De Ruyter, a Shakespeare tragedy

Picture the scene. The kitchenette in the executive suite at Megawatt Park in the end days of 2022. 

Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. 

A flick of the wrist, a conjuring trick, and a cup of coffee on its way to the CEO’s office is dosed with what doctors will later suggest is cyanide.

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, witches’ mummy, maw and gulf of the ravin’d salt-sea shark.

Root of hemlock digg’d in the dark.

The executive, Eskom boss André de Ruyter, had already tendered his resignation from the world’s most embattled and hated company, but it is likely the gangster-sorcerers lurking in the utility did not yet know this.

Oh well done! I commend your pains. And every one shall share I’ the gains.

If the assassination attempt seems improbably Shakespearean, check the ballistics. For there goes a man who has shone a light into  dark corners and, allegedly, uncovered a morass of corruption, vested interests, sabotage and dirty tricks.

Nothing new, of course, in dispatching opponents by poisoning. Along with “bungled hijackings”, it’s the South African way.

Lothar Neethling — a Shakespearean name if ever you needed one — was once accused of complicity in an attempt to murder Rev Frank Chikane by lacing his underwear with insecticide. That Chikane survived owes much to speedy intervention by doctors at a US university hospital.

Neethling later sued for defamation and won his case on appeal, a judgment which forced Vrye Weekblad, the paper that had first ventilated the claims, into bankruptcy.

De Ruyter’s attempted assassination shows that long after the convulsions of the struggle, this country is still gripped by evil.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

We have been warned. We ignore it at SA’s peril.