Pravin’s talk must spark some action

The South African public are justifiably feeling like the lights are off, and nobody is home. For years taxpayers have been hit with an inadequate power supply, and the burden of trying to ease Eskom’s massive debt, which keeps on ballooning. Load shedding has brought businesses to a standstill, while households have been equally effected due to poor management and the lack of a solid long-term solution from the power utility.

Yes, state capture has played a part, but that can’t solely be used as a scapegoat to explain the Eskom mess we find ourselves in.

With another weekend of load shedding on the cards, following a week of outages, and the very real threat of Christmas by candlelight looming, South Africans are gatvol because they feel there is no end in sight to this catastrophe. What is being done to fix the embattled parastatal?

Having said that, Minister of Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan on Thursday gave some hope this latest crisis would be averted when he stated Eskom managers would have to give up their end-of-year holidays to deal with the problems, and said he was confident there would be no load shedding over the festive period.

“The good resources and people of goodwill who want to see Eskom working are going to be mobilised in order to ensure that we stabilise the situation,” said Gordhan.

“There’ll be a very intensive look over the next 10 days. That’s part of the action plan to understand exactly what the nature of the problems is, which ones are easily fixable and which ones will take some time to fix,” added Gordhan.

Talk is cheap, though. Exactly how the energy supplier fixes the mess is going to take a massive effort.

Over to you, Mr Gordhan.