The decision to terminate Eskom CEO André de Ruyter’s notice period was made by its board and there was no meddling by the government, chair Mpho Makwana says.
Speaking to Business Day, Makwana said board members were “aghast” at a televised interview in which the outgoing De Ruyter pointed fingers at the highest ranks of the ANC and the government for the malaise at the utility.
After the eNCA interview was aired, the chair of the board convened a meeting of the board on Wednesday in which it was decided that De Ruyter, who resigned in December, should vacate his office immediately — one month before his planned departure. Makwana said the Eskom executive committee would make a decision on an acting CEO.
In the interview Makwana, dismissed rumours about interference from government in the decision taken to hasten De Ruyter’s departure.
Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, who is the utility’s political head, also maintained that the cutting short of De Ruyter’s notice period was “solely handled” by the board.
The department of public enterprises said Gordhan does not convene board meetings of state-owned enterprises.
“The board made a decision on the departure of [De Ruyter] and the minister concurred with the decision”.
Makwana said: “No, I’ve said this many times, this was the board feeling aghast at what we saw [in the eNCA interview]. There was no government person that came to the board to tell us what to do,” he said.
“In fact, it is an affront to the board to assume we are unable to figure these things out on our own and that we have to be told by government what to do,” Makwana said.
He said Eskom had suffered reputational damage because of the assertions De Ruyter made in the interview.
De Ruyter has in the past been frank about the deluge of crime and corruption at Eskom — a scourge that has seen president Cyril Ramaphosa deploying members of the SA National Defence Forces at some of its power plants.
“As the former CEO knows all too well, we are dealing with global funders. That interview has gone far and wide. Some of the points he raised could have been dealt with constructively in appropriate board committees that would have ensured they get investigated and followed through.”
Makwana told Business Day TV on Thursday that the new board which took over in October last year, in scrutinising all aspects of the business, “discovered a huge gap between the people at the coal face and those in the C-suite” and that they were not fully aligned.
Asked to clarify, he later told Business Day he thought De Ruyter was out of touch with certain areas of the business.
“There’s areas where he may have had his own sense of passion, but I don’t feel that people in power stations felt his leadership they should feel from a CEO of a technical company.”
In the interview De Ruyter also criticised the ANC’s ideological leanings and pervasive culture saying that “the ghosts of Marx and Lenin still haunt the halls of Luthuli House” and that some in the ANC were still “firmly committed to a 1980s style ideology”.
In their response to his assertions on Thursday the ANC gave as good as they got.
TimesLIVE reported that Gordhan said in parliament on Wednesday that CEOs of entities such as Eskom should keep whatever political views they held private and not get involved in “open political debates”. CEOs should, instead “keep their focus on their job”.
‘Shift blame’
ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said De Ruyter was trying to shift blame for his shortcomings to other people.
“We also reject his unfortunate, irresponsible and baseless claims of alleged political meddling and corruption at the embattled power utility. If Mr De Ruyter has any evidence to the contrary, he is duty-bound to present it.”
In a joint statement on Thursday evening, Business Unity SA (Busa) and Business Leadership SA said while the allegations made by De Ruyter remained unproven, they should be regarded “extremely” seriously.
“We condemn the attacks on Andre de Ruyter, irrespective of which quarter they come from. Reactions like these add credence to accusations that whistle-blowers are often treated as the criminals they unmask,” the statement said.
In the interview, De Ruyter said his attempts to stop the scourge of corruption at Eskom could be the motivation behind an attempt made on his life in December last year.
The alleged attempted murder, in which De Ruyter believes he was served a cup of coffee laced with cyanide at Eskom’s head office in Johannesburg, took place on December 13, one day after he submitted his resignation to Makwana, but before news of his decision to leave was made public on December 14. De Ruyter said in December that he had decided to resign because his position had become untenable.
In the days leading up to his resignation, mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe said that Eskom under De Ruyter’s watch was guilty of sabotage and of “agitating for the overthrow of the state” in allowing high levels of load-shedding.
De Ruyter told eNCA: “My rough estimate of what is stolen from Eskom is about R1bn a month and we’ve made some inroads. We’ve started closing the taps and that doesn’t make you any friends. It’s difficult to speculate on who might have wanted to make an attempt on my life, but the people with motive, there’s a pretty long list.”
Business Day reached out to De Ruyter for comment on the remarks made by Makwana, but had received no response at the of publication.
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