By: Attie van Nel
Lovers of history, such as yours truly, are intrigued by, inter alia, the fascination of the sheer brilliance and foresight of historic victors. Even when the conquerors were amoral, criminal, and unjust, the study of history still permits for learning from them, even if just to be smarter at preventing the same strategies and tactics from prevailing in the future. Shockingly though, is how history repeats itself tragically, regardless of how much we study, analyse, and draw from it.
Pravin Gordhan is, in this country at least, among the most noteworthy classic textbook examples of the brilliance of employing a contemporary Trojan horse in weakening an opponent and achieving ascendency. His usefulness by monopoly capital opposed to the recalibration of the country’s economic landscape and its dominant ownership of the means of production, compels one to reflect deeply on a successful 6 year-long deception conceived of and executed with finesse.
Pravin Gordhan never intended to – and neither did he – serve the South African people, their common prosperity, or their aspirations of building a more equal and just society characterised by reconstructed wealth patterns. I submit that an honest review of his record shows that he sold out his struggle credentials and revolutionary consciousness and was warmly welcomed into the order of neo-liberalism to which he became an instrument of distinction as he brought his considerable influence as Public Enterprises minister since 2018 to bear to repurpose State-Owned Entities for corporate capture. The exemplary erstwhile revolutionary, I suspect, was converted to the IMF and World Bank-sponsored ideology of liquidating the state to the highest (read Stellenbosch-aligned) bidder. He did so in full revolutionary regalia, shouting the right slogans and quoting from authoritative socialist doctrine while undermining the true agenda of economic transformation from within the engine rooms of the revolution.
To suggest he acted alone would be willfully blind, patently false, and manifestly naive. But his imminent retirement is cause for celebration.
Pravin Gordhan had and has no ANC constituency. Yet, in the name of the ANC’s expedient definition and selective application of what it terms the national question, he was assured of a cabinet post. So shallow is his grasp of his own party’s ideological leaning, that he unapologetically repurposed his department to pursue an energetic agenda that contradicts the developmental state that his party subscribes to. As a trained pharmacist, he has consistently prescribed an overdose of only one treatment to ailing public entities: auction. The ANC’s youth league president labelled Gordan an auctioneer, clearly not without basis.
The lowest ebb of his misrule has to be his appointment of André de Ruyter as Eskom CEO in January 2020. Desperately in need of an engineer, the pharmacist prescribed to the beleaguered Eskom a man who had just collapsed a paper company – Nampak – during his disastrous term as CEO. Clearly, the woefully inept De Ruyter, hopelessly out of his depth, accelerated Eskom’s descent to the abyss by traumatising the South African public with its first-ever, new low of summer load-shedding. Books will be written about the true purpose of De Ruyter’s appointment, the unmitigated disaster it was and the solution conceived to unbundle Eskom in preparation for auctioning off parts of it to the very wealthy people whose fingerprints are all over post-Gupta state capture.
Secondly, Gordhan oversaw the spectacular derailing of Transnet (pun intended). He inherited an entity in dire straits, but on his watch, Transnet entered the demise zone. What did the pharmacist prescribe? Expanded private sector participation. All in contravention of his party’s 2022 conference resolutions. In July 2023, a mere 7 months after the ANC’s Nasrec conference, Transnet announced ICTSI, a Phllippinian equity partner to its Ports division for participation at the Durban container terminal, Africa’s biggest harbour. This minister knows how not to serve the public interest or turn state-owned entities around. But he’s proficient at selling the family jewels.
Finally, this critique cannot but include in the minister’s highlights of his abysmal record, the enduring legacy that has imprinted his name indelibly on the public psyche: SAA-TAKATSO. Pravin has clipped the wings of the national carrier and planned for its crash-landing in the safe embrace of Takatso, the consortium he desperately sought to pimp SAA too. For nearly 3 years, the public was denied its right to know for how much SAA, a public asset nogal, was valued and the price at which the 51% stake would be sold. Gordhan was so bullish at pushing this deal through that he acted in parliament like a god, deluding himself that his surname is spelled without an “r”. As a member of the executive, he’s constitutionally obliged to account to parliament. Accountability is neither a courtesy nor a favour. He is a bizarrely conceived and clumsily executed attempt at gagging the portfolio committee boomeranged badly and made him the object of public scorn and ridicule.
When he fired his DG for the latter’s refusal to concur to the sheer scale of irrationality behind the SAA deal, he was shielded from robust scrutiny about interference in the administration. Go and verify if the printed media raised so much as an eyebrow or if the private sector-owned news channels lamented Gordhan’s illegal imposition of himself on the authority of the accounting officer. The DG who was a lone voice in screaming “state capture, different actors” has been thoroughly vindicated with the cancellation of the most recent auction of public assets and the resultant unabated commodification of public goods.
The imminent retirement of Gordhan is a major boost for the continued struggle for a better life for all. The only people who’ll mourn his exit from the department are the special interests who feast off the weakening and then sell off major public enterprises.
Nonetheless, we’ll pay for decades for the scale of the damage done during the 6 pimping years in which the Department of public enterprises was re-engineered into the Department of private equity.
Attie van Nel
Entrepreneur
Social Justice Activist
Essayist
Author
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