The ANC's hysterical reaction to outgoing Eskom CEO André de Ruyter's bombshell interview last week has yet again shown us how naked the emperor is.
There wasn't as much as a hint of humility or self-reflection as ANC ministers fell over each other to scream "right winger!" (read: racist) into the nearest journalist's microphone in the wake of De Ruyter's strangely timed interview with eNCA's Annika Larsen.
If nothing else, De Ruyter has succeeded in uniting comrades in their outrage over his disparaging remarks about the governing party. The ANC is really, really good at closing ranks against a perceived common enemy. And if that enemy is white and Afrikaans, so much better!
The ANC is not so good at taking responsibility for its own created crisis at Eskom, but more of that later.
What did I think of Larsen's interview with De Ruyter? In journalistic terms, this was gold. I interviewed him last year at News24's inaugural On the Record summit, and he didn't divulge even 10% of what he revealed to Larsen.
His resignation clearly gave him the freedom to name and shame (without actually naming) his bosses in government, and it was clear from the questions that De Ruyter wanted this information out. Larsen didn't push back on his answers, and there was disappointingly little about what exactly he did to counter load shedding.
Apart from admitting he had failed to lighten the burden of load shedding, I wanted to hear more about his maintenance strategy and whether he still believed it was the right way to prevent total grid collapse.
The interview timing was strange; I would have expected De Ruyter to wait to spill the beans when he was out of Eskom. It's unclear what caused the urgency to air the interview now.
I was also disappointed with De Ruyter's comment about his "white Afrikaans blind spots" supposedly preventing him from understanding the depths of extraction and corruption at Eskom. Apart from being a crime against humanity, apartheid was one massive state capture project that enriched the Afrikaner elite and their corporate friends.
Afrikaners understand corruption all too well, and De Ruyter shouldn't shy away from Eskom's complicity during the apartheid years in developing a working state for whites only. In fact, one of the major issues still bedevilling Eskom is that it was never supposed to provide electricity to 60 million South Africans, the majority of whom are black.
Another comment I found odd was his insistence that a microchip found in his car was a bugging device. I read numerous articles after the discovery of the chip, quoting technology experts saying it was definitely not a tracking or bugging device but part of Volvo's tracker system.
I assume De Ruyter's private investigators still insist it was a bugging device, and one can only hope that nobody is fuelling his paranoia for nefarious reasons.
The rest of the interview was rocket fuel and fire. It was astonishing to hear how little has been done by the police to accost the person(s) who tried to poison him in December; that despite organised coal syndicates being identified in Mpumalanga, no arrests have been made; that ministers advised him to turn a blind eye to potential corruption with the R150 billion loans and grants given by Western countries to South Africa for decarbonisation at COP26 last year, and that a senior ANC minister is allegedly himself involved in Eskom's corruption.
No wonder Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe called De Ruyter a 'policeman' and said he would prefer a pliant engineer in the job of Eskom CEO. Go figure.
The public lynching of De Ruyter, even by his own minister Pravin Gordhan who is now blaming the Eskom CEO for travelling too much abroad and not giving enough attention to power generation, is pitiful to see. Would Gordhan have preferred to see De Ruyter in a blue overall, spanner in hand, getting into the thick of things at Tutuka power station?
De Ruyter clearly touched the comrades on their studio, and the venom was piled on with such abundance that you had to wonder whether the likes of Gordhan, Mantashe, Fikile Mbalula and Mondli Gungubele had been living in a parallel universe for the past three years.
Were it not for De Ruyter and his team, we would still not have known the extent of maintenance neglect at our power stations during the Matshela Koko and Brian Molefe years; South Africa would not have been successful in securing hundreds of billions of rands for the just transition project; organised mafia syndicates would have continued unhindered to plunder Eskom's assets; Eskom would not have been able to buy parts from original equipment manufacturers, and we would have been much closer to grid collapse.
Despite the best efforts of De Ruyter's detractors, old and new, to blame him for our perilous state of load shedding, history will show that it was the ANC itself that broke Eskom to the point of no return.
It was the ANC's lack of foresight and planning in the 1990s to build new energy capacity; the ANC's rent-seeking through Chancellor House at Medupi and Kusile; the ANC's deployment of state capturers to plunder Eskom, and the state capturers' opportunistic "strategy" of running our power stations into the ground until they broke, that gave us Stage 6 load shedding.
Not André de Ruyter's trips abroad.
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