POINT OF ORDER
TIM COHEN: Plan A failed, so Brian Molefe is back at Eskom
The power utility desperately needs a turnaround. What it got was a reversal
Eskom. Oh, Eskom. What a dire, comprehensive disaster. Some colleagues and I had lunch last week with a leading South African corporation and we were told discreetly they had received correspondence from Eskom asking them to use more power. But alas, the company has long since made its own arrangements. This act constitutes a complete turnaround for Eskom, which a few years ago was begging companies to use less power. I understand the utility is so desperate, it has even started selling electricity to Zimbabwe again, which the Zimbabweans are again not paying for. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. The shortened version of Eskom’s recent history is that it ran out of capacity in 2008, when the economy was growing strongly and, consequently, it and the government panicked and commissioned two huge new coal plants, Kusile and Medupi. The costs of those plants exploded, which required ever more and ever larger electricity price hikes. Not untypically, just as the big, shiny new...
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