The alleged attempt to poison André de Ruyter is a frightening new low

It’s an aeon’s old human characteristic. No matter what harsh experience has taught us, at the beginning of each new season, each new year, and each new life, we appear to be neurologically programmed to allow ourselves to hope.

So, as South Africa stumbles into 2023, it’s important not to allow what was a horrendous 2022 to cloud our expectations. On the other hand, there’s no point in being a perpetually deluded Pollyanna.

The news that police are investigating an alleged attempt in December to poison with cyanide-laced coffee the chief executive of Eskom, André de Ruyter, is a frightening new low.

De Ruyter, who put the rooting out of deeply embedded corruption and patronage networks at the heart of his herculean challenge to turn around the power utility, had just the day before resigned. De Ruyter had cited a lack of political support for his resignation.

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The charge against him had been led by Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe, black business forums and the unions. Mantashe had accused De Ruyter of “actively agitating for the overthrow of the state” through load shedding. Load shedding, said Mantashe, was “worse than state capture” and De Ruyter acted “too much like a policeman”.

Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan, under whose department Eskom falls, had said not a word in defence of De Ruyter. Nor did Ramaphosa, who is dependent on Mantashe’s support for his political survival. Their cowardice is breathtaking, given the importance of the utility in the SA equation.

There is nothing better than the implosion of Eskom to serve as a case study of national decline. Almost every South African by now is familiar with the back story and how those three aspects of ANC governance mentioned above – incompetence, ideological delusion and moral turpitude – have intertwined and reinforced one another.

And the political conniving has never stopped, from the days when former president Jacob Zuma in 2017 signed an unaffordable and illegal R1 trillion nuclear power deal with Russia that was eventually nixed by the Constitutional Court.

As mandated by the ANC leadership conference, which last month endorsed Ramaphosa for a second term, control of Eskom is to pass from Gordhan’s department to Mantashe. It is a move contrary to the advice of virtually every energy expert, who predict a return to wide-scale looting.

Mantashe, of whom the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture stated that there was a “reasonable prospect” of prosecuting for corruption, has close ties to the coal mining sector and has impeded every attempt made to supplement Eskom’s capacity with renewables.

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Mantashe is also an enthusiastic proponent of a R200 billion deal with Turkey’s Karpowership, which uses offshore vessels to produce electricity using liquefied natural gas. There have been claims, strenuously denied, that ANC politicians and a relative of Mantashe have a beneficial interest in Karpowership SA.

Last week, the internationally influential Financial Times wrote that Eskom was “a study in miniature” of what had gone wrong with SA. The “insane” decisions made regarding Eskom showed that Ramaphosa’s administration “seems bent on prolonging it”.

“It is not clear that the ANC has the stomach to do what is right … There are some good people still in the party. But they are drowning in the swamp that will eventually swallow them all.”

That begs the question: is Ramaphosa one of the “good people” the Financial Times, which has championed SA as an investment destination and the ANC’s ability to secure its future, believes still populates the ruling party?