Like SA itself, the power utility is a barely functional entity hollowed out by criminal self-interest.
For reasons we don’t well remember now, in January 2020 the FM interviewed a team of numerologists in a lighthearted take on the trials facing then freshly appointed Eskom CEO André de Ruyter, the utility’s 11th CEO in a decade.
In one of those fun-but-not-to-be-taken-too-seriously sidebars, the husband-and-wife team of numerologists told the FM that this year would mark De Ruyter’s nadir. According toDe Ruyter’s “lines of code” showed 2020 would be an extremely difficult year for him. In 2021 things would go from bad to worse and “sadly, De Ruyter’s numbers are coded for failure and disaster, which manifest at maximum intensity in 2022”, they told the FM.
energy availability factor of just 58% — where, essentially, it is able to produce a little more than half the electricity it’s meant to, leading to load-shedding levels estimated to cost SA’s economy at least R4bn a day. Announcing Eskom’s new board of directors last Friday, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, under whose portfolio Eskom falls, said they had been set a “stretch” target to take the EAF back to 75%.
Increasingly, it appears it is entrenched corruption, now manifesting through acts of treasonous sabotage, that is behind Eskom’s rapid unravellingcar crash, given the lack of maintenance on the fleet of 1960 Datsuns that largely make up SA’s canon of power stations .
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