It's almost two years to the day that a group of government and business leaders had to hurriedly form a coalition to travel around the world reassuring investors that South Africa was still a great place to put their money, despite a ruinous president who had fired a finance minister without a justifiable reason.
An important part of the international tour was also to convince ratings agencies not to lower South Africa's investment grade. Among those who accompanied then finance minister Pravin Gordhan on this tour was retailing legend Christo Wiese, who is still among the country's richest businessmen.What a week it has been for Wiese! Steinhoff, the vehicle through which he was hoping to consolidate his decades-long run of wheeling and dealing in the retailing space, sits on the verge of collapse. Shares in the group, which aimed to become South Africa's answer to the likes of Ikea and Wal-Mart, will open trading in Johannesburg tomorrow at R6, their lowest level in over 13 years. It's a cataclysmic 89% collapse over the past week alone.
At the centre of its turmoil is possible fraud or theft by one of Wiese's protégés, Markus Jooste.
When Wiese was travelling and speaking to investors in Washington, New York, London and Asia with the rest of Team South Africa two years ago, he would have emphasised the country's virtues - which presumably included the fact that we have strong governance institutions and a private sector that is held to the highest corporate standards in the world.When investors quizzed the team about political uncertainty resulting from the implosion of the ruling party, Wiese and others would have acknowledged the problem but would also have cited the robustness of companies such as Steinhoff and Naspers as a sign of South Africa's overall good health.
They would have argued that governance in the private sector was strong and that auditing standards were among the best in the world.
It is ironic, therefore, that the unravelling of Wiese's empire this week was caused by the collapse of those very virtues at Steinhoff.
As strong as Steinhoff's board was in the eyes of outsiders - a board that one would think would have the ability and the know-how to rein in the executive - it simply failed in its fiduciary duty...