Shedding some light on the Eskom debacle
Eskom, which has a history of questionable pay trends and high expenditure on employee salaries, has recently come under fire for paying its top executives millions in salaries amid a financial, and operational crisis at the power utility.
WHILE Eskom has urged consumers to use electricity sparingly in light (or lack thereof) of the loadshedding woes in recent months, will cutting back on ones electricity usage really make any difference to the already gloomy state of affairs at the South African utility supplier?
Do the financial power problems perhaps stem from something somewhat more self inflicted, as it were? Something entirely not the responsibility of the consumer at large, nor to do with electricity consumption at all? Has the consumer become a scapegoat for the poorly managed parastatal?
Eskom, which has a history of questionable pay trends and high expenditure on employee salaries, has recently come under fire for paying its top executives millions in salaries amid a financial, and operational crisis at the power utility. Top executives at the company allegedly took home a total of R60 million in the 2014 financial year, up from R57.4 million the year before.
In its full year report for 2014, Eskom listed employee costs totaling R25.62 billion rand, which, when averaged amongst its 46,000-plus employees (as of September 2013, according to a report by BusinessTech), equates to roughly R550,000 per person on an annual basis.
Eskom spokesperson, Khuli Phasiwe, confirmed that Eskom’s financial issues were partly to blame for the rolling blackouts.
“We need money to buy parts for the maintenance,” said Phasiwe, “but that is not the only reason. Maintenance in the previous years, from about 2010, has been deferred.”
Phasiwe furthermore stated that the struggling electricity supplier is currently in talks with government to assist them in their time of financial crisis, adding that the R20 billion cash injection had indicated they would provide them with to help with operational issues was R30 billion short of what they required in terms of the work they are doing.
Eskom was allegedly working on a number of options to get the balance of the money it needed to complete work at Medupi, Kusile, and Ingula power stations, according to News24.
According to recent reports, loadshedding will kick in again over the weekend, or possibly from Monday.
At this stage, Vryheid still does not appear on Eskom’s 2015 schedule for loadshedding as yet.
