MILKING THE ESKOM COW
The white-anting of Eskom isn’t just a high-level problem. Unions estimate that 70%-80% of Eskom staff are corrupt including their own members. The government, however, seems to have turned a blind eye
Eskom is a crime scene, it needs to be treated as such and should have been for years now.
No-one can say corruption at the power utility is new. It was the subject of a 2018 parliamentary inquiry, which laid the basis for the damning findings made by the commission of inquiry into state capture.
Back in 2018, one of Cyril Ramaphosa’s first acts as ANC president was to push Jacob Zuma then the president of South Africa to overhaul the Eskom board. It was, it seemed, a step towards stabilising the power utility.
In fact, Ramaphosa’s ascension to the country’s presidency was supposed to usher in an era in which state institutions would be cleaned up and turned around. In the past month, however, the façade of this “renewal” has slipped and badly so.
Nowhere has the farce of renewal and reform been more clear than in the ANC’s vociferous response to former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter’s explosive interview with eNCA’s Annika Larsen. What particularly got the party’s back up, it seems, was De Ruyter’s allegation that two cabinet ministers may have been complicit in corruption carried out at Eskom by at least four criminal cartels.
Revelations by De Ruyter and others show that, far from getting better, corruption at Eskom remains systemic and it’s getting worse.
Not helping was that De Ruyter told Larsen that he had alerted public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan to the issue. (Gordhan has confirmed this, but said De Ruyter provided no evidence to back up his allegations.)
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is also said to have told Gordhan at a January 30 meeting how corruption was gutting the institution.
That the meeting went ahead in the first place was something of a feat. The union the largest at Eskom has long been at odds with Gordhan and has agitated for the utility to be placed under the direct authority of mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe.
Against expectations, it seems the discussions ended up being cordial.
The FM understands that the NUM shared two key messages with Gordhan. First, that load-shedding is a direct result of corruption at Eskom. Second,
What it means: Unions say Eskom only scrutinises contracts worth more than R1m. The looting will only be halted if the threshold is lowered that 70%-80% of Eskom’s 42,000strong staff complement is engaged in some sort of corrupt activity.
The union didn’t pull punches either, with ordinary members telling the FM that even some of its own are in on the action.
As a senior union leader, speaking on condition of anonymity, explains it to the FM: “They begin working at Eskom and then join the union to defend them when they are caught thieving.”
It’s a huge problem. As De Ruyter told Larsen, Eskom loses up to R1bn a month to corruption.
As far as the NUM is concerned, the problem is that Eskom’s high command only scrutinises contracts worth more than R1m. The only way to halt the looting, then, would be to lower the threshold. By all accounts, it told Gordhan as much.
According to one union leader, procurement at individual power stations is the heart of the rot. Here, it is common practice for, say, a R17,000 pump to be bought for R780,000 a transaction approved without so much as a blink.
“The corruption De Ruyter spoke of is not even a secret, we cannot hide it ourselves. In our meeting, we raised it with the minister,” says a source who attended the meeting but wishes to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the talks. “In actual fact, loadshedding is a result of corruption at Eskom.”
Of course, exposing corruption can have deadly consequences as De Ruyter himself almost found out when he drank poisoned coffee.
When chief justice Raymond Zondo released the state capture inquiry report last year, he referred to issues around the “capture” of Eskom linked to the controversial Gupta family, the repurposing of its board, and the role of its former CEO Brian Molefe.
But there’s much more to the story. Unions canvassed by the FM say corruption permeates every level of the utility, enriches far more than just two cabinet ministers and the cartels, and reaches far beyond the purview of the Zondo commission.
“In our discussion with the minister, we gave him names and surnames of people who are corrupt among Eskom management,” says another unionist who attended the meeting.
The problem, at least for the NUM, is Eskom’s procurement division — but it extends to its investigative arm, where members can allegedly be bought for as little as R50,000, say unionists.
The procurement department consists of permanently employed buyers as well as contract buyers. The contract buyers usually stay with the utility for 18-24 months.
“What is ironic is that most of the contract buyers are former permanent Eskom buyers who were fired because of corruption,” a source tells the FM. For instance, the source alleges that one buyer contracted by the Kendal power station was previously a permanent buyer for Hendrina who was dismissed after a finding of corruption.
As the union tells it, the rot simply morphs and resurfaces at another site.
“Between 70% and 80% of Eskom employees are corrupt,” another
NUM source estimates. “It is not a lie. You can see it in this load-shedding.”
And the looters are not done yet: the cartels are “finishing off Eskom”.
“This cow no longer has milk, but they are still milking it, dry as it is,” one leader says wryly.
“Eskom is being destroyed in front of our government ... There is no door we haven’t knocked on ... We have had a follow-up meeting with Gordhan and it is looking positive, but our next avenue will be the president himself. This cannot continue.”
Approached for official comment from the NUM, Bizzah Motubatse, chair of the union’s Highveld branch, referred the FM to a statement issued after the meeting with Gordhan, saying details of the talks were confidential.
In the relatively bland statement, Gordhan and the union agreed that the corruption “must be attended to with immediate effect”.
Labour is taking a hardline stance, saying it can no longer act as a “spectator” when service providers in cahoots with Eskom employees are inflating prices to the detriment of the utility — and ultimately the workers.
Helgard Cronjé, deputy general secretary of Solidarity, agrees that the situation is abysmal. He says his union’s members simply keep their heads down and do their jobs in an environment that’s fraught for most honest workers, regardless of labour affiliation.
Cronjé previously worked closely with workers to expose corruption at state-owned defence firm Denel, and to prepare them to testify at the Zondo inquiry.
But Eskom, he says, is an entirely different ballgame — and its culture of secrecy, inexplicable.
“At Denel, we actively worked with [union] members to get information to the state capture commission, but with Eskom it is way more difficult ... The culture of silence is entrenched,” he says. “The fear of speaking out is rife. And now what is happening to De Ruyter, that will only get worse.”
Cronjé is referring, of course, to the three-pronged attack on De Ruyter by Gordhan, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula and minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele.
Not everyone would agree with this assessment, however. Senior government sources tell the FM it is simply not true that the government hung De Ruyter out to dry.
“In fact, ministers had to defend him in the ANC NEC and publicly,” says one official. “Even when he was poisoned, minister Gordhan flew to Cape Town and drove two hours to visit him ... to understand what happened and make sure he was OK.”
But however you look at it, the furore around De Ruyter’s interview — and the ANC’s outrage at his temerity in speaking out — is a mere distraction. It masks the real issue — one that the ANC and the government, contrary to their protestations, are very aware of, and equally complicit in.
The gargantuan problem facing South Africa is whether Eskom, infested with maggots and surrounded by predators, can be resuscitated at all.