Eskom is set to get an acting CEO following the early exit of Andre de Ruyter.

His departure came after a special Eskom board meeting in which it was decided that he leave with immediate effect and doesn’t serve the balance of his notice period.

De Ruyter who resigned late last year was set to leave at the end of next month. But an interview in which he made damning allegations was the tipping point for the board’s late-night announcement, giving him the early boot.

In the e.tv interview de Ruyter spoke about entrenched corruption at Eskom as well as alleged political interference. He also entered the fray of politics when he accused the ANC of using the state-owned company as a “feeding trough” and suggested that the governing party is not interested in future infrastructure development but winning the next elections. He accused law enforcement agencies of not doing much to curtail corruption and letting people accused of this get off the hook.

De Ruyter also had his own shortcomings at the job.

Under him South Africa saw its worse load shedding which effectively reached Stage 7 outages this week. Some unions and energy had called for de Ruyter to go, over his push for renewable energy which would have seen a surge in private involvement but also having no engineering experience or the know-how to run Eskom’s fleet of coal power plants.