Power, glory and empire-building drive the outgoing head of Sanral, who has gone from heroic builder of world-class roads to villain of the e-toll piece thanks largely to his own complicated hang-ups. Nazir Alli should be every self-respecting psychologist's dream. The CEO of the South African National Roads Agency, who will step down next month at 65, is a walking feast of complexities and contradictions, say those who have known him over the years.He declined to be interviewed.He has gone from hero to villain more completely than any other local public figure one can think of - although the competition is stiff - and he has only his own impenetrable hang-ups to blame.A man who was scarred by apartheid, he was kicked out of his childhood home in Fordsburg under the Group Areas Act. He left to study abroad, could easily have stayed and prospered but chose to return into the maw of the still-breathing apartheid beast because, he said, South Africa was "home".story_article_left1He came back with a vision of serving the public. His vision was simple. He wanted to make the best roads. And he did. The roads he built are world-class. He let nothing and no one stand in his way. When the transport minister at the time, S'bu Ndebele, ordered him to stop employing whites and Indians, Alli gave him a two-word answer.He got the best people to work for him and he made the best roads. But he received so many accolades that he became arrogant and started dictating to the public.His megalomania grew and it's not hard to see why. During his 18-year reign as the head of Sanral he has been an extraordinarily powerful man. Lucrative engineering tenders were in his gift. He could make you rich, or he could break you.His power extended beyond the engineering industry. When Ndebele and his deputy Jeremy Cronin turned against his pet Gauteng e-toll project in 2012, he resigned. The then deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, no less, appealed to him to return. The minister and his deputy were kicked out and Alli reinstated.With an election on the horizon, the ANC chose him above votes, above its alliance partner Cosatu and above the advice and pleading of its own party in Gauteng.Quite what the hold he had over the Union Buildings and Luthuli House was, we can only speculate. His sponsor was Mac Maharaj, the man who believed in him back in 1994, made him his chief director of roads in the Department of Transport and, in 1998, CEO of Sanral when it was formed out of the roads directorate.mini_story_image_hright1President Nelson Mandela, who knew that the appointment of an Indian to another top post would be unpopular, as indeed it was, baulked when Maharaj came to see him. But Maharaj said, in effect, "he's right for the job, I've got to have him", and Mandela reluctantly agreed.If there was any prior connection between Maharaj and Alli, who was on the fringes of the ANC during the struggle - any reason Maharaj might have favoured and protected him beyond the purely professional, beyond the fact that after working with him for four years he knew he would do a bloody good job - nobody has found it.Maharaj was so alive to the race sensitivities involved that he told Alli to put in for a really low sum in order to avoid too much contestation. Sanral was a company now, no longer a government department, and he was entitled to state his salary expectations. He needn't have worried. Alli put down a figure much lower than anything Maharaj had in mind.Of course you could say he was an intelligent guy and knew that once he had the job in the bag his official salary would be the least important source of income. At the pinnacle of South Africa's road-building industry there was no limit to the money that could be made.But no evidence has come to light suggesting Alli was motivated by money. Nothing about his lifestyle points to it. He drives, or did until recently, a Lexus, but that's as close as he seems to have come to ostentation.block_quotes_start Lucrative engineering tenders were in his gift. He could make you rich, or he could break you block_quotes_endHe lives in a modest house - "it could be a bus driver's house", says one who knows it - in Marlboro Gardens, an apartheid-era township near Alexandra that was built for Indians who were moved out of the black township by government decree.Visitors park in the road outside, open an old-fashioned clasp on an old-fashioned wire gate, walk up a little drive and knock on the door.So if not money, what does drive him? Power, glory and empire-building, say those well-placed to know. And a conviction that he knows what people need and how best to give it to them, even if they themselves don't yet know it.And that is a more dangerous combination by far.It leads to what former British foreign minister, neurologist Lord David Owen, called the hubris syndrome, a narcissistic personality disorder that he thought explained the behaviour of former British prime minister Tony Blair.story_article_left2When Owen expounded his theory to John Clarke, a social worker and member of Outa (the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance), he applied it to Alli and decided his behaviour ticked all the boxes. Symptoms include a refusal to accept that any point of view is valid besides one's own, and being impervious to criticism and contemptuous of the rules, or other people, when they get in the way of what you know is the greater good, even if no one else does. Disempowering those who cross you, or even dare to disagree.A former senior employee says Alli would appoint consulting engineers and contractors off a list that he drew up. He wouldn't go to public tender, he would make these appointments unilaterally, at his discretion.And "he would threaten to close them out of work if they didn't do this or that".When Outa looked for engineers to help it understand the construction costs of the Gauteng e-toll project, nobody would talk.One of them explained: "Sanral is the biggest provider of projects in this country for civil engineers. Do you think we're going to criticise them?"Generally, people don't cross Alli, says the ex-employee. "It is a very career-limiting move."Former struggle veteran Stan Manong, a civil engineer with his own consulting engineering company, was not on Alli's list. For years, every tender he applied for was rejected.block_quotes_start Alli told a consulting engineer that he owned Sanral and could appoint anyone he liked block_quotes_endHe challenged Alli to explain why so many of those who were awarded tenders were colleagues he'd worked with when he was a civil engineer in the private sector, or old colleagues from his days in the Department of Transport roads directorate. Alli told him he owned Sanral and could appoint anyone he liked. "He said I would never get work from Sanral."Manong began a five-year legal battle to see Alli's CV. It ended in the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2007 when Judge Labuschagne ordered Alli to hand it over.In his judgment he said Alli's behaviour "converted what should have been a routine matter into one that gives rise to more questions than answers and which creates a great deal of suspicion"."Transparency and good governance dictated" that Alli, as the CEO of a public company, should have made his CV available on request, said the judge.Alli asked the court to make a special order of costs against Manong for citing him, Alli, in the proceedings, which the judge witheringly dismissed. This was gratuitously vindictive behaviour from someone whose costs were never going to be borne by himself anyway, but by the taxpayer. It is entirely typical of the man, say those who have dealt with him.Several court judgments have gone against Alli for failing to consult the public about toll roads and toll gates that they say will wreak havoc with their lives or desecrate holy sites.mini_story_image_hright2In a 2006 judgment, the Deputy Judge President of the High Court in Johannesburg, Phineas Mojapelo, summarised his attitude to public consultation as follows: "No, you cannot talk to us any further, the positions [of the toll plazas] are cast in stone."Alli talks the language of consultation, community buy-in and corporate ethics. He was even the keynote speaker at a Consulting Engineers South Africa conference in 2009 on the topic of "ethical issues in engineering practice". He stressed the importance of "integrity", "transparency", "civil society participation" and the "need to strengthen organs of civil society".But he has little time for these niceties when they stand in the way of his dreams.Key affidavits filed by him to show that the fiercely contested N2 toll road along the Wild Coast had strong community support have been denounced as forgeries. One was rejected as a fake by the very person who purportedly signed it.He consistently refused to hand over key documents relating to the equally unpopular N2 toll road through the Cape Winelands, an attitude that appeal judges - he uses the courts the way President Jacob Zuma does, knowing there are no cost implications for him - found "paternalistic" and more indicative of a desire to protect Sanral's reputation than anything else, before ordering him to provide the documents.Now the man who wanted so desperately to leave a legacy of world-class roads and cutting-edge technology that nothing else seemed to matter, has announced he is leaving the stage.And all one can hear is a massive sigh of relief...