Outgoing Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan said State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are down and out because people without qualifications were appointed in office to work but instead mismanaged state resources.
“People didn't have the skills and were concentrating on other things rather than making those SOEs work effectively and today or in the recent past, we've paid the price for it,” he said.
Gordhan was addressing day two of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) policy conference in Boksburg, Ekurhuleni on Wednesday.
State-owned firms, or SOEs, like SAA, Eskom, Denel, and Transnet, have been hindered by state capture. Several entities, like Transnet and Eskom, are struggling with budgetary and operational issues.
Gordhan lashed out at government officials for using state offices to advance their personal interests.
He said this has been going on for many years now, where officials give tenders to their friends, only to get kickbacks in all forms.
Gordhan said this was not only done by politicians but also by civil servants who participated in such practices.
According to Gordhan, this was a result of appointing incompetent and wrong people in important SOEs, boards, and management positions.
He stressed that the government should put strict measures in place to protect SOEs to avoid state capture 2.0.
“Our biggest failure, our biggest failure is implementation, our biggest failure is at a local government. Our biggest failure is that we want to use every institution in the state, and I'm going to come back to this - to put pressure.
“We need individuals that we know so that if we want money from them to win elections in our branch, in the province, or the region, we get the money to pay activists to vote for us, that’s the truth,” he said, adding that money was playing a bigger role in politics.
He said for quite a while SOEs “have been like magnets”, attracting all sorts of people who want to extract a coal contract or a transport contract or an oil contract or whatever the case might be, and it's there for anybody to see.
He warned that this results in them going back to the same situation of the past because systems will be destroyed and broken.
He hoped the seventh administration government will do better.
kamogelo.moichela@iol.co.za
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