Edward Kieswetter spent more than seven years as commissioner of the South African Revenue Service and stepped down at the end of April. According to his LinkedIn profile, he became chief executive of his own company, vEKtor Solutions Laboratory, in May. He confirmed the venture in an interview with the broadcaster Bruce Whitfield for the podcast So, you think you want to be a CEO?
The pitch is a career, codified. Kieswetter said he had 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. The firm advises corporate clients and state institutions on integrity, strategic leadership and performance excellence.
Forty years of broken things
The record he is selling runs a long way back. He recounted the lessons learnt as an 18-year-old church leader, as an engineering lecturer at Athlone Technical College, and later from running Eskom's Wilge Power Station near Emalahleni in his early 30s. He joined FirstRand in 2000, where a plan to compress an 18-month programme into 100 days worked commercially and cost 1,800 people their jobs. He decided then that the next time he had to retrench people, he should resign first, because leaders should see far enough ahead to make the decisions that could avert that catastrophe.
At Alexander Forbes he inherited a R1 billion civil claim, 21 criminal charges and a potential R3.5 billion tax bill, over accusations that the company had helped strip pension fund surpluses from retirement funds in the 1990s. Those claims were eventually settled, and he led the group through a financial turnaround, rebuilt its reputation and oversaw its relisting on the JSE. Then came SARS in 2019, and the governance failures and state capture corruption laid out in the findings of the Nugent Commission of Inquiry. In his last year as commissioner, the revenue service collected a record R2 trillion.
Not selling slide decks
Kieswetter is positioning the new firm against the industry it most resembles. He said he was excited to lead the venture, that traditional consultancies are becoming irrelevant, and that vEKtor Solutions Lab goes beyond a glossy presentation and strategic advice. The work, he said, is about building meaningful AI-enabled practical solutions alongside teams, with evidence-based and demonstrable proof, and about closing the execution gap. On the new job itself he was blunt: again there is no job description, so he only has himself to blame if it turns out to be a nightmare.
SARS is now run by his former deputy, Johnstone Makhubu.
