Eskom needs acumen

SIR — Brian Kantor’s proposed solution to save Eskom is appealing but quite naive (Airports Company SA could put Eskom on the right path, September 22). He ignores the three dimensions that will influence any government decision to change the present dispensation — the politics of free electricity supply, which underpins the African National Congress-led government; transformation requirements that will negate any labour efficiency required to operate a post-Eskom public utility; and the economics of monopoly dominance if we get a foreign player to underwrite the present wreck.

The examples of Telkom and the Airports Company SA demonstrate the very problem Prof Kantor is yearning to mitigate: the prohibitive costs imposed by these arrangements. We have one of the highest communication costs and the highest airport taxes. Imagine what a new private utility would levy?

What is required of Eskom is a return to hard-core professionalism. The government would have to create a special legal category for strategic industries that will be exempt from all the legislation that underpins the transformation prerogative — black economic empowerment and employment equity.

Prof Kantor, like the rest of us, needs to resign himself to the fact that we have a government that is too incompetent and too weak to impose any solution that will bring Eskom back to the days when it generated the cheapest electricity in the world and gave the country strategic competitiveness. John Catsicas Johannesburg