Can the Brett Kebble era possibly be over? Just about everyone who has ever had anything to do with him doubts it.
Kebble might have been knocked off his perch atop JCI — the venerable mining firm that he transformed into a motley collection of empowerment ventures — and he may have lost his corner offices at Randgold and Western Areas, but he will be back before long, both his friends and enemies predict.
Of course, he has forfeited his main organising base at JCI’s head-quarters in Bishopscourt, where the African National Congress Youth League and some of the sharper characters in the mining industry swap secrets, and shares. And, in many ways, it is to be hoped that the Kebble-factor will not return as a significant variable in South African business, whichever way the family’s personal fortunes turn.
It has been vastly entertaining to look on as Kebble parlayed struggle connections from his days at the law firm Mallinicks into a model of empowerment that he claims launched the careers of BEE stars like Tokyo Sexwale, fighting wars with everyone from the Scorpions to the mining establishment along the way.
Unlike Sexwale, he has never succeeded in winning the hearts of the mainstream business community, or indeed the mainstream of the ANC. Instead, he has partnered with more marginal figures in the Western Cape ANC and the Youth League in deals that critics have suggested — and the Mail & Guardian has demonstrated — at times were little more than sophisticated fronting arrangements.
The Orlyfunt transaction, which saw JCI consolidating its empowerment interests and selling them for a consideration amounting to shares and debt, was the grandest of these schemes. And, it seems, the most hollow. JCI’s new directors will rapidly unwind it.
But the end has not come simply because Kebble picked the wrong political allies. It has come because shareholders and lenders exposed to his companies had finally had enough of the shuffling — and occasional disappearance — of assets, and of his failure to deliver returns. And he could no longer come up with the cash to fight them off.
So his demise has to be seen as a victory for the allied forces of greed and corporate governance. Diddling the shareholders, and the JSE, is hardly a game Brett Kebble invented, but he combined it with politics to novel, and unsavoury, effect. And it seems, in the end, he didn’t make much money doing it.
Let’s hope his would-be emulators — and they are legion — treat it as a cautionary tale.