Pravin Gordhan’s 5-year tenure as Minister of Public Enterprises has turned SOEs into a financial wasteland.
15 October 2023
On Tuesday last week, the DA exposed how – in the past 5 years, the Minister of Public Enterprises, Pravin Gordhan, has triggered an unprecedented governance chaos at Executive and Board levels in State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), as most entities were either operating with interim Boards, acting CEOs, or with no Executive heads at all.
The damage inflicted by Gordhan’s disastrous tenure goes beyond Board and management levels and also extends to the financial health of SOEs. DA research has revealed that, over the past 5 years, the 7 SOEs that fall under the Department of Public Enterprises, namely – Eskom, Transnet, Denel, Safcol, Alexkor, SAA and SA Express, have incurred R300 billion in irregular expenditure, and R1,3 billion in fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
This regression is consistent with the findings made by the Auditor General in her presentation to Parliament on Wednesday last week, where she sounded alarms on recurring losses, failure to implement audit recommendations, continued failure to meet targets and overall inability to meet service delivery objectives.
The breakdown in financial controls and prudent financial management is a direct indictment to Gordhan’s avowed promise to clean up SOEs that were ravaged by State Capture and wholesale looting under Jacob Zuma. Not only has Gordhan failed to stop the bleeding, he has made it worse by failing to provide a clear plan to fix the precarious financial health of these entities.