SA’s political leaders are scrambling to find emergency solutions to the latest load-shedding crisis. It’s a situation that has long needed political intervention, just not necessarily the kind the president and some of his ministers have offered so far.
Take first the illegal strike, which has over the past couple of weeks been the proverbial straw that tipped Eskom into stage 6 load-shedding. Eskom was already struggling to keep the lights on; the strike, and the violence and intimidation that accompanied it, took even more capacity out of the system, prompting even deeper power cuts. Now the striking workers have their 7% wage increase at a cost to Eskom of at least R1bn.
But this was never simply a strike about pay. It was in an important sense another skirmish in a long-running battle over who controls Eskom. The power utility was always a union shop, and the workers had long ago become used to calling the shots over the company’s direction. Clearly they feel they no longer have that degree of influence — and they don’t like it.
The leaders of the National Union of Mineworkers and National Union of Metalworkers of SA and their federations have been in the media talking at least as much about policy as about pay. They don’t like the unbundling of Eskom. They don’t like independent power producers. They don’t like that Eskom is decommissioning three of its oldest, dirtiest coal-fired power stations.
It certainly isn’t only mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe who’s been fighting a bit of a rearguard action against the shift from publicly owned coal to privately owned renewables. But the unions appear to be using the strike weapon — unofficially, of course, given that Eskom workers are deemed essential and not permitted to strike. Even more unofficially, they’ve declined to condemn the intimidation, petrol bombs, truck blockades and general criminality accompanying the strike. Worst, and not new, is the degree to which disaffected, and no doubt demoralised, workers at Eskom’s power stations have helped over the past couple of years to sabotage their performance, whether deliberately or by sheer negligence.
The unions are accountable only to their members; their focus is on retaining those good jobs at Eskom. Wind turbines and solar panels don’t need many workers. And the vested interest is not about jobs alone at the power utility: it’s also about an extensive coal trucking industry, many of them small truckers, that mushroomed without any controls on procurement until late 2020. At least some Eskom employees are involved in these and other contracts. Anyone who tried to take on the whole series of vested interests and get some control of costs and corruption — as Eskom CEO André de Ruyter has done — was always going to face pushback in one form or another.
When it comes to labour, though, he’s not the first to have tried to stand up to the unions. And when public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan and then President Cyril Ramaphosa swooped in to push the parties back to the negotiating table, it wasn’t the first such political interference either. Whenever workers went on strike in the early days of Medupi’s construction then public enterprises minister Malusi Gigaba would quickly swoop in to persuade Eskom to settle, setting the stage for further strikes, not to mention endless delays in construction. When former CEO Phakamani Hadebe tried to rein in costs by offering a zero pay rise, Gordhan intervened then too.
The result is that the fight over Eskom’s future direction has simply become more intense, and more destructive. What the political leadership should instead be doing is, first and urgently, to get law enforcement to work. Without effective action by the intelligences agencies, police and prosecution services, Eskom will continue to face threats to the stability of its power stations and to its ability to restructure and transform. Second, political leaders need urgently to seek some sort of political accord with the unions, one that encourages them to discipline their own members and allow Eskom to run its power stations without the threat of disruption — while also ensuring the power utility can support SA’s energy transition.
But a second, big area in which political support is urgently and belatedly needed to mitigate the crisis is operational. Too often the focus inside and outside government has been on the need to change Eskom’s structure and bring new power generators onto the grid. There hasn’t been nearly enough attention paid to the performance of the existing generators, which has gone from bad to worse, with more than 40% of Eskom’s fleet offline lately. We’ve long heard how the power stations are old and poorly maintained, but the more maintenance Eskom did the worse its generating performance seemed to get.
People and procurement are two of the main issues that have bedevilled performance. Historically Eskom used to ensure there were three or four people of expertise and experience who could do any of the main jobs. It was also one of the few companies that started hiring black managers and professionals as far back as the 1980s, building a cadre of black executives to lead the organisation. But it’s been losing those people since at least 2014, when Collin Matjila took over as acting CEO and state capture took hold in earnest.
It’s carried on losing institutional memory and experience with a series of senior level retrenchments and departures since then. Efforts to rehire some of those skills have tended to meet a wall of human resources red tape, along with accusations that Eskom is going back on transformation. Likewise in procurement, where the Treasury’s overbearing regulatory framework has until recently made it impossible to buy the supplies needed for maintenance work timeously or efficiently, as well as preventing Eskom from buying them from the original equipment manufacturers who supplied the plant in the first place.
Belatedly, the Treasury has loosened up on the rules. And political leaders seem all of a sudden to have discovered that the government’s red tape has been one of the biggest barriers not only to getting new power onto the grid but also to fixing the old power. It seems utterly bizarre that the government would now contemplate declaring a state of emergency so that it can circumvent its own red tape. If it is genuine about tackling the power crisis it needs to provide the kind of political support that will make it more likely that Eskom operates efficiently.
• Joffe is editor-at-large.
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