LUKANYO MNYANDA: Phakamani Hadebe stood no chance at Eskom
Hadebe was set up to fail with his powers usurped soon after his appointment and he never seemed to be in charge
The announcement on Friday that Phakamani Hadebe is to leave his job as Eskom CEO will have come as a surprise to no-one, and probably should have happened much earlier. In some ways, Hadebe’s time was up before he had barely started. Which is sad. He was appointed permanently in May 2018, and one can plausibly argue that his powers were usurped by the government the next month and there was never a sense he was really in charge. A lot will and has been said about his lack of technical skills for this particular job, which would have been an enormous challenge even for someone who had spent their whole life running power stations. The one thing he did understand was finance and from early on he was clear that Eskom was not a sustainable business and something drastic needed to be done. But its shareholder, the government, never seemed to have the same sense of urgency. I first encountered Hadebe in his previous life as a public servant working at the Treasury. Looking back now...
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