As President Cyril Ramaphosa moved to assure the Eskom board and staff that they have the state’s backing, the power utility warned SA that rolling power cuts could return at short notice due to a constrained national power grid.
Just a few days after the department of public enterprises launched a public attack on board member and Business Leadership SA CEO Busisiwe Mavuso for being “unprofessional”, Ramaphosa used his weekly newsletter on Monday to defuse the matter and acknowledge that policy mistakes and state capture were responsible for more than a decade of load-shedding.
It marked a change in tone after a bad-mannered exchange during a visit on Friday by parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa). Mavuso left the meeting after an exchange with Scopa chair Mkhuleko Hlengwa. Last week, the head of the ANC’s economic transformation committee, Mmamoloko Kubayi, suggested Eskom is not being fully transparent about the causes of load-shedding.
Frustration about the power cuts ratcheted up last week as their intensity increased, highlighting one of the biggest risks facing an economy that is seeking to recover from Covid-19-related disruption.
Both the ANC and the Treasury in recent reports cited the lack of a reliable power supply as a major constraint for an economy that is struggling with an unemployment rate of above 35% and growth that lags behind its peers.
“This is the situation that we have confronted since the start of this administration and that we are all working to fix,” Ramaphosa said.
“We owe the board and management of Eskom our full support as they work to turn the utility around. We also owe our full support to the many hardworking employees of Eskom, including power plant workers.”
Just hours after the president’s letter, Eskom urged consumers to reduce their consumption of electricity.
“The loss of multiple generators over the weekend, as well as delays in returning some generation units to service, has made for a constrained power system,” it said.
It was trying to get generation units at the Matimba, Duvha and Arnot power stations back into service.
The health of various relationships with Eskom has been in focus since the Scopa chair took exception to Mavuso defending the board and CEO André de Ruyter, and asked her to leave the meeting on Friday.
Mavuso had said the board and De Ruyter could not be the “fall guys” for the ANC government. “This is not our mess,” she is reported to have said.
Eskom on Monday described the visit as “constructive” and engagements “robust”.
“During their visit to Medupi [and] Kusile power stations and Megawatt Park, Scopa called on Eskom to account for progress and expenditure on the new build programme and exhorted management to redouble its efforts to minimise load-shedding,” Eskom said. “Given Scopa’s oversight role, Eskom appreciates and understands the committee’s input as a continuation of its role to safeguard the public purse and assets.”
Ramaphosa said on Monday the structural reforms his administration embarked on in 2018 will have “a far-reaching impact on the SA energy landscape, even if the changes will take time to bear fruit”.
Unreliable power supply remains the largest growth inhibitor, according to professional services firm PwC, which estimates that load-shedding reduced SA real GDP growth by 3 percentage points in 2021.
According to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Eskom shed 554GWh of energy in the first two-and-a-half months of 2022, equal to 261 hours of outages. On a monthly average basis, that was 5% higher than in 2021, PwC said.
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