The conspiracy theories around those responsible for Eskom’s stage three and four load-shedding last week were ridiculous.
The ANC blamed sabotage by workers; workers blamed management and the government, which they said were plotting to carve up the business between themselves for private profit; and the Jacob Zuma fightback mob blamed Cyril Ramaphosa, who they said was plotting with his brothers-in-law, Patrice Motsepe and Jeff Radebe, to get bigger stakes in independent power producers.
Everyone thought someone else was to blame. Not one had a shred of evidence to back up their claims. But consider this. Eskom’s energy availability factor – the amount of energy its power stations are able to feed the grid at any one time – has been dropping like a stone since 2017, when it was at 79%. By October 2018 it had dropped to 71%. By the second week of February just before load-shedding began, only 64% of Eskom’s plants were delivering power.
This is because Eskom has severely neglected maintenance. Its plant is old – on average 37 years – and the midlife refurbishments that should have been done were not. Over the past four years Eskom has halved what it spent on maintenance in an effort to reduce costs as its financial crisis cut deeper.
During the Matshela Koko-Brian Molefe era people were inappropriately promoted as Eskom’s top executives applied it as a giant patronage machine. Now, morale is rock-bottom. These people, as well as thousands of others, live in daily fear of losing their jobs. The person seen as responsible for this is the new CEO, Phakamani Hadebe, whose detached leadership style has made matters worse. The appointment of Jan Oberholzer, an old-order Eskom man, as COO has confirmed the conspiracy theory that the plan is to remove the new set of managers and bring back white managers and technicians.
Last week I got direct insight into the internal workings of Eskom’s power stations in a conversation with a technical manager. He explained that at least half of the tripping incidents are due to faulty pumps. Frequently only two of the three pumps on a unit are in working order. If one of those overheats and the operator fails to notice, it trips, ultimately leading to the whole unit going down.
The manager also explained that due to low morale and poor discipline, maintenance work that is recorded as done has actually not been done. Due to poor planning at power plant level, some repairs that should take a day take a week, as the work of the various technicians is not co-ordinated.
Put this together with public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan’s comment a few weeks back that “40% of technical breakdowns are due to the human factor” and you are looking at a very different picture.
Each tripping incident is recorded and investigated by Eskom technical managers. These reports go to power station managers and technical divisions at Eskom head office. Asked whether Eskom had any evidence of sabotage, Eskom spokesman Khulu Phasiwe said: “We have no evidence or even suspected any acts of sabotage.” A top executive told me that “all trips were technically explainable”.
Monday last week was particularly bad, not so much because an extraordinary number of units tripped but because Eskom ran out of diesel at the weekend. It was unable to pump water for the pumped storage plants and so went into Monday with no pumped storage and no diesel for the open cycle gas turbines.
The diesel it needed was stuck on board a ship in the Mossel Bay port waiting to be off-loaded until late Wednesday afternoon. While Petrosa says that during this period it continued to supply Eskom with diesel from its own stocks, this doesn’t add up with Eskom’s account that it was perilously low on diesel for the first half of the week.
The ANC’s sabotage theory is reminiscent of “the bolt in the generator” that was put forward as the explanation for the failure of a unit at Koeberg back in 2006. At that time the country was experiencing load-shedding for the first time and the government and ANC were supremely convinced that Koeberg had been intentionally brought down.
However, a report by Eskom found that the failure of the generator was due to human error. Alec Erwin, the cabinet minister responsible for public enterprises, was forced to backtrack on his sabotage claim in parliament a few weeks later.
Many years later I asked Erwin if he still believed Koeberg had been sabotaged by a bolt thrown into the works. He laughed in reply and said: “No, and that was the last time I believed anything the National Intelligence Agency told me.”
• Paton is writer-at-large.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.