LETTER: State must get out of Eskom to save small businesses

After 12 years of load-shedding, numerous scandals and a failed social experiment in employment practices and procurement, Eskom is now teetering on the brink of collapse.

This will take with it what’s left of SA manufacturing, and brings a sledgehammer to the productive middle class who provide jobs and tax revenue to the government.

If we look at the economic destruction in the SA Post Office, Armscor, Prasa, municipal entities and other state-owned enterprises (SOEs) it’s clear that Eskom is going the same way as the same rules apply.

As a small manufacturer I shudder to think what large manufacturers are going through over these periods; more equipment failures, generator fuel costs, idle staff ... it just goes on.

How can entrepreneurs/investors have any confidence in a future in a country that allows this to happen? We don’t — we all sit and watch helplessly and hope we can mitigate our risk, although with Eskom that is almost impossible. None of us is thinking of growth or expansion as our future is bleak. How can it not be?

Anybody who runs a business understands that especially a complex business like Eskom has to be run by competent, motivated people, working together as a team.

Reading some of the stories of how generators are blown up by simple incompetence, that union workers don’t take instructions from management to even clean the plants, it is clear that there is a general non-caring culture that management has to deal with. Throw in corrupt activities and you have the present mess.

Eskom is cutting its workforce, but it seems it still has 10,000 too many staff. The problem with the natural attrition policy is that it is the competent — either retiring or emigrating as they have had enough, like the technicians from Koeberg — who are leaving.

Eskom complains that it can’t afford maintenance, but it cannot cut staff costs, which is probably costing R10bn extra per annum. What type of crazy logic does government force on it?

As we know, a lot of Eskom staff are deadwood, cadres hired to make up government bean-counting quotas. But the government won’t allow them to be retrenched.

The government’s policies concerning SOEs  are unworkable; it’s just impossible at this stage of the country’s development to have the correct socially engineered workforce, and tick all the other boxes. It might look good on paper, but it just has not worked — just look at the results!

If Eskom is not privatised it will be the end of manufacturing and any form of future industrialisation in SA, and possibly the long-term destruction of other sectors that employ a lot of workers (mining and agriculture).

Pravin Gordhan has tried, but 12 years down the road we are staring at failure. Things are not going to change,  they will get worse, and we can all see it.

He must use his considerable skills and determination to get the government out of Eskom, as then at least we have a chance.

Rob Tiffin, Paarden Eiland

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