TOM EATON | Only Bester could best Eskom, and the ANC is smugly loving the distraction

The escape and re-arrest of Thabo Bester might remain a supreme indictment of our prison system, but for the rest of the ANC government it’s a beautifully shiny distraction sent straight from political heaven.

Indeed, having first tried to deny the entire story after GroundUp broke it, the ruling party seems to have leaned in, perhaps after someone explained how valuable it might be to rebrand the miserable story as a triumph for transparency and oversight.

ANC MPs, as silent as the tomb about Phala Phala, have come out roaring, demanding answers from G4S, the international security firm whose employees seem to have allowed, or possibly helped, Bester acquire a dead body, fake his own death and escape.

What’s great about this set-up, of course, is that G4S is a private company, which means ANC committee members can empty both barrels of their self-righteousness shotguns without winging a single deployed cadre.

ANC MP Nomathemba Maseko-Jele, for example, was in fine form during the hearings on Wednesday, pointing out that G4S has so far only suspended black employees over the scandal, before asking if the company was racist.

Like I said, it’s manna from heaven, allowing the ANC to sniff out racism and cosplay accountability without upsetting a single party apple cart.

It’s important to remember how good politicians are at pumping smoke into the room, or dragging the conversation away from thing they don’t want to talk about. And given the deafening silence in some quarters, it seems to be working.

Best of all, the longer and louder the ANC can interrogate a naughty multinational, the less space there is in the news cycle for stage 6 load-shedding, into which the country has again subsided like a prehistoric fish that was just starting to evolve but has now given up and slid back into the primordial ooze.

To be clear, I’m not saying that parliament shouldn’t grill G4S, or that Bester’s story doesn’t serve as an example of the sort of filth the next government of South Africa will have to expunge.

I also understand why it gets so much airtime: the re-arrest of Bester feels like a win, as opposed to the vast sucking wound that is Eskom.

Still, it’s important to remember how good politicians are at pumping smoke into the room, or dragging the conversation away from things they don’t want to talk about. And given the deafening silence in some quarters, it seems to be working.

When South Africa went to stage 5 last September, great swathes of Idiot Twitter, and a surprising number of less obviously stupid people, placed the blame squarely at the feet of Andre de Ruyter. Cope spokesperson Dennis Bloem went one further, officially calling for the resignation of De Ruyter and the whole Eskom board.

This week, however, as we went to stage 5, then stage 6, Bloem and the 2022 peanut gallery were oddly reluctant to call for the resignation of new Eskom CEO Calib Cassim. Given their very firm belief that De Ruyter was the problem, I can only assume they believe he has tunnelled his way back into Megawatt Park for one last stab at collapsing the national grid, and they’re too jaded by his latest stunt to comment.

Either that, or they’ve all grown up a bit and realised Eskom is an unfixable mess and that blaming the CEO for it is as pointless as trying to get service delivery from a deployed cadre.

Luckily for those cadres, however, all the pressure is off. The Thabo Bester show is back in town, G4S is in the crosshairs, and Eskom, well, Eskom is so 2022.

And 2021. And 2020. And 2019. And ...