PETER BRUCE: Ramaphosa knows what’s up, but does he have the courage to lead?

There’s a juicy dilemma quietly establishing itself in our body politic ahead of President Cyril Ramaphosa possibly, maybe, within a few days, announcing a new cabinet.

With selected journalists from this newspaper and other outlets having been introduced to the results of a privately funded intelligence operation sparked by former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter, and having learned the names of current ministers, family and police officers running criminal and armed cartels out of Mpumalanga into Eskom, what will it take for anyone to print or publish a name?

The dilemma arises because, almost without question, one or more of those names are going to appear in Ramaphosa’s “new” cabinet. How will he justify his reshuffle knowing that a group of impeccably skilled and experienced intelligence officers believe some of his close colleagues are committing actual crimes against the state?

Watching presidential spokesman Vincent Magwenya take a press conference yesterday, I realised there’s a simple remedy. All De Ruyter has to do is go to a police station, make a statement naming the names, and the entire panoply of the SA criminal justice system would descend on his statement and investigate it to the nth degree.

De Ruyter, for his part, would argue that there is no point reporting crime and corruption to the police because every time he did it while he was CEO his charges were ignored. They once caught a guy billing Eskom R80,000 for knee-guards that would have cost R200. He was arrested and released the next day. There is no investigation of the attempt on De Ruyter’s life just three months ago. What’s the point of telling the police anything?

In between the two positions is where ordinary South Africans come in. We want to know the truth, or at least the best available version of it.  There is no point in this descending into a white guy complaining and a black guy defending. Somewhere in the middle there has to be ground for the private intelligence operation to share what it knows and for the president and people around him who need to know what they know, to listen to them.

There’s danger in that for both sides. The investigators stand to lose control of the information they’ve gathered. For the politicians hearing it, they cannot then unhear. That may be why they are keeping it at arm’s length.  “The president doesn’t know the names,” his spokesman insisted. But if he did, what would he do? For the presidency to insist a charge must first be laid for the government to pay attention to it is preposterous.

Corruption at Eskom is an existential threat to the country. There should be no barriers to  understanding it. De Ruyter reckons the cartels steal a billion rand a month from Eskom. At the same time, Ramaphosa’s dilemma is acute. He must rebuild his cabinet, if only because of ministers departing.

I’m actually pretty sure Ramaphosa knows the names. He disbanded the intelligence ministry —  and the domestic and external state security arms (both leaderless) now report to Mondli Gungubele in the presidency, an untidy situation fraught with danger now and in the future. They cannot identify, let alone thwart, threats to the state.

But even without a word from an actual spy, so many outsiders have by now been acquainted with the results of the Eskom intelligence gathering that it is only a matter of time before details start to leak. Ramaphosa’s risk is that the intelligence is good. Not, perhaps, actual evidence, but pretty good intelligence. It would, I suspect, be very foolish to underestimate it as mere conjecture.

You have to take the long view. Historical novelist Hilary Mantel spent her life sifting through evidence: “Evidence is always partial,” she said. “Facts are not truth, though they are part of it — information is not knowledge. And history is not the past — it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down.”

Once it becomes commonly accepted that minister A or B is also an Eskom theft cartel director, how do they do legitimate business, here at home or abroad? How do we approach creditors for more climate mitigation funding (we need between R3-trillion and R8-trillion) if the Eskom intelligence fingers the very people asking for it? It would make government impossible.

Given the names, and given enough time, it is not impossible that financial institutions can assist civil society, the courts and the media with a search for more facts. There will be unusual bank accounts and payments, travel records, suspicious behaviour. In this respect the ANC is the gift that keeps on giving.

But there is no substitute for courageous leadership and action. Ramaphosa must be acutely aware of how perilous the moment is now. This is his own predicament and it cannot be shared. Equally, De Ruyter, now just an ordinary citizen again, will appreciate the clear and present danger. Somehow they need to be able to communicate without one losing to the other. This is about the country.

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.