TOM EATON | We’ll stay in the dark on Eskom’s unfortunate series of events

It turns out the blockbusters have got it all wrong. In SA, when villains try to bring about regime change by sabotaging a country’s power supply, the authorities respond by dropping hints about coincidences.

To be fair, I understand why André de Ruyter isn’t calling a spade a saboteur.

Were he to pronounce, unequivocally, that sabotage is taking place regularly at Eskom, it would imply that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government is no longer in full control of the national grid.

Much more alarmingly for the ANC, it would also force the state to arrest and reveal the plotters, potentially releasing an avalanche of smallernyana skeletons from cupboards on both sides of the factional divide.

Thanks to 27 years of “cadre deployment”, De Ruyter would also have to be 100% sure he was dealing with criminal intent and not just standard-issue ANC incompetence, a tough task given how blurred the line has become in this country. (Of course, you could also argue that hiring people you know are not qualified for the job represents a form of low-intensity sabotage, but that’s a debate for another day.)

All of which is why De Ruyter is still speaking in such diplomatic tones, describing Wednesday evening’s double-whammy — an electricity tower “collapsing” at Lethabo power station and an extension cord being dropped onto a transformer at the Matimba power station — as “considerable coincidences”.

If it’s not being sabotaged, then De Ruyter should be sacked immediately for shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre, or at least dropping a hint about it, and thereby revealing that he is dangerously out of his depth.

He might even be right. Without video evidence of saboteurs pushing over towers or flinging cables onto transformers, we have to be open to the possibility that these events were simply random accidents that happened to take place at the same time.

Likewise, it’s entirely possible that the spate of outages that occurred just before the local government election on November 1 were caused by a cluster of completely unrelated events, none of which were deliberate, and that the subsequent damage done to Ramaphosa in the election was an accidental by-product of random timing.

Yes, this might all be one big coincidence. But the fact that we’re even talking like this, with nothing to go on but De Ruyter’s polite innuendo, is utterly absurd.

We don’t know what De Ruyter knows. He can’t tell us, and even if he could, it would be so redacted and sanitised as to be little more than the faint hints he’s been dropping so far.

But right now, we can be 100% sure that one of only two things is happening.

Either Eskom is being actively sabotaged or it isn’t.

If it’s not being sabotaged, then De Ruyter should be sacked immediately for shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, or at least dropping a hint about it, and thereby revealing that he is dangerously out of his depth.

If it is being sabotaged, however, then the state is under attack by domestic terrorists.

Neither of these options allows Ramaphosa to do nothing.

Either De Ruyter must go or the security cluster must arrest the wreckers, find out who they’re working for and start putting people in prison.

At least, that’s the theory. In reality, neither will happen.

Four months ago, Ramaphosa’s response to the Zuptas’ scorched-earth blitzkrieg was to watch and wait — and that was when two provinces were on fire. Now, facing the literally impossible task of being an ANC president and tackling the dysfunction and corruption of the party and its creatures (how do you clean a house made of filth?) he will be even more cautious.

All of which means that, at least for now, the Zuptas will continue to scream for De Ruyter’s head and the coincidences will continue.