TESSA DOOMS | Sabotage claim at Eskom is a mirage, it's criminality that must be dealt with

This week the government, through its acting spokesperson Michael Currin, announced that 25 people had been arrested in connection with  sabotage at Eskom. These people are accused of crimes ranging from theft, fraud and damage to Eskom properties.

Details of who they are and their relationship to Eskom are still unknown. While it is plausible that there is theft, fraud and damage contributing to the electricity crisis, the claim that these amount to sabotage is yet to be argued convincingly.

Sabotage implies a nefarious third force intentionally working to keep the country in crisis and in the dark. It denotes that people or groups are intentionally doing wrong to botch the efforts of government and Eskom’s management.

Corruption is certainly at play at Eskom. The findings of the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture gives a fairly detailed account of how coal contracts were manipulated to be given to politically connected persons rather than the most competent.

It exposed deal-making that saw the utility pay far higher prices for substandard coal that not only jeopardises Eskom’s generating capacity but also effectively looted it of hundreds of millions of rand.

There are emerging accounts of poor maintenance fuelled by contractors doing substandard maintenance in order to bill multiple times for the same work and Eskom staff allegedly taking bribes and kickbacks to enable this.

Assuming all this is true, these are still actions that the state, government and Eskom’s leaders, many deployed by the same government, must be held accountable for.

For corruption to become so endemic that it caused an electricity crisis at such a grand scale that it threatens to bring a nation’s economy to its knees, many people needed to have failed in political oversight.

This ongoing heist that stretches back over a decade is not something that is simply happening to the ANC-led government and its government deployees. The state is not simply a hapless victim of external saboteurs. Beyond sabotage there are many other problems that have led to this crisis.

There are questions about SA’s electricity capacity, about the cost of particularly generation and the impact of policy decisions on the climate and communities.

It is important to know what the gap in the national power grid is between how much electricity can be generated and how much the country needs. Since 2021, experts including the CSIR, have estimated the energy gap to be about six gigawatts. A clear understanding of the gap makes it easier for the public to assess the effectiveness of interventions in any plans the government presents.

Capacity questions are not limited to debates about the sources of energy. There are important issues related to whether the country is ready to decommission older power stations like Koeberg, especially considering that newer power stations have either not been completed or seem to break down more regularly than older ones.

Policy makers and Treasury must account for decisions that have limited Eskom’s investments into renewable energy infrastructure, even though a white paper drafted in 1998 already commits the state to investments into new energy technologies.

It is important to know what these policy implementation failures have cost the fiscus and the plant, to ensure we avoid making them again as we frantically seek solutions.

The cost of energy requires more information, transparency and accountability from the president and the ministers of public enterprises, energy and finance. Nersa’s recent decision to grant Eskom an immediate 18% tariff increase is a signal of the poor state of its financial health.

In a country that now has almost 44% unemployment and has municipalities that fail in basic governance like collections, it is unsurprising that end-users of electricity either cannot pay or have a culture of avoidance.

The strains on Eskom’s finances are a great risk to energy security. Without clear and deliberate interventions of investment, debt management, collections and ending corruption, our load-shedding woes will only multiply.

Breaking Eskom has not been simply a matter of sabotage. Fixing the electricity crisis will thus not be as simple as arresting low-level criminal elements. Turning the tide will require collective efforts, difficult trade-offs, but most importantly honest and accountable leadership.