SA load-shedding: The roots of Eskom’s power problem

JOHANNESBURG — South Africa is heading into the southern hemisphere winter with the prospect of the country's worst-ever power cuts — up to 16 hours a day. The roots of the problem lie in poor management, corruption and sabotage.

Late one Thursday afternoon, last November, a maintenance contractor reached his hand under a huge rotating shaft at an ageing power station in South Africa.

It took the man just a few seconds to unscrew a steel plug, smaller than a coffee mug.

As he moved away from the scene, precious lubrication oil quickly began seeping from the innards of the shaft. The steel bearings inside overheated and before long the coal mill, and with it one of the station's eight turbines, ground to a sudden, and expensive, halt.

If you are looking to understand South Africa's current struggles — its soaring crime and unemployment rates, its stubborn inequality and stagnant economy, its relentless corruption and crippling power cuts, and its broader drift towards what some fear could become "gangster state" or even "failed state" territory - then this one act of industrial sabotage, at a coal-fired power station on the high plains east of Johannesburg, is a good place to start.

The alleged saboteur, Simon Shongwe (43), was working as a subcontractor at Camden — a plant that was built back in the 1960s, bombed by anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s, mothballed in the 1990s, and more recently brought out of retirement to help a country now battling to keep the lights on.

There are several theories about the alleged sabotage.

It could have been designed to break the coal mill in order to enable a corrupt repair company to come and fix it at an inflated cost.

It might have been done as a way of threatening Camden's management in to accepting some other corrupt contract.

Or it may have been part of a broader political conspiracy to damage South Africa's energy infrastructure and undermine an ANC government increasingly seen as floundering after nearly three decades in power.

What is certain is that the sabotage at Unit 4 was not an isolated event.

Instead, it was one relatively small act in a vast, ongoing, and highly successful criminal enterprise that involves murders, poisoning, fires, cable theft, ruthless cartels and powerful politicians.

It is an enterprise that risks derailing international attempts to nudge South Africa away from its dependence on coal and towards renewable energy sources.

Over the past decade it has brought South Africa's once-worldclass public power utility, Eskom, to the brink of collapse and left most homes around the country in darkness for many hours each day.

One month after the incident at Camden, on a secure floor of a large grey office block on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg, a much smaller machine was causing problems.

The coffee dispenser for the executive management team at Eskom was faulty. Or so it seemed.

When the CEO's assistant came over to fill her boss's personalised mug, there was a delay.

She left the mug unattended for a few minutes, and then, once the machine had been serviced, she returned to the CEO's office with his coffee.

“I detected nothing. The foam consistency was a bit different to normal, but I thought nothing of it," Andre de Ruyter reflected later, in an explosive interview he gave to the South African broadcaster, eNCA.

But 15 minutes later, the man in charge of South Africa's power utility suddenly felt off-balance. Before long he was shaking violently, gasping for air, and "extremely nauseous".

His security guards rushed him to a nearby clinic.

His doctors later confirmed that Mr De Ruyter had been poisoned with cyanide, possibly mixed with rat poison in order to mask the presence of the cyanide in any blood tests. He was lucky to survive.

"So, this is where the executives serve themselves with coffee," said Eskom's head of security, Karen Pillay, showing us around the office one recent afternoon.

"I consider it a dangerous space. I'm still scared for my life, every day. Absolutely."

So why would anyone go to such dramatic lengths to try to kill a man performing what, in most countries, would be considered an important, but hardly controversial job?

"There is a long list of those who want me dead," said De Ruyter, a tall man who recovered from the poisoning, quit his job at Eskom and left the country. He told me, via text, that he was "going to lie low for the moment".

De Ruyter made it clear he believed he had been targeted by powerful criminal cartels who were busy stealing "a billion rand ($52m; £42m) every month" from Eskom and its coal-fired power stations.

In his eNCA interview and in excerpts from a new book, he painted a vivid picture of sophisticated "mafia" gangs with dozens of well-trained "soldiers", who were willing to kill anyone who threatened to clean up the coal industry, or to move towards renewable energy.

It is a picture that is immediately recognisable to many here.

"There's a lot of killing around. They put a gun to my head. They came to my house and threatened my family. The whole system is rotten, corrupted," said a local businessman who told us he had tried to supply parts to Eskom for years, but that the local cartels made it impossible to work honestly.

"These cartels are politically connected. They're above the law, basically," said the man, who asked us not to use his name for fear of being killed, and only agreed to speak to us at a secure location far from his hometown.

That request for anonymity is common in the province of Mpumalanga — the heart of South Africa's coal industry and a province that has earned a reputation for extreme lawlessness.

"Life is cheap here. You can hire a hitman for $400. People are just looting as much as they can," said an investigative journalist working with us and South Africa's news website, who confirmed the businessman's account.

"This is a brutal province for anyone trying to expose the truth. It's sabotage at almost every stage of the process. And it's not just about criminality. The money… gets passed on to politicians to keep them in power, to keep them running elections, to keep palms greased," said the journalist, who also asked not to be named.

The ANC has been the governing party in Mpumulanga and nationwide since the country's first democratic elections in 1994 after it successfully led the struggle against white-minority rule.

"This is treasonous behaviour. The ANC is involved at every level. The villains are members of the ANC or associates of the ANC. It is involved so deeply that it doesn't know how to extricate itself. They are tipping us over towards that terrible situation of a 'failed state,'" said political commentator Justice Malala, noting there was a direct link between the looting and the near-constant power cuts now crippling South Africa.

"It's very depressing. It's very concerning. Our country is in a serious, dark place," said Paul Pretorius, a lawyer who played a key role at a recent public inquiry into the state corruption that flourished under former President Jacob Zuma.

As an indication of the seriousness of the crisis, soldiers have recently been brought in to guard some power stations, and to accompany convoys of trucks carrying coal, after the railway network was looted and sabotaged so comprehensively that many companies were obliged to switch to using South Africa's roads.

Eskom security chief Ms Pillay said company investigators had recently identified more than 60 "black sites" where quality coal was still being stolen or swapped for rocky, poorquality coal, by criminals.

—BBC