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concluded that the police didn’t have a handle on the situation.

This week, University of Pretoria professor Sandy Africa’s panel, charged with looking into the government and the security c lu s t e r ’s response, is set to present its draft report on the July unrest to Ramaphosa.

It is believed to offer a comprehensive — and damning —account of events.

Ramaphosa has already shaken up his cabinet once since the unrest, ousting some ministers in the security cluster. Further shifts may be on the cards, given the Africa report, as well as Zondo’s final report, which is set to be handed to the president early next year.

As for Zuma? This week he released the first instalment of his biography, Jacob Zuma Sp e a ks . It won’t surprise anyone to learn that it ’s hardly the long-awaited tell-all about the skeletons in his comrades’closets; rather, it’s a sanitised and glowing account of his presidency —a period Ramaphosahas called “nine wasted years”.

It may be Zuma firing up the propaganda machine early, ahead of Zondo’s final report, due on January 1. Once Ramaphosa gets that do c u me nt , expect Zuma and his allies to again attack the judiciary.

The key question will be whether Ramaphosa is ready to act on the findings — particularly in an ANC election year, with Zu m a’s remaining allies in the party lo o k i ng for any excuse to weaken the president.

Zuma may not be in jail any more, but h e’s not off the hook. Apart from his pending corruption trial, the DA is challenging his release on medical parole. And Zuma-Sambudla faces possible criminal charges for inciting violence.

It means that, sadly, the country hasn’t seen the last of the 79-year-old Zuma — whose ability to weaken the fabric of its democracy has left any legacy he may have claimed in tatters.. x

seen very little progress. It is not good enough to tell uswe need to be patient. Our patience has run out. That runway is closed. We need to see results, we need to see people in court, we need to see prosecutions. We need to see people going to jail. It’s as simple as that.”

Speaking to the FM following B a to h i ’s appearance in parliament, Breytenbach says there are plenty of large-scale corruption cases dating back to the early 2010s that “must get attended to”.

But there are more recent ones that would boost citizens’co n f i d e n ce in the criminal justice system if prosecutions were brought, she says. “South Africans should be able to see that if you break the law yougo to jail.”

Breytenbach cites the theft of public funds destined for personal protective equipment (PPE) to combat Covid, and the Life Esidimeni horror.

“Stealing money from PPE—that’sa priority. When you send disabled people off to die —that’s a priority,” she says. “As soon as you do this, all this pressure will go away. Then people will be prepared to wait for a result.”

In Batohi’s defence, the NPA hasn’t received anything close to the funding it needs to go after SA’s insouciant crooks. More than R422m was cut from the o rg a n i s a t i o n’s original budget and R 41 m from the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) in the last financial year (the NPA got R4.5bn, and the SIU R438m).

The ID has a budget of about R324m over three years. “Bubblegum money,” sniffs Breytenbach.

Batohi argues that “moving too fast with cases is counterp ro d u c t i ve”. We say moving just a little might be quite helpful. x Giulietta Talevi

business E S KOM ’S HEART OF DA R K N E S S

Persistent load-shedding has kept S A’s struggling power utility solidly in the news this year —and its underfire CEO André de Ruyter along with it

Rob Rose ro s e r@ f m .co. z a

ou wouldn’t have wanted to be

YEskom CEO André de Ruyter this past year. Never mind juggling R402bn in debt, it was the crippling bouts of rolling blackouts that gave his critics an opening to call for his axing after less than two years in the job.

“It has been one of the most challenging years since I started my career 32years a go ,”De Ruyter tells the FM.“We ’ve definitely made progress on some important strategic imperatives, but the big disappointment has been load-shedding.”

Th at ’s no exaggeration. At one point in June, more than a third of Eskom’s generating units had broken down, as its energy availability factor —the percentage of power available for dispatch —fell to 64% from about 84% in 2011.

The blackouts became so frequent that they spawned an entire cottage industry of Eskom jokes. Have you heard the one, for instance, of how André temporarily handed

Freddy Mavunda André de Ruyter: It’s been frustrating for me that we haven’t made more progress

control of Eskom to his sister, Jenna Ruyter?

De Ruyter says he’s heard them all — often sent to him by friends and family.

“That doesn’t make it any funnier or more p a l at a ble ,”he says. “I do take it very personally. It’s immensely disappointing when I have to go out and share with the public that there will be load-shedding, particularly when it could have been avoided.”

It doesn’t help that there is little tangible sense of progress.

In November, shortly after the elections, Es ko m’s power crisis deepened, leading to a

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prolonged period of stage 4 power cuts that Business Unity SA says would have cost SA more than R25bn. Earlier this year consulting company PwCestimated that load-shedding would be responsible for slashing SA’s already subpar GDP growth this year by half.

In one of the media briefings during the November nadir, it emerged that since SA hit an unprecedented level 6 load-shedding two years ago, not a single new megawatt was added to the grid. That appears unforgivable.

“It ’s been frustrating for me that we h av e n ’t made more progress, especially when it came to implementing our reliability maintenance programme,”says De Ruyter.

When he joined, De Ruyter promised he’d

carry out this “reliability maintenance”in strict compliance with the guidelines of the original equipment manufacturers.

Only, this hasn’t been possible. In part, this is because Eskom just doesn’t have the cash available to plan for maintenance, buy spare parts, and sign contracts with providers. And the government’s rules on procurement have only made it harder.

“The procurement system does not lend itself to a maintenance programme. The average response time of the Treasury to requests for approvals is 77 days,”he said last month.

And the Public Finance Management Act, which obliges firms to embark on a laborious process of gathering three quotes, do e s n ’t help.

This suggests De Ruyter’s early ambitions have run into the cold reality that Eskom remains firmly stuck in bureaucratic treacle —unable to swiftly buy what it needs, or find the cash to deal with emergencies.

And yet, hard as it is to imagine, Eskom has actually made some institutional progress this year.

De Ruyter says the balance sheet is stronger than it’s been in a long time, and t he r e’s been progress towards splitting the utility into three separate businesses: transmission, generation and distribution.

Equally, Eskom has made headway towards cleaning up a company that seemed, at one point, entirely poisoned from within.

A few weeks ago the Special Investigating Un it ’s investigations officer Leonard Lekgetho told parliament at least 102 Eskom officials had illegally done business with the

Es ko m’s coal-fired Duvha power station outside eMalahleni in Mpumalanga

Sunday Times/Moeletsi Mabe

u t i l it y ,pocketing R5bn-plus in the process.

Th at ’s before you consider how much money was wastedelsewhere: in one of the more bizarre revelations, it emerged this year that Eskom had been paying as much as R26 a roll of single-ply toilet paper (four times the cost) and R51 a black refuse bag (2 0 times the real cost.)

De Ruyter has attacked these sorts of costs with zeal —but this sparked a bitter fightback from within.

“We mustn’t underestimate the degree of internal resistance to some of our fixes,”De Ruyter says. “For example, I’ve badgered my guys to install a barcode system for controlling stock in our warehouses, but unless I drive this, it doesn’t happen, because there are vested interests that benefit from this lack of control.”

Of course, it ne e d n ’t always be vested interests pulling the handbrake on the cleanup; in many cases, it may be good old-fashioned inertia, or ineptitude. State-run companies, after all, have never been an incubator of the can-do spirit.

Yet it is load-shedding that has given De Ru y t e r ’s opponents enough tinder to demand his a x i ng . Last week, the National Union of Mi new o r ke r s reiterated its call for De Ruyter and COO Jan Oberholzer to be axed for supposedly “destroying ”Es ko m .

More insidiously, this call has been amplified by a number of De Ruyter’s compromised predecessors, including Matshela Koko and Brian Molefe.

Remarkably, the SABC and other media even interviewed Koko —who was memorably caught lying on Carte Blanche about Es ko m’s prepayment to the Guptas, and whose stepdaughter scooped contracts from Eskom worth millions —as a so-called “ana ly s t ”on Eskom’s travails.

Says De Ruyter: “The spectacle of some of my predecessors being [used] by our national broadcaster as energy experts, when we are trying to fix the legacy of what they left behind, is a bit much.”

Perhaps if the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) had shown the slightest interest in bringing criminal charges against those implicated in looting the entity over the past decade, it would be different. But in yet another sterling example of institutional molasses, it hasn’t.

Eskom needs this reckoning, says De Ruyter. “We really need the NPA to start moving. There should be consequences in terms of any breaches of the law. And it should be swift and certain —not a decade after the fact.”

As it is, those who left Eskom under a cloud are now hard at work lobbying for De Ruyter to be axed. And were they to get their way, would anything improve at the utility?

Not likely.

As Business Unity SACEO Cas Coovadia arg ues, it doesn’t make sense “to create a governance and leadership problem in the midst of an operational problem”.

Better for De Ruyter to commit to a timetable of improvements, analysts say, and hold him accountable for delivering on it.

Those goals includehalting load-shed ding. “To end load-shedding definitively, we need to add 4GW-6GW of capacity to the g r id ,”he says. “This will give us the required headroom to carry out maintenance, and to start on the just energy transition.”

If the old cliché is that it’s darkest before the dawn —or, alternatively, at 4am during load-shedding —then it may just be that 2022 is the turning point. Because, thanks to Eskom, the country spent most of 2021 in a pretty dark place indeed. x