national treasury.
In the next and probably last structured recruitment process, Maseko, a lawyer by training, emerged as the preferred successor to Ramos. Alas, ANC politics intervened.
The party told him he was not its choice, and he had to bow out in public.
Ironically, this is part of his success story at Telkom. That Maseko, a Black Consciousness Movement activist, wasn’t and opted not to join any of the ANC factions contributed to his success as Telkom CEO. This was also a key ingredient to the success of another successful black CEO of Telkom, Sizwe Nxasana.
By his own admission, Maseko also benefited from a successful partnership with his chairperson, the late Jabu Mabuza, a shrewd entrepreneur who knew his way around politics.
In a casual conversation, one of us once asked Mabuza how he managed to work with Zuma, the former president who is now serving a 15-month jail term for contempt of court, Mabuza answered with his typical charm: “When I was asked to be chairman of Telkom, I went to see him and I said, ‘Mr President, when I ask you for guidance I need a yes or no, not maybe’. And that’s how we worked.”
Politics played a big role in the pair’s success. It enabled them to be agile and nimblefooted, overcoming the other hurdles thrown at black executives (and not white ones) in SOEs including, but not limited to, the Public Finance Management Act.
Internally, however, Maseko managed to build a coherent team, often repeating motivational executive team-talk messages such as, “fall fast... fall forward... don’t give half yeses... don’t carry the energy of the previous meeting into the next meeting... you can t wait for the 12th round to throw a killer punch, you may not reach the 12th round...”
Now, it is up to the government, especially the new minister of communications and digital technologies, Khumbudzo Ntshaveni, whether Telkom is allowed to disrupt the duopoly’s festival in the public interest.