Monday’s Supreme Court of Appeal ruling against Eskom is one of those moments where the law says one thing very clearly, but the politics refuse to behave.
On paper, it is simple. AfriForum asked for Eskom’s coal and diesel contracts. Eskom said no. The court said yes. Transparency wins. Case closed.
But nothing that involves Eskom, money and power ever really ends at “case closed”. It usually starts there.
Why did Eskom not want to release the contracts?
The question is not just why Eskom didn’t want to release the contracts, but more uncomfortably, who benefits when those contracts stay hidden, and who gets exposed when they don’t?
Some of the contracts may show long-standing relationships with established suppliers, built decades ago, still shaping who gets what today.
That would confirm a familiar argument: that economic power in South Africa did not disappear in 1994; it simply adapted.
The court’s ruling is quietly disruptive
At the same time, it is also entirely possible that other contracts will reveal something else — a newer layer of access, where proximity to political power opens doors that markets alone would not. That would confirm another argument: that transformation, in practice, has sometimes meant redistribution to the connected, rather than the many.
This is what makes the court’s ruling quietly disruptive. It does not choose a side in that debate. It does something more unsettling. It says, “Let us see”.
And “let us see” is dangerous in a system built on managed visibility. Because once the contracts are public, the arguments will no longer be abstract. They will have names, numbers and patterns.
The public must know how billions are spent
AfriForum, for its part, enters this story wearing the clothes of transparency — and to be fair, in court, that is exactly what it argued. The public must know how billions are spent. There is load-shedding. There are corruption allegations. There is a constitutional right to information.
All of that is true.
But it is also true that AfriForum operates in a political space where state failure is not just a governance issue, but an ideological one. So while the legal argument is about access to information, the political consequences of that access may travel further than the courtroom.
And then there is Eskom itself, which argued that disclosure would harm its commercial interests. The court was not convinced. It found the reasoning thin, even contradictory.
Once everything is visible, everything becomes contestable
But perhaps Eskom’s real instinct was not legal — it was institutional. Big systems learn, over time, that opacity is not just protection; it is survival. Once everything is visible, everything becomes contestable.
So here we are. The court has opened the door. Not to a single truth, but to multiple, competing ones.
The contracts may show that the past still pays, or that the present has found new ways to pay itself.
And if that happens, the real discomfort will not be legal. It will be political.
