Professor Fix-It
Apart from holding the post of health ombud and doing coronavirus vaccine research, the much-accomplished professor Malegapuru William Makgoba now also has one of SA’s toughest jobs as interim chair of Eskom — which he wryly likens to being Bafana Bafana
My single most important aim is for load-shedding to disappear from the face of SA
— On 702 radio’s ‘Money Show’ with Bruce Whitfield in July
● There’s a strange dimension to the timing of my interview with professor Malegapuru William Makgoba. One of the many positions he currently occupies is that of interim chair of Eskom, and I ask him what alarmed him the most about the state of the embattled behemoth. “The fact that so many outsiders could come in and run the place,” he replies.
The next day there are yet more gob-smacking revelations at the Zondo commission detailing the rapacious looting that brought Eskom to its knees. Suzanne Daniels, former head of legal and compliance at Eskom, reveals she once stopped at a petrol station near Megawatt Park and Gupta enforcer Salim Essa pulled up in a black Maserati to offer her an R800m bribe if she “worked” with the Gupta gang.
Zondo is furious when Daniels admits she later met with Essa out of “morbid curiosity”. He interrogates her motives incredulously: “After he has offered you R800m — CORRUPTION! — you say he called you over a weekend, you agree to go and meet him because you are curious?! You should not be wanting to TALK to that person after that, Ms Daniels. You should not be wanting to take his calls after he has offered you R800m to do something wrong.”
Obscene avarice
Roll with it, deputy judge president. There’s no logic, no reasoning, no explanation when it comes to interpreting the motives of the charlatans, crooks and vultures that circled Eskom during the Zuma era.
I grapple with metaphors to describe the insatiable greed that dominated that period and am forced to turn to the ancients. It’s Virgil who captured the destructive nature of obscene avarice best: “Curst greed of gold, what crimes thy tyrant power has caused.”
In an SMS exchange with the Prof after this startling testimony I write: “It’s been pretty surreal speaking to you in a week of more Eskom revelations. Unbelievable.”
He replies: “For it to be run this way as is emerging from the commission is really shameful to us all. No words to describe what has emerged so far.
“In the end it’s our country and we must fix it.”
Well, Makgoba is the Professor Fix-It that President Cyril Ramaphosa turned to when he needed a new board chair in January this year. Initially the professor demurred because he already had a lot on his plate as the country’s first health ombud and deputy chair of the National Planning Commission. But our president’s persuasive powers are not only legendary, they’re historical, so in the end Makgoba agreed.
Looking for the obvious
During our interview over coffee (Earl Grey tea for the Prof) Makgoba says wryly that running Eskom is a bit like being the Bafana Bafana coach. “Everybody runs Eskom. Except the people who should run Eskom.”
So how does one go about one of the toughest jobs in the country? Makgoba says his whole career can be summarised as making complex things simple.
“As a basic scientist you look for things that are obvious, but people may not see. You look for an interpretation everybody knows but may not be able to solve, and try to provide a solution.
“We knew sorting Eskom out was urgent, knew it was a priority. Eskom affects all of our lives. It’s necessary for development, for our economic recovery and the wellbeing of people.
“The problems are well established and well known. So how could we work on simplifying the mess?”
Itchy ears
One of the board’s priorities was to hear group CEO André de Ruyter’s vision, “things he would like to do in order to achieve the Eskom he dreamt of when he applied for the job”.
De Ruyter, who was appointed at the same time as the Prof, had four key priorities: to restructure his executive; focus on grid reliability maintenance; cut costs and unbundle; and simplify the huge organisation as mandated by the president.
Eskom has become a four-letter word for South Africans and load-shedding our biggest gripe.
“As soon as you mention load-shedding every South African’s blood pressure must go up.” He smiles: “I tell people my ears start to itch because they are swearing at me now. I’ve never had such itchy ears in my life!
“I want to believe that this time next year some of the impacts of our priority projects will become more obvious to the country.”
Makgoba says he’s going to be strict on ethics, and the board will stick to its oversight role and not interfere in operations.
Makgoba is also involved in coronavirus vaccine research. Does he agree with the government’s strict lockdown strategy? After all, the economy shrank a massive 51% in the second quarter.
“You had to make a choice — save lives or save the economy. Anybody faced with this choice has no choice. You can’t get life back. You couldn’t leave people to die and say let them die, we’ll deal with the economy.
“The government has done exceptionally well. We should pat ourselves on the back.
“We all knew the economy would suffer. Now we need a mechanism to recover the economy.”
‘The Limpopo Nkandla’
Sitting down with Makgoba I’m reminded of the English humorist PG Wodehouse, who wrote: “I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”
Makgoba’s string of achievements is longer than one of those Stephen Hawking calculations that posit theories normal people don’t quite understand. It’s difficult not to veer into the realm of hagiography.
Among other things he’s a leading South African immunologist and physician. He recently wrote an article for Science magazine about institutional racism in the scientific world internationally.
He served as University of KwaZulu-Natal vice-chancellor for a decade. He says the most rewarding part of the job was signing graduation certificates. “These are documents students treasure for the rest of their lives.”
Once, while at a New Year’s Eve party at Victoria Falls, an old English couple bought him a bottle of champagne. When he asked why, they said: “Because you are in a photograph that hangs in our house in England. You signed that certificate and graduated our daughter.”
After 10 years he retired to his home village, where he had built a house. “A newspaper called it the Limpopo Nkandla.
“I wanted to look after my parents, they had done so much for me.”
Fat chance of that. Former president Jacob Zuma called him to serve a second stint on the National Planning Commission as deputy chair. This commission has just completed a comprehensive report for Ramaphosa. He won’t go into details, but says it’s an “honest review of what has been achieved and what has not been achieved. The economy is not transformed. Is the current model what we want for the future?”
Speaking truth to power
Since 1994, Makgoba has advised four South African presidents and close to 20 ministers. He’s known for his courage in speaking truth to power.
As Medical Research Council president he was one of only a few experts to speak out about president Thabo Mbeki’s crackpot Aids theories, a disastrous policy that cost at least 350,000 lives. He has been responsible for several major research initiatives around HIV/Aids, most notably the South African Aids Vaccine Initiative. Only three ANC leaders called him to express their support for his public stance: Nelson Mandela, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Zuma.
Justice Edwin Cameron paid tribute to Makgoba’s role in fighting Aids: “The clarion voice of truth speaking amidst the siren clamour of unscientific waywardness earned Makgoba few friends in the political establishment. But it enhanced his standing as a medical scientist faithful to his discipline and to canons of scientific inquiry.”
I ask him if he made an adversary in Mbeki. “I had never thought Mbeki and I were enemies, we just did not have the same understanding of this,” he says. “But I wouldn’t speak about, say, the economy, because I’m not an expert in that field.”
He continues: “During that time I went back to my village, and one of the elders said: “Poki – that was my childhood nickname – you don’t have to do research. You just have to come every weekend to see who is being buried. Parents are burying their children. This cannot be normal.”
“You learn a lot from ordinary people.” Makgoba grew up in the village of Schoonoord in Limpopo. The village produced three vice-chancellors and former health minister Aaron Motsoaledi, now minister of home affairs. All four had school principals for fathers and attended the Lutheran church. “I don’t know what was in the church’s water!”
One of these vice-chancellors is professor Mahlo Mokgalong, vice-chancellor of the University of Limpopo. He and Makgoba were in the same class from primary school, and were taken in the same van to Hwiti, their boarding school in Pietersburg. The third was older than the other two, a former vice-chancellor of Vista University, professor Mogobo Nokaneng.
Political awareness
I ask when he first became aware of racial discrimination. “In Schoonoord. There was a police station run by Afrikaners, and we were always harassed. I knew it was apartheid, and it was unjust and unfair, but I didn’t think of it politically.
“It was only when I entered university in 1971 that I became politically aware.” This was the University of Natal medical school and the era of Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement.
In 1979 he went to Oxford, where he became a doctor of philosophy and then first assistant to the president of the Royal College of Physicians, who judged his research as “unquestionably outstanding”.
So what gives somebody from rural SA during the apartheid era the confidence to excel in the toffee-nosed corridors of Oxford University?
“My mother is from our chief’s family, so I had a special place as a grandchild to the local chief. I was one of his favourite grandchildren.”
One day his teacher called Makgoba and his parents to a meeting. He said he had taught many children, but Makgoba was special. “Just leave him to be what he wants to be.”
“That was the best advice I could get. That has boosted my confidence my whole life. I was only 11. It was 1963.”
Life Esidimeni
As the country’s first health ombud
Makgoba received universal praise for excoriating the Gauteng health department in a report released in February 2017 on the Life Esidimeni disaster. The Gauteng health department had cancelled its contract with Life Esidimeni and sent 2,000 patients with severe mental illnesses to NGOs, government facilities and home care. The consequences were pitiful. Patients starved, were neglected and shunted around like cattle. More than 140 died.
Again, I ask him what shocked him the most. “Senior people responsible for the project were in denial about accountability and responsibility. They always pleaded they never expected that there would be deaths.
“It’s extraordinary to take patients from a safe environment and put them in an unsafe environment of really poor quality and expect anything but tragedy to unfold.”
“You don’t mince your words,” I remark. “I’m very careful about what I write. I wouldn’t write something that I can’t defend. I learnt this from the late Es’kia Mphahlele, who came from the same area. He told me, ‘When you write, make sure every word and every paragraph is where it’s supposed to be.’ ”
A young shepherd
How on earth do you manage to fit so much in a day, I ask.
“It’s so funny, lots of people always assume I am busy. I am not. I wake up at five every morning. I’m sitting here talking to you, and fully engaged with you, but lots of ideas are running through my mind as well,” he says.
Maybe it’s growing up in rural Limpopo, the eldest of nine children. Tending to his father’s goats and sheep as a young shepherd gave him lots of quiet time to cultivate a passion for the natural world and how things worked.
“I formulated a lot of ideas and my personality evolved out of that.
“I think there is lots of exaggeration about hard work. We have enough time in the day to do things meaningfully, but we waste time on other things. I’m generally reserved, I don’t party much. I enjoy being in my own space, and reflecting on things profoundly or being with my wife.”
Whew. We don’t need to haul out the bunsen burner and test tubes to prove that “loafing” is not part of the Makgoba lexicon.