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Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan has rejected the Eskom board’s recommendations for a new CEO, sending the nine-month process back to square one.
News24 reports that there were four front-runners for the job, three of which were submitted to the Ministry of Public Enterprises for deliberation.
Three of the four short-listed candidates’ names were already known: former Eskom manager and chemical engineer Dan Marokane, NRS Association chair Vally Padayachee, and former Eskom Rotek Industries director Ayanda Noah.
News24 reports that the fourth candidate was former Eskom CFO Paul O’Flaherty.
Gordhan’s spokesperson Ellis Mnyandu said in a statement that the recruitment for a new Eskom CEO would be finalised soon.
“The recruitment process for appointing the GCEO of Eskom must be transparent, run with integrity, and be beyond reproach. A rigorous vetting process of the candidates is required,” Mnyandu said.
“This is a requirement that the shareholder cannot deviate from. To that end, the process must be subjected to enhanced due diligence so that all necessary considerations are considered in making the appointment. The process will be concluded soon.”
Eskom board chairman Mpho Makwana told journalists in August that the appointment of a new CEO was subjected to “enhanced due diligence” and was in the hands of Gordhan’s department.
“We are, from time to time, receiving questions as part of the enhanced due diligence the shareholder and board have had to do,” Makwana said.
Extra care was being taken “given the significance of this appointment at this point and, I guess, the painful lessons we learnt from our past,” he said.
“The [memorandum of incorporation] of Eskom requires that once the board is done with the selection process, they have to obtain the shareholder’s concurrence,” Makwana stated.
Eskom’s shareholder is the South African government, with the Department of Public Enterprises and Gordhan acting as custodians.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, accompanied by Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe and Mining Indaba Advisory Board Chairperson Mpho Makwana, arrives at the Cape Town International Convention Centre to deliver the keynote at the 25th annual Investing in Africa Mining Indaba. February 2019.“Our shareholder have their own processes they have to go through with their own colleagues and principles,” stated Makwana.
Makwana said he imagines nobody wants a new CEO appointed only to have questions raised about the due diligence done.
“The SOC [state-owned company] environment is highly contested,” Makwana said.
“The bigger the SOC, the greater the contestation. The bigger the SOC, the bigger the challenges of toxicity and all manner of people who want to influence who gets appointed to this position.”
Eskom has had no permanent CEO since André de Ruyter’s early departure in February 2023.
De Ruyter’s resignation was announced in December, and his last day at the company would have been 31 March 2023.
Makwana’s statement about “painful lessons” refers to De Ruyter’s whirlwind exit for the state-owned power utility, which included an explosive TV interview and a tell-all book several months later.
Following a bombshell interview on E-tv’s My Guest Tonight with Annika Larsen in February, De Ruyter left Eskom with immediate effect — around a month and a half earlier than planned.
During the interview, on Larsen’s prompting, De Ruyter called Eskom a feeding trough for the ANC.
He also relayed allegations that senior ANC politicians were complicit in the Mpumalanga coal cartels — but stopped short of naming the alleged mafia bosses.
De Ruyter earned further scorn from the ruling party when he said they were being ridiculed behind their backs by people from other countries for calling one another “comrade”.
André de Ruyter on My Guest Tonight with Annika Larsen. Source: @Annikalarsen1/TwitterFollowing the interview, Makwana said the former CEO spent his time “chasing renewables” rather than focusing on fixing existing coal plants.
He also said De Ruyter dodged a performance review by resigning.
ANC Secretary General Fikile Mbalula threatened legal action against De Ruyter unless he named the senior ANC officials allegedly involved in Eskom corruption.
Interestingly, no one who knows the names has been willing to disclose them publicly to Parliament — including Gordhan.
Most recently, the Special Investigating Unit declined to name the suspects for fear of provoking a defamation claim.
Gordhan, who had staunchly supported De Ruyter in public until the interview, accused him of spending too much time promoting a transition to green energy and paying inadequate attention to fixing Eskom’s broken coal-burning plants.
“What Mr De Ruyter effectively said was that all of us in government are idiots, and that stirred the backlash,” he said.
“He did not pay attention to Eskom’s generation that he should have, and instead swanned around the world looking at renewables.”
Former President Thabo Mbeki also laid into De Ruyter, saying the interview exposed him as “the classical extreme right-wing anti-communist fanatic of the Apartheid years.”
Former Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter published a book titled Truth to Power: My Three Years Inside EskomThree months after his explosive interview, De Ruyter opened a fresh can of worms when he released a book titled Truth to Power: My Three Years Inside Eskom.
He also revealed during an interview that he had started writing his book six months after taking over as Eskom’s CEO, working on it every Sunday morning for four hours.
Shortly after the book’s release, Makwana said De Ruyter’s actions had broken the trust of the utility in the “most repulsive manner possible”.
He also accused De Ruyter of breaching the Protection of Personal Information Act, the Companies Act, the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA), and his own contract of employment clauses on confidentiality.
“Our corporate governance teams are reviewing all this and will take appropriate and reasonable steps to ensure that the board takes all necessary action,” stated Makwana.
Despite his condemnation of De Ruyter’s actions, Makwana said the Eskom board’s Audit and Risk Committee would nonetheless launch an independent investigation to confirm the veracity of the former CEO’s claims.
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