Malegapuru Makgoba
I have known and worked with Dr Sibongiseni Maxwell Dhlomo, the former Deputy Minister of Health, since 1985, when he was a final-year medical student at the Nelson Rolihlahla School of Medicine, UKZN.
We became friends because he often drove me to my residence after school. He was part of a group of young students
including Drs Steve Komati, now a physician and Victor Ramathesela, a sports medicine specialist who is also a DJ and a
television commentator.
Also deserving of mention are Aquina Thulare, a senior official responsible for the management of the NHI, Prof Maphoshane Nchabeleng who is head and professor of Microbiology at Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University and the late Tshimbiluni Mathivha who was a professor of Cardiology at the University of Pretoria.
Bongani Mawethu Mayosi was a Professor of Medicine at UCT and I often tutored them and gave them extra clinical tuition over weekends at the King Edward VIII Hospital. My goal was to encourage these medical graduates to take postgraduate research studies after qualifying rather than taking the option of private practice, which was very popular at the time.
Bongani was much younger and was behind the Sibongiseni Group at medical school. Happily, they all took my advice and are playing important roles within the health system.
Dr Dhlomo was arrested and detained over Christmas in 1985 and his father often visited my office to share his pain and to search for his whereabouts.
During these visits he was often accompanied by Nozizwe Charlotte Madlala-Routledge, the chairperson of the Natal
Organisation of Women (NOW).
He was sentenced to imprisonment on Robben Island but we maintained contact. He continued studying psychology and
sociology while on the island, completing a BA degree through UNISA and I provided him support.
I then received a large case document from Gay Johnson MacDougall, a well-known Human Rights lawyer at the US
Congress, and was requested to provide a character reference for him, which I gladly did.
After his release, Sibongiseni Dhlomo served as special advisor to the vice-chancellor and as a member of the Interim
Executive Committee at the establishment of UKZN in 2004, and we continued our working relationship when he joined the KZN Department of Health, later becoming an MEC for Health and chaired the Health Portfolio Committee in Parliament.
I worked with him as Health Ombud when he was Deputy Minister of Health. Dr Dhlomo is a coordinator, he is gentle, caring and passionate about South Africa’s success but in particular is dedicated to South Africa’s national health system and its quality.
He is an ardent advocate for the National Health Insurance Bill. Dr Dhlomo understood the political dynamics and culture of KZN better than I ever could.
I also served with Minister Pravin Jamnadas Gordhan, a shaper in Belbin’s team role categorisation. Gordhan is a Minister with a penchant for interference and at times undermines the people he appoints, so much so that at times he is referred to as minister of ‘Command and Control’ (notably by Ghaleb Cachalia of the Democratic Alliance (DA).
Gordhan was the Minister of Public Enterprises. I initially chaired the Social, Ethics and Sustainability Committee of the
Eskom Board chaired by Dr Jabu Mabuza. I was subsequently appointed as interim chairperson of the Eskom Board when Jabu Mabuza resigned, and he later passed away.
Our mandate was to stop the widespread looting of state capture and set up principles of good corporate governance at
Eskom. I served a full term on the Board and the Minister requested me to continue serving while he reviewed – rather than replaced – the Board.
For 18 months this review continued, but it was never finalised despite several reminders, requests and empty promises that he would address the matter urgently.
However, the Minister kept ducking and diving; he was as slippery as an eel. However, much later he did confirm that he had ‘done what he could’ in complementing the board.
He then claimed that the matter was now ‘out of his hands’. Was it stuck at the ANC Cadre Deployment Committee, asked Radio 702’s Clement Manyathela.
But Gordhan would not be drawn in and would not say. We respected each other but for some unexplained reason, there
seemed to be a trust deficit between us.
I served in the Eskom Board that prepared Eskom’s presentation to the Zondo Commission on state capture; a board selection committee that interviewed and recommended Andre de Ruyter’s appointment as GCE; and a Board that initiated the implementation of the unbundling (‘divisionalisation’) of Eskom into three divisions, namely Transmission, Distribution and Generation as required by government.
But the process was delayed by the Department of Public Enterprises and the Minister, who dragged their heels in appointing the independent board of the Transmission Company.
As Anton Eberhard explains in his article headed ‘Ministers have let Ramaphosa down on the unbundling of Eskom’ in
BusinessDay of 16 January 2023, the Board that under Ms Mandy Rambaros led the Eskom Transition Programme, which is now entrenched.
And when the ambassadors of the UK, USA and the EU, visited South Africa to consider and finalise the USD8.5 billion
financing for approval at COP26, they needed to know and confirm that the Eskom Board supported this venture.
The Board did indeed support this programme fully. The same Board had reported several high-level state capture-related cases of corruption and looting to the SAPS and courts without much progress.
The same Board had recovered some looted monies from a few companies such as ASEA Brown Boveri (ABB). This was the same Board that worked jointly with the NPA and SIU; a Board that initiated the Eskom Skills Audit and Organisational Culture Change with Ms. Elsie Pule, executive HR; a Board that together with Phillip Dukashe, executive generation; Jan Oberholzer, chief operating officer; and Calib Cassim, chief financial officer, identified the three troublesome power stations, namely Duvha, Majuba and Thuthuka, for focused external supervision and support.
The same Board also reversed a major decision on the Econ oil tender, saving Eskom approximately R10b. I served on a Board that provided the Minister and the President with a comprehensive response to the Zondo Commission’s report.
The Board I served refused to approve the Karpowership tender for its 20-year term and lack of indemnity; I served on a Board that jointly, with the executive, prepared the basis for the so-called Presidential Energy Crisis Action Plan to ‘fix Eskom’.
The plan was prepared in conjunction with a small team of experts in the electricity field. The team of experts was chaired by Dr Bonang Mohale, President of BUSA, and Prof Anton Eberhard and Chris Yellen were members of the team.
This plan had been in the making since Andre de Ruyter was appointed GCE of Eskom on 6 January 2020 and was now well defined. The plan was initially shelved and disregarded by the Minister of Public Enterprises over time, only to be resuscitated when the disquiet, pressure and crisis of load shedding was mounting.
The plan had been modified and refined over this period but essentially it retained the basic elements of ‘additional megawatt capacity and fixing the Eskom plant’.
The load shedding crisis has gone on for too long. It not only impacts on the wellbeing and lives of South Africans but also on the economy and development of the country. It is a crippling crisis.
It is common cause that the Eskom coal fleet was poorly maintained for a long time. Equally, we know that there was a period when Eskom Executives were instructed to keep the lights on at all costs i.e., running the units hard beyond their capacities.
The units are completely run down, becoming unpredictable and unreliable with multiple repeated breakdowns. That is the reality staring at Eskom’s executive management.
No amount of political shouting, screaming or intimidation can correct this. These machines are simply following the laws of physics, mechanics and not politics.
Politics and ideology will never resolve the electricity crisis. The ANC-led government has over 15 years failed abysmally to resolve the Eskom crisis using politics and ideology.
How many times or how long must/should you fail before you recognise that the method or approach does not work. Some of the ANC politicians have very little understanding of the complexity of the electricity problem and its solution.
The level of understanding is underscored by timeframes for stopping load shedding. Some government ministers claim to be able to stop load shedding in six months; others at the end of the year; yet others in two years and others have no clue.
For a long time, the Board of Eskom advised the Minister that it was impossible to expect the current Eskom fleet to attain a 75% energy availability factor (EAF). However, the Minister would not budge, and despite this advice, he insisted that the 75% EAF must be achieved.
We were later promised an EAF of 60% by 31 March 2023, however the measured EAF on that date was recorded as 52%. A real mismatch between politics and science and technology.
Electricity generation is a complex scientific and technological process. The generation of electrons does not understand,
listen to, or read Das Kapital.
To resolve this ongoing crisis, the following should happen:
- Read and internalise the recommendations on Eskom contained in the NDP, dated August 2012.
- Resolve and re-align policy and governance uncertainty at Eskom.
- Politics, ideology, politicians and politically-aligned senior staff, cadre deployed or not, should be recused or removed from Eskom.
- Experts in the field of electricity should be brought in to resolve the crisis.
- The experts must be given a specific mandate and be left to resolve the crisis without political meddling or interference.
- The experts must be given autonomy to practise their trade.
- The approach used for COVID-19, of appointing an independent ministerial advisory committee of health scientists with
modifications should be adopted i.e., appoint top-class experts in electricity. - Politicians cannot suddenly become electricity scientists or experts through briefings or surfing the internet. It’s admirable that they
are briefed, but this does not convert them to experts, so they should remain humble. - The re-purposing programme of the current Eskom coal fleet must be accelerated to avoid a total grid collapse.
- Koeberg needs an extension for another 20 years. After 20 years Koeberg will be shut down.
- So, to plan for the future, and for the development of South Africa, a needed mix of energy is required. We should therefore
start building a new Koeberg now and possibly double the capacity of the current grid. These actions must commence now. - Importantly, we must suspend ad nauseum dead-end debates … and implement.
President Ramaphosa has been let down by his own ministers. DA leader John Steenhuisen pointed this out to the president’s Security cluster ministers during the 2021 July riots.
The probe on the Digital Vibes scandal and the then Health Minister is ‘ongoing’ two years later; and Prof Anton Eberhard called a spade a spade when he pointed out how Minister Gordhan has let down the President on the Eskom electricity crisis.
However, the President retained these Ministers who failed him and the country, but critically he gave them the authority to resolve the crisis. Surely this was ill-advised, if not foolish.
As Albert Einstein once said, ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them’. The definition of a fool is someone who does the same thing repeatedly, expecting different results.
This is what the ANC government has done for the past 15 years. The president’s cabinet by all assessments was the weakest to lead the country, deliver services and understand planning and strategy.
This was a cabinet very allergic to implementation. However, it was his cabinet. If birds of a feather do flock together, then the President and Minister Gordhan were amongst these ‘flocking birds’.
Finally, a private security company was hired to investigate the threat of sabotage and corruption. During this period the budget deficit was gradually reduced and corporate governance was improved.
I am a firm believer that the face of an organisation is its Chief Executive Officer rather than its board chairman; that the role of the board is oversight and strategic and not operational, meddlesome or ‘activist’ as former Minister Gordhan seemed to believe.
There is no clause for activism in the Company Act or the King Code of Corporate Governance; I also believe it is not the business nor the competence of the board chairperson to conduct annual assessments of the board members.
Members of the board are senior and experienced individuals who do not need this type of ‘kindergarten control’ or assessment. I also believe that the role of the board is not only to hold the executive accountable but also to ‘support’ and ‘guide’ them to succeed in their operational task.
That Eskom is in a mess and continues to be messy is a tendency that began in the late 1990s because of ANC policy ‘missteps and a failure to take advice from experts’.
This current mess has been two decades in the making. This is common cause, as both President Mbeki and President Ramaphosa have acknowledged.
The ruling party must take full responsibility as the two Presidents have done. However, the relevant Ministers did not accept the blame. They continued to speak with forked tongues and at times they contradicted one another to create policy uncertainty.
It is indeed ironic that the very ministers who were part of the chain of command that led to the mess at Eskom were given the authority to get rid of people who were trying their best to solve the Eskom problem.
They should have been removed and would have been removed in a normal democracy, but ours is not normal; it’s a ‘miracle’ democracy.
When Ms Busi Mavuso, a member of the Eskom Board, had the so-called ‘robust’ exchanges with Scopa and its chairperson, Honourable Hlengwa, the Department of Public Enterprises criticised her conduct publicly.
All Busi had said was that the ANC government must take accountability and responsibility for the mess Eskom is in, something which is common cause.
She was not given credit but was instead criticised harshly. I then received a strange phone call from the Department of Public Enterprises instructing me ‘to do something about this board member’.
The tone and subtext I understood to mean that I should reprimand or ask her to step down from the board. Instead, I called a board meeting to discuss the matter and her stance was unanimously supported.
Judging by the degree of load shedding, Busi must be having the last laugh. In a Mail & Guardian article dated 20 to 26 January 2023 and titled ‘The Eskom Killers’, of the 24 ‘killers’ listed 13 (54.2%) were politicians and seven were politically-Gupta related appointees, the three Gupta brothers and Tshediso Matona, who was unceremoniously removed as GCE, allegedly on the instructions of former president Zuma and the Gupta-appointed Board of Mr Tsotsi and Dr Ben Ngubane.
Importantly, Minister Gordhan features amongst this illustrious group. Politicians, politics and ANC ideology ‘killed’ Eskom in a period of just over 25 years through cadre deployment, looting and confusing good corporate governance with stealing.
Minister Pravin Gordhan is a struggle veteran, the former Commissioner of SARS who set the foundations of the revenue service on its way of excellence, world-class performance and success, the Minister of Finance and a qualified pharmacist.
He is a graduate of UDW and a role model for many students and political activists of the time. A man of principle and integrity who understands business and finance.
He is committed to excellence and the success of our young democracy. He eschews corruption and worse with the grand-scale looting that took place within the SOEs.
However, leading a revenue collecting service such as SARS does not equate or come anywhere near/close to leading a complex science, engineering and technology organisation that Eskom is.
Collecting revenue is totally different from generating electricity, a very complex scientific and technological project that should be devoid of politics but understood scientifically and technologically.
I repeat: Electrons do not read nor understand Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Karl Marx’s philosophy. An industrial action at SARS has virtually no impact on the wellbeing of South Africans, unlike an industrial action often accompanied by sabotage and property destruction at Eskom.
The Minister appreciated very little of the pervasive toxic, racially charged environment of Eskom between workers and the management.
This toxic environment affected the strategies and pace at which one could undertake transformation. There was little understanding of this critical factor.
His greatest weakness as is popularly experienced and reported widely is a passion for interference, intervention, micromanagement, meddlesome behaviour and undermining the board and executive.
He has a misguided belief that his way is the only way to solve complex problems. Contrary to reports of alleged racism by Themba Godi and Adv Dali Mpofu SC, I never observed or experienced racism from Pravin Gordhan. He is not a racist.
Some journalists often inquired how I ‘got on’ with Minister Gordhan because of the way he treated them with disrespect and at times arrogance. He remains in total denial of the many cumulative failures of the government and his department in the electricity crisis and the policy contradictions that continue to confuse the operations and governance of Eskom under his former political leadership.
On this aspect he simply refused to take accountability and responsibility. He appeared to be a very square peg in a round hole.
Prof Anton Eberhard, a world-renowned energy expert, former NPC Commissioner and a member of President Ramaphosa’s ‘war room on Eskom’ puts it this way: ‘I’ll be surprised if CEO de Ruyter does not depart @ Eskom_SA soon. An impossible job, misaligned board, and a suspicious minister who contacts his management directly, spied on by the state, inadequate police action vs corruption. He’s helped deliver the JETP@COP27. Good time to leave?’ As we now know, De Ruyter has left.
In his hard-hitting article ‘The problem(s) with South Africa’ in City Press of 2 October 2022, Peter Vundla describes Minister Gordhan thus: ‘Much can also be said of Pravin Gordhan, whose effortless superiority, interference in all things and rule by sleight of hand earned him the much-deserved sobriquet of prime minister’.
Even before Peter Vundla’s characterisation of Pravin Gordhan, the prescient Bathabile Dlamini of the ‘smallanyana skeletons’ had said this of Pravin Gordhan in an article in the Mail & Guardian of 16 April 2017 titled ‘Gordhan only deals with people who say ‘Yes Baas’ to him. “He enjoys harassing other people; he enjoys chastising other people; he enjoys bullying other people;.
It’s his hobby. He wants to be followed by everyone. He has feelings of grandeur. He thinks he is bigger than everyone in the world’. He tends to butt heads with independent, thinking people.
Nothing comes this close to describing a Messiah!
I do relate to these descriptions. His legacy is in setting up a world-class South African Revenue Service (SARS) and fighting state capture corruption, but, he is the Minister who failed to defend Eskom and Mr Andre de Ruyter while Andre was under attack from his cabinet colleagues, and failed the country at Eskom and other SOEs such as SAA, despite his long illustrious struggle career.
Perhaps South Africa is not only a ‘miracle democracy’ but also a country blessed with emerging Messiahs. With so much discord within Eskom, so much policy and governance confusion, so much racial tensions, low trust deficit and poor political leadership, transformation at Eskom was impossible to undertake.
In total I served with seven cabinet ministers and one deputy minister in the 5th and 6th Administrations.
It is now apparent that ministers Sibusiso Bhengu, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, Ben Ngubane, Kader Asmal, Naledi Pandor, Trevor
Manuel, and Aaron Motsoaledi distinguished themselves in advancing transformation in their respective portfolios.
They all had deep knowledge and understanding of their portfolios. Their legacies are a testimony to their works. In contrast,
Ministers Manto Msimang-Tshabalala, Essop Pahad, and Pravin Gordhan have let the transformation project down.
President Mandela was royalty and unquestionably belonged to a different generation and type of leadership (being traditional,
sophisticated and championing a modern democracy); President Mbeki was like a business company CEO.
This is an edited excerpt from Malegapuru Makgoba’s Leadership for Transformation since the Dawn of South Africa’s Democracy, which is available at local bookstores for R360.
