EDITORIAL: Eskom sabotaged at every turn

For reasons we don’t well remember now, in January 2020 the FM interviewed a team of numerologists in a lighthearted take on the trials facing then freshly appointed Eskom CEO André de Ruyter, the utility’s 11th CEO in a decade.

Back then and only one month into the job, he was able to describe his soon-to-be presented operational plan, without any sense of impending disaster, as “a structured, well-managed intervention to restore the integrity of our assets”.

In one of those fun-but-not-to-be-taken-too-seriously sidebars, the husband-and-wife team of numerologists told the FM that this year would mark De Ruyter’s nadir. According to Chris and Suzanne Styles, De Ruyter’s “lines of code” showed 2020 would be an extremely difficult year for him. In 2021 things would go from bad to worse and “sadly, De Ruyter’s numbers are coded for failure and disaster, which manifest at maximum intensity in 2022”, they told the FM. In a nutshell, they said, though he is capable, “he will be so cynically and systematically sabotaged that from the moment he said ‘yes’ to this job, he was doomed to fail”.

Welcome to 2022, where SA by mid-September had endured a record of more than 100 days of power cuts. The power utility has now clocked up its worst-ever energy availability factor (EAF) of just 58% — where, essentially, it is able to produce a little more than half the electricity it’s meant to, leading to load-shedding levels estimated to cost SA’s economy at least R4bn a day. Announcing Eskom’s new board of directors last Friday, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, under whose portfolio Eskom falls, said they had been set a “stretch” target to take the EAF back to 75%.

Said Gordhan: “Below 60% is just not good enough. And so the board has to ask the question: the journey from 60% to beyond 75%, what does that involve? What extraordinary things need to be done?”

Well, for a start, you didn’t need people with dubious paranormal skills to predict this present car crash, given the lack of maintenance on the fleet of 1960 Datsuns that largely make up SA’s canon of power stations (minus, of course, Medupi and Kusile, which are an entirely new mess). But it’s partly because of unrealistic targets — such as an EAF of 75%, set to appease the government in the past, as painstakingly documented by amaBhungane in a two-part series on the utility last week — that Eskom now finds itself, ironically, 6GW short of electricity.

So the Eskom board has a huge task ahead. It’s set to face its first test: what to do with De Ruyter in the face of calls for his axing. The calls for his head are mostly political — though it is undeniable that the utility’s ability to generate power has deteriorated at a shocking pace since he came into the job.

Yet, increasingly, it appears it is entrenched corruption, now manifesting through acts of treasonous sabotage, that is behind Eskom’s rapid unravelling. De Ruyter has repeatedly said there are no silver bullets to Eskom’s predicament, and the “extraordinary things” Gordhan wants done are an unhelpful deflection from the more simple, yet no less difficult, fix Eskom needs. 

That is, Eskom has to be empowered to overrule — with the help of the police, security services and the National Prosecuting Authority — entrenched interests that range from unscrupulous unions to venal politicians to have anything close to a fighting chance of restoring electricity output to the kind of functionality that will stop rolling outages.

To a large extent, Eskom is SA in 2022 — a barely functional entity hollowed out by criminal self-interest. Until the state grapples with this sort of lawlessness, there’s no fix at all, let alone a quick one.