'It is a mountain top experience, but as with any plateau, you can always move to a higher level'

FOR the second time in as many months, Reuel Khoza has gone head to head with the mighty Cyril Ramaphosa and won.

The first occasion was when the African Mining Group, which he chairs, won the race for JCI. The second was this week when he was appointed chairman of utility Eskom - beating Ramaphosa in a two-man race.

Khoza prefers to call it a "sibling" contest. "The two of us have a fraternal relationship going back many years."

Indeed, Ramaphosa called Khoza in Cape Town, where he was in a board meeting, to offer congratulations. "I appreciate his magnanimity," says Khoza.

Khoza takes over from retiring John Maree on March 15.

For Khoza, the appointment is the cherry on top of 16 years' hard work in a competitive, hostile environment as a management consultant. "It's a mountain top experience, but as with any plateau, you can always move to a higher level."

Khoza tells of the days when he had "to get into bed with whites or use them as fronts in order to get an office in town". Business itself was inhospitable to a black management consultant. As he puts it, he "survived the turbulent period" and built the consultancy into a force to be reckoned with.

Today he counts among his recent and past clients Barlows, IBM, SA Airways and Eskom, where he ran a number of management and leadership development programmes, both at middle and top management levels, in the late 1980s.

For him, Eskom is therefore familiar territory.

"I am lucky to have had extensive exposure to the utility. Over the years I have grown to know almost all the executive managers at Eskom through the programmes I ran for them."

He brings with him a leadership style that is going to be "bold, yet consultative", but also extensive consulting experience where the focus has been on managing change.

That he comes to Eskom familiar with the territory is a plus for the utility. It means he is well aware of the challenges facing the giant corporation, one of the five largest utilities in the world, in the next century.

Eskom has begun its own transformation process - it is noted for being at the forefront of affirmative action implementation. "At a practical level, the challenge is to improve and optimise the skills of the workforce for genuine empowerment, maintain Eskom's position as a leading utility and contain costs. The goal is to make electricity accessible to South Africans to the greatest extent possible," says Khoza.

Over the years Eskom has become one of the most costeffective supplier of cheap electricity in the world and has committed itself to electrifying 300 000 new houses every year from 1992. It has electrified well over 1.5-million houses since the drive began, although non- payment of services remains a serious problem.

Equally important, Khoza says he will "seek to work closely with management and unions to reposition Eskom to remain a leading supplier of electricity at the cutting edge of technical excellence" in the face of the competition it will inevitably face as the industry undergoes a shake-up. He will not be drawn into the privatisation saga at Eskom until he has consulted with the relevant stakeholders.

After graduating from the University of the North in 1974 with honours in psychology, Khoza joined Lever Brothers as a brand manager until 1978.

Between 1978 and 1979 he completed a masters in marketing management from the University of Lancaster before taking up a post with Shell SA as marketing communications manager. In 1981 he set up his own consulting firm, Co-ordinated Management Consulting, and has not looked back since. He holds a number of directorships, including Standard Bank, IBM and Glaxo-Wellcome.

He enjoys listening to contemporary choral music, reading management literature and jogging "once in a while".

Thabo Kobokoane

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