EDITORIAL: Finger points at Mantashe over De Ruyter’s exit

What we’re seeing unravelling before our eyes is a minister cycling through the last vestiges of his credibility. 

Last week Gwede Mantashe, minister of mineral resources & energy, launched a full-throated attack on Eskom and CEO André de Ruyter, accusing the utility of “actively agitating for the overthrow of the state” by allowing load-shedding to continue.

Now, it’s scary enough to have a wild conspiracy theorist anywhere in the government, let alone in a post with political responsibility for the country’s critical commodities. But it’s especially galling when this broadside comes from somebody who led the party that really is responsible for Eskom’s predicament.

What Mantashe said, it won’t surprise you to learn, was utter demonstrable claptrap. But it probably played a pivotal role in pushing De Ruyter over the edge, leading to his resignation earlier this week. With no public support from either Public Enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, or from President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is battling to keep a lid on his own skeletons, De Ruyter’s resignation felt somewhat inevitable.

What De Ruyter’s exit won’t do, however, is reverse the waves of load-shedding convulsing the country. Many in the ANC know this, instinctively. But the party, in characteristic fashion, needed a scapegoat to deflect from its own failures. 

In an admission of what really matters to the ANC, its leaders moaned at the weekend’s national executive committee meeting about the impact that the constant load-shedding — which ratcheted up to stage 6 last week — will have on its electoral prospects — not, tellingly, about the impact it has on the country’s citizens.

Party first, country second, as always. De Ruyter, who was handed the poisoned chalice three years ago, has now been sacrificed on the altar of the ANC’s wilful historical amnesia about the real cause of the rolling blackouts.

The truth is, it was the ANC’s politicians who blithely ignored the 1998 white paper that warned: “Eskom’s present generation capacity surplus will be fully utilised by about 2007.” 

And it was ANC politicians who were entirely complicit in former President Jacob Zuma’s decision to appoint a legion of bent executives and directors to head the utility, just as it was those politicians who seemed to have no problem with the ANC’s front company, Chancellor House, scoring immense contracts to help build Medupi and Kusile, which have suffered no end of breakdowns since being commissioned.

In the end, De Ruyter would also have felt like his hands were tied behind his back by the government’s decision not to give more cash to Eskom to allow it to buy diesel to keep the lights on. This is despite the fact that, last week, a senior researcher at the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research, Monique le Roux, put the cost to the country of load-shedding this year at R560bn.

President Cyril Ramaphosa may say it’s Eskom that keeps him up at night, but without government displaying much appetite to buy diesel, it’s more likely it’s only the whirr of generators interrupting his sleep.

Mantashe moaned too in recent days that De Ruyter was acting “like a policeman”. But if he meant that De Ruyter was rooting out the corrupt elements at Eskom — the real saboteurs — well, that was entirely within his brief.

Mantashe should know that one of the key jobs of any CEO (or minister) is oversight. The country now exists in the twilight precisely because Mantashe and his colleagues failed lamentably on this score. And the fact that the minister now has no shame in moaning about those who are, finally, exercising the requisite oversight is indicative of a stunning lack of self-awareness.

Would De Ruyter have stayed, had the mainstream business sector been more vocal in supporting him? 

It’s hard to say. But what does seem true is that as much as Ramaphosa and Gordhan’s silence about Mantashe’s assault on De Ruyter was unforgivable, the response of the business sector to the wider electricity crisis, and what is expected of the government to address it, has been decidedly tepid.

Last week, the Energy Council of South Africa, Business Unity South Africa and Business Leadership South Africa issued a joint statement detailing their “concern” overload-shedding. They called on the government to “fund adequate and reliable diesel supply” to keep the lights on. Those companies that have collapsed due to the government’s mismanagement of this crisis will feel that a hand-wringing plea doesn’t quite capture the gravity of the situation.

Pick n Pay chair Gareth Ackerman wasn’t wrong when he told Business Times last weekend that “you’re not seeing enough heads of business standing up — they don’t want to do it because of potential political ramifications”. Ackerman was talking about the illicit economy, but his point holds true in a wider sense too.

De Ruyter’s resignation, hopefully, will reinforce the need for a less equivocal approach from organised business. Already, there are signs of this: after news of his exit broke, Business Unity SA CEO Cas Coovadia spoke of how his departure was a “major blow for Eskom and the efforts to address the energy crisis”. He commended De Ruyter for his valiant effort “under unbearable conditions” in the national interest.

But, Coovadia added, De Ruyter’s resignation was "hardly surprising, given the irresponsible comments by some in government.”

Gwede Mantashe, that finger is pointing at you.

*Note: This is an amended version of the editorial in the FM of December 15th, updated to include news of De Ruyter’s resignation