Eskom to offer staff incentives for keeping the lights on

Despite the country’s crippling energy crisis, Eskom says it will be incentivising its staff members that have been working hard to keep the lights on.

Eskom board member Mteto Nyati made the announcement on Thursday during a media briefing on current system challenges.

Performance-based incentives

Nyati said the incentives will form part of the power utility’s top five priorities to address the load shedding crisis.

“We have got a majority of Eskom employees that are great people that are doing exceptional work [and] committed to this company and country. It is important that we continue to support them so that they can help us to execute this recovery plan,” he said.

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Nyati said the incentives will include salary increases and promotions and will be performance-based in order to boost the morale of staff.

“The people, and the culture [of Eskom] is an important agenda of the board and this is being led by one of our board members… partnering with management.”

The other top priorities for Eskom’s board include improving the performance of its four flagship power stations, ramping up maintenance at its top six worst-performing power stations, management of planned and unplanned outages, as well as securing funds for diesel and bringing in new generation capacity.

Pressure to end load shedding

Asked whether Eskom’s board and management were under pressure from government to end load shedding by December this year, Nyati said the only pressure they felt was from South Africans who are fed up with the rolling blackouts.

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This follows the announcement by the African National Congress (ANC) this week that it plans to end load shedding by December and it supported calls to declare a national state of disaster over the energy crisis.

“As the board, we have never really had any pressure from other people or from government to change our plans.

“We have very capable board members [and] many of them are part of the business operation performance committee who are technical and have been working together with capable people on the management side,” said Nyati.

Weekend load shedding schedule

Meanwhile, Eskom announced that stage 4 load shedding will be implemented from 5am on Friday until 5am on Saturday.

Thereafter, stage 3 power cuts will be implemented and continue until 5am on Sunday morning.

“Load shedding will be suspended until 4pm on Sunday afternoon, when stage 2 load shedding will be implemented,” Eskom said in a statement.

The struggling power producer said this was due to an improvement in available generation capacity, together with the lower weekend demand for electricity.

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