Eskom is often criticised for having a bloated workforce, but the ministerial technical task team has found the embattled utility is, in fact, lacking critical skills.
Speaking at a dinner hosted by the Minerals Council SA on Tuesday evening, ahead of industry body’s annual general meeting, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan said the technical task team he appointed in early March would hand this and other findings over in a report to both him and the Eskom board by Thursday this week.
“Eskom has the strange contradiction where on the one hand we’ll say we’ve got 48,000 people and, by virtue of a World Bank study in comparing Eskom to a similar utility, it’s overstaffed.” Gordhan said. “This team has found that whilst there is this overpopulation in some parts of Eskom, on the other hand, where the real business of Eskom is, which is on the generation side and power stations, there are in fact vacancies for key professionals that need to be filled urgently.”
The utility is struggling operationally and buckling under an enormous debt burden.
Its troubles have had an adverse effect on various sectors, not least the mining industry, which was negatively affected by bouts of stage 4 load-shedding implemented earlier in 2019.
“Eskom and this industry are joined at the hip,” said Minerals Council SA CEO Roger Baxter. “If Eskom fails, we fail. And if we fail, Eskom fails. We’ve got to work together to resolve issues”
Once the new cabinet is appointed, the government is expected to get straight to work on fixing Eskom, which includes the implementation of its restructuring, as mooted by President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The ANC-led government has repeatedly promised that Eskom staff will not be retrenched, but the unions are unconvinced of this and many experts have said job cuts are necessary for the utility to get its finances under control.
Gordhan, however, said the real issue for Eskom was fixing the operational problems. The team of volunteer engineers has helped to get to the bottom of the technical issues affecting Eskom. “It’s going to make a huge difference, one hopes, as we move into the sixth administration,” he said.
Baxter said the mining sector could also assist the energy system with a potential supply of 1.4GW of power, which it could bring on stream in the next couple of years. It required help from the government in order to get these projects going, he said.
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