As chilling details emerge of how far the energy “procurement mafia” will go to ensure their looting isn’t derailed, the spotlight has quickly swivelled onto a government and Eskom board that seem clueless about how to handle it.
Five months ago, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter was given the heave-ho by chair Mpho Makwana and public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan after a tell-all interview with eNCA, in which he described unchecked corruption and how the utility had become a “feeding trough” for the governing party.
The revelations were greeted with haughty, self-righteous indignation. ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula raged about De Ruyter’s “lousy talk”, and Makwana said De Ruyter behaved “reprehensibly” in making those claims. Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe mocked De Ruyter for acting like a “policeman” in his zeal to eradicate corruption.
All of which implied that the corruption problem at Eskom isn’t as intractable as the excitable (they stopped short of using the word “hysterical”) De Ruyter had made out. Rather like the way in which ANC apparatchiks made a meal of how electricity performance had “improved” after De Ruyter left.
It’s now clear what rampant embellishment that actually was.
This weekend, a former Eskom forensic investigator, Dorothy Mmushi, told journalists she’d been contacted by someone claiming to be a hitman, who said he’d been offered R400,000 with the connivance of her “boss” at Eskom to assassinate her.
Most telling was that this didn’t happen during the height of state capture. It wasn’t Atul at 50 paces with a loaded tender. Rather, Mmushi was called at 8.30pm about two weeks ago and told this.
In the recording, the “hitman” says: “I need you to understand properly what I’m telling you. Your boss, who works with the people [who’ve paid me], says you’re disturbing them. Your boss is eating with these people. There are cases around certain tenders that you’re busy investigating and, my sister, I was supposed to kill you a long time ago.”
He says he’s been paid R50,000 and will get the other R350,000 later.
It’s a sensational story, for sure. But what’s to suggest he’s not simply a con artist, making up a story to solicit money out of Mmushi to ditch the hit?
Asked in one interview about this, Mmushi says his eerily accurate descriptions of her movements in Mbombela, where he says “I wanted to shoot you at that point”, as well as a video he sent her of him at the gate to her estate, and another of him inside Eskom’s Megawatt Park premises, made her believe he was deadly serious about his mandate.
Amid all the hand-wringing over ‘closing the corruption taps’ at Eskom, the rent-seeking business is better than ever
As she later told the SABC’s Francis Herd: “It’s not every day that anyone gets a call from a hitman, where [he] tells you that ‘your life is at risk, and I have a decision whether you live or die’.”
It’s curious timing, since all of this happened a week before her contract expired on July 31. Though Mmushi began working as a forensic consultant two years ago, she took on a full-time role as an investigator last year.
So, why call her days before she was leaving? Surely the conspirators could simply have waited until she’d left, then slipped their dodgy contracts through the front door?
Mmushi says she’s not clear on this either. Maybe it’s to intimidate her, and prevent her from telling anyone later; maybe it’s to send a message to anyone else blocking the cartels.
Either way, there are two clear headlines to this story that leap off the page. First, the response of Eskom’s chair was not exactly a commendation you’d want the judging panel of the “best company to work for” to hear about.
Asked by City Press what Eskom had done to protect Mmushi, Makwana said: “Please report the matter to the police, not to me. Let the police do what must be done.”
If anyone should know that the police are foremost first responders for the insurance industry, and secondarily staging props for Bheki Cele photo opportunities, it’s Makwana. It’s as lamentable a response as you could hope to see.
You can see why Mmushi says she’s “quite disappointed at the management of Eskom in that I reported these allegations to them, but I did not get the necessary support in terms of getting close protection security”.
If this is how Eskom’s top brass acts when there’s a death threat, what incentive is there for any forensic investigator to “deal decisively” with corruption, as the utility’s lip service would have you believe?
Second, it suggests that amid all the hand-wringing over “closing the corruption taps” at Eskom, the rent-seeking business is better than ever. A month ago electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa told Carol Paton that “crime is inside the procurement division, extending into the cartels. The people who breathe life into these cartels are inside Eskom, especially in the procurement division.”
Mmushi herself refers to the notorious knee guards, bought by Eskom for R80,000 a pair, which De Ruyter referred to in that interview on eNCA. As he pointed out at the time, “these things cost about R320 a pair at Builders Warehouse”.
All of which only underscores Mmushi’s point, which is that “Eskom does not prioritise corruption or fraud, or even victimisation of its employees”.
For those of us working in “normal” companies, it’s hard to understand how cut-throat this environment is, and how utterly wrong Makwana was when he tried to depict De Ruyter’s assessment of corruption at Eskom as simply exaggeration.
As De Ruyter himself told the FM this week: “You’ve got to have worked there to realise how surreal these things get. My ‘exaggerations’ are starting to look like understatements.”
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