Profit, load shedding and price increases: What’s going on at Eskom?

The inner conspiracy theorist in all of us must look at the load shedding comeback in the same week as Nersa klapping Eskom down to size as something to behold. Sure, a 12.7% hike approval is shocking. It’s just not quite as shocking as the 36.5% Eskom asked for.

And all this in the week that Eskom declared a half year profit of nearly R18 billion.

To think we were thinking of sticking load shedding in the same history bin as lockdown, Nkandla and bragging about hosting the 2010 World Cup. But of course, regardless of profit, no SOE can give us peace. This is South Africa. It’s almost like it’s written into the common law that we must be kept on our toes, always.

I really want to take the top brass at their word that this new set of load shedding is a result of a perfect storm – breakdowns, delays in repairs, planned maintenance and exhausted reserves. It would be so much easier if we were enabled to just believe. We did the let’s-just-believe thing for more than a decade, so 10 months of lovely uninterrupted electricity does not inspire much confidence.

But I want to be confident in Eskom. I want them to win. If they win, so do I, so do we. It’s been so delightful to live for 10 months without the buzzing of inverters and anxiety of whether we’ll be stuck in a lift or hear yet another reason why the ice cream machine is broken.

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This is where I think Eskom gets it wrong; this is not a journey they’re telling us much about. Ain’t nobody got time to read through reams of a Nersa report. There should be no reason why the public has to choose to be in the dark and spending days reading through documents that even MPs can’t be bothered to read. I’m sure the information is there, but make it consumable for us.

Tell us where this R18 billion in profit is going. Meet us halfway with your price increases and tell us what you’re doing to keep prices down. Tell us about what you’re doing with redundant staffing, illegal connections and cost cutting measures. Show us the convictions for energy theft and give us your views on the cost benefit between renewable and coal.

Show us that you’re serious about taking on the contractors who are behind on maintenance and tell us how they’ve been reprimanded. You say that part of this perfect storm of outages is downed units being delayed in coming back online. I want to know why and what’s been done about the causes of those delays.

Key power stations are failing? Thanks for letting me know half of the story. I’m waiting on the part where you explain the causes of the failures, take ownership of it and give us an indication of what’s going on with that. You want a 36% increase from us but expect us to be satisfied with, ‘it’s down but we’re fixing it’?

ALSO READ: At least electricity tariff increase is not 36%, but still 3 times inflation rate

I would like to think that South Africans have earned more than that. We deserve to be brought into the confidence of the SOE and be informed of how this recovery plan is working out.

We can tell it’s not going well when we get notified of the reintroduction of load shedding faster than a notice of a family meeting. It’s not a lot to expect to be notified of the things that are working and not working in the entity that gives us electricity.

C’mon. They have R18 billion to play with. Hiring a PR team to offer accountable and edible information can’t be that difficult.