No cake for Eskom
The company recently turned 100, and most South Africans are not aware of this and probably would not even care.
I WONDER how many people are aware of this, but two months ago, Eskom quietly turned 100 years old. I work with news daily, but I would have missed this remarkable milestone had I not looked up Eskom on Wikipedia one sleepless night this past weekend.
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The company was established on March 1, 1923, and its first two power stations were built in Durban and Cape Town. In most cases, accolades are bestowed on anything that celebrates its 100th anniversary or birthday, be it a human being, a building, or even a tortoise. Not with Eskom. The whole country would have been up in arms had they even dared to celebrate the anniversary, hence they deemed it best to keep quiet about it.
As Eskom turns 100, the country is grappling with the most severe load-shedding that we have ever experienced since it started in 2007. Coincidentally, last Friday, I started reading André de Ruyter’s book, Truth to Power: My three years inside Eskom, which is what made me search for the company’s history at 02:30 in the first place.
De Ruyter is the most recent addition to the long line of former Eskom CEOs, and his book patiently describes the scale of corruption in the company, which is the sole reason we are experiencing load-shedding. He says he was made aware that some of the misappropriated money’s trail ends in one of the offices at the Union Buildings. I was losing hope, to begin with, before I read the book, but now I’m totally hopeless. According to De Ruyter, two power stations are to permanently shut down by 2025 as they have reached the end of their life cycles. I don’t even want to think about what is going to happen after they close as we are not coping as it is. What makes things even worse is that there is no short-term plan to counter this.
Our newly appointed Minister of Electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, has said we will see the results of the measures he is implementing in six months’ time, which should be around November. I’m not getting my hopes up. Eskom is too broken to be fixed.
By the look of things, the load-shedding stages are going to keep getting worse as winter sets in.
Eskom, I wish I could sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to you, but I’ll be using the candles that should be on your cake to give me light in my house.
DID YOU KNOW?
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