ANC needs a ‘Mavuso dose’
Ihad a little debate on social media with Prof Lesiba Teffo soon after the Busisiwe Mavuso/Eskom debacle. Once again, the professor opted to sail against the wind about the Eskom board member, who faced a chorus of criticisms for speaking the truth. Teffo asked me: “Please tell me that Ms Mavuso was wrong at the Scopa committee meeting?”
He went further: “South Africa deserves better, a new mix of political leaders is called upon to take the country forward. The youth is restless, your country needs you.”
My response was simple, that Eskom, or any other SOE for that matter, needed a “Mavuso dose” – someone who would stand up to the bullying ANC politicians, to tell them they must not blame anyone else but the elephant in the room: the governing party itself.
They let Jacob Zuma and the Guptas mess up the SOEs but expect the current management and board to be the ones to account for it. That’s the gist of Mavuso’s frustration.
Quite often, departmental and SOE officials are invited to appear before parliamentary portfolio committees to account for this and that. But most of the time it’s not about accounting, but barking up the wrong tree.
Instead of holding the executive to account for graft and mismanagement, ANC parliamentarians protected the executive by cushioning them from accountability. That’s a shoddy oversight job. If not, how did the Nkandla corruption fall through the cracks?
They should not make the new Eskom leadership the “fall guys” when we all know who messed up. This is not to imply the Eskom board should not execute their mandate to put Eskom back on track.
The Mavuso incidence exposed two things – that South Africa remains a chauvinistic society that treats women with contempt. Instead of humiliating Mavuso, you would have expected Scopa chair Mkhuleko Hlengwa to credit her for her boldness. As opposition, he should have asked Mavuso to elaborate about how she believed ANC put Eskom in a mess, as part of Scopa’s investigative oversight.
That we are currently experiencing continuous load shedding by Eskom and that other SOEs are on their knees are proof of the mess our politicians put us in – and Scopa’s failure to do its job well.
There was nothing untoward in Mavuso demanding accountability from the governing party. That was different to shifting the blame from the Eskom leadership.
No doubt Hlengwa was playing to the ANC gallery – wanting to impress the ANC segment of his committee, who felt insulted by Mavuso’s truth. He felt obliged to embarrass a smart woman by treating her like a schoolgirl who should behave before the headmaster.
Scopa had dropped the ball since the days of former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein, who chaired the watchdog committee with distinction. Feinstein set the bar too high for his successors, who have become ANC lackeys and proxies.
Feinstein disappointed the ANC by doing his job properly and famously exposed the arms deal graft. That is why the ANC ensured they chose the tamest opposition politician to chair Scopa. It needed someone it was confident would never rock the boat.
That explains why the governing party would never again dare to let the committee be chaired by the robust DA, which is the official opposition that should lead it, logically. They know that, by now, the DA would have rocked the boat – and would even have sent some ANC politicians to jail with evidence of financial mismanagement and graft in its possession.