'One year into my term of office, I had seen enough to realise that Standerton was the Palermo of Mpumalanga. It was the heart of organised criminal activity in the province — and our power stations were the breeding ground.'
The number leapt off the page. One single power station, Tutuka, was burning no less than 43% of all the fuel oil purchased by Eskom.
While everyone else was seemingly taking the shocking statistic in their stride, I was happy to be the little boy pointing out that the emperor was wearing no clothes. Repeatedly. Sello agreed that something was amiss with Tutuka’s sky-high fuel oil usage and took a personal interest in investigating the matter., he later recounted the dramatic events of 21 April 2021 that led him to solve this long-standing mystery. In the early hours of that morning, he was summoned to the power station after two units had tripped.
As the truck drove off, Sello noted that the level of fuel oil in Tutuka’s tanks had barely budged. He took a split-second decision to chase after the tanker in his own vehicle, accompanied by a security official whom he had alerted. In the heat of the moment, Sello probably didn’t fully grasp the great personal risk he was taking. He didn’t know yet that he was chasing down two members of an organised crime syndicate.
It goes without saying that this kind of corruption requires the collusion of a whole chain of power station workers. From the security guard at the gate to the weighbridge operator to the supply chain worker at the fuel depot: they all have to be in on the scheme. Some time later, on a site visit, I talked to the person in charge of procurement at Tutuka. “Ever since we’ve implemented controls, the fuel oil levels in our tanks are far higher,” he said.
If they’d had a modicum of self-control, they could probably have got away with it for far longer. But, as is almost always the case, the greed was all-consuming. If you also consider the effect that load-shedding and higher electricity prices have on the economy and the consumer, the cost to the country of embedded criminality in Eskom is truly incalculable. In the absence of law enforcement pursuing the crooks, it was left to Eskom management to play policeman in order to save taxpayers billions.
What he found shocked him. The plant was dirty and the ash build-up enormous. In some areas it lay 6m deep, covering doors, stairs and equipment, he told Netwerk24. In a private-sector company, it would have been a no-brainer to shut down the plant. Its cost of production was much higher than the tariff we received, and it required enormous maintenance and capital expenditure to keep running and remain compliant with environmental regulations. And years of systemic neglect and corruption had rendered the plant beyond redemption.
Without the ability to hire and fire at will, without the support of law enforcement, without the ability to bring in skill and discipline, and facing hostile unions, point-scoring politicians and a workforce that no longer knew what good looked like, it was clear that our best intentions weren’t going to do the job.
Racism charges had become a dime a dozen. At one stage, Eskom chair Professor Malegapuru Makgoba spoke to the Executive Forum and basically said: We need to end this nonsense — stop playing the race card when you are held accountable for poor performance.
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