ESKOM POWER PLAY
Board chair Ben Ngubane attacks Ngoako Ramatlhodi
ESKOM’s chairperson Dr Ben Ngubane on Friday launched a blistering attack on former mineral resources minister Ngoako Ramatlhodi, describing him as an incompetent liar.
Ngubane said Ramatlhodi had not given a true account of events when he accused him and Eskom chief executive Brian Molefe of frustrating the business efforts of Glencore to pave way the way for the Gupta family to buy Glencore’s Optimum Mine.
He said it was Ramatlhodi who was heavy-handed on Optimum and was being hypocritical by dragging his name into the matter.
“In his previous position as minister, Ramatlhodi stated, according to media reports, that he suspended Glencore Optimum’s licence, because it did not conduct retrenchments properly. At no point did he allude to us being the reason thereof,” Ngubane charged.
Ramatlhodi last week drew the ire of Eskom’s head honchos when he claimed that in 2015, Ngubane and Molefe met him and demanded that he cancel the mining licences that allowed Glencore, a Switzerland-based multinational commodity trading and mining company, to operate the Optimum coal mine.
The mine supplies the power utility with coal for its Hendrina power station.
Optimum was later placed under business rescue after Molefe refused to renegotiate the price of a long-term supply contract and reinstated a disputed R2.7 billion penalty that Optimum supposedly owed for supplying sub-standard coal.
In 2015, Ramatlhodi ordered Glencore to suspend all operations at the Optimum Mine, because of the way it planned to carry out job cuts, charging that the company had not kept with the spirit of the law when it implemented the retrenchments.
Retrenchments cited “The retrenchments of workers at Optimum Coal Mine recently were inhumanely conducted, and disregarded all the legal prescripts which govern the process of retrenchments,” Ramatlhodi said at the time.
Ngubane said it was suspicious to him why Ramatlhodi waited for close to two years and when he had left the ministry before coming forward with his allegations.
“One would have to be extremely biased against Eskom to even remotely consider these allegations to be true, given their ridiculous nature. Such allegations by a former senior minister, with
Eskom boss’s pledge to reverse utility’s earlier decision on renewables opportunistc, says Sarec chairperson.
such a critical national mandate, are not only absurd, but highlight his incompetence.”
The week of high drama at Eskom began with Molefe’s return to the helm at the power utility, followed by Ramatlhodi’s claims before reports emerged that Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown could have misled Parliament about multimillion rand payments to the Gupta-linked company, Trillian.
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) on Friday accused Molefe of taking a populist stance in trying to woo the support of its members to his side by touching on apartheid wage gaps at the power utility and promising to stop the closure of power stations in Mpumalanga.
“If Molefe can come back and say Eskom is not going to close down five power stations, it means that this thing of closing the four power stations was a myth and it can be reversed,” the NUM said.
Molefe on his first day back at Eskom had told staff members at the power utility’s Megawatt headquarters that he would review the decision announced by Eskom in March that it would shut down the Kriel, Komati, Hendrina and Camden power stations to accommodate the renewable independent power producers.
The IPP programme was launched by the Department of Energy in 2011, with the aim of getting 3 725 megawatts of renewable energy technologies.
Brenda Martin, chairperson of the South African Renewable Energy Council (Sarec), said Molefe’s plan to reverse Eskom’s earlier decision was opportunistic.
“Coal plants have a limited lifespan, as do the mines that feed them. Eskom’s generation-licence requires these plants to be decommissioned as they reach the end of their design life and become too expensive to operate and maintain, so it is completely misleading to blame renewables.”