When I chaired a postbudget discussion at Deloittes with SA Revenue Service commissioner Edward Kieswetter the other day, we talked tax at first. Then I asked him how he rated SA’s chances of ending load-shedding.
It was not a question that took him entirely out of his lane. Among his many achievements Kieswetter is a former Eskom power station manager. He ran Matla and other stations successfully in the late 1990s and won a national “best boss” award. He also now leads one of the workstreams supporting the president’s National Energy Crisis Committee (Necom). Even so, I did not expect quite so impassioned an answer.
The commissioner made essentially three points (and I paraphrase). First, the debate about Eskom is now so polarised along political and racial lines that we cannot have an honest conversation about what’s wrong and how to fix it, and we don’t have a coherent plan of action. In a context in which former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter blames crime and corruption for load-shedding while ministers Gwede Mantashe and Pravin Gordhan blame De Ruyter, Kieswetter’s argument is that both are to blame.
“Most of you in the room are progovernment and anti-De Ruyter or pro-De Ruyter and antigovernment,” he told the Deloitte audience. “But there is culpability on both sides. There are things government ought to have done better and should be held accountable for, including clarity of policy and understanding what our energy mix and transition should look like … On the Eskom side there are definitely things they could have done better in terms of maintaining the plant.”
Second, Kieswetter is emphatic that Eskom’s narrative that its coal-fired power stations are old and therefore cannot be expected to perform is fundamentally flawed. And profoundly demotivating for its power station managers: “Imagine you are a young power station manager struggling to keep the boilers on, struggling to keep the turbines on, and you hear your leadership saying you shouldn’t expect these plants to perform any better because they are old. How does that inspire you to bust a gut at 2am in midwinter?” Kieswetter asks.
And third, it is impossible to explain why Eskom’s brand-new power stations are such a mess, even taking corruption into account. They should be producing at 90% of capacity; instead Kusile is struggling to produce at 50%, says Kieswetter, who has visited the power station. Inexplicably, it has no coal contract in place and is sourcing coal from six or eight different mines, and half is being replaced by thugs who substitute rocks for the coal. Inexplicable too is the management of the ash at the power station, where ash buildup caused a chimney to collapse, taking out three units.
Kieswetter believes Eskom has lost its focus on plant performance and on the discipline of excellence. He spoke of walking on a power station floor where “basic hygiene” is not in place: “It doesn’t require money; it requires focus,” he says. “I will stay with the narrative that Eskom could have done better even with the existing plant.”
Nor is he the only one to be distressed at the state of the power stations: other former senior Eskom folk have been shocked at the dirt and ash buildup at some of the power stations they have visited.
He may well be seen as fuelling the government’s anti-De Ruyter rhetoric. But just as De Ruyter’s frightening revelations on the crime and corruption that have savaged the power utility’s operations must be heard, and urgently investigated, so too must Kieswetter’s blunt comments on the erosion of motivation and management at the power utility.
Nor is he the only one to be distressed at the state of the power stations: other former senior Eskom folk have been shocked at the dirt and ash buildup at some of the power stations they have visited. And some of Eskom’s large customers have long wondered how it is that the more maintenance it does, the worse its power stations perform — old and new.
This is an organisation that in recent years has been spending about R30bn a year on maintenance and repairs, more than three times the annual total a decade ago. It is imposing load-shedding in part, supposedly, to create space for more maintenance. But it is unclear what it has to show for it. The money cannot all be going on corruption, even if procurement people and middlemen and original equipment manufacturers are doing a fair bit of skimming. And without effective maintenance to improve the performance of the power stations there is no real way to slash load-shedding in the shorter term — even though new renewable energy capacity is clearly the way to go for the longer term.
Eskom should be required to detail the outcomes of all the maintenance and repair work it does, and explain why power stations keep falling over even after they’ve had work done. Yet for all their grandstanding Gordhan and Mantashe do not seem to have probed this systematically or held Eskom to account. Indeed, their belated interest in Eskom’s management woes in recent months has been more a way to scapegoat De Ruyter politically than a genuine effort to support an operational turnaround.
One reason Kieswetter’s comments matter is that they raise the question of whether a new CEO would make a difference, and what kind of CEO that would have to be. It clearly would have to be someone with a track record of turning around large, technically complex organisations — not someone whose only experience is running a small government department. The government often does not seem to know the difference.
But even if it did, nobody suitable wants the post (Kieswetter certainly doesn’t). And that touches on the bigger issue of Eskom’s governance and its place in SA’s political economy. It is so dominant and so deeply embedded in the economy that there is no possibility government will allow it the agency to make its own decisions or allocate its own resources, without interference. Quite the opposite: the power utility is being subjected to ever more government oversight, by a range of departments with often competing policy priorities and competing teams of experts probing its power stations.
Eskom marked its 100th anniversary this week. As we wish the utility a healthy birthday, if not necessarily a happy one, it is surely time to go full circle back to the days when it was a far smaller part of SA’s electricity market and much less of a polarised political football.
• Joffe is editor at large.
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