Sunday Times E-Edition

And the winner of the Eskom blame game is ...

PETER BRUCE

Life as editor of the Financial Mail and of Business Day over almost 17 years was outstanding. I was paid, basically, to do whatever I wanted. I loved the abuse and stress that came with the job. But I absolutely hated having to provide management with proof that whatever newsroom I was running had completed its annual performance review process.

My sphincter still tightens at the phrase. I had to ask hardworking senior colleagues about their goals for the coming year and, if we could find them, check how well they had met their last targets. It was phoney. They knew I didn’t take the reviews seriously.

But management were tricky. They’d check the performance review against the pay rises I would recommend at budget time. I was trapped.

I know performance reviews are popular in corporates. Perhaps, if you pay thousands of people, they help. I was interested a few years back when President Cyril Ramaphosa, still trying to convince us he would start all his meetings on time, announced he would compel ministers to sign performance agreements and hold them to their targets.

I remembered all this as the row around Eskom and loadshedding and André de Ruyter and Gwede Mantashe deepens. There’s a pronounced trend on social media to either support De Ruyter and lament his bullied resignation, or to support mineral resources & energy minister Mantashe in his assertion that load-shedding is Eskom’s fault, not his, and that he could turn this all around quickly.

The trend is distinctly racial, with (largely) whites supporting De Ruyter and (largely) blacks supporting Mantashe. That’s probably to be expected in South Africa and I’ve often wondered about the fruitfulness of asking any white person here, now, to lead a largely black organisation, let alone to change its course. In theory it should be possible. But we don’t live in Theory.

You can tell De Ruyter struggled by the criminality he now describes at Eskom plants. Whether a black replacement would do any better we will, I’m sure, soon see. I doubt it. Eskom is far gone. This isn’t 2011 any more and if you track the relentless decline of Eskom’s energy availability factor (EAF)

the difference between all the plant it controls and the plant it could actually use when it wants to it falls through all eight black CEOs who preceded De Ruyter.

Jacob Maroga in 2008/9 heaved the Eskom EAF up from 84.9% to 85.3% when he was CEO (it was 95% in 1999) and De Ruyter leaves it below 60%.

But to blame the fall on him, or even the greater part on him, is clearly ridiculous. Eskom has failed as a result of poor maintenance and management over a very long time, of deep and relentless corruption in the company and at its shareholder, the government of the ANC, and, more recently, Ramaphosa’s failure to hold his ministers to account.

I have in my hands Mantashe’s performance agreement with Ramaphosa, signed and initialled by both men. It says “secret” at the top but it’s easy to find online. It is dated June 2019 to April 2024, (a possible election clue).

In the agreement Mantashe makes a number of commitments he clearly hasn’t achieved and won’t in the time available, even if he gets the dirty Karpowership deal through. And this is just in energy. The mining bits, if anything, are worse.

For instance, he promises to: “Improve energy availability factor to ensure constant supply of electricity.” Well, he hasn’t come close. As Eskom’s EAF has fallen, he has not made a single extra watt available on the national grid. Of course we understand there are lead times, and slow bureaucracy, but he is way off target. He doesn’t get to be the only guy with excuses.

“Increase reserve margin to counter load-shedding,” Mantashe and Ramaphosa sign. Nothing going there yet. There’s the Koeberg life extension but also this: “Implement the Nuclear New Build Programme at scale and pace that the country can afford, to ensure security of energy supply”. Huh?? That’s not even in the 2019 Integrated Resource Plan.

“Grid connections to households in terms of the National Electrification plan ...” A million new connections by April 2024, he swore. And so on.

The point is, surely, that the government has stuffed up Eskom. Overall, Ramaphosa bears the larger responsibility. He is famously inattentive and the big question is whether or not he needs Mantashe’s political support in the party that just re-elected him leader. Even if he doesn’t, he equally wouldn’t want Mantashe plotting against him. The coming reshuffle will be riveting.

Ramaphosa should call his bluff.

The point is, surely, that the government has stuffed up Eskom

Comment & Analysis

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2023-01-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

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