Much spleen has been vented and ink spilt over the departure of Eskom’s former CEO André de Ruyter earlier this year. He has come in for stinging criticism from the government. At the heart of much of the opprobrium has been a contentious privately run investigation funded by the private sector into organised crime at the utility’s power stations and in its coal supply chain.
The resulting security reports were undoubtedly incendiary. They attempted to follow the trails along which billions of rand were allegedly being siphoned off at Eskom every month through theft, tender fraud and vandalism at plants and in the supply chain. While much of the intelligence in these reports is yet to be backed up with evidence, new information only further proves the extent of ongoing criminality and graft at Eskom.
The blowback for De Ruyter was swift after the release of a book about his time at Eskom, and once he made allegations about the involvement of cabinet ministers in an infamous television interview. There is little doubt that some of his comments about the character of the ANC were irrelevant and ill-advised.
Minister of mineral resources & energy Gwede Mantashe accused De Ruyter of treason, “acting like a policeman” and went so far as to accuse him of “agitating for the overthrow of the state”. Eskom’s own chair, Mpho Makwana, refused to say that he did not believe De Ruyter was a “traitor”.
The ANC weighed in too, accusing him of an “opportunistic venture into the political arena” that “unmasked his regressive political and ideological agenda … We also reject his unfortunate, irresponsible, and baseless claims of alleged political meddling and corruption at the embattled power utility,” the Financial Times reported.
After the very public bust-up, criticism about his time at Megawatt Park ramped up. Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan suggested he should have spent more time running power stations than “collecting gossip” for his book.
It is certainly true that no matter the issues he had to attend to, Eskom’s performance under his tenure was far from stellar.
However, accusations of graft did not start with De Ruyter. Mining’s biggest trade union, NUM, warned Gordhan about the scale of the problem long before De Ruyter went on television.
It is notable, though, that President Cyril Ramaphosa in a written response to a parliamentary question confirmed that Eskom is attempting to recoup billions of rand that it believes was paid irregularly to contractors, including in terms of supply agreements and construction contracts. A total R11bn of contracts have been cancelled, he said.
On Monday, electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said 2,147 criminal cases relating to Eskom have been opened since April 1 2022, 1,586 of which are under investigation. “We are looking at the configuration of the anatomy of a criminal operation by looking at the sources,” he said.
De Ruyter, to some extent through his own misadventures in the media, became a lightning rod for many of SA’s issues and a huge distraction from the problem at hand on which we are now starting to see some progress — rampant theft and corruption at Eskom and in its supply chains.
It is possible for two things to be true at once. De Ruyter’s conduct is a matter of contentious debate, but it is increasingly evident that his frustration at the slow pace of action to address crime at the utility was entirely well founded.
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