POINT OF ORDER
TIM COHEN: Young guns think about life after Zuma
It has been only four months since President Jacob Zuma’s "night of the long knives" cabinet reshuffle and already, he has a finance minister problem.
Zuma keeps making the same mistake, thinking that by appointing a loyalist, he can rely on his personal relationship to manipulate the minister into giving him and his friends what they want.
But as soon as finance ministers land in the chair, the inevitable happens: they very quickly become aware that their job, like all senior management jobs, is a complicated process of keeping dozens of balls in the air at the same time. The affiliations and responsibilities pull them in different directions like crosscurrents in a stormy sea — and this effect is seldom more acute than in the finance ministry. Nothing demonstrates this better than the way the Eskom crisis has unfolded. When Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba released his 14-point plan to revive the economy, one of the surprise issues was the sudden need for "soft support" for Eskom.Point eight of the plan was entitled "energy" but essentially it was announcing the need for an emergency package for Eskom. It says the finance ministry is going to approach the national energy regulator to encourage the organisation to hike electricity tariffs and it intends to review the speed of the electricity rollout to reduce Eskom’s fi...
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