Hello everyone

Lets start with a dialogue

How many of you would want to work for big consultancy firms like BCG, ABC, McKenzie for that
matter!!

Wow, quite many of you, that’s great!

Now, lets park that aside and let me ask you a very different question

What’s the GDP of South Africa!

Well, ok, why would you know that, its, .3T USD

And what about India? Right, its 8 times SA’s GDP, 2.43T USD.

Now imagine a scam valued around 4800 Cr INR as against let’s say, Vijay Mallya’s scam of 8000 Cr
INR. And that too for a dwindling economy, 8 times smaller than ours, a country with worst income
inequality and more than 50% unemployment rate. This counts a lot!!!

And imagine our dream company McKenzie at the centre of it

Well, that’s South Africa crisis for you.

Let me explain this to you as a story.

(Draw on board)

So, we have a state-owned power supplier, Eskom which is struggling badly, frequent outages,
deferred maintenances, bad debts and what not.

In 2015, its new CEO, Mr. Brian Molefe, decides to rope in McKenzie to help them with financial
crisis.

McKenzie has already been into providing consultancies to govt. and state owned companies since
long. It handled Transnet crisis in 2011 in SA.

But, SA laws require a foreign company to subcontract a back owned firm for such projects.

Mr. Molefe steered them to Trillion, a consulting firm supposedly owned by Guptas.

Now, Guptas, they are very influential people in SA, having friends with Jacob Zuma, and many other
high ranking ministers, and infamously quoted by SA media as “state capturers”.

McKenzie had adopted a new payment system which says, they will take payments only when its
strategies start to pay-off. But it apparently appeared that even though there was no improvement
in Eskom’s condition, McKenzie and Trillion has still roped in 800Cr INR. Now this becomes a matter
of worry for an economy already struggling hard to sustain.

As it turned out, during an investigation, it was found that there were lot of anomalies in the way
payments were channelled and even the way contracts had been floated, particularly pointing
towards favouring the Guptas with the involvement of some senior officials from Eskom and
McKenzie and even some ministers.

Soon all the ties with McKenzie were severed and Mr. Molefe resigned amid investigations.
McKenzie clearly seems to be at fault by not vetting the contract, no vetting about the Trillion as well
as not having a local to head the project which raises questions about the haste or callousness
shown by McKenzie drawing wide criticism worldwide.

Recently, McKenzie released a press statement, apologising to SA and returned the full payment it
received from Eskom.

As I move towards conclusion, this is just one issue involving SA govt and alleged state capturers,
which highlights the depth of corruption and crisis SA is facing currently and McKenzie might seem
to be an accomplice here, but having faced similar situations previously as well, it still didn’t learn
the lessons well and would you still want to work for such a firm?