Eskom sabotage an ominous sign

The opening chapter of the classic DIY Terrorism Handbook – were there actually such a thing – would be devoted to the importance of sabotage in destabilising, or even overthrowing, a sitting government.

It’s been done all over the world – and even here in South Africa, liberation movement saboteurs focused on remote electricity pylons, because they knew that by bringing just a few of them down would cause huge disruptions to power supply.

It is chilling that history is possibly repeating itself, now that we know for sure that the ongoing horror show at Eskom is more than just people stealing and incompetence – it’s deliberate sabotage.

Eskom chief executive André de Ruyter’s public acknowledgement that power generation and distribution is being sabotaged – from inside and without – takes the load shedding saga into a new realm of skulduggery.

What happened near the Lethaba power station in the Free State this week was deliberate. The station was targeted because it is the most reliable in the Eskom network.

Had the saboteurs’ plan – to disrupt power to the station’s coal conveyor belt by dropping an electricity pylon – been successful, the country would have been plunged into stage 6 load shedding.

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De Ruyter also admitted the probability that more sabotage is occurring with the stations themselves.

What is behind this? Given that President Cyril Ramaphosa described the chaos in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng in July as an

“insurrection”, could the sabotage of Eskom be an additional weapon in the arsenal of people plotting against the government?

Could the disruption of power be linked to pushing the country towards accepting the idea of having “powerships” moored off our coast for the next 20 years?

As in the July disturbances, our security and intelligences services are again missing in action.

These are ominous times indeed.