Racial divisions make Eskom’s skills shortage an elephant in its boardrooms, while Solidarity says BEE procurement requirements cause South Africa’s electricity prices to be 27% higher than they need to be.
Eskom employees are divided on the role that race-based transformation has played in the skills shortage that is hampering the utility’s ability to keep the lights on, Sunday TimesThe paper also reported that Eskom is struggling to staff all the shifts at its coal power stations due to a rapid loss of technical skills.
The newspaper spoke to several Eskom insiders who explained that race’s role in the skills shortage was a dividing factor.“There is a feeling that when whites say there are no skills, they are talking about blacks who are now in charge of most of these power stations,” the insider said.Another source said Eskom’s human resources division believed that the utility should not talk about how the skills shortage worsened load-shedding.
Eskom workers inside a coal-fired power station’s control room in 2012. Editorial credit: Sunshine Seeds / Shutterstock.compublic enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan accepted trade union Solidarity’s offerThat came after the union wrote to the minister, offering to help locate skilled and experienced engineering and technical staff.
The union contends that Eskom’s “reckless” race-based transformation programme was to blame for some of the operational issues the utility has been experiencing.
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