The cabinet will consider changes to the Eskom board when it meets on Wednesday as the government scrambles to contain one of the worst series of power cuts in SA history, two cabinet sources have said.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, who cancelled his attendance of a UN meeting, will chair a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. His office has confirmed that Eskom would top the agenda after SA went into stage 6 load-shedding at the weekend for a second time in two months.
Interventions
It is unclear whether these mooted interventions will be finalised on Wednesday.
However, two well-placed sources in the cabinet confirmed to Business Day on Tuesday that the interventions would definitely be on the agenda.
This comes as Eskom said it would reduce power cuts to stage 2 by the weekend after blackouts in recent days raised fears of destabilising the national grid and prompted Ramaphosa to cut short his overseas trip.
Eskom chair Malegapuru Makgoba said he had not yet been consulted on any changes, additions or additional funding at Eskom, but acknowledged the board needed to be beefed up.
“The board needs to be complemented, but how that gets done is for the minister to decide,” Makgoba said, referring to public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan.
Skills
Makgoba, a medical school graduate who leads an eight-member board that has often been criticised as lacking the technical skills to provide meaningful oversight or understand engineering-driven turnaround initiatives at the power utility, expressed full confidence in the CEO, André de Ruyter.
“People don’t appreciate the enormity of the problem we are dealing with,” he said, adding that it was only at the end of July that the president announced his plan to open the door wide for the private sector to generate electricity.
“There is a plan and people are committed to it. We have never doubted that and have full confidence in the executive ... and no-one has come to the board and said any differently,” Makgoba said.
Opposition political parties including the DA and EFF this week called for those responsible for plunging SA into darkness to be axed.
The DA said in a statement that the “catastrophic” blackouts were the result of “decades of corruption, mismanagement, and unworkable policy proposals by President Cyril Ramaphosa, energy minister Gwede Mantashe and the ANC in national government”.
The EFF said: “The incompetence and arrogance of Eskom executives has plunged SA into a perpetual and unwarranted darkness that is killing businesses and livelihoods. The collapse of Eskom and the failure to provide dependable and consistent energy supply are meant to render the country’s electricity utility redundant and useless.”
Business Day reported on Tuesday that some interventions had already been implemented to tackle SA’s energy crisis following the announcement by Ramaphosa of an energy master plan in July. These include the recruitment of experienced former Eskom employees and the approval of procurement of about 1,200MW of power.
Eskom has previously stated that it needed an additional 5,000MW to stabilise the grid and allow for maintenance.
Correction: September 21 2022
A previous version of this article said Eskom would reduce power cuts to stage 2 by Thursday.
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