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Hendrik van der Bijl must be spinning in his grave over Eskom woes
He not only lit us up, he made Joburg the first city in the world to have streetlights – and then-Escom was born.
A general view of Eskom’s Tutuka Power Station in Standerton, South Africa. Picture: Gallo Images/Rapport/Deon Raath
Hendrik van der Bijl will be spinning in his grave, I think, looking at a pic of Nikola Tesla apparently spinning in his and my neighbourhood group telling me about poor Eskom.
Hendrik is my man; my De Ruyter on his white horse; my Don Quixote storming mills and turning them into wind energy.
Because Hendrik, in his life, was just a good entrepreneur; an Elon Musk solving the world’s problems… Only problem is, Hendrik didn’t have Elon’s money to throw around. And he didn’t care. He, unlike Elon, didn’t envisage pods underground shooting you from one city to the next.
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He, like a true entrepreneur, told America how to make the first trans-Atlantic telephone call. Far away from power, I know, but enough for Jan Smuts to lure him back to SA to “light us up”. He not only lit us up, he made Joburg the first city in the world to have streetlights – and then-Escom was born.
Smuts told him to “take a stake” in it. He refused. Like a true socialist, or, God forbid, communist, his answer was always the same: “It’s not mine; it’s the people’s.”
And for the people he apparently – if I believe my friend telling me Hendrik’s story – started a string of companies: Escom that is now the broke and broken Eskom; Armscor without dodgy arms deals; Safmarine that became a vital shipping link between us and the US; showed his mettle with Amcor trading in metal and just for good measure Iscor, making cheap steel from sunny South Africa.
Government kick-started every endeavour and Hendrik saw that those loans were paid back in a jiffy so the people could truly benefit from each state-owned entity’s commercial success.
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No wonder he got a town named after him: Vanderbijlpark, the home of Iscor. Not bad for a little boy who learnt his lessons on the back of an ox wagon during his father’s trading trips; who only went to a farm school, but ended up with a PhD in physics from Germany.
And little wonder he then joined yet another entrepreneur, Alexander Bell’s company in New York before Smuts “stole” him back for us. Hendrik cared not for money. In fact, when cancer took him at age 61, he had just a house, car and a wife. He truly must be spinning in his grave…
