Former Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter’s refusal to be vetted by state security has planted a seed of doubt in Luthuli House about his credibility.
By law, all senior state managers, government employees and state-owned entity executives ought to be vetted.
The ANC top brass says it is shocking that De Ruyter refused to comply with the State Security Agency’s (SSA’s) vetting process. Insiders say De Ruyter is using the ANC as a scapegoat to escape deep-seated issues involving his tenure at the power utility, including his failure to subject himself to scrutiny.
This comes after De Ruyter, following his resignation, fingered ANC politicians for aiding and covering up corruption at Eskom, which he claimed was one of the reasons “he could not take it anymore”.
De Ruyter, it emerged, refused to be vetted when he took the position three years ago. However, it was not until his dramatic departure from the utility last week that he dropped a bombshell about “apparent ANC-sponsored widespread corruption at the power utility”.
This is one of the reasons the governing party is not letting De Ruyter off the hook after his forced exit from the power utility. As he left, he blamed “politically connected looting networks” for bringing the state-owned company to its knees.
In a wide-ranging eNCA interview last week, De Ruyter said he was approached by the SSA for vetting for the first time last October – nearly three years into his tenure. “So why the sudden urgency to now find out if I could possibly be compromised? And we can speculate about that,” he said, adding that “my trust levels, frankly, in SSA are fairly low and all I could think is that they want to equip themselves with information that could be handy to them in running various intelligence campaigns.”
But some within the higher echelons of ANC leadership allege it may be logical to conclude from his refusal to be vetted that he was “planted by their political foes” who could possibly include opposition party senior officials.
“Had he been a black CEO and had refused to be vetted, there would have been a lot of noise. The man was clearly pushing an opposition party agenda. We are convinced he contributed to the attack against [ANC national chair and energy minister Gwede] Mantashe. He confirms this [assertion]when he says he resigned when Mantashe said they are orchestrating a coup against the ANC,” said a senior ANC official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The leader said they were informed that De Ruyter only resigned the day he “was called to answer for his own sins including the vetting issue”.
In October last year, Eskom told Parliament that De Ruyter and 100 other employees had not been vetted. The standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) heard that the delay in his vetting “arose because he had not complied with submissions that were due to the SSA”.
Scopa said then it took “a dim view of negotiations around vetting because it is a statutory requirement”.
Another well-placed source said De Ruyter should have been dealt with a long time ago and his dramatic exit proved he was desperate to shift the blame for failing to resolve loadshedding issues.
Said our mole: “This guy messed us up big time and some of us have been at pains trying to say this long time ago, but some of our comrades were defending him.”
ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said the party had served De Ruyter with papers to reveal the ANC leaders he blames for Eskom woes.
According to Mbalula, the ex-Eskom boss was riding on the existing narrative that “the ANC was corrupt”, and that this was a diversion. De Ruyter also alleged that ANC’s investment arm had benefited from “the Eskom loot”.
If there are ANC leaders doing business with Eskom wrongly, charged Mbalula, De Ruyter must name and shame them instead of dragging the party in the mud.
Mbalula said there is nothing wrong if ANC politicians are involved in business transactions if such involvement is legal.
He found it opportunistic of De Ruyter to attack the ANC, charging that in his mind “corruption is to be associated with a black face”.
The secretary-general said “it was for this reason that we are challenging him to reveal the owners of companies that got the biggest slice of the Eskom procurement pie.”
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