Former SARS commissioner Edward Kieswetter confirmed his new venture in an interview with broadcast journalist Bruce Whitfield for his podcast ‘So, you think you want to be a CEO?’
After more than seven years as commissioner of the South African Revenue Service (SARS), Edward Kieswetter stepped down at the end of April this year and has embraced a new position as CEO of his own company.
He confirmed the new venture in an interview with broadcast journalist Bruce Whitfield for his podcast ‘So, you think you want to be a CEO?’
“I’ve established a company that will codify 40 years of experience, with incontestable evidence of having been able to fix broken things as a young power station manager through to the Commission of SARS,” Kieswetter said in the interview.
He recounted the lessons learnt as an 18-year-old church leader, an engineering lecturer at Athlone Technical College, and later from running Eskom’s Wilge Power Station near Emalahleni, Mpumalanga, in his early 30s.
He joined FirstRand in 2000, and the move turned out to be a formative experience that fundamentally changed his views on retrenchment.
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“We came up with a very smart plan to implement what was initially considered an 18-month implementation programme into a 100-day project, which, from a business perspective, was great. [But] the collateral damage was the retrenchment of 1 800 people around the country.
“I made a decision then that the next time I have to retrench people, I should resign first. Because leaders should see far enough to know that a retrenchment may be coming down the line and to make the decisions that could avert that catastrophe.”
Kieswetter also reflected on becoming CEO of Alexander Forbes (now Alexforbes) in 2010, when the company was facing “a R1 billion civil claim, 21 criminal charges, and potentially a R3.5 billion tax bill” amid accusations that it helped to strip pension fund surpluses from retirement funds during the 1990s. The claims were eventually settled.
One of the biggest personal challenges he faced at the firm was internal pushback from actuaries who questioned being led by someone without an actuarial degree, and he spoke to Whitfield about how he worked to earn their trust.
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The truth hurts – but less than a lie
In 2019, when Kieswetter took over at SARS, he had to grapple with years of governance failures and state capture corruption as laid out in the findings of the Nugent Commission of Inquiry.
On the podcast, he spoke about how he dealt with the five SARS executives who were mentioned in the Nugent report when he became commissioner.
“One of the things I have learned is that people can deal much better with the truth, as hard as it may be, than they can deal with knowing they’ve been lied to. If you try to be nice to people, but in reality, you know that you’re going to have to make some firm decisions, people will not know when to trust you.
“I can tell you, some of the people against whom I’ve taken the toughest decisions, in a professional sense, have remained in friendly relationships with me afterwards because they respect the fact that I never lied to them.”
Kieswetter detailed his “steward leadership” approach to being a CEO, and said the “real job of a CEO is hardly ever expressed in the job description”.
In his new role as founder and CEO of vEKtor Solutions Laboratory, “again there’s no job description … so I only have myself to blame if it turns out to be a nightmare”.
The company aims to advise corporate clients and state institutions on “integrity, strategic leadership, and performance excellence”.
“[It] is a privilege and excitement to create something which starts out as a dream and a vision, and [through] painstaking attention to detail along the way to see it coming to fruition. I think that’s really what keeps people like myself going. I think the minute you have no purpose, you have no function, and then the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.”
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