EDITORIAL: Who would be Eskom’s new boss?

There’s no doubt about it. Eskom’s boss has many bosses. And he or she is about to have more. Indeed, between all the reporting lines and accountability, it must be hard to find the time to run Eskom.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement that he will appoint a minister of electricity in the presidency has, predictably, not gone down too well. Ramaphosa has not so far succeeded in injecting the requisite urgency or effectiveness into his July plan to tackle the electricity crisis. He told the nation in his state of the nation address that what was needed was “a single point of command and a single line of march”.

The new electricity minister, it seems, is his one answer to the effectiveness and urgency issue. The other, of course, is that the president has acknowledged what a disaster it all is by simply declaring a disaster.

It is not clear at this stage how this new ministry will work. We have been told that it will assume full responsibility for overseeing all aspects of the electricity crisis response, including the work of the national energy crisis committee. The committee, which came out of the July plan and is led by the director-general in the presidency, Phindile Baleni, is supposed to bring together all the relevant government departments and Eskom. It reports to an interministerial committee and beneath it are eight workstreams, involving an impressive and experienced array of electricity folk, public and private.

We have been told too that the new electricity minister will not supplant public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, who remains Eskom’s shareholder minister. And courtesy of mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe we have been told that the new electricity minister is just going to be a project manager.

It is all very confusing. Business people, energy experts and economists have rightly warned of the confusion and territory battles that will result, and the risk that this could make implementation more contested and chaotic, not less.

But just imagine the plight of the incoming Eskom CEO who at some point will be appointed to replace the outgoing André de Ruyter.

The CEO reports to Eskom’s board of directors, but also to the shareholder, which is the ministry of public enterprises, and the policy department, which is Mantashe’s department. Over and above that, the Treasury controls the purse strings and also oversees the public finance and procurement rules, along with the auditor-general.

Then there is the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa), which sets the tariffs for electricity and so controls Eskom’s revenue. That is not counting parliament, whose various committees can call  Eskom to account for one thing or another. Add to that the media and the various other stakeholders with whom Eskom’s CEO and executives must interact frequently at a time of crisis. Since July there is also the national energy crisis committee itself, however helpful, and the interministerial committee that oversees it.

There can be no question that Eskom needs to account to the nation and that it needs help. It provides the electricity which is the lifeblood of SA’s economy (or fails to do so). It has been the recipient of billions of rand of bailout cash and is now receiving at least R23bn a year from the public purse, ahead of a more durable, taxpayer–funded solution to its debt crisis. SA certainly deserves to be informed of its progress. SA deserves too to know that serious effort and expertise is going into helping Eskom to reduce load-shedding.

But can it possibly be functional for Eskom’s executives to be subject to so many competing and time-consuming spheres of oversight and reportage ? No private sector company, however large and complex, would have to contend with this. Far from being the answer to the problem, more layers are part of the problem in themselves.

The issue is at its worst in relation to Eskom. But it reflects a more generalised problem of objective overload and contested governance structures plaguing the state-owned enterprises (SOE) sector. Ramaphosa last week promised to implement the recommendation of the Presidential SOE Council to establish a state-owned holding company as part of a centralised shareholder model to ensure effective oversight of SOEs.

It is hard not to fear this will simply add yet another layer to an already overcomplicated and dysfunctional system.

No wonder no-one wants to be Eskom’s new boss.