We need to talk about the quality of people we appoint to top positions. It is no wonder that the 10 years of Jacob Zuma’s administration took SA to the door of destruction: the quality of its people was horrendous. It was an administration that appointed fraudsters, rewarded liars and elevated incompetents. It was an administration of thieves and their yes-men and yes-women.
The Zondo commission showed us again last week just how badly the state and its numerous entities were run. Former SAA chairperson Dudu Myeni took the stand at the state capture inquiry. She was asked whether she had a bachelor of administration degree as stated on her CV in the past. She said she would not answer because she might incriminate herself.
Help me here, please. How would answering yes or no to a simple question about your degree incriminate you in a crime?
Unless, of course, a crime has been committed — and you know it. She also said, rather nonsensically, that she would not say whether she had the degree or not, but would provide the commission with her CV.
“You can’t say you can give the CV then say it will incriminate you,” the commission’s evidence leader, Kate Hofmeyr, told her.
Zondo and Hofmeyr tried again and again to get a straight answer from Myeni. She refused and repeated: “I’m not going to answer in case it incriminates me.”
We now know that Myeni does not have a degree. We also know that her CV at SAA said, in 2012, that she had such a degree. If it was a mistake, why does she not just say so? Unless, of course, it was fraud — she lied to the airline about her qualifications.
Myeni is an example of the kinds of people Zuma surrounded himself with. They were liars; grifters who used “radical economic transformation” to hide their destruction of government entities such as SAA and others.
Remember another Zuma crony, Ellen Tshabalala? She lied in her application for a seat as SABC board chairperson, saying she had a degree from Unisa and then submitting an affidavit — that is a statement written under oath — that her qualifications had been stolen during a burglary at her home. So, just to be clear, a non-existent certificate was stolen during an unreported burglary at her home ...
This person became the chairperson of the SABC. Dudu Myeni was at SAA. Then there was former SAA board member and ex-SAA Technical chairperson Yakhe Kwinana, who this week told the Zondo commission that she saw absolutely nothing wrong with having numerous conversations with Vuyo Ndzeku, a director of JM Aviation, while a R1,2bn tender she was deciding on was open. She saw nothing wrong with being wined and dined by the company either.
This is just a sample of the Zuma cartel of corruption. Think of Mosebenzi Zwane, the former minister of housing in the Free State who proudly told the commission that he didn’t know the housing act existed and that he never read it. It becomes clear what type of of person he is when you realise he travelled to Switzerland to strong-arm a mining company to sell assets to the Guptas.
There are so many others. Des van Rooyen was given advisers he did not know from a bar of soap by the Guptas. Think of Bongani Bongo, a man who became intelligence minister, despite investigations into his activities in Mpumalanga. Think of the advisers, such as Malusi Gigaba’s henchman, Siyabonga Mahlangu, whose primary job seems to have been to introduce SOE executives to the Guptas, where they were offered bribes.
The rot extended from political office, where incompetents such as Van Rooyen and Zwane were appointed to do the bidding of outside players such as the Guptas, to the boards of SOEs and to executives at places such as Eskom. The result is what you see now: a country so deeply in debt many are asking how we can credibly say we will avoid further deep downgrades from credit-rating agencies.
One hopes the Myenis of the world will one day see the inside of a proper courtroom and have to answer to a prosecutor and a judge in a criminal trial. But there is a greater battle. We must do everything we can to ensure we appoint people because of their expertise, their hard work, their commitment to institutions, instead of their connections to powerful comrades.
What we have long known about the Zuma administration’s corruption must make us all help the current administration, and others after it, to entrench professionalism and integrity in government appointments. The alternative is that we will end up with a country that is broken and corrupt to its very core.
One only hopes that we are not too late.
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