Former Eskom chief executive Brian Molefe on Tuesday lost his bid to have the Democratic Alliance and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) excluded from his Labour Court case to get his job back.
The two political parties will, on Thursday, get to tell the Johannesburg Labour Court exactly why they believe Molefe should not be reinstated again, reasons that include allegations that he favoured the Gupta family.
After a morning of arguments it took Judge Connie Prinsloo only moments to deliver a ruling that dismissed Molefe’s opposition to the political parties’ involvement in his application, with costs.
Counsel for Molefe had argued that Eskom is a company, Molefe an employee and that the “unfair dismissal” of one by the other was not a matter for political parties to get involved in. The DA and EFF were doing so simply to score political points, Molefe’s advocate, Noel Graves, told the court.
“This is lawfare,” he said.
Graves also described the parties’ attempted intervention as a “tactical” effort to ensure “a bloodless victory” in their separate high court challenge to Molefe’s earlier reinstatement at Eskom, before it fired him again, leading to his Labour Court application.
The DA replied that the attempt by Molefe, until recently a member of Parliament, to limit the participation of political parties was “troubling”.
“It concerns an organ of state, spending public money, exercising public power, providing public services,” the party’s advocate, Paul Kennedy, said of Molefe’s attempt to get his job back.
The DA’s fellow opposition party was somewhat more blunt.
“It is simply illogical to conceive of the argument they have constructed,” advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi told the Labour Court on the EFF’s assessment of Molefe’s approach.
Had Molefe succeeded in excluding the DA and EFF, that would have left only Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown opposing his action. Though Brown has put up what Molefe’s legal team characterised as “stout opposition”, she has not challenged his fitness to run Eskom, nor brought up findings by the public protector linking him to state capture.
The DA and the EFF, on the other hand, have promised to argue that if Molefe did not resign from Eskom and was not lawfully fired from it, he should still not be allowed to run it because of his relationship with the Gupta family and their companies.
Along the way they are also likely to point out, again and again, that Molefe has never provided his own version of what happened between him and the Guptas.
“There is not a single line that provides a version, not one,” Ngcukaitobi said of Molefe’s submissions to the courts. “They have not provided a single explanation about the allegations in the public protector’s report.”