Licence to Loot by Stephan Hofstatter

Author:Stephan Hofstatter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781776093137
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2018-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

13

Trillian’s Billions

Tetris is a game invented by a Soviet software engineer named Alexey Pajitnov who worked at a state computer lab in Moscow during the Cold War. It was based on an ancient Roman puzzle played with wooden blocks called pentominoes. Pajitnov pictured the blocks falling from above, with players guiding them into place. In 1985, he turned his imaginings into a hugely popular video game.1

Brian Molefe likes to tell the story of how Tetris inspired the creation of a power plant maintenance tool that helped end load shedding. When Molefe asked two young Eskom engineers, Christo Murray and Lyle Timm, to explain the intricacies of maintenance planning, they described juggling shifting blocks of time when planned outages would be suitable at dozens of plants with minimal disruption to the power grid. Molefe thought it sounded like Tetris, and the idea stuck. He encouraged Murray and Timm to create a visual-planning tool that represented maintenance schedules for all of Eskom’s plants in one dynamic multicoloured chart.2

Eskom’s ‘Tetris model’ had its origins in the Top Consultants programme launched by McKinsey in 2013. The global consultancy had been hired to provide field training in consulting skills to Eskom engineers to reduce the utility’s R1-billion annual consultants bill. Within two years, a total of thirty full-time Eskom employees had graduated from the McKinsey class and were providing helpful consulting services across different work streams. Among them were Murray and Timm, who with McKinsey’s help had developed the Tetris tool.

In 2015, McKinsey submitted a proposal to ramp up its programme to create a fully fledged consulting unit at Eskom that would focus on risk management, including of the power crisis. The ambitious plan was submitted jointly with Regiments Capital. It included providing Eskom with advisory services on how to achieve substantial cost savings in coal supply, procurement and claims lodged by contractors at Medupi and Kusile.3

In a pattern that had become an all too familiar justification for looting, Eskom’s energy crisis would be used as an excuse to break Treasury rules on public spending and pay astronomical fees to McKinsey, with up to half the proceeds going straight into the pockets of the Guptas and their associates, including Salim Essa.

In a previous chapter I described how Essa had allegedly used his connections to ensure Regiments displaced consulting firm Letsema as McKinsey’s empowerment partner of choice at a number of parastatals. From Transnet alone, Regiments earned fees of up to R485 million during the tenure of Brian Molefe and Anoj Singh. Half appeared to have been diverted to Essa and some to his golfing partner Kuben Moodley, even though neither of them performed any discernible services for the logistics parastatal.

As we’ve seen, Singh had been hosted by the Guptas on at least five occasions in Dubai during this time, often staying in the same hotel as Tony Gupta and Essa, and had probably received cash payments from the family too. Singh later admitted that he had met Essa ‘on two or three occasions’ when he was ‘seeking business opportunities’ at Transnet.

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