Editor
The shenanigans at Eskom not only illustrate poor or lax leadership skills on the part of the company, but also illustrate how arrogant our government can be when it comes to governing of its owned enterprises.In our country, it is normal to occasionally find yet another key state-owned enterprise slumbering through a major crisis.
Every well-informed South African was shocked to hear the former Chairman of the Eskom board, Zola Tsotsi, announcing that the electricity supplier’s four top executives were being put on ice for three months while an investigation was being instituted into why the massive entity was not working.Personally, I never heard any reactive shock from the Minister of Public Enterprises Lynne Brown at Tsotsi’s move.
In fact, it was business as usual at Pretoria’s Ministry of Public Enterprises. Here, Tsotsi has been Eskom’s Chairman for four years, yet suspending the Chief Executive Officer Tshediso Matona, who has only been in his job for five months. Wasn’t that strange?
Matona might have been the wrong man for the job given his lack of private sector experience, as many have said, but one thing Matona cannot be blamed for is being responsible for the problems of Eskom. He wasn’t there per se, while Tsotsi has overseen the mess as the Chairman of the board for the past four years.
On the day that the CEO Matona and company were suspended, the electricity grid had already lost 30 percent of its generating capacity. It is however; fully understandable that Eskom was built to cater for a ‘certain minority race.’
But, we cannot always hide behind apartheid past, unless we always aspire to succumb to failure.First, the ANC government needs to find itself, unless it wants to alienate its supporters in each and every election.How can an organisation with such a rich history be at the whim of such mediocrity? Maybe the expulsion of Zola Tsotsi was a right direction to redeem Eskom.
Philani Hadebe is a KZN community-based Qualitative Researcher for the Aids Foundation of South Africa and a freelance journalist who majored in Political Science.
