Is the ANC’s cadre deployment committee delaying the appointment of the Eskom CEO?
20 September 2023
Reports that the Minister of Public Enterprises, Pravin Gordhan, has sent the Eskom Board back to the drawing board on the appointment of a new Eskom CEO creates a justifiable suspicion that the ANC cadre deployment committee may once again be trying to hijack the process to appoint a cadre approved by Luthuli House.
While Gordhan hides behind Eskom’s Memorandum of Incorporation to justify his refusal to consider the recommendation made by the Eskom Board, the amount of time he took to communicate this position to the Board raises suspicion that he may be running a parallel process to find a candidate that is palatable to the ANC.
With the explosive revelations of corruption and ANC-run cartels at Eskom, by former CEO Andre de Ruyter, still fresh in the ANC government’s mind – it won’t be surprising if the ANC decides to look for a pliant candidate who does the bidding of Luthuli House and not interfere with the corrupt networks at Eskom.
Considering the ANC’s storied history of interference and corruption at Eskom, it will be hardly news if turns out that the ANC’s cadre deployment committee has decided to insert itself into the process to find a new CEO for Eskom. After all, this is the same party that deployed the likes of Matshela Koko and Bryan Molefe to the entity, only to leave it reeling under state capture and institutional collapse.
It simply does not make sense that 7 months after the departure of Andre de Ruyter, Gordhan and the ANC government do not see the urgency of finding a new CEO for an entity that has literally brought South Africa’s economy to the brink of collapse. The only reasonable explanation is that the ANC is trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic while giving the Eskom Board the false impression that they are still in charge of the CEO appointment process.
As Gordhan drags his feet, presumably to give the ANC deployment committee time to find their lackey, Eskom’s precipitous decline has continued apace and loadshedding is scheduled to be the highest on record for 2023. Unless Gordhan comes clean on the delay in the appointment of a new Eskom CEO, the official working assumption should be that he has delegated the appointment process to the unelected and opaque ANC cadre deployment committee.
Issued by Ghaleb Cachalia, DA Shadow Minister of Public Enterprises, 20 September 2023
