Eugene Nyati, political and financial consultant, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
Here’s what Eugene Nyati had to say on Newsline following the April 1994 elections: “No amount of foreign aid can be a substitute for the internal sacrifices that we ourselves have got to make in order to get South Africa to work. We have to learn to live within our means … Every manager or politician in this country drives a car more expensive than that driven by Bill Clinton, president of the richest country in the world.”
A bare 18 months later finds Nyati in Nelspruit, in a hired, white Mercedes-Benz. He is neither a manager nor a politician: he is a consultant, hired by Mpumalanga, and found with R1,2-million of the province’s money in his bank account — handed over to him, in blithe, blank-cheque fashion by a province naive, inept and so desperate for the rapid change Nyati promised (and delivered) it was willing to forego all forms of financial control.
In the ensuing investigation the following was revealed: Nyati was collecting interest on state moneys; his lawyer had “mistakenly” added an extra zero to her fee, raising it to six figures; his accountant had hired a pharmacist to play detective after hours at roughly R10 000 a weekend; the chair of the commission, 25-year-old Ntoake Mohape, was paid over R300 000 for just two months’ work, while simultaneously drawing a full salary from her employers; and Nyati himself was richer — after three months’ work — by the amount a national Cabinet minister or a corporate executive usually earns in a year.
Gravy, finally, has a face. One with volatile features that shift from charm to contempt in the flicker of a moment; one with fiercely intelligent eyes burning above one of those fine-fluted sets of nostrils that exhale arrogance with every utterance. The day after the Sunday Times led with “Gravy high-flyer crashes to earth”, I went to Nelspruit to see Eugene Nyati. He was, understandably, prickly and irritable and did not want to do the interview. He gave me two hours of his time anyway.
Adamant that there was no irregularity whatsoever (save, perhaps, the catering account going to his assistant’s mother), he insisted — as he had been doing all the previous week — that the Sunday Times vendetta against him had pre-empted “a natural process of reconciliation that would have taken place anyway. All the money not used would have been returned at that point. It’s called covering yourself. It’s a standard business practice in the private sector.”
Nyati, you see, is a self-confessed “private-sector man”. The government came to him and said, “do the job!” and he did it. “I walk in here and I find that some civil service employees are happy to spend
R20 000 convening three meetings of a tender board to make a decision on how to spend R16 000. Well, I don’t work that way. If you’re given two months to do a major job, you have to be able to walk into an expert’s office and say, ‘deliver in five days!’ If that means you put a premium on your rate, then so be it!”
Here’s what the Sunday Times didn’t tell you: Nyati did deliver. Next week, this country’s first restructured provincial development corporation will come into being. On paper it’s impressive: run according to private-sector and free market principles, no guaranteed jobs for lazy civil servants, senior executives on contract, an arm’s-length relationship with government; even a provincial development bank that will fund enterprises according to business plans and wean them into the private sector.
No one in Nelspruit — not even his detractors, of whom there are many — denies that the job was well done. That, says Chris McPherson, the National Party representative on the commission, “was why we were so hurt when the money thing came out. Eugene had credibility: he was excellent at marketing all these ideas about private enterprise to the cabinet. He was charming and friendly and worked very hard.”
But, says McPherson, no way was the job worth R1,2- million. Nyati counters with two cogent points: that he achieved, in two months, what “a consultative process, costing millions and millions of rand, failed to achieve over 15 months”, and that “the result of the work will save this province millions of rand in the months and years to come”.
Yes, but should the taxpayer ever be expected to fork out R540 an hour to a consultant? The nostrils flare. The eyes burn. The pages of a rather ragged diary turn furiously, releasing bits of paper that turn out to be evidence. Here, for example, paperclipped to a page, is a fax confirming that Eugene Nyati has been invited to give an hour-long presentation to a major insurance company. Fee: R4 700. “So you see. I’m actually giving myself on the cheap!”
But isn’t there a difference between a once-off fee to the private sector and a continuous fee, over three months, to the public sector? The pages turn again, more furiously. Nyati is a master of releasing information by protesting that he is not. Example: “If I wanted to, I could tell you that I saw the president of IBM last week. But that’s not how I operate.” Or (thrusting a gilt-edged and well-thumbed invitation to dine on HMS Britannia under my nose): “I’m not the sort of person who goes on a trip and comes back and says, ‘Oh, by the way, I had lunch with Queen Elizabeth!’ I’m not looking for recognition. I’ve got recognition, whether people like it or not!”
Or my personal favourite (pulling an equally well- thumbed envelope of photos of himself posing with various American politicians out of the diary and laying them on the desk): “Some guy came and said to me, ‘that’s you with Senator David Boren! That’s you with Congressman Howard Wolpe! What are you doing with Al Gore?’ Now what sort of bullshit is that? I don’t need to sit here and justify why I have contacts all over the world. What the hell for? I provide a service. It’s very good. The market pays good money for it. That’s all.”
Moving into the personal domain and using the same strategy, he says, when I ask him about his past: “What relevance is that? I could tell you about how I was born in a village near Newcastle, and how I moved with my parents, who were teachers, to then-Rhodesia, when I was nine or 10. I could tell you about how my parents died and I was orphaned … But I don’t like bringing that into things. I want to be remembered as an issues person.”
He is furious that the Sunday Times disputes his Master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, but he refuses, point-blank, to correct what he calls the “slander” by telling me anything about his past. Twice he evades the question of where he was an undergraduate. He speaks with a strong accent (Central or East African) but, when I ask where he has lived, he will say only: “All over the world!”
Why on earth would a man so clearly pleased with himself be so reticent about his background? Eugene Nyati has invented himself, brilliantly and skilfully. With his intelligent, easily-understandable and independent commentary, he has built himself up as this country’s prime political commentator. At the SABC, he was known as “Mr Dial-a-Quote”: Want comment on the budget? Call Eugene! Slovo dead? Get Eugene! Winnie fired? Ask Eugene! We journalists loved him because he spoke common sense: he said the obvious thing; the thing we wanted to say but could now attribute to an
When quoted, he was always “Dr Nyati” or “Professor Nyati”. He does not have a doctorate, although, he says, he is an “honorary professor at a university by virtue of the fact that I give occasional lectures there”. Which university? “Oh, just a university in California.” He tried to tell the people inputting the titles at the SABC that he wasn’t really a doctor, but it happens once, and then it’s such a big deal to get it changed. “I’m not into titles. If someone calls me ‘Dr Nyati’, why do you blame me? There’s an assumption that because I engage in high-flown analysis the way I do, I must be some kind of academic.”
Nyati’s analysis is, if not always high flown, always articulate and interesting. He is known as a prophet of the market (who would not be at R4 700 an hour?), and is most critical of the ANC’s inability to separate itself from labour now that it is the government. Interestingly, though, his semi-academic writing (published in current affairs journals) is aggressively anti-free-market. In the mid-1980s, writing from Namibia, he was an apostle of the “mixed economy” and of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, whom he praised for “far-sighted and pragmatic” leadership.
He arrived in Johannesburg some time in the late 1980s, and was appointed as a contributor to Tribute magazine. He set up his Centre for African Studies, first in His Majesty’s Building on Commissioner Street, then in a Parktown flat. He was certainly not flush in those days: he drove an old red Jetta and lived with his girlfriend — a night-nurse at a private nursing home – – first in a Hillbrow block of flats and then in two rooms at the old Hyde Park Hotel: dingy quarters, right address. A catalogue of the upwardly mobile black professional women he dated would, says a former associate, easily fill an issue of Enterprise magazine.
“The world of ideas” was, in those days, not his only entrepreneurial concern. He had a share in a hair salon and a night club; he was involved in plans to sell African art and craft abroad. His greater asset, however — as the Mpumalanga fiasco attests — was his mind and not his bookkeeping skills.
And so his career as a “consultant” took off. Because of his understanding of economics and his independence — something he quite consciously developed, according to the associate — he became extremely popular on the briefing circuit: ambassadors, visiting foreign missions, foreign companies. It all reached an apex when CNN paid him to be its resident talking head during the 1994 elections; the BBC did the same during the opening of the first democratic parliament.
Now the night-nurse is his wife; they have a cluster in Fourways — not ostentatious at all — and an 18-month- old baby. The Sunday Times claims he has signed a R700 000 housing contract in one of those dreadful new walled cities to the north of Johannesburg: he disputes it.
What will happen to him now? There is, he claims, a “big picture” that only he and premier Mathews Phosa understand. He will not say what it is, save that “one of the undercurrents is this goddamn racism. It’s as if some people believe that certain [money] figures are just not supposed to be associated with a black man.”
Part of the story is the fact that grumpy old white men want to trash him because he is too threatening a change agent. If he can persuade the world that this is all there is to it — a strategy, to his credit, that he is no longer pursuing — then he will bounce back.
It seems a long shot, though. At the end of our discussion, Eugene Nyati and I stopped doing a dance around his past and firing shots at each other about his present dilemma, and lapsed into a discourse more familiar to both of us: I the inquiring and attentive journalist, he the sagacious commentator.
As usual, I found his comments clear and opinionated. But something was different, and it wasn’t only that he now says “us” rather than “them” when talking of government: there was an exhaustion to this usually ebullient man; a listlessness to his commentary.
His accountant, Maurice Allis (whose R200 000 bill to the commission was reduced, this week, by R150 000), trundled asthmatically into the office. “Are you winning?” he asked us.
Well, Maurice, no.