For a whistle-blower, De Ruyter has got a lot of film star publicity

The stories and important information in his book should not be packaged for personal profit

Early in his making money Truth” to . Power best-selling memoir of his three years heading Eskom, André de Ruyter recalls a friend ribbing him that he “should aim for a goal more meaningful than merely An opportunity came with a chance to be COO at the power utility before he was offered the top job. He declined. “If I played a role in turning Eskom around,” he remembers reasoning, “it would not be me but the CEO who would get the credit. Making someone else famous was beyond the bounds of my altruism.”

He needn’t worry about having made someone else famous, nor about making money. Truth To Power sold over 16,000 copies in its first week after being published, setting a record for an SA writer.

The Exclusive Books pop-up stores at literary festivals looked like ad stands for De Ruyter. At Kingsmead he got his own 2m-high display stand, on which dozens of images of his face — in the darkly lit, Bruce Willis-esque photo that graces the book’s cover — pinned visitors with a resolute stare. You can’t escape that face at any SA airport.

In this sense, it’s a success. But the stories inside, of ineptitude and looting within an institution meant to serve the SA people, should not be packaged in a sexy headshot airport thriller for personal profit. Even more gross was his publisher’s threat of legal action against anybody who circulated the PDF via WhatsApp and didn’t pay R350 for it.

De Ruyter casts himself as a whistle-blower. If he is one, speaking truth to power, then everything he wants to reveal should be public — given to courts, given in full to journalists, put up online for free. This is what real whistle-blowers do. And often they remain anonymous.

Not only out of fear of persecution — Chelsea Manning ended up jailed for leaking classified documents revealing how the US military killed Afghan civilians — but also to make sure the focus is on the information.

In 2005 the leaker who brought down US president Richard Nixon’s corrupt administration finally unveiled himself in a feature in Vanity Fair. He’d always been known as Deep Throat, lying even to his family about his involvement in Watergate. The splashy article was accompanied by a caddish portrait in a crimson blazer.

I presume Mark Felt didn’t want to die before feeling what it’d be like to be known for his brave acts. But coming out damaged the credibility of his revelations by linking them to his personal story. Reporters dug in, concluding — in a 2017 biography’s words — that Felt “wasn’t out to protect American democracy and the rule of law; he was out to get a promotion”.

He might have been. But that didn’t matter while the focus was on what he revealed. Now, US politicians who want to practise Nixon’s form of malicious, lawless politics use Felt’s persona to discredit the information.

I wrote a book recently, and in a Twitter conversation someone suggested my criticism of De Ruyter arose from jealousy. Even if that’s at play for me, many others have told me the incessant advertising for his book and its cost has

— as one friend put it —“left such a bitter taste in my mouth”. She’s a black professional who hates the ANC and works to repair damage done by SA’s governing party. Because of that she hasn’t read the book. And thus it fails to reach readers who deserve to know its contents and might be able to make a difference.

She said that in private because when you complain about De Ruyter’s salesmanship, his self-promotion and profiteering, many rise up to protect him, asking why you focus on the style over the substance, or how he could have made his insights public when even the justice system may not give him a fair shake. He could have put it online — Manning and Edward Snowden did.

Policy watchers in SA are, deep down, always hoping for a solitary saviour, a reverse image of the African “Big Man” whose lawless ambition ruins everything. We want a good “Big Man”. It could be a man or woman, black or white. But remember the brief but intense surge of belief that Mamphela Ramphele could turn the country around? Or the now-forgotten “Ramaphoria”?

There is a South African who has written about the danger of that kind of glorification: André de Ruyter. One of Truth to Power’s main messages is that yearning for idealised heroes to take positions of power does little good because they tend to acquiesce to the temptation to look like movie heroes rather than to act heroically.

De Ruyter stresses he has “great respect” for Tito Mboweni’s “integrity”. But he begins the book by skewering Mboweni’s “leather wingback chairs” and suits “tailored by the same firm that had dressed Winston Churchill”.

De Ruyter says he took Rudy Giuliani’s “broken windows” approach to his CEO tenure, schooling his employees that unnecessary grandiosity, as well as signs of neglect, such as dust, had to be tackled because they infected the institution’s whole culture.

In the office he represented himself with a pair of battered safety boots. He pointedly had an expensive-looking silver trophy awarded to former CEO Brian Molefe removed. It was a “phallic monstrosity”, he writes. “It transpired that the award had been given ... for ‘ending loadshedding.’ Pass the sickbag.”

The book’s best stories show that incompetence and a victim mentality, not madefor-TV corruption, most bedevil Eskom. De Ruyter acknowledges this. It’s not clear he rated so far above most of his colleagues on these attributes. Quick to fear he’s been snubbed, he resents that Eskom board members called other employees, not him, with questions. And yet he also kept a mug on his desk “boasting the Afrikaans inscription ‘Ek is jammer om van jou kak te hoor’ (I’m sorry to hear about your shit).” When a team member “got whiny”, he writes that “I would point to the mug and ask what they wanted to do about solving the problem.”

The book also contains much detailed, important information about Eskom’s operational limitations and its good and bad personalities. SA suffers badly from its politicians’ unwillingness to disclose things publicly. With that information experts such as my friend could get cracking on innovating solutions and voters could be empowered.

Instead, at the Franschhoek Literary Festival a few weeks ago readers got a phallic monstrosity: a hundred copies of Truth to Power stacked metres high right behind the Exclusive Books till. We’re still load-shedding, and this feels far too much like a reward.