Eskom - The African Mirror

Apr

2024

South Africa’s electricity crisis: a series of failures over 30 years have left a dim legacy

IN 1994, apartheid ended and the African National Congress (ANC) won South Africa’s first-ever democratic elections, promising “Electricity for All” as part of its Reconstruction and Development Programme. Back then only 36% of all South Africans had electricity in their homes. The development programme promised to double that number by electrifying an additional 2.5 million homes by 2000. This seemed achievable – during the 1980s, the state-owned power utility Eskom’s build programme was so aggressive it had surplus electricity. Some power stations even had to be mothballed. By 1994, South Africa’s coal industry was generating high-quality coal which was exported…

Apr

2024

By The African Mirror

State capture in South Africa: time to think differently about redress and recovering the stolen loot

SPECIAL FEATURES: ANALYSIS, EDITORS CHOICE

SOUTH Africans are plunged into darkness daily by rolling power cuts. These are a stark reminder of the destruction that years of state capture wreaked on Eskom, the state-owned power utility. Eskom’s inability to meet the energy needs of citizens and the economy is now the undeniable example of how state capture made parastatals and other state institutions ineffective. The country urgently needs action to recover the stolen funds and fix the economy. So far, President Cyril Ramaphosa has offered only a few general targets, and outcomes have been dissatisfying. For example, the “total of R2.9 billion” that he said…

Mar

2024

By HARTMUT WINKLER

South Africa’s electricity crisis: what political parties say in their election manifestos about solving it

SPECIAL FEATURES: ANALYSIS

SOUTH Africa is in the middle of a deep electricity crisis. In 2023 the public, many of whom are voters, experienced the worst load-shedding to date, losing power for an average of five hours a day. The power shortages were largely due to excessive breakdowns in the country’s coal power plant fleet, which generates over 80% of South Africa’s electricity, combined with delays in developing new generation capacity. The power crisis is a key election topic with national elections scheduled for 29 May. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is tipped to lose its absolute majority in parliament. One reason…

Mar

2024

By JOE BAVIER

Dan Marokane: the new boss of South African utility Eskom

BUSINESS

DAN Marokane is about to tackle the hardest job in South Africa: getting the lights back on. As CEO of state power utility Eskom, he takes on an organisation hampered by alleged coal theft and sabotage, which faces financial and technical crises. He will be working with a government shareholder who has a conflicted vision for the country's future energy mix and is struggling to move forward on a major overhaul of its electricity supply industry. As South Africa heads for national elections in May, turning Eskom around and solving a persistent power crunch could rescue Africa's most industrialised economy from a cycle…

Feb

2024

By JOE BAVIER

S.Africa’s power sector needs more private investment, Eskom chair says

BUSINESS

SOUTH Africa's power sector will require increased private sector investment as debt-ridden utility Eskom implements structural reforms and builds critical new infrastructure, the company's chairman told Reuters. Private sector involvement in the power sector is a politically sensitive subject as South Africa prepares for elections in May, and the chairman made clear that state-owned Eskom would not be moving towards privatisation. "Private sector participation, yes, but the asset is going to end up with the government," Mteto Nyati, the chairman of Eskom's board of directors, said in an interview. Africa's most industrialised nation is weathering its worst power crisis on…

Feb

2024

By The African Mirror

South Africans are opting to go off-grid: how they’re being helped, and hindered, in their efforts

SPECIAL FEATURES: ANALYSIS

ESKOM, South Africa’s state-owned power utility, struggles to generate and supply a stable flow of electricity to meet demand. In 2023, there were times when households and businesses had no power for up to 11 hours a day. Eskom has warned that load shedding will be worse in 2024. GERMARIÉ VILJOEN, Associate Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, North-West University, North-West University FELIX DUBE, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Public Law, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, University of Pretoria The result is that many South Africans are choosing to end or reduce their dependence on the…

Dec

2023

By MACDONALD DZIRUTWE

South Africa picks Marokane as next CEO of power firm Eskom

BUSINESS

SOUTH Africa's government appointed Dan Marokane as its next Chief Executive Officer of its state power firm Eskom, which has implemented the worst rolling blackouts on record this year. Marokane, who previously held senior Eskom positions, including as its head of group capital, will rejoin no later than March 31 of next year, Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan said in a statement. Marokane has been acting CEO of sugar producer Tongaat Hulett (TONJ.J) since the end of February. Bloomberg News reported on Thursday that Marokane was expected to be appointed Eskom CEO. Eskom has been without a permanent CEO since February when then-CEO Andre…

Dec

2023

By The African Mirror

South Africa to pick Marokane as CEO of utility Eskom

BUSINESS

SOUTH Africa is expected to appoint Dan Marokane as Chief Executive of struggling state power utility Eskom, Bloomberg News reported, citing unnamed sources. Spokespeople for Eskom and the Department of Public Enterprises, the government department that oversees the power company, declined to comment on the Bloomberg report. Eskom has been without a permanent CEO since Andre de Ruyter left in February. Marokane is currently acting CEO at sugar producer Tongaat Hulett. He previously served as an executive at Eskom. Eskom has struggled to keep the lights on in Africa's most industrialised economy for more than a decade. This year it has…

Nov

2023

By ABBEY MAKOE

SA receives power generating equipment from China

NEWS

ELECTRICITY generation, and supply, have become South Africa’s perennial albatross around the neck. So much so, that our country is credited with the popularization of the term “load-shedding”. And so constant has this societal inconvenience been since 2007 that, to a large extent, load-shedding has come to be accepted as a normal occurrence in SA. At the beginning of the year, President Cyril Ramaphosa responded to the energy crisis by declaring a national state of disaster. Today might, however, just be the beginning of the end of load-shedding, thanks to the flourishing bilateral relations between Pretoria and Beijing. Minister in…

Nov

2023

By PROMIT MUKHERJEE and ANAIT MIRIDZHANIAN

South Africa’s Eskom to significantly narrow loss next year

BUSINESS

SOUTH African state power utility Eskom forecasted a significant narrowing of its net losses in the financial year to March 2025 but after only a marginal drop for this year. Eskom's interim CEO Calib Cassim told a press conference that the company was likely to post a net loss of 23.22 billion rand ($1.24 billion) for the year ending March 2024. "March '24 should be the last year we have significant losses. It should then drop significantly in 2025," Cassim said. Eskom reported a 23.94 billion rand loss for its last financial year, which ended in March 2023. The 100-year-old…