Dilly-dallying will be death of us

Eskom CEO André de Ruyter told Bloomberg last week that unless the government backs its maintenance plan, stage 8 load-shedding was a real possibility, no, “a regular event” by June next year.

Nice hey?

Either De Ruyter has had a falling-out with his shareholder (the government), or he is expecting one.

If not, why threaten them? In documents before parliament recently, Eskom said that “if we do nothing, stage 8 will be a regular event by June 2021.”

That’s a shutdown of 8,000MW, though it is a little theoretical because it assumes the state can’t simply ignore its own commitment to carbon emissions reduction.

Eskom plants at Kendal, Duvha and Tutuka need new technology to reduce emissions.

Ho hum. So we miss the target?

Eskom has worse problems. Here’s one I’ve just thought of.

Moody’s, the last credible international sovereign debt ratings agency to still have us at investment grade, is to pass judgment on us later this month.

Imagine if it’s a close call. The budget last month wasn’t bad and we’re saying the right things about energy, finally.

But the Moody’s people want one last face-to-face with Eskom.

Could we, they ask, please speak to the chair of the board?

That would be one Malegapuru William Makgoba, a man with about the same level of knowledge of electricity as Boris Johnson would have about underwater welding.

He was supposed to be interim chair for just a few days after Jabu Mabuza took the blame for breaking a promise President Cyril Ramaphosa made to the nation not to cut electricity over the Christmas holidays.

The few times we’ve met, Makgoba has been absolutely charming.

But he is unusually eccentric and utterly inappropriate in this Eskom role.

He claims to have smeared himself with lion fat to help defeat enemies and he ruined the University of KwaZulu-Natal when he was vice-chancellor. But his report on the deaths of hundreds of psychiatric patients at the hands of the Gauteng ANC government in 2016 was outstanding.

So he’s not toxic in the Zuma sense.

But naming him Eskom chair in the middle of January sounded so outrageous, I called the department of public enterprises to find out why.

No big deal, I was told. He was simply the lead independent director (again, #WTF) so the interim job naturally fell to him.

I went higher up the government ladder.

“For a few days, my man,” I was told.

“Board in place in days.” I was reminded of that when I read a piece by Business Day’s political editor, Genevieve Quintal, on Ramaphosa’s response to the existence of actual, undisputed vacancies at the very top of the National Prosecuting Authority.

The NPA boss has three deputies and only a deputy can stand in for her if she were ever indisposed.

Those jobs have all been vacant for months and Ramaphosa has not replaced one of them.

Same for the Eskom board. It should have been replaced the week after Mabuza left.

Going on for approaching two months later, Makgoba is still there and he’s going to have to be the guy to convince Moody’s Eskom has got its corporate governance under control?

Give me a break. I asked public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan what the delay was.

“We are currently concluding the process and putting together the right combination of skills.

“But we can’t afford any delay,” he texted me.

“So it is urgent, work in progress.

“This will reinforce the leadership provided by the new CEO, who is also in the process of putting in place a skilled management team.

“This is but one dimension of the range of changes that are taking place in Eskom.”

Well excuse me but I’ve been around a bit and I know the sound, from a mile away, of a can been kicked down the road. Either they can’t find a credible chair or there’s a fight about who it should be. Appointments are hard. Take the Post Office since Mark Barnes left last year.

A new minister, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, fired the old and competent board and replaced it with one with almost no experience at all.

They almost immediately suspended Barnes’s accomplished replacement, Lindiwe Kwele, and more recently her COO and chief financial officer.

That new Post Office board has met more than 30 times since the beginning of November 2019, wiping out its budgeted fees for the rest of year in one month, as it pores ravenously over tenders and contracts.

It is insane, and Ramaphosa knows it is happening. Why does he tolerate it? His indecision appears to be incurable and final.

The coronavirus might at least make some decisions for him.

● This column first appeared in