We are all on journeys of discovery. When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears. My path accelerated a dozen years back when I started attending Berkshire Hathaway AGMs in Omaha. Among the learnings was when the bookish, owl-faced Charlie Munger encouraged studying great minds of the past because “we can learn a lot from dead guys.”
This is an obvious observation, or aphorism in Charlie-speak. For everyone alive today, 16 direct line ancestors have walked the earth before them. And those people mostly had more time to reflect than we who inhabit this warp speed world. So when something is confusing me, the search for an answer begins with dead guys. Usually with satisfactory results.
Last week, the deeply compromised former CEO of Eskom Brian Molefe was reappointed. Howls of outrage drowned out attempts at an explanation by public enterprises minister Lynne Brown. Emotional politicians, social activists and media commentators added to the furore with shrill accusations of malfeasance and corruption.
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The explanation for what actually happened is almost certainly a lot less dramatic.
Molefe is a crook. Also beyond doubt is that he has been corrupted by the crony capitalist Gupta family. These facts are obvious in the Homix court papers and the ex-Public Protector’s report. But that doesn’t mean Molefe’s reappointment was engineered in the Gupta Saxonwold Shebeen.
A more likely reason comes from the timeless words of German philosopher Goethe who wrote, in 1774, that “misunderstanding and neglect occasion more mischief in this world than malice and wickedness.”
Variations on this theme have appeared regularly over the centuries. It has now been popularised through a 1980 joke book on Murphy’s Law where computer programmer Robert J Hanlon told us “never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.” It has become commonly quoted as Hanlon’s Razor – a philosophical term to help explain baffling phenomena by first eliminating the most unlikely.
Brown, the person responsible for Molefe’s reappointment, is a well-intentioned activist who worked her way through the ranks. She is a heart-on-the-sleeve politician, known for raising uncomfortable questions. Brown is famous for being SA’s first openly gay member of cabinet – not as some Machiavellian genius. And unlike predecessor Malusi Gigaba, she has no obvious connection with the Guptas.
Applying Hanlon’s Razor means, we should start by taking Brown at her word. She is clearly sickened that the Eskom board approved Molefe’s R30m golden handshake for his 18 months of dubious contribution. She regards that as outrageous – commercial law isn’t a forte’ – and as the representative of Eskom’s sole shareholder, decided to reverse the agreement. She expected applause.
The unintended consequence for Brown is pundits have now branded her part of a conspiracy to reimpose the crooked Molefe back onto Eskom so rentseekers can plunder more State resources.
The real story is surely simpler. Geothe called it “misunderstanding and neglect”. Hanlon goes for “stupidity”. In modern parlance we might call it a cock up rather than a conspiracy. We’ll know soon enough when the next act in this distasteful soap opera is rolled out.
