Former Eskom chief executive Andre de Ruyter. (Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg)
Thursday.
The Eskom leadership is up early, with board chairperson Mpho Makwana and his team giving us the news from Megawatt Park about the dark winter that lies ahead for the citizens of our good Republic while the lights are still on.
The news isn’t good.
With more generation capacity lost at Kusile and Koeberg, the power system is severely constrained and in a worse state than this time last year, with no relief from the stage six rolling blackouts that have become our daily bread.
There are 3 000 fewer megawatts of power being generated than last winter, with a move to stage seven and stage eight of load-shedding inevitable if we are to avoid a collapse of the electricity network.
The silver lining, according to the Eskom leadership, is that the total grid collapse predicted to take place within two weeks by Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema won’t happen.
Hopefully.
The Eskom leadership — like our political leadership — appears to be less than impressed by former Eskom group chief executive Andre de Donker’s release of a book about his time in charge of the state electricity entity.
Fair enough.
It’s not just the cheesy Truth to Power title — or the choice of cover picture for that matter.
De Donker was getting paid to keep the lights on, not to moonlight as a novelist and self-appointed spy boss. He was spending his time with ghostwriters, rather than engineers and generation experts, while Eskom — and the taxpayer — picked up the tab.
Like the majority of my fellow South Africans, I’m wondering how — and where — De Donker managed to find the electric light by which to write his parting epistle.
Most of us can hardly rustle up a boiled egg or a cup of coffee, but De Donker had enough power to churn out a 400 pager at the height of the load-shedding he was getting paid to stop.
That’s assuming, of course, that De Donker wrote the book after work and on his days off, and not during office hours when he was supposed to be trying to sort out our power supply.
Was De Donker, like his former bosses, exempted from the rolling blackouts that are ruining the rest of our lives and able to burn the midnight oil, electrically speaking, to have it ready by the time he was fired?
Or was De Donker, again like his former employers, more focused on his side hustle than on the day job that he was being paid to do and busy hammering away at the keyboard in the executive suite at Megawatt Park during working hours?
My money is on both. While the rest of us were transitioning from stage two to stage six of load-shedding, De Donker was busy bumping up his word count ahead of his inevitable departure from the state-owned electricity entity under less than favourable circumstances.
Day and night.
Not exactly the sharpness of focus on the daytime gig one would have expected from the man chosen by Public Enterprise Minister Pravin Gordhan to fix Eskom — and our supply of electricity — which may help explain why we are no closer to keeping the lights on than we were when Gordhan appointed him in January 2020.
When Gordhan appeared before parliament on Wednesday, he appeared to be more focused on exonerating himself from the mess created by De Donker than on explaining why he gave him the job in the first place.
Gordhan’s dots weren’t exactly joining for the MPs present at the standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) meeting called to question De Donker’s claims about members of the executive.
Those present didn’t appear impressed with Gordhan’s explanation that De Donker had operated of “his own free will” and without his knowledge in raising R50 million from the private sector for an off-the-books intelligence operation.
I am not De Donker’s keeper.
I still haven’t read the PDF of De Donker’s offering that’s been doing the rounds on WhatsApp.
Not because I’m waiting to line up and give De Donker my hard earned cash on top of all of our tax money he was paid for moving us to permanent stage six load-shedding, but because the power has gone off every time I’ve tried to download it.
One wonders whether his book will be classified as autobiography, politics, engineering or — like the intelligence report he commissioned into alleged government collusion in the looting of Eskom — a work of fiction?
My money’s on the latter.