Sometime in the 1980's a prestigious consulting firm were asked by the US telecom company AT&T how many mobile phones they could expect to sell in the year 2000. Having duly consulted they came up with 100,000 and AT&T neglegted the market to their shareholders detriment. The actual amount was around 2 million. I'm uncertain what the consultants charged for their services back then.
In 2017 a SOE collapsing under the weight of decades of bad planning and crippling corruption asked a prestigious consulting firm how to avoid further power cuts, which were anyway a non event due to a serious down turn of the economy (we won't go there) and a fact confirmed in advance by their ailing clients. Having duly consulted etc. they said nothing to worry about and that'll be R2.8 billion please.
Guess who were consulting?