Bulletproof vests and bodyguards – Eskom under siege

Former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter’s affidavit before the Pretoria High Court makes for sober reading.

“On 12 December 2022, I was poisoned with cyanide,” he deposes.

De Ruyter provides no further elaboration on the poisoning, but we know from press reports that he became weak and dizzy after drinking a cup of coffee in his office at Eskom Megawatt Park in Sunninghill.

He was rushed to hospital by his security detail, and doctors quickly established that it was cyanide poisoning. A case of attempted murder was opened at Hermanus Police Station in the Western Cape on 5 January, before being transferred to the Sandton Police Station in Gauteng.

He was arguing on behalf of Eskom in a case brought by the United Democratic Movement (UDM) and 18 others in which they want the court to compel Eskom to provide sustained, reliable electricity to all South Africans in line with their rights and basic service delivery needs.

De Ruyter rebuts claims by the applicants that sabotage and criminality at Eskom is “an exaggerated risk”.

He had received several threats against his life prior to the poisoning, and was always accompanied by personal security.

In May 2022, Eskom chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer received a bomb threat, allegedly from EFF Emalahleni branch chair Thapelo Mnisi, who was apparently disgruntled after being trained as a boilermaker at Kusile Power Station and being denied employment.

Eskom’s general manager for security, Advocate Karen Pillay, has said several Eskom executives have been the targets of threats in recent months.

De Ruyter’s affidavit before the Pretoria High Court provides more chilling evidence of the state of siege under which senior executives and managers at Eskom must operate. The manager at Tutuka Power Station in Mpumalanga “has to wear a bulletproof vest when walking the stations and has to be accompanied by two bodyguards”.

“His wife and children also have to be accompanied by bodyguards all as a result of threats being made on his life,” says De Ruyter.

Despite being one of Eskom’s newest power stations, Tutuka operates an energy availability factor (EAF) of 15% to 17%, a sharp drop from the 30% recorded in 2022.

The causes of Tutuka’s underperformance are numerous, but “intolerable levels of criminality plaguing Tutuka are undoubtedly a significant contributor to its unacceptably low EAF,” according to De Ruyter.

Tutuka is not an isolated example.

Eskom is spending about R3.2 billion a year on private security due to the sabotage and criminality inflicted on its plant and personnel.

Many instances of damage to Eskom property and operations have been deliberate. “This is not always the case, but the sheer number of inexplicable incidents of damage to Eskom’s property, coupled with the substantial number in which intention is clear, overwhelmingly confirms that Eskom has experienced a sustained campaign of sabotage.”

Acts of sabotage

Apart from threats to Eskom executives, De Ruyter details several instances of sabotage dating back to 2019.

• On 18 December 2019, Majuba’s overland coal conveyor caught fire. Investigations revealed that two valves controlling water flow to a fire suppression system on the conveyor were shut off before the fire broke out. There was no record of any approval for the valves to be shut off. As a result of this fire, Eskom had to transport coal to Majuba by truck, at an approximate cost of about R100 million per year.
• On 17 November 2021, a pylon carrying power lines to Lethabo’s overland coal conveyor was cut, causing the pylon to collapse, and the conveyor to stop functioning. It took nine hours for the coal supplies to be re-routed to Lethabo. Eskom narrowly avoided an entire outage of Lethabo’s 3 558MW of generating capacity which would have moved the country from Stage 4 to Stage 6 load shedding.
• On 22 June 2022, an extension cord was dropped into Matimba’s Unit 2 transformer. All three of Matimba’s cooling units consequently shut down. Three units tripping in this way at Matimba, one of Eskom’s best performing power stations, was unprecedented.
• On the same day, a unit at Kendal and two units at Matla broke down. Cumulatively, these incidents reduced generation capacity by 2 400MW.
• On 28 June 2022, unlawful industrial action at various Eskom power plants interrupted its operations, and caused 10 generation units to trip. As a result, the country was moved from Stage 4 to Stage 6 load shedding.
• On 10 November 2022, a contractor at Camden removed the bearing oil plug from the station’s bearing, causing oil burners to trip repeatedly, resulting in an outage of Camden Unit 4. The contractor later confessed that this was an intentional act of sabotage.
• Eskom has recorded more than 25 arrests for matters of sabotage relating to plant tampering and theft of diesel and fuel oil.
• On 16 December 2022, since Eskom “was under near constant siege, the President [Cyril Ramaphosa] deployed South African National Defence soldiers to four of Eskom’s power stations.