Tim CohenSouth Africa is such a strange country. You can run a transparent actual fraud on actual pensioners, in which you take their actual savings and put them in your actual pocket. And nothing happens to you.
But God forbid you should embellish your CV with a few theoretical additions. If you do that, suddenly the full might of the law comes pounding down on your head. How do we make sense of this?
Last week, the JSE decided to fine “Ms” (note, not “Dr”) Thabi Leoka R500,000 and disqualified her from holding directorships for five years because she lied about completing her PhD.
I have to say, I feel very sorry for Leoka, but it goes without saying that her deception is inexcusable. And, by the way, it’s fabulously common in South Africa, where masses of branches of the state are under huge pressure to appoint highly qualified, particularly black, applicants but struggle to find them.
The problem is not, I suspect, actually always the number of qualified applicants, but the number of qualified applicants with the necessary practical experience who aren’t being grabbed by the private sector. Though, of course, CV boosting is a multiracial activity.
Anyway, the consequence of too few candidates and lots of very demarcated job requirements, is corner-cutting, CV-boosting, “degrees” from dubious universities, paid-for academic papers in dubious journals, and a lowering of qualifications in order to allow subpar candidates to successfully apply.
“The misrepresentation of qualifications is a pervasive and menacing evil that greedily devours and indelibly taints our employment landscape. It trivialises our institutions of learning, devalues the sanctity of honest educational pursuits and deepens legitimate and hard-earned achievements. It can never be excused, rationalised or condoned,” acting judge Bart Ford thundered last year in a judgment. That case involved the CFO of Lesedi local municipality in Gauteng, who got the job fraudulently.
Fair enough.
But on the other side of the coin, the effect is that candidates who do make the cut – or seem to – are in massive demand, and this was the case with Leoka, who was at one time or another, on the boards of five of South Africa’s top companies, including the JSE itself. They include the who’s who of South African blue chips: MTN, Remgro and Anglo American Platinum, not to mention President Cyril Ramaphosa’s economic advisory council. None of them apparently bothered to check with the London School of Economics. As I understand it, it was only when Leoka became a candidate for a position in the Reserve Bank that someone bothered to go through her CV with a red pen.
But, you know, there are shades of grey here. Leoka lied about having completed her doctorate, which by the way takes years to complete, but she did have a graduate degree and a master’s from two top institutions. In some ways, this makes her public humiliation even more tragic.
I’ve met Leoka a few times, and honestly, she is just a pleasure: sensible, measured and thoughtful. She seems to have now gone into hiding, which is completely understandable, just as her decision to keep on allowing others to have the impression that she was a “Dr” was not.
Criminal action
Compare and contrast Leoka’s position to that of Daniel Mthimkhulu, the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) executive who was fired for lying about his qualifications. Mthimkhulu not only lied about his qualifications, but also about a whole range of other stuff too. And his lies about his qualifications were pretty extreme.
Mthimkhulu’s CV claimed he had a national diploma and a bachelor’s degree from the Vaal University of Technology when he applied for the job of Prasa chief engineer way back in 2010. He didn’t: he had a matric.
But then on top of that, he claimed to have offers from competing companies, and forced Prasa to increase his salary to – wait for it – R2.8m a year in 2018. And it wasn’t as though his lack of qualifications didn’t matter; he was a key person involved in the “too-tall” trains tender scandal.
Mthimkhulu has paid richly for his transgressions. He was forced to pay Prasa back R5.7m for the salary-increase deception, and has been sentenced to an effective 15 years in prison in criminal court for falsifying his qualifications and other documents.
But my question is this: what happened to the person who appointed Mthimkhulu? That would be Lucky Montana, who also happens to be the person who was in charge of Prasa at the time of the too-tall trains tender scandal. Well, he is in parliament, of course, as an MP for the MK Party, of course, still earning a fat salary courtesy of taxpayers, of course.
This is despite the fact that the Zondo commission recommended that the Hawks should expedite its investigations into allegations that Montana was responsible for criminal misconduct while at Prasa; it also recommended that the National Prosecuting Authority should give “serious consideration” to the prospect of prosecuting Montana and that a special commission of inquiry should be established to investigate what judge Raymond Zondo called Prasa’s “slide into almost total ruin” during and after Montana’s tenure.
My guess is that it’s working like this: people who were involved in the complicated process of actually conducting the fraud benefited most, and consequently have most to lose if they are found criminally liable. So they have a huge incentive to fight tooth and nail to try and stymie any Hawks investigation and go full Stalingrad when faced with an actual criminal action.
The lesser offenders, who were fellow travellers in the schemes and, crucially, whose offences are more easily established, are bearing the brunt of the fightback against corruption.
The main orchestrators are getting away with it – so far at least. They are just lucky, I guess.
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