Efforts seem under way to dispense with the Eskom board, for good reason, but the question we should all be asking is: what clause has Eskom CEO André de Ruyter put in his contract that makes it so hard to fire him?
Alternatively, what does De Ruyter know about so many powerful people with vested interests in Eskom that keeps him safe in his job in spite of his woeful record?
Ordinarily, a chief executive who plunges the country into so much darkness, who stunts GDP growth, who decimates small businesses and unleashes despair and hopelessness that force a president to cut short an international trip, would not survive. When an international trip is cut short twice, you’d think there would be consequences, right? Wrong.
Not long ago, we complained bitterly about life under stage 2 load-shedding. It seemed most inconvenient, causing apoplectic protests. Naively, we thought stage 6 improbable. Well, welcome to your new normal, SA.
The past three weeks have been the worst South Africans have endured. It's the longest period of load-shedding we have been subjected to — and with higher stages. There can be no doubt that Eskom has become worse.
Today, as we wallow in what is fast becoming our new way of life in stages 5 and 6, we yearn for days gone by. Stage 2 now doesn’t seem that bad, does it? That’s the depths of despair into which we’ve plunged. That’s how much pummelling we’ve endured.
Yet the guy who goes around pretending to resolve the No 1 crisis for the nation faces no censure. It must be nice being De Ruyter.
His defence team will remind us that challenges faced by Eskom predate him and his dismissal is not going to miraculously resolve the issues. Well, who doesn’t know that?
The point, though, is that his job, like that of any self-respecting CEO, is to ensure the company improves and its performance doesn’t get worse. Not De Ruyter. Our load-shedding is record-breaking, and not in a good way. Yet, De Ruyter stays.
If he can’t save our economy from the effects of a dysfunctional Eskom, why keep him? Are we afraid to pay him out because he negotiated a good contract? Must we just be complicit in the damage he unleashes on our country’s economy because paying him off is scandalous? What is scandalous, is going nowhere slowly — and doing nothing about it.
If he can’t save our economy from the effects of a dysfunctional Eskom, why keep him?
His defenders, again, will tell us, as they have done before, that state capture has affected the state utility badly, with more than R14bn looted. And so poor De Ruyter is trying his best to undo what former president Jacob Zuma’s comrades did.
The implicit message here is that if you want De Ruyter to go it means you are, directly or not, part of the state capture band who want Eskom to return to the bad guys of the past administration.
For those who think like this, it is inconceivable that you could be opposed to state capture, want those implicated in it to be arrested, but still want De Ruyter to be shown the door for his incompetence.
The fact that no-one knows for how long this devastating load-shedding will be with us is damning, not just for clueless De Ruyter, but his handlers too.
You’ve got to feel sad for a president who cuts short a trip and then sits with De Ruyter and other technocrats but remains in the dark on what to say to the nation. President Cyril Ramaphosa clearly doesn’t enjoy sitting in his mini-castle and saying nothing while the nation writhes in pain over De Ruyter-induced load-shedding.
He wants to say something new, something substantive, something believable about what has become the bane of our existence. He did that just a few weeks ago. Yet, we are back here.
How many times can a president address the nation about the same unresolved crisis without looking silly?
Many are wondering whether Ramaphosa believes that the people he has put in charge are the right people to help us get out of this pit. If he does, it probably means he too has to go soon. If not, he must remove them.
No nation deserves this level of incompetence. You can unleash the best spin possible but it could never ease the pain we endure daily because of load-shedding.
If there’s a CEO we all want to see succeed, it is De Ruyter. We wanted him to undo state capture. We wanted him to reduce load-shedding, which he promised he could do in 18 months. Not that we believed him. But slow progress would have been nice. Our expectations are that low — but still unattainable.
We knew that De Ruyter’s success would be the country’s success. We knew that the nation’s hopes for an economic recovery, an antidote to years of plunder and pillage under Zuma, needed a functional Eskom.
How many times can a president address the nation about the same unresolved crisis without looking silly?
Sadly, the economy and Eskom are spiralling down into smouldering ash. We are in a worse position than we were when De Ruyter took over.
The time has come for De Ruyter to stop pretending that he knows what he’s doing at Megawatt Park.
Each time we are in the dark, each time load-shedding gets worse, or we wonder if we’re now closer to total system collapse, we know in our hearts that De Ruyter is also in the dark on what to do about our power crisis.
We are all in the dark, literally and figuratively, because no-one has the guts to remove a clearly incompetent guy at Eskom. You’ve got to wonder what is in that contract of employment that keeps the government’s hands tied.
We are in the pits. Nkosi sikelel iAfrika.
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