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BL Premium reports that Department of Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan on Wednesday suggested that sabotage at Eskom’s power plants could not be ruled out as the power utility continued to grapple with financial and operational challenges.
“Why is it that each time we think we are reaching stability within the system, we have tweets coming from certain quarters — and no sooner the tweets come, one or other part of the plant experiences some kind of disruption? Unfortunately there hasn’t been the kind of attention [on these concerns] required in order to figure out what is really going on,” Gordhan said in response to questions from members of parliament’s public enterprises committee. Gordhan was leading a delegation of Eskom executives to discuss the power utility’s 2020/2021 annual report. The government has previously alluded to sabotage at the power utility without providing much evidence. Eskom, which supplies virtually all of SA’s power, is battling to keep the lights on after more than a decade of running its plant too hard and neglecting long-term maintenance. Without mentioning names, Gordhan suggested that some current and former Eskom employees could be behind the disruptions at some of the power utility’s plants. “A message should go out to those who feel aggrieved because they had to leave the opportunities [at Eskom] for all sorts of mischievous stuff and now want to retaliate in one form or another ... whose egos wouldn’t allow them to accept that it’s time for them to move on and leave the job to someone else to do. Together with a culture shift within Eskom and its 40,000-staff, I think we will begin to see a significant shift,” Gordhan said. Last week, Eskom said it had increased surveillance at its power stations to uncover possible acts of negligence or sabotage. CEO André de Ruyter was, however, reluctant to attribute the breakdown of Eskom’s generation units to acts of sabotage, pointing out that some breakdowns were due to common criminality such as cable theft.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Bekezela Phakathi at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
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