On the Brink. Claire Bisseker
month. And it was only two months later, in mid-February, that Molefe’s appointment as CEO was announced.
Once Molefe was in charge, strange deals began happening. In early 2014 a consortium linked to the Guptas, China South Rail, secured a slice of a lucrative R50-billion contract to provide Transnet with 1 064 trains. The Guptas, it was subsequently reported, scored R5,3 billion in kickbacks on this deal alone.20
At the time, the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa complained to the Public Protector about ‘the implementation of opaque and underhand business dealings to line the pockets of a selected minority business and political elite’.21 But in government circles, Molefe was being praised, helped by the fact that Transnet’s profits seemed to be soaring.
Conversely, Eskom was foundering, unable to prevent a series of rolling blackouts (euphemistically dubbed ‘load-shedding’) that were hammering the economy. And it was chaos in the executive suites at Megawatt Park, as stand-in CEO Tshediso Matona was suspended, along with three executives. For what has never been quite clear. Insiders referred to Eskom as ‘Hollywood’ because there were so many people in acting positions.
So, Molefe, Mr Fix-It, was seconded to Eskom. Smart, and with a disarming ability to get employees on his side, it was, at least initially, a thumping success. Known to his staff as ‘Papa Action’, Molefe was soon being praised as the man who ‘ended load-shedding’. That is more myth than reality, as the truth was that electricity demand had plunged as economic growth came to a shuddering halt. But what is indisputable is that Eskom became far more professional and less chaotic under Molefe.
But, soon, awkward questions began to crop up about the extent to which Eskom seemed to be helping the Guptas. At first, Molefe batted them away, saying that wealthy individuals like the Ruperts and Oppenheimers also had ‘influence’. ‘The fact that they are wealthy and have influence doesn’t mean they have captured me. Influence is not capture. When I said they have influence, I don’t mean over me, I mean influence in general,’ he said during an interview on eNCA.22
Molefe claimed there was nothing unusual in the coal contracts given to the Gupta family, repeatedly arguing that the family was treated as any other.
Perhaps his version would have been allowed to stand were it not for Thuli Madonsela, a fiercely independent, 54-year-old lawyer, who had been born to a domestic worker and informal trader in Soweto. A devout ANC member, the unassuming Madonsela had been part of the team that drew up South Africa’s post-democracy Constitution.23 Perhaps mistaking her membership of the ANC for fealty, Zuma appointed Madonsela as the Public Protector for a seven-year term in 2009. This Chapter Nine institution is required to act as an ombudsman and investigate any misconduct in government. It was a move Zuma must have regretted every day since.
Madonsela, painstakingly deliberate and scrupulously fair, had become a cause célèbre for a series of blistering findings that had held powerful politicians to account – including Zuma himself, who was hauled over the coals for using state money to upgrade his home in Nkandla. It made her distinctly unpopular; ANC officials publicly lambasted her. Zuma cronies contorted themselves into knots arguing why her rulings shouldn’t apply.
But she stood firm in a stance that later led Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng to describe her as ‘the embodiment of a Biblical David’.24
It was a tension Madonsela felt acutely. ‘The struggles my office often faces have nothing to do with race or gender … surprisingly, it has never been about this younger woman calling out faults, but rather the “code of the mafia” that is problematic. We are breaking that unspoken rule of taking on “one of us”. That is just not how my team and I work. If you are in the wrong, even if your intentions were good, we are not going to turn our backs,’ she said.25
And, for the office of the Public Protector, the stakes didn’t get any higher than probing state capture. In March 2016, after Jonas reported that he had been ‘offered’ the position of finance minister by the Guptas, Madonsela received three requests to investigate state capture. It was a mammoth task.
Molefe, however, didn’t seem overly worried. Speaking to the Financial Mail the day before Madonsela’s ruling came out, he said, ‘We gave her all the documents she asked for. We explained this (pre-payment) wasn’t unusual, that we’d done it before, and there was nothing wrong with it. We didn’t make the payment so that the Guptas could pay Glencore. It was about the supply of coal.’26
Asked why it happened at a late-night board meeting, seemingly designed to help the Guptas in their hour of need, Molefe said that if the coal hadn’t been delivered, then there might have been cause for worry. ‘But it was delivered, and it addressed a real coal-supply problem we had.’
The next day, Madonsela released her eviscerating 355-page State of Capture report. Molefe’s world caved in. She described the ‘prepayments’ to Tegeta as possibly illegal, warning that Tegeta’s own conduct ‘could amount to fraud’. Her bottom line: ‘It appears that the conduct of the Eskom board was solely to the benefit of Tegeta in awarding contracts to them and, in doing so, [Eskom] funded the purchase of Optimum Coal Holdings.’27
And she crucified Molefe, who, she said, ‘did not declare his relationship with the Gupta family’. Not only had Ajay Gupta described Molefe as a ‘very good friend’, phone records showed that between August 2015 and March 2016 the two had spoken 58 times. In the space of four months, Molefe had visited Saxonwold (the suburb where the Guptas live) 19 times.
Madonsela also flayed Zwane, saying his trip to Switzerland flouted the Executive Members’ Ethics Act: ‘It is potentially unlawful for [Zwane] to use his official position of authority to unfairly and unduly influence a contract for a friend or, in this instance, his boss’s son at the expense of the state.’
Madonsela’s credibility – which had continued to rise over her seven-year tenure because of her iron-clad rulings – meant the release of her State of Capture report was like a bomb going off. Opposition parties demanded resignations; marches were planned; compromised boards of SOEs spent days locked in committee.
Two days later, Molefe had to present Eskom’s financial results at Megawatt Park, where he faced a phalanx of reporters whose sole interest was his response to Madonsela’s report rather than Eskom’s accounts. Famously, in the most iconic image of the saga, Molefe broke down in tears, overwrought, apparently, by the injustice of it all. ‘The Public Protector says my cellphone reflects that I was in Saxonwold 14 times, in the area of Saxonwold … There is a shebeen there. I think it is two streets away from the Gupta house. Now I will not admit or deny that I was going to the shebeen,’ he said.28
Eskom’s chairman, Ben Ngubane, a veteran politician of questionable efficacy, squarely blamed Madonsela: ‘Thuli Madonsela has struck a death blow against Eskom and against the people of South Africa. If we lose Brian, she will take the blame,’ he said.29
It was a hapless response from Eskom’s top brass, one that was easily lampooned by the public. The ‘Saxonwold Shebeen’, assumed to be fictional, sparked a series of internet-based images that were widely circulated. Then, a few days later, in an unexpected boon for governance at Eskom, Molefe announced he would resign.30 While he argued that Madonsela had made only ‘observations’, which were either based on ‘part-facts or simply unfounded’ in an incomplete report, he was leaving, he said, to ensure no further harm was done to Eskom.31
Few had sympathy with him. Sipho Pityana, a former senior member of the ANC who had turned to campaigning for Zuma’s removal, wrote an open letter to Molefe, saying he had thrown away ‘an excellent track record as a young black professional … for a place at the high table of the forces of state capture’.32
So, you can imagine the country’s surprise when Eskom announced on 12 May 2017 that Molefe would be returning as CEO. It sparked widespread outrage – even from within Molefe’s own coterie. The ANC described his reappointment as an ‘unfortunate and reckless’ decision by the Eskom board, given that nothing had changed since he’d quit. The decision was also ‘tone deaf to the South African public’s absolute exasperation and anger at what seems to be government’s lacklustre and lackadaisical approach