President Jacob Zuma.
Maybe it's because the executive is so addicted to secrecy that some important news was hidden away in a budget speech by the minister in the presidency – the information that President Jacob Zuma himself will chair the body charged with organising the huge spend and build of South Africa's intended nuclear programme.
The first point made by anyone who noticed this news is that this was the deputy president's chair until now, and he is being given hard, potentially embarrassing jobs, not long-term, potentially lucrative ones.
It will also be staggeringly expensive – somewhere in the region of R1-trillion. Many, including the treasury and the National Planning Commission, argue that nuclear power is the last thing we need to be spending so much public money on: we're behind on the coal-fired power station at Medupi, yes, but we have coal to last a long, long time, and then there's the possibility of gas piped from Mozambique or the Karoo, and greener sources are beginning to be tapped.
What the placement of Zuma as head of the nuclear committee shows, though, is that this is one programme the government is very serious about, for reasons as much to do with securing geopolitical position as with expected electricity demand.
The scope for sleaze, patronage and outright corruption, of course, is proportional to the scale of the spending. The fact that the president himself is in charge of this is not very reassuring, but at least in years to come he will not be able to say – as he has of Nkandla and so much else – that he had no idea what was going on or who was spending money on what.