Eskom, Armscor dramas a perfect script for soap opera
November 16, 2009
By Donwald Pressly
If last week is anything to go by, we could see Bobby Godsell back in the chair at Eskom or even appointed acting chief executive by the end of this week. Last week we had the former chief executive, Jacob Maroga, bouncing back at his Megawatt Park office after apparently declaring that he had not lost his job.
However, on the second day he was barred from the office by the acting chairman, Mpho Makwana.
Godsell resigned apparently unhappy with how the government had handled the board's acceptance of Maroga's resignation.
What a remarkable circus the whole matter has been.
Barely was the nation getting a glimpse of the boardroom shenanigans of Eskom when events at Armscor provided yet another potential soap script.
The very man who had alerted the nation to the enormous cost of the Airbus A400M aircraft, Armscor chief executive Sipho Thomo, was the target of the parastatal's chairman, Popo Molefe. Like at Eskom, the board had decided the chief executive should go, Molefe reported to MPs, but Thomo was having none of it.
One can understand why Maroga and Thomo, who until recently was hardly a household name, want to hang on to their jobs. Who else would pay them millions of rand a year plus bonuses while also providing them with low-interest housing loans and private jets and vehicles. It is far too much of a comfortable life on the inside.
One simply doesn't need Sewende Laan or Dallas for an insight into fictional accounts of the madness that seems to prevail among South Africa's public sector leaders. Who needs JR Ewing when we have Thomo and Maroga?
Who needs George W Bush when we have President Jacob Zuma? Apparently Zuma intervened to resolve the Eskom crisis, but failed to convince Godsell to stay, even though it appears that he was backing him. One will never know what happened at their meeting, but Zuma's intervention appears not to have worked out very well at all.
The two positive outcomes of these dramas are that the use of the race card seems to have - to a large extent - run out of currency, and that competence is being lauded. The National Union of Mineworkers and ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe both came out strongly in Godsell's defence.
It was a way of rebuking Maroga, who muttered about a white conspiracy in a document written for the Eskom board. Godsell was also praised for the role he had played in negotiations with unions when he was AngloGold Ashanti's boss.
Now there is street credibility if there ever was creed. Public Enterprises Minister Barbara Hogan also heaped praise on Godsell last Thursday, thus providing a fitting end to a week where her ministry had maintained a stony - and rumour fuelling - silence.
Perhaps we can, indeed, turn it into a weekly episode: "The Power Game: Whoever is left, switch off the lights."
|
|
