‘ANC messed up Eskom’

ANC national executive committee member and former deputy finance minister Mondli Gungubele says the blame for the state of Eskom falls squarely on the governing party.

Gungubele, who was part of parliament’s committee looking into state-owned enterprises, said the objective reality was that Eskom had financial, management, maintenance, capacity and reinforcement challenges.

“We were sleeping on the job. Even where there was reinforcement, due diligence has not been done very well,” he said.

The presidency, in a statement on Monday, said President Cyril Ramaphosa had received an update on developments around the crisis and was in constant contact with Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan.

Ramaphosa has cut his trip to Egypt short yesterday and returned home to deal with the ongoing electricity crisis.

The president also raised concern over the “devastating” impact the power crisis had on the country.

He said it was causing great harm to the economy and disrupting South Africans’ lives.

Recalling parliament’s inquiry into Eskom, Gungubele said it had become clear that people had deliberately allowed the electricity supplier’s capacity to decline. “There was no intervention in wrongdoing,” he said.

Comparing Eskom to the South African Revenue Service, he said there were scenarios where individuals had dismantled functioning institutions without providing alternative models.

“It’s us who messed up Eskom … it happened under our watch,” Gungubele said. “We are trying to keep Eskom afloat with very limited capacity.”

However, Gungubele said he believed the ANC government under Ramaphosa’s leadership would manage to stabilise the power provider. “I have confidence in the interventions that are being made.”

He said the difference between the challenges when Eskom started load shedding in 2008 and now was that the government has now accepted maintenance was in arrears and skills were wanting.

“We weren’t accepting that we were messing up. Now we are and can be trusted with dealing with it,” he said.

Gungubele said he was not convinced by the theory that the power outages were sabotage or an attempt to counter the battle against corruption. “Whether there is a pushback or not is a matter that should be supported by evidence,” he added.

He also agreed with comments that Gordhan made on eNCA on Monday that this was a manageable crisis. “He is correct in saying that. I doubt he goes home,” Gungubele said, adding that he believed the public enterprises minister worried most about the state of Eskom, of all the ailing stateowned entities. – News24 Wire