In a tell-all book about his time at the helm of Eskom, former CEO André de Ruyter says syndicates looting the company and imperilling the nation’s power supply received assistance from as high up as the Union Buildings.
In Truth to Power, My Three Years Inside Eskom released today, De Ruyter alleges that information from a state security investigation into possible sabotage, which began in 2019, was kept from Eskom and police leadership because a “highly placed politician” who sat on the presidential task team “requested that all information be shared only with him”.
The intelligence was therefore never acted upon.
He alleges that in Mpumalanga, a senior police officer he does not name ensured that those caught stealing coal were never prosecuted and that the routes syndicates use to transport cash were free of roadblocks.
He also writes that one day, when using a different route, coal trucks were stopped at a roadblock and “officers on the scene allegedly received a phone call from the Union Buildings asking them, ‘Don’t you have better things to do than to stop coal trucks? Let them go.’”
In the book, De Ruyter says he told public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan and Sydney Mufamadi, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s national security adviser, the names of two top politicians implicated in the sabotage, and that Gordhan was not surprised.
“Gordhan looked over at Mufamadi and said, ‘Well, I guess it was inevitable that it would come out’,” he wrote.
De Ruyter’s book is likely to cause discomfort for Gordhan when he appears before parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) on Wednesday.
Gordhan and Mufamadi have been invited to respond to allegations De Ruyter made to the committee last month, that he forwarded allegations of corruption to them.
While De Ruyter does not name the top politicians in the book and refused to do so during his appearance before Scopa, Gordhan may well be grilled for those names.
The book alleges that the police top brass did nothing about information he provided on corruption and sabotage at power stations.
At a meeting in June last year and in response to Gordhan’s plea to protect Eskom’s infrastructure, Maj-Gen Pushkin Skhosana, who is responsible for national key points, said Eskom should guard its own assets to the police commissioner’s satisfaction.
At a subsequent meeting, national police commissioner Gen Fannie Masemola “bemoaned the general lack of crime intelligence at his disposal” and said he knew nothing about either the coal theft or the sabotage — which by then had been the subject of news reports.
It was particularly galling for the management of Eskom to be exhorted by both President Ramaphosa and Minister Gordhan to display a greater sense of urgency when we were at the mercy of the ‘activist’ and ‘engaged’ board under a go-slow chairman
— André de Ruyter
Some of the information De Ruyter provided appears similar to that contained in a discredited dossier by private investigating firm George Fivaz Forensic & Risk, which used an apartheid-era intelligence operative to head its investigation, according to a News24 report by Jacques Pauw.
The dossier, compiled during the 15-month, R50m investigation that began in 2021, reportedly contained no verifiable information. Fivaz, a former national police commissioner, admitted to Pauw that the information was wrong and there was no evidence to substantiate it.
This week, before Scopa, Masemola and his Hawks counterpart Lt-Gen Godfrey Lebeya both appeared to suggest that De Ruyter was at fault for failing to report the corruption.
They said they had been “unable to find him” after he first made the allegations in an interview with eNCA, and added that no politicians were being investigated in connection with corruption at Eskom.
Masemola confirmed meeting De Ruyter in June last year but reportedly said he only received proper information from him last month. But later, Masemola admitted delegating a brigadier to deal with De Ruyter who told him of the private investigation.
Lebeya told MPs he knew nothing of Fivaz’s investigation, while Masemola said the Hawks had been informed.
Committee chair Mkhuleko Hlengwa said to Masemola: “I don't get a sense that between June [2022] and now anything has happened, and this is our area of concern.
The collapse of Eskom at the hands of syndicates is a major cause of load-shedding. If your interventions were working, we would be seeing some sense of reduction in criminal activity.”
In the book, De Ruyter has harsh words for Eskom board chair Mpho Makwana to whom he handed his resignation in December.
He accuses Makwana of treating COO Jan Oberholzer with “galling disrespect” because he didn’t speak to or otherwise engage with him during his first 100 days as chair.
He also accuses the board, which claims to be an “engaged board” or “activist board”, of interfering in operations and doling out instructions to employees, bypassing their line managers and Eskom executives.
He also accuses Makwana of tardiness, saying he had none of the “dedication to efficiency” of his predecessor Prof Malegapuru Makgoba.
“He would sit on letters and documents for months, both incoming and outgoing. At one stage 18 documents were in limbo — not being signed, and not being actioned. He also didn’t wish to sign even self-explanatory letters and documents without these being syndicated by two or more board committees.
“It was particularly galling for the management of Eskom to be exhorted by both President Ramaphosa and Minister Gordhan to display a greater sense of urgency when we were at the mercy of the ‘activist’ and ‘engaged’ board under a go-slow chairman,” he writes.
De Ruyter writes that after his June 2022 meeting with Gordhan and Masemola he realised Eskom was on its own and he made public remarks about the possibility of instituting private prosecutions.
This elicited a response from national director of public prosecutions Shamila Batohi with whom he subsequently met.
He says he told her how he was “struggling to have certain state capture cases prosecuted”, to which Batohi replied she was not aware of this. He said Eskom had laid 104 criminal cases with the police but only 12 had been prosecuted.
In a statement about the book, publishers Penguin Random House said: “De Ruyter candidly reflects on his three years at the power utility, his successes and failures, his reasons for leaving and his hopes for the future.”
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