Standard Bank CEO Sim Tshabalala says Eskom should consider an international candidate to lead the state-owned power utility in the wake of former chief André de Ruyter’s shock exit and allegations of an attempted assassination.
“SA should have the confidence in its national competitive advantage to say we’re going to find the best person wherever they’re from to run the power utility,” Tshabalala told Business Day in an interview. “If that person is international, I humbly submit that if they’ve got a mindset that is consistent with SA’s national goals — why not?”
De Ruyter sent shock waves across SA when he resigned as Eskom CEO in mid-December after just three years at the helm of the power utility, which in 2022 suffered its worst power cuts yet. Eskom has also lost skilled employees to overseas utilities, with many said to be leaving due to a combination of better pay, the allure of securing overseas residency and lower stress levels.
Last year Eskom’s chief nuclear officer, Riedewaan Bakardien, resigned to join Canadian utility Ontario Power Generation.
Mandy Rambharos, who headed Eskom’s energy transition department, left to join the Environmental Defence Fund, a US nonprofit organisation.
Policy environment
Tshabalala said the ideal candidate to run Eskom would require prior experience at running large power utilities as well as a deep understanding of electrical and mechanical engineering. However, the candidate would also need to have the
requisite social and political sophistication to navigate SA’s complex sociopolitical and policy environment.
“There are people in other parts of the world who run utilities who have got all those skills,” Tshabalala said.
“Whoever that person is, they have to have the knowledge, skill and talent, experience and capability to manage in an Athenian democracy ... sophisticated, loud, rambunctious, with a fourth estate that says what needs to be said. Other countries have done it, there is no reason why we can’t do it.”
Though De Ruyter is meant to remain in the Eskom CEO role until the end of March while its board searches for his successor, that plan might be scuppered by disclosures of an alleged attempt to murder him by cyanide poisoning.
The alleged assassination attempt took place at Eskom’s head office in Johannesburg, where De Ruyter drank a cup of coffee believed to have been deliberately laced with cyanide on December 13, the day after he submitted his resignation to chair Mpho Makwana.
De Ruyter’s resignation was made public on December 14.
Iraj Abedian, CEO of Pan-African Investment & Research Services, described the alleged attempt on De Ruyter’s life as “absolutely horrendous by global standards”, putting SA in the realm of being a mafia state.
Such events are also why it would be unlikely that a foreign candidate would consider Eskom’s top job as they would face the same political quagmire of corruption, rent seeking and sabotage that ultimately sealed De Ruyter’s fate.
“If you’re sitting in Singapore or wherever in the world and this opportunity comes up, you’ll think twice to take the job,” Abedian said.
“If a local guy who understands the culture and the history finds it untenable, steps down and then gets poisoned — if you’re a foreigner you’ve got no chance.”
Abedian said an international CEO candidate would probably want to drastically lower Eskom’s bloated headcount, which stood at 40,421 at the end of March 2022, according to the utility’s latest integrated report. While that is down from 44,772 in 2020, Abedian said the staff numbers remained a burden on its cost base, though lowering the headcount would be politically untenable given SA’s chronic unemployment.
“The first thing that any new CEO would want to do is get rid of the 30% to 35% surplus workers that are there,” he said, adding the public enterprises department would never accede to such layoffs.
“Whoever takes over, the politicians must get out of the way,” said Abedian.
“No credible operator would take the contract without demanding full management autonomy. But my guess is
that government would find it difficult to give them that
autonomy.”
While Tshabalala said he was of the view that De Ruyter possesses the requisite expertise to run Eskom effectively, he favoured hiring someone with an engineering background to be the utility’s next leader.
“You don’t necessarily have to be an engineer ... but clearly an engineer is best positioned,” said Tshabalala. With Denene Erasmus and Hajra Omarjee
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