Power clashes

The Podium

The first happened in my job at the Danish National Authority of Municipalities. I had been at the Authority for two years, in a department with two consultancy sections, organizational development and human resource. I was in organizational development, this was where my background and interests lay and I had moved my way slowly upwards in the hierarchy. Human resource was unknown territory, and furthermore involved a lot of public speaking. Not my thing. One day, YB from human resource talked me into being an emergency stand-in for her at a human resource seminar. It proved to be a national seminar and suddenly I was standing on the podium in front of 300 municipal human resource managers supposed to tell them from a national perspective how they should run their department. A disaster, of course. YB made sure this disaster was communicated very directly and in writing from her and another head of department, to my boss. I later realized that I was in the running with YB to manage the department when the present boss was leaving. YB had set me up for failure. I am not sure I was outmanoeuvred, but I was hurt. This was the first time I had experienced that someone openly tried to dent my professional reputation in order to gain an advantage in the hierarchy. I ran. My boss granted me a 1 year leave and I moved to the other side of the world to help my brother manage his clothing company. 

The Copy Machine

The second power game I can remember happened in my third job and had similarities to the first. I had moved to the international department of a large engineering consultancy company, and had again moved my way up the hierarchy to the second position in the department. The department had 60 professional consultants, and when the head of department was abroad, they used me to run the department in his absence. The boss’ boss, the vice president, I seldomly meet, maybe because I did not regard him highly. These things has a way of showing. One day the Vice President came to my office, for the first time I think, with some of my print outs from the central copy machine room, pointing out all the English speeling mistakes it contained (I still remember one of them, writing major instead of mayor), and put me on a basic English spelling course. This was the international department, I was deputy, pure embarrassment. I later found out that AA, an ambitious consultant in the department, had handed him the print out and she had told him that I found him professionally weak, which I think I had mentioned in passing at the coffee machine. It was a blow, but not devastating, I was still fine. If our social stratification ranking is high enough, and in consultancy if our ability to win contracts and make money for the company is good, we are difficult to touch. Still, someone in my close surroundings had come after me and put a stint on my reputation. It annoyed me. A bubble had burst. Like the first time, I ran. I put my name in for long term postings, and quickly won one. I moved to Borneo on the opposite side on the Earth, far away from the internal power politics at head office. 

The Ambassador

The Danish Ambassador to Thailand became the third person to play a painful power game on me. I had worked three years in Thailand for a project for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs managed by the Embassy, but had never meet MS, the Ambassador. The tsunami stroke and the Thai Government, with my team as technical assistance, started a reconstruction project in Southern Thailand funded by the Danish Embassy, on the island of Koh Phi Phi. We had almost completed the construction, the project looked beautiful and started to attract attention. The Embassy called to ask if I could arrange an onsite visit for the Ambassador. He came for 3 days, we showed him around and had a good time. No issues whatsoever. He returned to Bangkok and I never saw or talked to him again. I left the project and Thailand, the project ran into typical operational issues, the Ambassador refused to release the operational budgets set aside for the Thai government, but choose instead to launch an attack on me and my company back in Copenhagen. He activated the full force of the Foreign Affairs’ legal department. The claim centred around the lack of technical drawings and specifications. Legal negotiations were held, and my company accepted to pay the claims (did not really have a choice, the Ministry being a big client). In all this was neither I as project manager or the Thai Government as project owner involved. The Ambassador used his power base to attack and blame the project he had visited shortly for operational issues without the involvement of me or my Thai colleagues. As the Ambassador never contacted me to discuss what the issues were or how they could be solved, I can only guess about his motives. Having worked later as a diplomat, my best guess is the cover-my-back strategy, applied almost instinctively in the extremely risk-adverse Foreign Affairs sector. Blame someone else to be sure you cannot be blamed thereby not being transferred to the next country. Who knows. Having my company pay a fine for something that easily could be solved (and was solved by the Thai and Japanese Governments as the plant still was treating wastewater satisfactory 10 years later) was painful. If was particularly painful as I was not offered a position to fight from. He was a small man. 

The Charlatans

The next time I was in a painful power game it was about money. In the last week working at the Embassy in South Africa, TM and AP, the CEOs of LTE, a black owned consulting engineering company, came to my office and invited me to stay on in South Africa and join their company. I visited their company, I liked what I saw (a growing engineering company with plenty of staff and good potential) and l liked both of them. Charming, convincing and rich (the last likely mattered, I had just divorced and was left with nothing and had to start from scratch. A story for another day). We opened a separate company with 50/50 ownership and I got started. I worked on my own, won my first contracts and established a small team paid from the surplus of the projects I had won. After a year I wanted to go after a large contract for Eskom, the national energy company, and that was when I realised that LTE did not operate as a normal engineering company. I needed to assembly an engineering team, but found that among the 110 staff employed only 3 had a certificate. The apparently busy HQ was a Potemkin building staffed with family members or relatives of the politicians they got contracts from. To submit the proposal I had to pull in professionals from my Danish network. I wrote the proposal single-handed, won and received the appointment letter. It was largest contract I and LTE had ever won, more than R400 mill in consultancy fees. And then everything went quiet. No answers to emails or request for start-up meetings, no work orders from the client. I asked an insider (a husband of a colleague at the embassy) to see if he could find out what the problem was. He came back and told me that R31 million had already been paid out, not to the bank account on the contract (mine), but directly to the LTE account number. No work had been delivered, that I knew. But money had still been transferred. I had no clue what had happened. I asked the energy company and the two LTE CEOs, and I got nowhere. For every question I asked, for every step I took, I was meet with a different diversion strategy. I ran in circles. First I was played with silence (Eskom never replied to any of my emails or calls), then the good cop bad cop strategy between the two CEOs getting me confused about who did it and how, then as my temper rose, with legal stuff. I engaged a lawyer and we had meetings with 4 of their lawyers. Overpowered. Then I was suddenly not a director in our 50/50 company (again some legal cleverness), and so on. I started to realise that for every step I took, I was three behind. This was their playing field, they had been here before, and was prepared for anything I came up with. I had been scammed for millions. Being good at scamming requires con artist skills, charm, eloquence and very good interpersonal social skills, all of which they had aplenty. I had entered a lion cage without knowing. I decided to just leave, defeated. I later found out TM and AP were top scammers that went from scamming not only millions but billions. For the good scammer, easy money generates more money as they now can pay cash upfront to secure the next even bigger contract. They had no professional competence, but won contracts to build bridges, substations and dams. They are so rich and well-connected that they still are out there, scamming and accumulating money. They have become famous nation-wide. I got defeated early and got out in time. I was lucky. My wife helped. She is a good middle classer. When I get a little depressed by this defeat she comfortingly say that I would have beaten them in any other professional field, just not the one they were playing on. She also always warn me of the lure of money. This takes repeating to a rural boy. 

The Wicked One

XM, a community leader, hit me hard and brought me my 15 minutes of unwanted fame. I had worked 4 years with the community trying hard to make the rural development project funded by the government a success, or at least not a failure. In these years I had seen the community fight against each other over and over. The community of 90 families was divided into fractions. In the four years they had had many different community boards, each being outmanoeuvred by the next and voted out based on accusations and internal dirty games. I was an outsider, trying to help keep order and the project moving forward. I was paid directly by government to keep everything transparent and me out of internal trouble. The board consisted of ten members, and they decided to throw XM out of the board. This he did not take laying down. Three months later he launched his counterattack, unfortunately for me, this attack launched me as the main villain. He wrote letters to the national TV station which ran a weekly populist investigative programme. He convinced them to take his story, they came to site, stayed an hour, interviewed XM and some of his supporters (but none of the nine board members that had kicked him out) and the following week had a 15 minute coverage that featured me as the one that had ruined the project, the foreign white villain that had stolen all the money from the poor black farmers. They even had found pictures on Facebook of me swimming on a tropical island (I have not posted on Facebook since). This is a widely viewed programme, and some of my friends called and told me not to worry, this happens again and again when working with communities in South Africa. Easy to say, they were not swimming like a rich walrus in clear blue water on the TV screen. Of the five stories, I think this is the one that hit me hardest. It hit my professional honour, it hit my wife and my family. Google me and XM and his story pops up. I feel this story will follow me forever. I hired a lawyer to force them to take the false story down. That went nowhere. The Government started an investigation (they had to), investigation teams came to my home, I handed over all documents, bank statements and financial records, and for 4 months I felt under siege. They did not find anything. I knew that and the investigation team also knew. I have not come to South Africa to steal money from the poor. I am a middle class professional. I cannot steal. And XM? He got what he wanted. The community held a vote and he was elected board Chairman and the nine board members was kicked out.