BETWEEN THE CHAINS: Give power to the people
The public deserves to know what threatened Eskom’s survival. Particularly after paying R83bn for it
He who has nothing to hide is the freest person. For the past two years, that thought came to mind each time I asked Eskom chairman Ben Ngubane about the status of an investigation into the power utility by law firm Dentons. Eskom initiated the investigation two years ago to determine what was ailing the utility.An equally big concern at the time was that Eskom had run out of cash to continue operations, and its ability to continue building power stations was severely compromised. In December 2014 the utility told government it would run out of money to pay the salaries of its 49,000 direct employees in about four months. That would be by March 2015. The average SA household consists of six people, including the breadwinner. So in Eskom’s case, almost 300,000 people would have been immediately affected by the utility’s imminent collapse. That does not include the hundreds of thousands employed by contractors and suppliers. You’d think these would be the things that worried the compa...
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