Send an SOS to engineers

Brian Dames Qualified as a

physicist Your cover story about Eskom refers (January 29-February 4).

While the article is well written and covers Eskom’s challenges well, it contains factual errors about some of the current and previous role players in Eskom.

Former CEO Brian Dames is a physicist, not an engineer as claimed in your article. His Eskom career started at Koeberg nuclear power station, followed by a stint in Eskom Enterprises, which deals with the noncore businesses of Eskom, before moving to the mainstream business of Eskom, which is power generation.

Another former CEO, Jacob Maroga, who is an engineer, had a background in distribution and transmission before he got to the apex of the organisation.

Neither of these CEOs had a background in managing the core of Eskom’s baseload capacity, which is made up of large coalfired power stations.

The former Eskom executive who has a solid generation background, including being a power station manager of a coalfired power station and being an executive responsible for generation, is industrial engineer Ehud Matya. He was also at Eskom longer than the three CEOs appointed in the post-apartheid era. He was overlooked for the top job several times and left Eskom after the appointment of Dames.

It is a well-known fact that government policy uncertainty about who can build new baseload power generation led to Eskom losing the time needed to close the demand versus supply gap.

But the problem, in my view, is compounded by the fact that Eskom has over the years lost the skills of the experienced engineers who could design and build new power stations. The proof of this lies in the farcical delays in getting the first unit of Medupi commissioned and connected to the