Readers’Views
Promises and noble words won’t keep the lights on, Tito
Tito Mboweni says: “If we are doing practical things to fix Eskom and the electricity sector, then in my view that should be seen as a positive.”
The problem is they are continually “saying” but hardly ever “doing”. It’s the latter that really counts.
It may fool the voting fodder up to a point, but they will eventually recognise the lack of relevant action. Nice try, but no cigar.
We will await without bated breath.
Claudio Longo, on BusinessLIVE
Eskom is the country in microcosm. And the government has admitted it stuffed up Eskom and is battling to sort it out.
Much of what has gone wrong in the rest of the country doesn’t have the media profile of Eskom, and will be put on the back burner for now.
But watch this space. There will be lots of other unpleasant surprises over the next few years.
Walter Stevens, on BusinessLIVE
Generous to a fault
After analysing the data in the tables in “Eskom meltdown puts ratings at risk” (February 17), I can well understand the motives driving the unions [to oppose] any retrenchment of staff during this possible restructuring.
The tables show the average annual cost of employment of all Eskom employees in 2007, from the CEO to the lowest unskilled labour level, was R290,751 per annum. The average annual cost of employment in 2018 for the same levels of employees was R606,646 per annum.
This increase corresponds to a compounded growth of just over 7% per annum, well above any published inflation figure.
How can a conscientious management justify such increases across the board, when the sales of their product have progressively declined over the past few years, and they have had to rely on government bailouts to continue trading?
The executive management of Eskom and its board have created a rod for their own backs for which they should now be held to account. John S Whybrow, Swellendam
Man up, Cyril, and fix SA
Despite having been in office for a year, President Cyril Ramaphosa appears to do a lot of fence-sitting when it comes to making tough decisions.
The common refrain is that he is mindful of alienating his fellow ANC hierarchy.
This perplexed me until I realised that, in his heart of hearts, he is just a politician. Clearly he does not need the money as president, so what is stopping him sacking useless cadres and doing a thorough clean-out of the dodgy members of his party?
If he was really interested in cleaning up SA, he would take decisive action. He would gain the respect of the majority of business and taxpayers and go down in history as the man who fixed SA, not as a spineless president who stayed quiet right through the Zuma years.
Come on, Cyril, show us your backbone.
Tony Ball, Gillitts