Eskom’s R1bn bill to a French contractor reveals a deeper pathology. The utility has been ordered to pay Framatome, a state-backed nuclear reactor builder, not a fly-by-night contractor, for stalling critical repairs at Koeberg.
It’s the latest headline in a decades-long saga — 10-year Medupi delay and R50bn-plus overspend, rolling Kusile setbacks, 2023 gas-turbine holdups under the independent power producer programmer and fresh hiccups at Camden-Komati coal-to-gas conversions — that exposes a utility allergic to basic project discipline.
The dispute with Framatome began in January 2022, when Eskom took Koeberg Unit 2 offline for what it promised would be a five-month outage to swap out three steam generators and refuel. Months later, Eskom abruptly informed Framatome it wasn’t proceeding with the work, leaving the French contractor to claim compensation for breach of contract.
Instead of hashing the numbers, Eskom refused to participate in adjudication, let Framatome’s figures go uncontested and then challenged the adjudicator in court. The gambit failed spectacularly.
By stalling rather than negotiating, Eskom squandered every shred of credibility. The court branded its legal submissions “contrived and unconvincing” and refused to set aside Peter Ramsden’s award of €35.2m (R727m) plus R256.6m.
That legal brinkmanship is a telling distraction from the real crisis: Eskom remains a routine organisation with no fear of the next blackout or lawsuit. And it left Eskom not just on the hook for cash but also for Framatome’s French-based legal fees, and a public image that resembles a petulant subcontractor, not a national utility.
To be sure, Eskom’s board has done some heavy lifting on governance by scrubbing state-capture fingerprints from policies. And Eskom’s decision to bench three officials, including the engineering chief, does carry some heft. It’s a sign that the board is not afraid to hold people to account, and opening up those roles creates an opening for fresh talent.
If Eskom’s monopoly mindset remains intact, the country will alternate between load-shedding and boardroom litigation.
Still, surface-level clean-ups often leave middle management and project teams running on old, capture-era playbooks. Has the board’s revised mandate translated into revamped contracting processes, clear accountability lines and new performance incentives at the coalface? Is it the same skeleton staff, just a new boss’s name on the board?
These are not trivial questions. They go to the heart of whether Eskom’s overhaul is more than window-dressing and whether the utility can shake off its state capture-era DNA to deliver complex projects on time and on budget, whether the next multibillion-rand debacle is already written into its playbook. Examples of project mismanagement post the state-capture years show symptoms of an entrenched, organisation-wide failure to adopt even basic project-management disciplines
The human cost of the cascading delays is writ in stage 6 load-shedding and an economy that cannot dare run at full throttle. The prolonged outage on the 920MW unit inflated load-shedding as much as it underscored Eskom’s inability to even manage a contractor’s workshop space, let alone SA’s national grid.
The government has taken the first step in simplifying Eskom. The break-up of the utility into generation, transmission and distribution arms, each with ring-fenced governance and specialist execution teams, will inject the commercial rigour the utility still lacks. Let private capital and technical experts bid for complex projects rather than loading every megawatt through a single lumbering bureaucracy.
If Eskom’s monopoly mindset remains intact, the country will alternate between load-shedding and boardroom litigation. The scandal is less the Koeberg ruling than Eskom’s uncooperative response, which confirms that institutional decay has fused contract-breaking into corporate strategy. Until that changes, the next legal liability will be eclipsed only by the next blackout.
Correction: Republished to fix a typo in paragraph 3.
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