In 2012 Walter Isaacson, celebrated author of biographies of innovators such as Albert Einstein, set out to summarise what made Apple founder Steve Jobs such a phenomenal business leader. Among many attributes, he wrote in the Harvard Business Review, was that “Jobs’s passion was applied to issues both large and minuscule”.
Isaacson went on: “Some CEOs are great at vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both ... For example, in 2000 he came up with the grand vision that the personal computer should become a ‘digital hub’ for managing all of a user’s music, videos, photos, and content, and thus got Apple into the personal-device business with the iPod and then the iPad.
“In 2010 he came up with the successor strategy — the ‘hub’ would move to the cloud — and Apple began building a huge server farm so that all a user’s content could be uploaded and then seamlessly synced to other personal devices. But even as he was laying out these grand visions, he was fretting over the shape and colour of the screws inside the iMac.”
Because of this and several other obsessions, Jobs’s triumph was that he “built the world’s most valuable company” at that time.
I have thought a lot about President Cyril Ramaphosa and his close ally public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan over the past few weeks as I have traversed South Africa. A lot has been said in the corridors of corporate South Africa about these two men lately, and most of it is not complimentary. Where is their leadership? For many, the overwhelming feeling is that of being let down, if not betrayed, as Transnet, Eskom, the National Prosecuting Authority and so many others falter or fail.
When Ramaphosa was deputy president to Jacob Zuma between 2014 and 2018, he could not criticise his boss openly. Gordhan, who was fired by Zuma (and then reinstated because the man from Nkandla had no choice), was free to speak. In his time of freedom, he painted a picture of an efficient future South Africa shorn of state capture corruption. He had done it at the South African Revenue Service and many of us believed he could do it again.
Ramaphosa arrived with a message so inspirational, so clear-eyed, about what a collaborative future held that many were buoyed by the ascent of such a man to the top office in the land. The vision was great. Many of us bought into it, hook, line and sinker.
How, then, could these two men have got it so spectacularly wrong on two key state-owned enterprises, Eskom and Transnet, in particular? How is it that “the fixers” have presided over the biggest economic mess South Africa has faced in the past 30 years — a collapsed national logistics framework and a collapsing national energy supplier?
From 2020 onwards things went steadily south at Transnet while the minister and the president sat on their hands
They thought that saying fine words (“Thuma mina! New dawn!”) and laying out a glorious vision for the country would be enough. They didn’t once stop to ask themselves how that vision would be brought to fruition.
At Transnet, Gordhan and Ramaphosa appointed a board and a few top executives and folded their arms. That could not be enough, because the place clearly needed constant monitoring (not interference) and to be shown quickly when things were going awry. It seems that from 2020 onwards things went steadily south at Transnet while the minister and the president sat on their hands. Now here we are, wondering how it is that Transnet could have so much debt and why it takes one of its trains, carrying its chair and CEO, six hours to travel just 60km.
The same applies to Eskom, where every week we are told things are getting better even as stage 6 load-shedding is implemented. No-one was obsessing about how Eskom was being fixed, no-one was monitoring how the executives were getting along. Eleven months after André de Ruyter announced his departure from Eskom, it still doesn’t have a CEO. The minister is taking his own sweet time.
So, who should we blame? Ramaphosa and Gordhan are the two people who make the most excuses for the collapse of these two entities. The one thing they have not done is take responsibility for it. They have been in charge for six years. They have not fixed it. They have no excuse. If the cabinet were a business, they would have been fired years ago.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.