George Orwell is one of the most influential political authors of the ages. Although he died more than 70 years ago, his words resonate today.

In 1946, he penned his famous polemic on political pretence and hypocrisy, in his essay “Politics and the English Language”.

Two events this week — the forced ejection of Eskom’s CEO Andre de Ruyter  and  the naval exercises our sorry excuse for a navy is conducting with its Russian allies — add contemporary  local meaning to Orwell’s words.

He wrote: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms … political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Let’s start with De Ruyter’s explosive revelations in his midweek interview with eNCA.

He advised of multiple instances of ANC-linked corrupt practices, the state and its agencies turning a blind eye to more than R1bn “stolen from Eskom every month” by criminal syndicates and the virulent opposition from our allegedly climate-sensitive government to the just energy transition — all on the watch of Cyril Ramaphosa and his administration.

As recently as his Sona address, Ramaphosa regurgitated his fighting credentials on the corruption front, complaining — in his holiday from inconvenient political history — that “we inherited a state hollowed out by corruption”.

Actually, Ramaphosa sat at Zuma’s side and presided over the deployment committee which greenlighted the ransackers and the locusts who did the hollowing out. Talk about making “lies sound truthful”.

But the most troubling, arguably terrifying indictment by De Ruyter, which shatters any lingering assumptions about the “new dawn” Ramaphosa promised five years ago, was that an unnamed “particularly high level politician” was involved in deep corruption at Eskom and a minister simply brushed this aside.

Perhaps the same minister who advised De Ruyter not to concern himself with governance issues relating to the multibillion climate financing from European and US governments as “you have to enable some people to eat a little bit”.

Incandescent over this fusillade, the hacks on the Eskom board, doubtless ordered by Luthuli House, fired De Ruyter the day after the interview, and you can bet your last declining rand that his revelations will be swept under the carpet.

The ANC statement on the matter is in a league of its own within Orwell’s theory of how pure wind is dressed as solid fact.

The party of clean governance and renewal offered this nugget on De Ruyter: he was “a naysayer with right-wing political posture … his opportunistic venture into the political arena has unmasked his regressive political agenda”.

Perhaps valiantly battling against all odds to keep the lights on is now regarded as a right-wing regression — after all Thomas Edison was both American and an arch capitalist.

The ludicrous and childish rantings of a party under siege are one thing, but like its boss, Ramaphosa, the ANC is exempting itself from recent history.

When De Ruyter was appointed CEO of Eskom in December 2019 the same ministerial duo who recently accused him of treason (Gwede Mantashe) and political interference (Pravin Gordhan) were his champions, preferring him over the candidate favoured by the search committee.

Perhaps they thought him to be more pliant and state-centric than events proved.

Fortuitously De Ruyter is on his own real holiday abroad. Whistle-blowers in Ramaphosa’s new-dawn country have an unfortunate habit of being killed, financially ruined or reputationally destroyed, all without consequence.

But the ANC is a rank amateur as an enemy of clear language. Here the gold medal goes to Russia. On the first anniversary of his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin insists that a full-scale war, which has cost his country around 200,000 battlefield casualties, is simply a “special military operation”. And the South African Navy has chosen the anniversary, February 24, to conduct exercises with Russia and China off the KwaZulu-Natal coast.

We are, however, “neutral” in the conflict, even though we choose to partner with the aggressor in the largest land war in Europe since 1945.

Just how tattered and debased our once acclaimed international standing has become was underlined by The Economist, which backed Ramaphosa in April 2019 as “the man to stop the rot” in South Africa.

Nearly four years later, on February 19, the magazine struck a very different chord.

Noting our palling around in murky waters with the Russian Navy it says: “To friends in the West, South Africa’s pretensions to global importance look increasingly ridiculous. Its sympathy for Russia only makes it more so.”

As a spectacle of the ridiculous, it is Ramaphosa’s weekly newsletter this week which, à la Orwell, widened the gap between the real and the declared aims of president and party.

He writes of the AU: “We remain committed to use our experience of negotiation, political dialogue and peacemaking to support people elsewhere on the continent …”

At the same AU summit of which he writes, the South African delegation exulted at the expulsion of Israel — one side to a protracted conflict — as an observer country.

In its statement of joy at this event, the ANC wrote: “The ANC is against the AU granting apartheid Israel any observer status.’’ North Korea’s observer status remains intact and unmentioned. And Russian colonialism and imperialism in seizing foreign territory and rebuilding its old empire is to be celebrated not condemned.

Orwell had a word to describe the vast gap between words and deeds and the utter confusion of holding two diametrically opposed views and believing both. He called it “doublethink”. Perhaps even that is too grand a term for the mendacity and incompetence which characterises our government today.

Tony Leon, a former leader of the opposition, now chairs Resolve Communications. @TonyLeonSA