Sunday Times

Gordhan’s Gornado shakes up public enterprise­s

- By Ferial Haffajee

He’s bald. Stern. A pharmacist. She’s multi-hair-styled. Jolly. A lawyer. Yet Public Enterprise­s Minister Pravin Gordhan is taking over where former public protector Thuli Madonsela left off. Madonsela’s successor is a disaster-a-minute who has denuded the office, but Gordhan has taken on the role in spirit, if not in name, at public enterprise­s, where he has replaced the hapless Lynne Brown with vigour, changing the leadership of the companies at the heart of state capture in under three months. Gordhan plays a role that is somewhere between that of public protector and prime minister to President Cyril Ramaphosa. His imprimatur is on Ramaphosa’s economic ideas, while his department and ministry are at the centre of the war on corruption, which is where Madonsela located her office when she held the all-important job.

Gordhan marked his 100 days in office this week by an almost wholesale renewal of the boards of key state-owned enterprise­s. By Thursday, Eskom, Denel and Transnet had new permanent boards. Eskom gained a new CEO when the acting incumbent, Phakamani Hadebe, was confirmed in the role. Like Gordhan, he is messianic about fighting corruption.

He has started fraud investigat­ions into six senior managers at the utility, with five more facing disciplina­ry hearings. Hadebe has encouraged whistle-blowing at Eskom, and 250 matters are being probed with confirmati­on of corruption, fraud or irregulari­ty in 42,

Gordhan told parliament last week.

Gordhan has set his sights on Transnet, a hornet’s nest of corruption to rival Eskom. Its purchase of new trains enriched the Gupta family and their lieutenant Salim Essa to the tune of billions. It is said that

Gordhan will not rest until the money is returned.

This week, the cabinet confirmed Popo Molefe as interim board chairman with a full new board. Last week, Gordhan said he had accepted the resignatio­n of certain Transnet board members. The rest tried to hold on to their lucrative positions, but were also sent packing.

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall as they tried to explain why they should stay — almost all of them were personally chosen by Essa in connivance with Brown and previous Eskom chairman Ben Ngubane, and all lacked credibilit­y and experience. Now they are all gone, swept away by the Gornado.

In his own words, Gordhan sees his work as the “recapture” of state-owned companies by appointing boards with capacity, capability and integrity. Next, he wants to see skilled management put in place. No officials at the companies will be allowed to do business with their employers — a practice so rampant that Gordhan will be taking on powerful mafias. There will be lifestyle audits where graft is suspected.

For this, Gordhan could face the same fightback now bedevillin­g Ramaphosa, whose stance on provincial patronage is seeing him bank a growing number of political enemies. Patronage morphed into capture where the Gupta family’s entire empire was built on where state-owned enterprise­s controlled revenue flows. They were not the only network operating this way: at the diamond miner Alexkor, at the state forestry company Safcol and at the airports company Acsa there are similar mafias running their operations through securing and channellin­g procuremen­t budgets.

This new anticorrup­tion tsar is going to have his hands full as he stops the money flows and reduces the massive contingent liabilitie­s that the state-owned enterprise­s load onto the fiscus. Gordhan wants to turn around these companies to place them at the centre of the state’s growth and employment strategy without significan­t privatisat­ions or public-private partnershi­ps. It’s a tall order for a politician who is known to not want to stay longer than next year’s election, which gives him about a year to get the mafias jailed and turn the serial loss-making companies to profit.

In his own words, Pravin Gordhan sees his work as the ‘recapture’ of state-owned companies

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