TOM EATON | Now that De Ruyter has resigned ...

As Andre de Ruyter’s resignation is cheered and lamented, we still don’t know if he was doing a heroic holding job at Eskom or hastening its collapse. But there’s a pretty good way of making an educated guess: just look at the people who are happy he’s gone.

So far they fall into three broad categories: sycophants of Jacob Zuma, fans of burning diesel and coal, and people whose continued employment depends on them thinking whatever Cyril Ramaphosa orders them to think.

For a few, De Ruyter’s race has also clearly been extremely upsetting, as the EFF’s Floyd Shivambu revealed when he tweeted “Good riddance to white incompetent and mediocre trash”. If only De Ruyter had smuggled cigarettes for a living, his race and alleged trashiness might have been overlooked, but c’est la vie.

Mostly, however, it’s been the two-faced ANC slagging him off out of both its lying mouths.

Fikile Mbalula led the charge, tweeting that De Ruyter’s departure would “give us an opportunity to get a well informed [sic] person about eskom [sic] challenges.”

Inevitably, some wondered aloud how someone so bad at his job was so comfortable questioning someone else’s competence, but with respect, that outrage is misguided.

If being minister of transport were Mbalula’s job, I would agree that he’s terrible at it, but that’s not his job. His real job, the one he is paid huge amounts of money to perform, and the one he’s actually pretty eager to do, is being unshakeably, almost pathetically loyal to Ramaphosa; and you have to admit he was doing it fairly well this week, even managing to type out the day’s new talking point without adding too many spelling mistakes. (“No, sure, whatever you want, my President. Er, just one question: what’s a ‘well informed’?” “Jesus Mbaks, just write it and I’ll throw you another cookie, OK?”)

Gwede Mantashe didn’t say much after De Ruyter’s resignation, mainly because he’d said it all already, from mooting the formation of a second, ANC-controlled Eskom and disingenuously claiming that De Ruyter was spending all his time being a “policeman” to finally accusing Eskom, and by implication De Ruyter, of “actively agitating for the overthrow of the state”.

I’m sure we’ll find out one day why, exactly, Mantashe wanted De Ruyter gone, and what kind of deals were made in order to get Ramaphosa to comply. Certainly, it seems a very remarkable coincidence that, having wanted De Ruyter fired for months, Mantashe got his wish 24 hours after Ramaphosa was saved from potential impeachment by a surprisingly united closing of ranks by the ANC.

What we know right now, however, is that this is simply the next step in a strategy that’s been evident for over a year.

When I wrote about it 13 months ago, the basic agenda was already transparent: deny responsibility for Eskom’s failure by pushing the lie, over and over again, that Eskom is completely beyond the control of the ANC.

In the first few months this strategy took on the form of shrugging and hand-wringing.

When the president told the country that Eskom was being sabotaged, essentially announcing that a violent insurgency had been launched against the republic, he presented neither evidence nor a plan to tackle the alleged insurgents. Because, after all, what could anyone do?

Since then, however, the lie has evolved. A year ago, it insisted that Eskom was a walled city shrouded in mist, inscrutable in its workings and completely unreachable either by phone or email. Now, Eskom is Fifth Columnist working for regime change; an enemy of the people.

Those last ones aren’t my words, by the way. They come instead from Paul Mashatile, the man being tipped as the country’s next deputy president, who told the press in the aftermath of De Ruyter’s resignation that “Eskom cannot become the enemy of the people”, implying that De Ruyter had been taking the utility in that direction and was therefore a traitor.

That talking point has clearly been disseminated through the upper echelons of the ANC and down to the vassals. On Thursday, when energy expert Chris Yelland asked Eskom board chair, Mpho Makwana, if he thought De Ruyter was a traitor, Makwana managed to produce an answer of supreme cowardice and toxicity, saying that he wasn’t qualified to offer an opinion. Well played, sir.

The ANC hasn’t tried to hide any of this. Each phase of Mantashe’s Big Lie is plain to see, as a utility broken by the ANC has been rebranded first as a mysterious, untouchable enigma and then as a malignant occupying force.

The trajectory of this narrative is clear: next, the occupier must be defeated. Eskom must be liberated, corridor by corridor, office by office, and re-occupied by cadres loyal to Mantashe.

And if it can’t be retaken? Well, history tells us what happens to besieged enemies who won’t surrender. They must be destroyed and their fortifications torn down so that a new city can rise from the ashes, and the comrades who missed out on the Medupi and Kusile millions can finally get their place in the sun…