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City Press writes that there was much hope of a light at the end of the load shedding tunnel when André de Ruyter was appointed CEO of Eskom two years ago, but that was not to be.
Instead, the country has experienced its worst bouts of load shedding with De Ruyter and the organisation’s current executive committee and board at the helm. In a number of media briefings, Eskom’s leadership said sabotage by unknown saboteurs crippled the utility’s capacity to provide continuous electricity. However, according to Duma Gqubule of the Centre for Economic Development and Transformation, the elephant in the room is the CEO at Eskom and the entire executive committee leadership, who are being handled with kid gloves, despite their incompetence. “If André were a black person, he’d have been fired a long time ago. I think he’s protected because he’s white. We must tell it like it is. The level of incompetence of this leadership is incredible – and there’s also no leadership from the top in terms of the president,” said Gqubule. He went on to indicate: “They must stop scapegoating the workers. We had three or four days of labour unrest and now they’re blaming the workers for long-term systemic issues … These are systemic issues that have worsened under André’s leadership and the leadership of this board.” The Black Business Council (BBC) agrees. Trade union Numsa, whose members have been on strike at Eskom over a wage increase, said De Ruyter had been the wrong person for the job from the outset: “In our view, he’s executing a mandate, which is to privatise Eskom. Stabilising the grid is something of which he actually has no understanding, which is why we’ve experienced the highest level of load shedding.” Energy expert Ted Blom said that De Ruyter had long passed his sell-by date: “He’s done nothing – absolutely nothing – to fix Eskom.” However, economist Lumkile Mondi said the problems at Eskom were beyond De Ruyter’s scope as the root problem was a corrupt governing party that had run out of ideas. Mondi added that Eskom, like many other state-owned enterprises, had had its resources hollowed out.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Dimakatso Leshoro at City Press (subscriber access only)
- Read too, De Ruyter still in charge thanks to ‘white privilege’, at Sunday Independent
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page