PETER BRUCE: As Ramaphosa hacks away dead wood, the new guard will have their work cut out for them
Extract
When it came, the firing of Tom Moyane as head of the SA Revenue Service (Sars) this week was as short, sharp and brutal as anything the morose 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes could have conjured.
And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Slipped into the job after a year of planning and coaching from Bain, the consulting group, Moyane aided and abetted state capture arguably to a greater degree than any single person who was not a direct member of the Gupta or Zuma families.
He will squeal and whine and run to the state capturists’ favourite advocate, EFF president Dali Mpofu, but it won’t help him. What he did was to single-handedly destroy the state’s ability to maximise its collection of taxes.
You have only to cast your mind back to the TV interview and evidence given to Robert Nugent’s commission of inquiry into Sars recently by Mmamathe Makhekhe-Mokhuane, the Sars IT chief who could not describe her own job. She would have been appointed by Moyane. The person she replaced, the person driven out of Sars by Moyane and Bain, is a man by the name of Barry Hore, a financial IT genius who was snapped up by Adrian Gore to become CEO of the Discovery Group’s new bank. That’s how good he is. So with Moyane out at Sars and Shaun Abrahams out at the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), President Cyril Ramaphosa simply now has to find strong and ethical replacements, as he has already done at the Hawks. He’d like at least one of them to be a woman, and the presidency was complaining the other day that the civil society advisers helping him find a candidate to run the NPA had failed to come up with a woman’s name. That should not be the end of the world. There are plenty of strong ...
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