POINT OF ORDER
TIM COHEN: Executive shuffles can’t hide Eskom hole
‘As fascinating as it might be, the McKinsey/Trillian angle tends to obscure a larger problem: the financial state of Eskom itself’
The Eskom board decided on Friday to "rotate" the position of CEO, which acting chairman Zethembe Khoza says is a way "to give other people a chance". So Johnny Dladla goes back to his old job, and information technology manager Sean Maritz comes in as acting CEO. So who’s next? The catering manager? Nowhere on the planet is the notion of a "rotating" CEO of a major national utility even an experimental strategy. The reason the boards of 99.9% of public and private companies appoint a single CEO is that anything else reduces the CEO’s authority, responsibility and accountability. So it’s a certainty that Maritz did not get his job on the basis of a warm and fuzzy notion that everyone should have a turn.This is why Friday’s sequence of events is so revealing. What happened, if I have this right, is that Eskom’s head of legal affairs, Suzanne Daniels, insisted — as any responsible head of legal would — that Eskom demand the return of the R1.6bn it wrongly paid to Gupta-aligned company...
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