It may be news to you that the government is still looking for an equity partner for Eskom, our failed, bankrupt and unhappy electricity monopoly. No less than the deputy president, David Mabuza, passed this reassuring news to the National Council of Provinces just the other day.
“We continue to engage with key stakeholders to address [the Eskom crisis] and the bottlenecks. We are looking at a strategic partner that will complement Eskom and ease the burden … but we will cross [that bridge] when we get there,” Mabuza, who is also leader of government business, told his audience.
I laughed a few hours later after Prof Anton Eberhard, once an energy policy adviser to President Cyril Ramaphosa, expressed his exasperation on Twitter at the scale of cabinet disarray over energy — while Mabuza was promising an equity partner, new finance minister Enoch Godongwana has spoken of selling off individual power plants. Ramaphosa himself has foresworn any privatisation. Energy minister Gwede Mantashe blames Eskom management for the power cuts, and public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan blames them on Mantashe.
It really would be hard to find a government in a bigger mess than Ramaphosa’s. There is no direction. One result is the humiliation of the governing ANC in the local government elections. A far more serious result is the continuing decline of the SA Post Office, which has now lost the ability to pay benefits for its 16,500 or so employees. It stopped making medical aid contributions for staff. It started up again when they protested but then stopped paying the PAYE it deducted from salaries over to the SA Revenue Service. In July it owed the receiver about R600m.
I hear on the radio the Post Office will have closed 100 branches this year in Gauteng alone. Some have been vandalised by citizens who haven’t quite caught the spirit of the president’s infrastructure programme. Others can’t pay their rent. Post Office CEO Nomkhita Mona reckons she needs R8bn to turn the business around. She didn’t get it earlier this month from the finance minister and she is unlikely to from anyone next year either.
The fact is the Post Office got to the point when Mark Barnes was running it a few years ago when it required zero money from the state. Nothing. A Treasury list in mid-2019 showed government guarantee exposures for 2019/2020, and the Post Office had none, meaning it created zero risk to the fiscus. The only other entity on that list with that credential was the Reserve Bank. Sanral, SAA, independent power producers, Eskom and the Land Bank and others all had a helping hand.
I’ve known Barnes for years and he was absolutely the right guy for that job. He was enjoying himself, he had a long-term strategy, the unions backed him, he didn’t need the money and he had a real sense that he was there to serve people who depended on the Post Office. It was, in his eyes, a strategic asset for the country.
That it all ended badly was entirely Ramaphosa’s fault. He appointed a dim-witted young woman, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, as communications minister and she almost immediately began to interfere. She persuaded the cabinet it would be a good idea to hive the Post Bank off from the Post Office and run it as a separate state entity.
For Barnes, an experienced banker, that was too much. The whole point about the Post Office and the Post Bank was what they could achieve together. He made it clear he would resign if the (new Ndabeni-Abrahams) board approved the split. The day they did he walked and Ramaphosa did nothing. Only much later did he realise what a hopeless minister she was and demoted her, in his one and only reshuffle, to small business. The Post Bank is still where it was.
Except now we’re back to the begging bowl — R8bn or we won’t survive, please mister finance minister. Barnes, I have no doubt, could put a consortium together in a week to buy the Post Office, save all its jobs and expand its services. The state could hold a golden share like it plans to do in SAA, and the unions would get a stake and sit on the board. That’s the thing about Barnes — he is an almost radically open book. I called and asked him.
“We need to look past what you think the Post Office is, to what it could be,” he says. “A commercially irreplaceable infrastructure, access to probably the best data base in the country, integrated into the national payment system, a low cost of capital (its depositors, he means), certain exclusive statutory rights. What could you build with that?
“A powerful state-to-person channel across all services — grants, licences, chronic medicines, vaccines, ID documents — and a physical delivery footprint unrivalled in SA and as international partner to e-commerce players.”
He could make it actually work, and Ramaphosa should have the courage to invite him back, do a deal and tell his minister to leave management and the board alone. Imagine going into the next election with an actual success in your pocket to brag about?
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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.