Following comments made by Eskom board member Busisiwe Mavuso during a parliamentary committee hearing on Tuesday, Minister of Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan has called on her to “be careful of what she says”.
Mavuso suggested that a “shareholder” is stopping the struggling energy utility from load shedding for political reasons.
While Gordhan was not mentioned by name, this is likely a reference to the minister, who represents the shareholders at Eskom.
“There are decisions that we know we have to be making as this board, but the shareholder quickly comes in and says that you can’t do that because it is politically inconvenient,” she said.
According to Mavuso, “we need to load shed at least for the next eight months”, but this is not taking place due to “political interference”.
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On 702 on Wednesday morning, Gordhan hit back.
“I think she has to be careful of what she says as a board member because she is part of a collective decision-making process and accounts to the shareholder, which is government at the end of the day,” he said.
“We all have to make difficult decisions and one of the difficult decisions is whether we fire 16,000 people or not and a government that is responsible will not fire 16,000 people.”
Mavuso asked to speak about municipal debt on Tuesday when the Eskom board appeared before parliament’s standing committee on appropriations. According to the board member, this debt is “political decision” which has nothing to do with the board.
She said she would speak frankly “so that we don’t sit here trying to manage each other”.
“This is an issue that affects 57 million South Africans. Eskom at the moment is a sovereign risk and its collapse means the collapse of the South African economy.
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“If we were given the latitude to actually make decisions without political interference as this board, I’ll tell you what we’ll do.
“We’d actually go to South Africans and say we need to load shed at least for the next eight months, and I’m saying that understanding that load shedding for one day costs the economy R2 billion, but that would be the honest conversation, because you are sitting with units that are nearing 50 years old”.
“The reason why they are falling at no warning is precisely because the decisions that have been taken in the past were at the cost of maintaining these things.
“If you are going to be given an instruction saying, ‘Keep the lights at all costs because we are nearing elections,’ it is actually problematic. I wish that we were given latitude as this board to do what we are supposed to do,” Mavuso said in an emotional address which saw the board member venting and unleashing her frustrations.
She warned that continuing to pour money into failing state-owned-enterprises was bad news from the perspective of investment, noting that ratings agencies kept raising red flags around this issue.
She slammed labour for attempting to “sit there as principals with a red pen” rather than playing a role in trying to save Eskom, and accused the labour force of holding the energy utility to ransom.
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“We made this decision as this board last year to say that we are going to give 0% increase because we realised the dire situation of Eskom. It was labour that said: ‘If you dare do that, it’s going to be a declaration of war.’
“Immediately thereafter, you saw the bout of the first load shedding that happened in this country. We were quickly given an instruction to say: ‘You are going to have to rethink your decision and you are going to revise your 0% stance.’ But you are sitting with this developmental state mandate – and I don’t know if we actually can continue in that trajectory.”
Mavuso said that Eskom was bloated, with 15,000 too many employees, calling this unjustifiable and saying any honest conversation on Eskom’s future must include this issue.
The shedding of 15,000 jobs, however, is not something which will be readily accepted by the SA labour force.
On Tuesday, Stats SA released its latest unemployment statistics, finding that the amount of South Africans without jobs has increased by one percentage point since last quarter to 29.1%, the worst it’s been in 11 years.
(Compiled by Daniel Friedman)
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