A combination of ANC incompetence and corruption has ultimately broken Eskom’s back. No amount of noise must distract us from one important truth: having collapsed Eskom, the ANC can never rebuild it.
Since the dramatic departure of Andre De Ruyter from Eskom following the release of his tell-all interview with eNCA, South Africans have been talking.
White South Africans who feel that one of their own has been ill-treated by a black government have been reluctant to jump into the public arena to defend him openly, fearing the easy accusation of racism. Even black people who believe that De Ruyter has been treated unfairly don’t finish their statements without adulterating their support by pointing out that De Ruyter has failed to end rolling blackouts, or that, in his lamentations, he should have eschewed matters of ideology.
Only ANC leaders and their supporters felt emboldened to grab hammer and nail to publicly crucify the man, excoriating and casting him as an incompetent right-wing saboteur plotting to subvert the ANC-led government.
Even such embarrassing incompetents as Fikile Mbalula did not miss the opportunity De Ruyter presented for them to shine. Under the glare of cameras, Mbalula opted to forget that as minister of transport he himself has fixed no road and improved no transport in South Africa.
In his fractured English and grotesque incoherence, the clownish ANC secretary-general proceeded to lampoon himself. Satisfied that he had hammered De Ruyter enough, Mbalula concluded: “The ANC is not corrupt.”
Tale of the tape
That the ANC has been complicit in corruption and State Capture is a clear and undeletable finding made by the Zondo Commission. The party’s own president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has told us that the ANC is “accused No. 1” in corruption.
If Mbalula has a mind, and if he needs more evidence, he should simply spend a minute remembering his own engagements with his dead friend, Brett Kebble, the man who corrupted ANC Youth League leaders beyond repair.
But we must be fair. In relation to the mess at Eskom, Mbalula’s major problem is failure to tame his ungovernable mouth. And of course, the company was looted and collapsed by Mbalula’s comrades, not him personally.
All ANC presidents since 1994 — from Nelson Mandela to Cyril Ramaphosa — have failed to invest in building new power-generation capacity at Eskom. In 2007, former president Thabo Mbeki apologised on behalf of government for the ANC’s catastrophic neglect. Alas, an apology cannot produce electricity.
What De Ruyter has alerted us to are problems relating to one vital state-owned company, Eskom, whose failure is to our country what heart failure is to a living organism. This is why there is now talk of a possible collapse of the state that might result from a total collapse of our national electricity grid.
Absence of ANC accountability
When people talk about problems at Eskom, the ANC is happy to fold its arms as if such problems have nothing to do with the party. But we know that it is ANC’s ministers who have been meddling with governance and management at Eskom. It is the ANC that has collapsed Eskom.
Eskom was established 100 years ago, in 1923, by the then government of prime minister Jan Smuts, to provide electricity for industrialising the entire country beyond a handful of mining centres. Operationally, the company was built by the globally renowned South African scientist Hendrik van der Bijl, who ran it professionally and profitably until his death in 1948.
All the governments that came after that of Smuts — from the pact government of 1924 all the way to the apartheid government — appreciated the need to keep on strengthening Eskom, and to never undermine it technically and managerially.
Things went wrong when the incompetents of the ANC took over the company after 1994. They extended electricity provision to millions of previously unelectrified people without building more generation capacity. This is like having a boat that you keep loading with more and more passengers, without the vessel becoming any bigger. It will eventually sink. Hendrik van der Bijl must have turned in his grave as he watched the ANC destroy the company he built.
It is the combination of ANC incompetence and corruption that has ultimately broken Eskom’s back. What De Ruyter saw is a result of almost three decades of neglect and primitive looting — effectively milking the cow dry and cutting off its udder.
No amount of noise must distract us from one important truth: having collapsed Eskom, the ANC can never rebuild it. The ANC has mastered how to demolish, not to build. Is there anything Fikile Mbalula can show he has built?
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State-owned destruction
Eskom is only one among many state-owned companies the ANC has run aground. Think of Transnet, Prasa, Denel, the post office, SAA, and so on and so forth. Everything that the ANC touches turns to dust. This list focuses only on state-owned companies. A wider view reveals an even more depressing truth – that the ANC cannot govern a modern state.
Look at what the ANC has done to public education: 80% of public schools are dysfunctional and universities have been turned into theatres of chaos, where vice-chancellors are no longer safe. Even dancers have been deployed to lead serious universities, only to be ejected a few years later with a golden handshake.
To gauge the extent of South Africa’s education problem, ask yourself the following question: If Angie Motshekga were the principal of the school in your neighbourhood, would you take your children there? What about a university run by Blade Nzimande?
The ANC has turned public hospitals to dust. Let us be honest: all the hospitals built by the apartheid government in black communities used to function better than they have done since the ANC’s bunch of incompetents took them over. Do you think ANC politicians go to Thembisa Hospital when they are sick?
There is a dramatic minister who frequently shows up at crime scenes after people have been murdered or after women have been raped. The minister looks like a gangster himself, but his threatening looks have not intimidated the criminals who have literally taken over our country. To kill a human being in South Africa under the ANC is easier than killing a chicken.
The areas singled out above are but a sample of critical pillars of a modern state. And the ANC has collapsed all of them.
If you want to see the collapse of governance in a concentrated form, take a drive through the central business districts of our towns and cities, except Cape Town. The city of Bloemfontein now looks like the Nigerian chaos called Lagos — with putridity in the air, ubiquitous potholes and uncollected garbage all over the place.
We have reached the point where even shack dwellers in informal settlements can see evidence of ANC incompetence in the squalor they live in. Their illegally connected electricity disappears for 12 hours a day, under the fancy euphemism of “Stage 6 load shedding.” Those who live in posh suburbs now grapple with water shortages even though our dams are full to the brim.
That the ANC cannot govern used to be an allegation; now it is a reality that everyone can see. Is there anyone who does not drive through potholes on daily basis? The number of bakkies and SUVs on our roads tells you that something is getting worse. Is there anyone who is not affected by blackouts? When you see the explosion of solar panels on roofs, you must stop taking Cyril Ramaphosa’s twaddle seriously.
In short, the ANC has morphed from being a national asset in the 1990s to becoming South Africa’s greatest liability today. It is a demon devouring every good thing in our country.
Storm of hypocrisy
Most of the decisions taken by the ANC now are truly baffling. In the domain of foreign policy, for example, how are we to explain the ANC government’s support for Russia’s murderer in chief — Vladimir Putin? Everything Putin is doing is against our country’s constitution.
There is a tragicomedy about ANC leaders. If you were to consider recent trips of ANC NEC members who took holidays abroad, you would be lucky to find one, except DD Mabuza, who chose to visit Moscow. Mabuza was not there on holiday. He was sick and scared that his comrades would kill him in a South African hospital.
ANC leaders go to Dubai on holiday, not Saint Petersburg. They go to Paris to buy Louis Vuitton shoes and handbags, not to Vladivostok. They are happy to holiday in New York, not in Kazan. What kind of mental dissonance, then, explains the oddity of these duplicitous lovers of Western culture?
The answer may be as hollow as the discredited ideas that used to animate the defunct Soviet Union. ANC leaders are so out of touch with the world that they are not aware that the Putin they support is not a communist. The billionaire despot is one of the wealthiest crony capitalists of all time. He possesses palaces and yachts (disguised, of course) that are reminiscent of the bourgeois decadence of Tsarism.
To quote another famous Russian, Vladimir Lenin famously asked: What is to be done?
The answer to this requires much more reflection and space than I have available here so I will address it another time.
For now, let there be no confusion: South Africa has been collapsed by the ANC, and will not be fixed for as long as the party is still in charge of our beautiful country. DM