Confession time! I did something last weekend that I’ve never done before: I read a business book.
It’s called Truth To Power, and it’s the memoir of André de Ruyter, who led the troubled South African power monopoly Eskom for three years, before resigning in early 2023. Over his short, fraught tenure, he uncovered criminal networks stealing from the company, allegedly with the collusion of partners high in the ruling African National Congress. On his way out the door, someone in his office tried to poison him with cyanide. Quite a business climate South Africa has these days.
What brought me to the book was the interview I did for The European Conservative with a South African named Paul Maritz, of Afrikaner descent. Maritz says that his native country is descending into chaos because of widespread corruption and mismanagement — and he believes (correctly, in my view) that many in the US and Europe don’t know about it because it doesn’t fit the media’s preferred narrative about post-apartheid South Africa.
In particular, Paul Maritz told me that far from being post-racial, South Africa today is still a place where race matters very much. The implementation of laws compelling companies to hire by racial quota has meant that the most qualified, competent employees cannot always get the job. Plus, the ruling African National Congress party has become a font of patronage, doling out contracts and jobs to its allies. Result: the country increasingly does not work for any South Africans, black or white, except for cronies of the ruling party.
Eskom is the country’s state-owned electrical power monopoly. It was once considered to be one of the best-run entities of its kind in the world, but in the three decades since apartheid’s end, Eskom has become a basket case that cannot keep the lights on. As Maritz told me:
Eskom has always been in the hands of the government. It was created by a previous government and was actually quite effective. But then it started becoming a tool of the state. There was a lot of corruption, and they didn’t pay heed to the warnings given to them. They were warned in 2002 that they should do something about their capacity. They didn’t really listen. In 2007 we started having rolling blackouts in South Africa. Usually it wasn’t that bad. You can live without electricity for two hours a week.
For a while it stopped and we thought that the problem had been addressed. Then it started up again in 2017 or 2018, and it became very, very bad. In February of this year, we had several areas that only had electricity for a couple of hours each week. Coupled with that, South Africa has an immense problem with the theft of copper cables. It seems that the government is not doing anything about it.
Maritz said that DEI-obsessed Americans need to learn from the South African experience that when you give people jobs based on race, connections, or any reason other than competence, it will have cascading negative effects throughout the society and economy. There is a serious, material cost to be paid when wokeness is the measure of a company, not its actual performance.
Curious to know more about what specifically that has meant for South Africa, I picked up de Ruyter’s new book. Yes, it had some slow parts for a non-business reader like me, but mostly I found it hard to put down. Why? Because it is above all a morality tale about what happens when ideology and personal connections displace merit, and living by lies is the cost of doing business in a corrupted system.
Andre de Ruyter, now 55, is a native South African born of Dutch parents who emigrated after the trauma of the Second World War. They went to South Africa looking for a new start. When apartheid ended in 1994, de Ruyter placed himself “on the left side of white political thinking—more traditionally liberal than revolutionary, and more focused on individual freedoms and responsibilities.” As a free market liberal with a hatred of totalitarianism bequeathed to him by his mother and father’s experience with Nazi occupation, de Ruyter “was excited at the possibility of a rainbow nation.”
Founded a century ago, Eskom became the largest electricity generator on the African continent. When it came to power in the mid-1990s, the democratically elected government of President Nelson Mandela inherited one of the most important utilities in the world. New legislation in 1998 greatly expanded government control over the state-owned power company.
As the government began filling Eskom’s ranks with supporters whose most important qualification was connections to the ANC, and new affirmative action laws required quota-hiring of blacks, the utility’s performance began to suffer. By 2008, South Africa began to suffer its first-ever “loadshedding”—rolling blackouts necessary to keep the entire power grid from collapsing. Under the spectacularly corrupt government of President Jacob Zuma (2009-2018), Eskom very nearly fell apart, as loadshedding swept the nation of 60 million, threatening the fundamentals of Africa’s largest economy.
Being the CEO of Eskom ought to have been a dazzling prize, but by the time de Ruyter came on board, it had become one of the most miserable corporate assignments imaginable. Zuma had sacked most of the Eskom board, and filled it with his cronies, resulting in massive scandals. Zuma’s successor as president, Cyril Ramaphosa, appointed a new board, but by then, corruption had become a way of life within Eskom. In 2019, the board brought de Ruyter in to rescue the ailing utility giant and restore stability to the power grid.
Naming a white CEO to Eskom inflamed the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a far-left faction led by Julius Malema, which was recently in the headlines for chanting “Kill the Boer” at its party gathering. De Ruyter writes that playing the race card had become standard operating procedure to silence critics:
Time and again, when negligent, incompetent or just plain lazy Eskom employees were taken to task, they would fight back with the lodging of spurious charges against their superiors, forcing the disciplinary wheels to grind to a halt. Sometimes they would stick around for years or, in extreme cases, never face real consequences—all while still drawing a handsome salary.
Spurious allegations of racism to deflect accountability became so rampant that Prof. Malegapuru Makgoba, the black chairman of Eskom, expressed outrage at the practice. At one point in de Ruyter’s tale, an EFF regional leader threatens violence against the white CEO, but later claimed that he meant it “metaphorically.” This is the same excuse that The New York Times earlier this month used to brush off concern over “Kill The Boer.”
To call the corruption that the new Eskom CEO found “systemic” is to vastly understate matters. When most of us think of corporate corruption, what comes to mind are executives on the take, employee theft, things like that. There was that, and lots of it. The most shocking thing, at least to me, was how utterly demoralized Eskom had become, even at the lowest level. Over and over, de Ruyter makes personal inspections of power plants, and found them to be filthy, poorly cared for, and falling apart.
A typical anecdote:
It was the responsibility of the station manager to manage coal supplies. I had previously drawn up, out of pure frustration, a list of daily responsibilities for power station managers. Right at the top of the list was: Is there enough coal? It’s not rocket science. You run a huge coal-fired power plant. Perhaps you should make sure you have enough coal. My sense of frustration was enormous. Was there no system or procedure that could rely on? Did I have to check everything myself?
Even the housekeeping at Kusile was shocking. It was a new plant, but was already filthy and neglected, with weeds growing everywhere. Neglect often starts small—deceptively small—until it becomes so deeply ingrained in the culture of an organisation that there is no turning back. And then, one day, it explodes—sometimes literally, as in the case of Unit 4 at Medupi.
De Ruyter finds that a sense of lethargy, and a total lack of pride in one’s work, had infected the entire system, from senior management all the way down. This was not the Eskom that the new democratic government inherited after apartheid ended. With its Marxist economics, tribalist thinking, and anti-white racism, the black-majority government had looted the national electricity provider and turned it into a disaster zone.
In de Ruyter’s account, his attempts to right the sinking Eskom ship were usually met with opposition within the government, which expected the utility to be administered according to the needs of politics, not electricity customers. In May of 2022, de Ruyter approached government public works minister Pravin Gordhan, and told him things were so desperate at Eskom that they needed to bring back “experienced managers”—which the government heard as “white managers.” De Ruyter goes on:
Two and half years earlier, shortly after I took office, I’d received a touching letter from seventy-two Eskom pensioners, who had held a meeting and were willing to come back to work, saying they wanted to do their bit to help solve the energy crisis. When I responded positively, it created a political firestorm. The EFF went ballistic and labelled me a racist. No sooner has a white man taken over than he’s bringing back the old white people, they complained. Pravin Gordhan had no stomach for this fight and instructed me to reject the pensioners’ offer.
It seems that no small number of black South Africans can live with incompetence and exploitation as long as the face of the incompetent exploiters is black.
De Ruyter is keen to emphasize that though race is a key element in the overall story, it is not a simple black-and-white morality tale. Here he writes of the turnaround of a once-flagging power station:
It was quite the turnaround at Kriel. On my first site visit, I had been dismayed. The windows were broken and rubbish was everywhere around and in the plant. But a new station manager, Morongwe Raphasha, grabbed the plant by the scruff of its neck and changed the culture. Remember that this was the power station where they paid R80 000 for a pair of kneepads. If ever anyone was going to dispense with the poisonous fallacy that excellence has anything to do with gender or race, it was Morongwe. It has everything to do with attitude, purpose and mentality. The battle raging in Eskom is one between integrity and corruption, between excellence and incompetence, between good and evil. And there are people of all races and genders fighting on each side of this divide.
De Ruyter also had to contend with the indifference of the government, in particular the police, to rampant theft and even sabotage within Eskom. At one point, he brings together senior business leaders to fund a private investigation that uncovers four criminal networks operating within Eskom – allegedly with direct connections to two senior government officials. Nothing happened. The country’s energy minister accused de Ruyter of acting like a cop, instead of doing his job fighting loadshedding – this, despite the fact that criminality is largely responsible for loadshedding!
De Ruyter finally recognizes defeat:
The only conclusion is that profit-sharing by criminal and corrupt elements has become so normalised that it is self-evident: it is no longer questioned, and it has to be incorporated in plans. Without largesse being dispensed to the comrades, plans will fail, sometimes by being deliberately undermined. Now, I am not naive: I understand that in every society there is a certain level of corruption. Whether in the US, France, Germany or the UK, corruption seems to be a ubiquitous phenomenon. The difference is that even if a corrupt official abroad takes a 5 per cent bribe, the bridge still gets built, the power plant still gets repaired. In South Africa, corruption has become so overwhelmingly dominant that the system feeding the corrupt has begun to fail.
Moreover, the ubiquitous racialism of South Africa, particularly its racial quota laws, makes it very difficult, perhaps impossible, to fix the problems. What de Ruyter describes is a Sovietized system that operates according to political (and racial) logic, not ordinary laws of productivity. What can’t go on forever, doesn’t. De Ruyter says this “rent-seeking” dynamic, when it becomes totally detached from real-world effects (e.g., when rolling blackouts become normalized), “ultimately can lead to state failure, as institutions are systematically denuded and resources stripped by rent seekers.”
This past February, de Ruyter tendered his resignation as Eskom’s CEO. The next day, in one of his final meetings in the office, someone slipped cyanide into his coffee mug, nearly killing him. The businessman and his family left South Africa, and went into hiding. He was recently named as a guest lecturer on energy policy at Yale University for this coming fall term.
The narrative in Truth To Power is acutely relevant for European and American societies. There is no substitute for competence—not politics, nor diversity, nor equity, nor inclusion. None. Any attempt at achieving a politically determined outcome—such as the distribution of jobs and contracts along racial lines—can only come at the cost of productivity and the provision of goods and services. Some of this can be tolerated as the cost of doing business, as long as the lights still come on without interruption. But if it spreads, eventually the entire system could become degraded beyond rescue.
We in the United States, Great Britain, and continental Europe are no strangers to any of this. De Ruyter writes of how the newly racialized bureaucracy created an entire ecosystem of managers who added nothing to productivity—something that expensive DEI bureaucracies do in the West. One startling difference: in South Africa, the government implemented running the economy as a racial spoils system. In the West, our CEOs and senior systems managers more often than not do it by choice, and congratulate themselves, and each other, for being progressive.
De Ruyter’s book is also a warning that corrupt decisions made today may not come to poisonous fruition until years later, when it may be all but too late to stop the collapse. He points out that the South African energy crisis is rooted in decisions the state made twenty or more years ago. As the flap of the proverbial butterfly’s wing in Fiji can cause a hurricane in the Caribbean, so too can the appointment of politically connected and racially correct deadheads to leadership positions lead, in time, to the demise of morale and pride in one’s work among minions at the ground level.
I finished Truth To Power on the same day that news broke from the U.S. state of Vermont, in which Tyeastia Green, the former DEI manager for the progressive city of Burlington, defended herself from accusations of corruption and costly mismanagement by accusing its current mayor, a white man, of racism.
“White supremacy does not mean that you have a hood and a robe in your closet,” she said. “That’s not what that means. It means that you’re going to do everything you can to make sure that whiteness is the standard.”
But Green came under fire for her subsequent work with the Minneapolis city government, for the same reasons. This time, her accusers were black—and she called them racist too. Having failed out of two government jobs in America, it sounds like Tyeastia Green might have a bright future for herself in South Africa. Or maybe just a future, one not so illuminated: last month, South Africa hit a new low in its loadshedding crisis. One expert predicts that it will take at least a decade for South Africa to make the kind of changes necessary to end loadshedding.
As Truth To Power makes plain, this is a technological failure, a managerial failure, and a political failure—but above all, it is a moral failure by a generation of post-apartheid South African leaders. No wonder they wanted him dead.
