Good riddance, parties tell Gordhan
OPPOSITION parties have welcomed the announcement by Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan that he will be resigning from government at the end of the current administration following the elections.
The recent years of the 74-yearold embattled politician’s government career have been marred by controversies with the collapse of SAA and Transnet under his watch.
Firing the first salvo was the EFF, saying Gordhan’s retirement left a trail of destruction in state-owned companies while he had “mafia tendencies” in his style of leadership.
The EFF also accused the outgoing minister of spending his deployment at the DPE trying to dismantle the state electricity utility company Eskom into separate entities to hand over electricity generation to the private sector.
“Today, the Durban harbour port is barely functional because Transnet was deliberately sabotaged to pave the way for privatisation … Denel also remains on the brink of complete collapse because of Gordhan,” it said.
Gordhan’s biggest fraud and corruption since his appointment at the DPE was the “disfigured Takatso deal” to partially privatise SAA, the EFF said. “Gordhan attempted to sell SAA for R51 to a group of cronies and friends who do not have the money or industry experience to run a complex organisation.”
The EFF vowed to hold the minister accountable for the destruction and “shoddy dealings”, regardless of his retirement.
The DA labelled Gordhan an ANC lackey and an unprincipled public servant “choosing to pander to the ANC and, in the process, failed to clean up the mess created by the criminal state capture project”.
“When former Eskom CEO, Andre de Ruyter, exposed the deep-seated rot at Eskom perpetuated by politically connected criminal networks and costing the entity R1 billion a month, Gordhan decided to close ranks with his ANC comrades. He chose to victimise De Ruyter rather than ask law enforcement agencies to investigate the allegations.
“He has stubbornly refused to publicly disclose the SAA/Takatso documents, citing legally questionable third-party confidentiality. Gordhan has gone to extreme lengths to try to co-opt Parliament into his long drawnout plan to maintain a veil of secrecy on the SAA/Takatso deal,” the DA said.
The National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) said, “good riddance to bad rubbish”. Since 2018 “he has wrecked every single state-owned entity he touched. He has a ‘deadly Midas touch’; everywhere he goes, SOEs collapse and workers suffer.”