The eNCA prepaid-styled advertisement to conceal the inertia of De Ruyter, lacked finesse and credibility

By: Arthur J. Van Nel

My 12-year old, with obviously no academic training and any journalistic experience, would have done a far better job at interviewing the now former Eskom CEO.

It was interesting that it was set up with eNCA. It was no coincidence that the Daily Maverick broke the insider details of the intelligence gathering into cartel networks in Eskom. Clearly, our neoliberal and well-funded and Stellenbosch-controlled media have lost all pretense to concealing it’s positioning to the right of the ideological spectrum. Shameless, brazen, devoid of any journalistic minimum standards and hopelessly partisan, I couldn’t shed the overwhelming suspicion that the “interview” was conceived of, scripted and delivered for agendas that have nothing to do with shedding light on the most important job in Azania right now. The only thing left to do for Anika Larsen after the “interview” was to bow down, kiss De Ruyter’s feet and repeat ten times “I’m not worthy”.

Eskom’s problems are shockingly simple, and the analysis paralysis caused by over-diagnoses is masterful distraction. a) there’s a maintenance backlog, b) the newly built Medupi and Kusile stations labour embarrassingly under created design flaws, c) Eskom struggles to collect debt and d) the parastatal’s soul was sold to the highest renewable energy solution bidder.

Ask yourselves then people of SA, why the Stellenbosch Mafia and its IMF and Worldbank collaborators have deftly and cunningly sold a lawyer to the government to fix an engineering problem? With zero generation background – De Ruyter’s former job was making paper – he was deployed with the blessing of the country’s most powerful families to come and accelerate the decay, hasten the collapse and guarantee that Eskom is burnt so definitively into ashes that it’s only reasonable hope would be to unbundle it and source private sector equity partners to take it over. Whoever controls energy generation, along with the already captured financial services industry, don’t ever have to win an election to be the de facto rulers of the country. The democratic project is being perverted here.

If you find my proposition preposterous, ask yourself how the oldest cabinet minister, into his 70’s, could possibly be expected of to oversee the turnaround process. Pravin Gordhan backed De Ruyter without regard for objective performance indicators. The former board fell shamelessly over their black feet in parliament to protect the former CEO from being grilled for his completely inept leadership of the failing SOE. They answered politically to engineering questions before SCOPA. De Ruyter just sat there and basked in the glory that privélege afforded him to escape accountability.

He introduced the hitherto unfathomable reality of stage 6 loadshedding. While we absorbed that shock, he led us to our first summer loadshedding experiences. We lost more electricity under his 3-year watch than for the preceding 13 years combined. Pravin never thought that’s serious, neither did the handpicked board that hung on the lips of the man they were appointed to hold accountable. He is the worst Eskom CEO but thé best-ever external investment to deliver an outcome that will render this country properly captured. What the Guptas did to us was a children’s picnic compared to the grandscale looting engineered from Stellenbosch, just with much more finesse.

So, methinks Anika was brought in to distract us from a real discussion on the man’s tenure. While we were enticed to obsess about who the minister is, none of us wonders why the same 4 companies have had uninterrupted coal supply contracts for more than 40 years. Deceived. Successfully. Anika never cared to ask André why he didn’t lay chargers as enjoined by legislation in relation to his fiduciary duties. Anika never probed to understand why an accounting officer would deceive himself to think he could act and sound like a whistleblower as if he didn’t yield enormous executive power, including the power of disclosures before parliamentary oversight committees. Anika wasn’t interested in deviating from her sponsored script to ask him why this information is not contained in a single Eskom annual report. Finally, in her zeal to heap praise on the victim she was portraying, she never wanted to know why he ignored the President’s request to stall the NERSA-imposed tariff increases but he didn’t mind to brief a minister about another minister’s involvement in Eskom looting.

What a farce. How widespread is the tentacles and control of the country’s godfather and his Stellenbosch mafia network that can use their media ownership to carry the perspective that serve their accumulation interests?

Wake up Mzansi. Resist the temptation to be deceived by smoke and mirrors. We have paid someone R12m per year for 3 years to accelerate our drift towards the abyss and set Eskom up for private sector takeover and we are now asked by Anika Larsen to feel pity for him as he rides off into the sunset to enjoy the fruit of his devious labour.

De Ruyter – along with his corporate enablers and political backers – were an unmitigated disaster, for which we’ll pay for decades in anemic economic growth, pervasive unemployment and growing inequality. To imagine it any different is to display the highest form of ignorance and discernment.

To be fair, loadshedding didn’t start with De Ruyter. There’s a litany of executives and third party interests that conspired over decades to have thé parastatal limping as it does. To be equally fair, he promised us the end to loadshedding in 18 months. And accelerated it instead.

He’s not the victim, we are!