Uncover all Eskom dirt

Anton Eberhardt and Catrina Godinho of the UCT Graduate School of Business’s vital investigative research report, The Eskom Inquiry Reference Book, reveals how Eskom’s procurement system was infiltrated and subverted to be “repurposed” as the Gupta conglomerate’s feeding trough for tenderpreneurs (How corrupt power captured Eskom and helped pull the plug on growth, September 12).

Their bombshell explains one missing piece of the jigsaw. About the time of the Department of Energy’s December 2016 public consultative meetings, we were told that the procurement of eight or nine nuclear power stations would no longer be undertaken by the department but by Eskom.

This was after the department had spent more than R100m on “advice” on how it should proceed to procure. This amounted to fruitless and wasteful expenditure of more than R100m of public funds.

The Eberhardt and Godinho book reveals that this was not fruitless. Its perverse fruit would be to ensure that the corrupted Eskom supply chain management system would issue all contracts for those proposed nuclear power stations.

MPs of all parties, and the public, need to find out who gave that order and oppose it.

Keith Gottschalk Claremont