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Johan Kruger claims in his letter that Jacob Zuma destroyed Eskom (“Zuma is Eskom’s destroyer”, December 1). This is a simplistic accusation. No single person destroyed Eskom. It was doomed from its inception in 1923.
First, Zuma became president in 2009 (not 2007, as Kruger claims). Load-shedding started in 2007, during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency. But this wasn’t the first case of rolling blackouts and rot in the parastatal.
While many forget due to their rose tinted-goggles, Eskom’s own annual reports and historical newspaper archives reveal that it (known then as Escom/Eskom) was not all that popular even before 1994. Escom was reported in the 1950s as failing to meet demand, and then going on to produce too much.
All this while the entire parastatal was funded by enormous debt and a regulation that disallowed it from making profits. In 1984 Escom/Eskom had become so bad that the De Villiers commission was created to investigate how the power supplier could fix its myriad issues.
The commission didn’t work, and Escom/Eskom became just Eskom and continued to charge too little for electricity, ensuring it couldn’t afford to retain engineering staff or build new power plants in time.
Nelson Mandela, Mbeki, Gwede Mantashe, Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa are all guilty of the same crime. Eskom should have been privatised. If it had been, we wouldn’t be experiencing rolling blackouts now. Dozens, if not hundreds, of power producers would be feeding the market. If one failed, more would take its place. That is the virtue of a free market.
But Eskom wasn’t privatised, and now we live with the results. That is not fundamentally Zuma’s fault. Nor Ramaphosa’s fault. But the fault of a century’s worth of nationalised electricity generation.
Nicholas Woode-Smith Cape Town
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.
Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
LETTER: Eskom was doomed from the start
No single person destroyed Eskom
Johan Kruger claims in his letter that Jacob Zuma destroyed Eskom (“Zuma is Eskom’s destroyer”, December 1). This is a simplistic accusation. No single person destroyed Eskom. It was doomed from its inception in 1923.
First, Zuma became president in 2009 (not 2007, as Kruger claims). Load-shedding started in 2007, during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency. But this wasn’t the first case of rolling blackouts and rot in the parastatal.
While many forget due to their rose tinted-goggles, Eskom’s own annual reports and historical newspaper archives reveal that it (known then as Escom/Eskom) was not all that popular even before 1994. Escom was reported in the 1950s as failing to meet demand, and then going on to produce too much.
All this while the entire parastatal was funded by enormous debt and a regulation that disallowed it from making profits. In 1984 Escom/Eskom had become so bad that the De Villiers commission was created to investigate how the power supplier could fix its myriad issues.
The commission didn’t work, and Escom/Eskom became just Eskom and continued to charge too little for electricity, ensuring it couldn’t afford to retain engineering staff or build new power plants in time.
Nelson Mandela, Mbeki, Gwede Mantashe, Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa are all guilty of the same crime. Eskom should have been privatised. If it had been, we wouldn’t be experiencing rolling blackouts now. Dozens, if not hundreds, of power producers would be feeding the market. If one failed, more would take its place. That is the virtue of a free market.
But Eskom wasn’t privatised, and now we live with the results. That is not fundamentally Zuma’s fault. Nor Ramaphosa’s fault. But the fault of a century’s worth of nationalised electricity generation.
Nicholas Woode-Smith
Cape Town
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.
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