New PIC chair under scrutiny over wife’s R18m housing deal

It took all of one day for the shine to come off South Africa’s newest state asset manager appointment. The DA is now questioning whether Seiso Mohai – installed this week as chair of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) after a boardroom bust-up that felled David Masondo – has a clean enough record to oversee an institution that is meant to be turning over a new leaf.

At issue is a 2020 declaration dug up by a DA task team in which Mohai told parliament that he held 100% of a company called Moyakhe Trading.

In the 2019 book Gangster State, investigative journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh traced how at least R18m had gone from the Free State provincial government into Moyakhe Trading. Most of that money, the book claimed, had flowed into the company after Ace Magashule became the premier of the Free State in 2009. 

Records from the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission list Mohai’s wife, Moyanda, as the sole director of Moyakhe Trading, a position she held since the company’s inception in March 2006. 

Mohai told Currency: “I have no ownership interest in, nor do I derive any direct financial benefit from [the company]”. He said he had no involvement in the day-to-day business of his wife’s company.

“My disclosures were made precisely to ensure complete transparency and to avoid any perception that relevant interests had not been declared,” he said. “The contracts in question relate to work undertaken in the Free State many years ago. They have no connection whatsoever with the Public Investment Corporation or with my responsibilities as chair.”

But this has nonetheless created concern within the DA, given that a history of persistent allegations of corruption and cronyism within the PIC had led to the formation of a commission of inquiry under Lex Mpati that in 2020 recommended no politician chair the entity. Mohai, who was the longest-serving chief whip of the ANC in parliament, also has a long history in the ANC Youth League.

DA MP Mark Burke told Currency that a DA task team working on the PIC had been disturbed by what it had found. 

“How are we supposed to trust that the new chairperson will clean up an organisation that seems to confuse investment with patronage when his own history in this regard is deeply questionable?” Burke said. “The new chair seems worse than the departed. This is why we need an apolitical head of the PIC, not yet another ANC cadre.”

Two weeks ago, Burke said he had proposed the Pension Protection Bill to parliament’s legal services arm, which would mandate that the PIC’s chair would have to be apolitical. “No person holding a political office or having held a political office in the three years preceding their appointment will be permitted to serve as a director,” he said.

‘No findings of wrongdoing’

The PIC is the largest asset manager on the continent, managing R3.72-trillion on behalf of 1.7-million civil servants, and finance minister Enoch Godongwana has stressed the importance of unimpeachable governance at an institution that is of systemic importance to the economy. 

Yet in recent weeks, the institution has splintered, after the previous board led by Masondo suspended the CEO Patrick Dlamini over a disputed whistleblower report. Under pressure from Godongwana, who supported Dlamini, Masondo and the whole board resigned.

Mohai’s appointment, and that of seven other non-executive directors this week, was meant to fill this leadership role. For an institution searching for stability, the DA’s awkward questions over Mohai’s wife’s Free State government contracts will be an unwelcome distraction.

Back in 2010, Moyakhe Trading won a contract to build 300 houses in Bloemfontein, but had only actually completed 132 of them by 2013. A progress report on the project at the time cited “cash flow problems” among the reasons the contractor could not finish on schedule, according to Myburgh’s book.

Mohai was a key member of the Free State provincial executive that awarded the contracts benefiting his wife’s company. Between 2009 and 2013, he served as the province’s MEC for finance – the same period during which Myburgh says the payments to Moyakhe Trading were concentrated – having previously served five years as MEC for public works, roads and transport from 2004 to 2009.

However, Currency has not established that Mohai personally signed off on any payments to Moyakhe Trading. 

Mohai told Currency that the housing project had been investigated repeatedly by “legally mandated institutions”. 

“To the best of my knowledge, none of those investigations made findings of wrongdoing or impropriety against me. I therefore reject any suggestion that I acted unlawfully or improperly in relation to those matters,” he said.

The Moyakhe payments were among many controversial contracts flagged during Magashule’s controversial tenure as the premier of the Free State, a position he held for nearly a decade. In December 2017, Magashule became the ANC’s secretary-general, but he was suspended in 2021 after refusing to step aside despite facing corruption charges. In 2023, the ANC expelled him outright.

Magashule is now on trial, alongside 17 co-accused, over a separate R255m asbestos-eradication tender awarded by the Free State’s department of human settlements during his premiership. 

Mohai told Currency that his political affiliation will have no bearing on the way in which he carries out his duties as chair of the PIC. “I also understand the clear distinction between political responsibilities and the fiduciary obligations of a board chairperson. These principles have guided my conduct, even where doing so carried personal or political consequences,” he said.

He said he will exercise his duties independently and impartially, to contribute to the “stability, credibility and effectiveness of one of South Africa’s most significant public institutions”.

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_{Top image collage: Seiso Mohai. Picture: ChatGPT; supplied; Currency.}