In common parlance, “Hell hath fury like a woman scorned” is wrongly attributed to 17th-century English playwright William Shakespeare. Instead, it was written in 1697 by William Congreve thus, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned”.
He certainly did not have in mind the Samson of our times, former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter. Last month the power utility advertised his role after De Ruyter resigned in December, with a three-month notice period. He was scheduled to part ways with the state-owned entity (SOE) at the end of March. This was cut short with immediate effect on February 22 after his eNCA interview with Annika Larsen.
De Ruyter, without security clearance or appropriate qualifications, was politically parachuted at Eskom, as the best item after ice cream, to lead a complex engineering cum economic behemoth that by all counts was in trouble. The current advert has none of De Ruyter’s parachute banners, begging the question: what did those who imposed him in this strategic asset see in him that those who are well qualified and understand engineering and economics did not. The advert exonerates those who know what it takes to appoint a competent person and implicates the political honchos who shot him into the position. His unceremonious departure after he ruptured the political pact points to a fragile, arranged-in-the-dark marriage.
De Ruyter is not new to controversy, oftentimes correctly so, given Eskom's life-threatening environment. First he said his vehicle was surreptitiously fitted with a listening device. This claim was allegedly confirmed by none other than first postapartheid commissioner of police George Fivaz, only to be “refuted” by Volvo, which said it was a standard vehicle tracker installed by the carmaker. The second incident involved him having to wear a bulletproof vest because his life was endangered by those he stopped from fleecing Eskom. The third came after he announced his resignation — his coffee was allegedly laced with cyanide. Having studied in Ghana, I learnt how fatal cyanide poisoning can be. The gari powder from cassava, if not well-dried and consumed, will finish you off in minutes. De Ruyter survived it with vomiting and diarrhoea.
Many asked that De Ruyter be released immediately after he indicated he was leaving. It is normal practice in high-security environments to do so and it should be no different at Eskom, especially in heightened volatility. There was no reason to keep him on. Besides, he showed little respect to the parliamentary hearing he left while it was in session. But there are politicians and politicians. One thought there was a hierarchy in this regard — that parliament represented the apex of politics — but the reality is certainly different. It ain’t over until the fat lady sings. We were soon to learn who the fat lady of our politics is.
De Ruyter entered Eskom at stage 1 load-shedding and left it on the day we were at “stage 7”. His parting shot was it will soon be at stage 8. A day after his departure, that landmark was reached, though Eskom has reportedly denied this. The question has to be asked of those who appointed him: for what task was De Ruyter enlisted? If it was to stop load-shedding and ensure Eskom delivered electricity, he failed spectacularly, yet he was given the longest tenure compared with those who preceded him in the crisis, all of them black, giving credence to the notion of racial bias in confronting white failure. If De Ruyter’s mission was to privatise Eskom, as he said electricity generation should be, US linguist Noam Chomsky is on the money in defining privatisation's standard technique — “defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital”. De Ruyter executed this mission with excellence.
He is known to have raised $8.5bn (about R156bn) not for fixing Eskom, but for the just energy transition (JET), which has been at the centre of shutting down Eskom's coal-fired power stations, the most recent being Komati's ninth unit. It was generating 121 megawatts when it was buried alive in November. In its place, as stated by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his state of the nation address (Sona) three months after the burial, we will now go cap in hand to buy 300 megawatts from neighbouring countries. Would someone chasing an $8.5bn dollar loan have time to undertake the difficult task of fixing Eskom? True to form, De Ruyter left the parliamentary hearing on his progress in this regard.
This begs the question: if the JET is a government programme in the Presidency under a commission headed by a former banker, why was this massive task given to a man who had to run with an existential crisis at Eskom? With all the bureaucracy in the National Treasury and other experts in government who could focus on loans, grants and gifts, why distract the person who has the difficult job of fixing the power utility?
The results are clear. The intention was not to fix it. It was about what Chomsky taught us about the cyanide cocktail that usually precedes privatisation. The poison was intended for Eskom, not De Ruyter. As Eskom devoured the cyanide, a bit splattered into De Ruyter’s tea. Fortunately he survived, but by the time he left, Eskom had died. Mission accomplished.
South Africa was recently at "stage 8" load-shedding, which public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan denied could be reached a mere six months ago. De Ruyter came into Eskom at stage 1. He left it at the last level, "stage 8", and has stated that the power will stay on when electricity is in private hands. Mission accomplished, despite denials that Eskom is not being privatised. He hoped he would disappear under a cloud of praise, but he sinned by spilling raw and cooked beans on politicians. It took less than 24 hours for De Ruyter to be sent packing because he ran the fat lady up the wrong canal. It had nothing to do with electrons, their quantity or lack thereof, the benchmark by which he would be measured and by all accounts failed at dismally. Instead, what he said has seen him fall on his sword.
Politicians have a very thin skin when it comes to what they perceive to be insults. Services can collapse, but that does not matter. Hurl a mild insult at them, however, and you soon realise they have magnified ears that hear and eyes that see. The trick is to do a De Ruyter on them — they'll go from fast asleep to wide awake. Thus, the fat lady finally sang the last song that relieved us of De Ruyter. But maybe we have not seen the last of him because his canary melody may, on the basis of state capture precedent, trigger Zondo Mark II. Entertainingly, the De Ruyter effect has caused an alignment shift — the hunters are now the hunted. This scenario holds a spectre of steeping South Africa into the deepest catharsis of never-ending economic and political diarrhoea.
Perhaps out of this chaos, especially as the Russia-Ukraine war exposed the hypocrisy of the West and the stupidity, gullibility and timidity of South Africa in the JET saga, a true national agenda for South Africa may emerge. This starts with the bold measure of writing off the Eskom loan, as stated in finance minister Enoch Godongwana's budget speech. To ensure the catharsis is gone and gone forever, the question has to be asked: why was Eskom forced to borrow money from open markets when in the final analysis, after round-tripping and rent-seeking, we are paying several fold more than what we would have had we followed a home-brewed solution from first Eskom chair Johannes van der Bijl. He borrowed R16m from prime minister Jan Smuts to establish the power utility exactly a century ago. With that he built unmatched infrastructure. From this experience, Mariana Mazzucato, one of Ramaphosa’s Economic Advisory Council members, has written extensively about the success of public-service investments, of which Van der Bijl's Eskom is but one. South Africa must learn to deepen its bucket where it is by studying Smuts and his chief scientist Van der Bijl in building a capable state Mazzucato labels entrepreneurial.
De Ruyter might yet be thanked by the nation for being that notorious uncle who holds secrets on each family member and reveals them at awkward moments. And at that, for being a useful idiot or inconvenient uncle. Whether by Shakespeare or Congreve, South Africa has learnt that Hell hath fury like De Ruyter scorned.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.
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