BL Premium reports that as SA staggered through another day of stage 4 load-shedding on Tuesday, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter and his top executives addressed the media and painted a picture of a company unable to do crucial maintenance because of cash flow problems and procurement delays.
He also spoke of a shortage of technical skills, poor quality of work from contractors and cheating by municipalities that refused to drop load from the grid when asked to do so. De Ruyter said load-shedding would taper off this week and be lifted by the weekend, but that SA remained critically short of power. Eskom faced a hostile media, with some journalists asking De Ruyter whether he would resign and some going so far as to suggest that he was “sabotaging” the economy. De Ruyter said he served at the pleasure of the board, which served at the pleasure of the public enterprises minister. He would not resign of his own accord as “flogging the dead horse” or “changing the jockey” would not help Eskom or SA. “I do not intend to resign of my own accord. In the current circumstances, it is more important to have continuity than to repeat the last 10 years, in which there were 11 CEOs. Lack of continuity has certainly contributed to instability. These problems will not be resolved by changing horses or jockeys at this point,” he stated. The unreliability of the plant was due to years of neglect and could not be laid at the door of existing management, De Ruyter claimed. The Black Management Forum and the National Union of Mineworkers have each called for the resignation of De Ruyter and the Eskom board. Business Unity SA said it rejected these calls and stood with the Eskom leadership in difficult times.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Carol Paton at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
- Read too, Procurement rules and liquidity constraints hold back Eskom’s maintenance roll-out, at Mining Weekly
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page