Three months ago the headline was adamant: André de Ruyter was saying that Eskom “can’t be fixed”. Today, Eskom says it is producing more power than SA can use. It’s enough to give you whiplash.
Of course, the devil is always in the detail, and admirers of De Ruyter will explain to you that what he actually told a conference back in May was not that Eskom couldn’t be fixed, but that it was unlikely to be returned to its former glory as an internationally admired, state-run behemoth providing cheap electricity.
But only three things are guaranteed in this world — death, taxes and people not reading past dodgy headlines — and a few days later the fabrication of a click-hungry subeditor had become official history, as Eskom chair Mteto Nyati said: “I heard some people saying you cannot fix Eskom.”
To be fair, the invented quote and its confirmation by Nyati were simply the last iteration of a belief that had taken on the feel of a fact during the darkest days of stage 6 load-shedding: I was one of many people who read stories about wet Gupta coal, or listened to a whole state president blame a campaign of sabotage, and was sure Eskom was going only one way.
Which is why the latest claim — that Eskom is producing more power than it has in six years — is so disorienting. And because it is, it will quickly go and join a strange but growing pile of claims, some true, some false, that shape us and the way we perceive our country, and yet which, through exhaustion or what US journalist Sean Illing calls “manufactured nihilism” — that soul-deep ambivalence to facts that comes from being exposed to too many lies — become forgotten the moment they fall through the sieve of our collective attention span.
I’ve probably forgotten most of them. That, after all, is the plan. But two have stuck with me as reminders of this phenomenon whereby we are told something that seems very, very important, and then — poof — it’s gone. The first was Sydney Mufamadi telling the Zondo state capture commission in 2021 that certain journalists had been paid by the State Security Agency to write puff pieces about Jacob Zuma. The second is the claim made by Lindiwe Sisulu in July that while she was intelligence minister in the cabinet of Thabo Mbeki, “we bugged everyone”.
Now, I understand that our outrage bar is pretty high, and allegations about things that may or may not have happened many years ago and didn’t kill anyone, or cost billions of rand, probably aren’t going to twitch your burnt-out adrenal glands. Still, I would have thought journalists might want to know which of their colleagues were sell-outs who’d write propaganda for a buck. At the very least, I would have thought they’d want to know whether they’d once been the targets of a huge criminal conspiracy carried out by Mbeki and his security minister.
Yet both claims have drifted away with time and tide; or, as is more likely the case, been washed away by a phenomenon coined by one of the world’s most cynical people. In 2018, Steve Bannon, the grandpappy of Trumpism, explained to the faithful that Democrats were not the main threat to the Maga movement. “The real opposition,” he famously said, “is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Of course, public relations sharks and political spin doctors have been doing something similar for decades, usually burying scandals under a mountain of charity donations and press releases about nothing. But it was Bannon who defined the current and vastly expanded iteration of that process; of flooding the news cycle with mis- and disinformation, specifically to overwhelm newsrooms by handing editors and journalists more lies in a day than they could refute in a month.
We know Trump proved an eager student: the 30,000-plus “false or misleading” statements he produced during his presidency have become lore, and his advancing age doesn’t seemed to have slowed him down: over the weekend the august fact-checkers at National Public Radio combed through his Thursday speech and found “at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes”. Of course, the trouble is that all 162 got identified long after the horse had bolted; and it only happened at all because editors know that Trump is an endless source both of Bannon’s stinky stuff and of clicks.
Someone like Sisulu, on the other hand, knows she will have none of those spotlights put on her. In a country in which journalists are too underfunded, understaffed — and in some cases too timid or sycophantic — to produce receipts in real time, Sisulu and her ilk know a press conference isn’t a cross-examination: it’s a megaphone.
I don’t know if De Ruyter made any “false or misleading” statements back then. I don’t know if his replacements are making any now. But I do know there is a radical difference between what was widely believed then, and what we are being asked to believe now; and the fact that we are not demanding experts to explain that difference to us — to help reconcile two contradictory realities — shows how much we’re willing to let slide.
I don’t blame us. I just wish our media wasn’t running on fumes.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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