President Cyril Ramaphosa has urged South Africans to allow the newly appointed Eskom board to do the work it was appointed to do.
Following bouts of heavy load-shedding in recent months, which escalated to stage six, Ramaphosa told parliament the 12-member board appointed in October should be given space to do their job.
One of the questions he was responding to in his last Q&A session of the year, was from EFF leader Julius Malema: had the president considered a change of leadership at the power utility led by CEO Andre de Ruyter since 2019.
“With respect to the group CEO, he was appointed on a five-year contract. The group CEO reports to the board, which conducts performance reviews against agreed targets. The newly appointed board should be given the space to assess what needs to be done to improve the efficiency of existing plants and effectiveness of management at all levels.
“It’s a process they’ve started or will embark on soon. The new board has the skills, experience and expertise to conduct a thorough assessment of current leadership at Eskom and take whatever steps they think are necessary. They must be given space to do so,” Ramaphosa said.
On load-shedding, Ramaphosa said the reason behind the extensive blackouts were both structural and operational.
He said among those was that there had been insufficient investment at the power utility in new generation capacity.
“Capacity or new generation build needed two decades ago has resulted in the national capacity shortage. This situation was made worse by delays in building Kusile and Medupi power stations, the faulty designs that resulted in that build, state capture and corruption as well as the loss of staff, but also the halt of maintenance at Eskom.
“I recently heard that real serious maintenance had been halted for quite a number of years. At operational level, as a result of these challenges, power stations run very hard to maximum capacity due to poor reliability of maintenance and neglect of midlife refurbishment,” he said.
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Part of the range of initiatives to turn around the country’s power crisis includes hiring back old power station managers as well as ensuring units at Kusile are brought to commercial operation and expediting Medupi.
“We did say we’d bring back some of the old power station managers who not only know operations but the sounds of those machines. A number of them have indicated a great willingness to come back and be utilized.
“We’re also coordinating efforts with law enforcement to address sabotage, theft and fraud, which continue to disrupt operations. We’re pushing back the frontiers of broad corruption,” he said.
Touching on Eskom debt, the president revealed that municipalities and government entities owed the power utility more than R50bn.
“We have made it clear that non-payment for services is unacceptable and have taken steps to ensure that payment is recovered.
“For this reason, we have established a multidisciplinary revenue committee, of which Eskom forms part, to address payment of debt to the utility by municipalities and organs of state,” Ramaphosa said.
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