JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Troubled South African State power utility Eskom should place emphasis on stability ahead of improvement, GE chairperson and CEO Jeffrey Immelt suggested on Monday.

Speaking at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Johannesburg, the head of the 137-year-old, 350 000-employee US company said his experience of business turnarounds had made it clear that stability should always come first.

"So I would put an emphasis on stability in the short term," Immelt said in response to Creamer Media during question time on how GE, which has a market capitalisation of $240-billion - some two-thirds of South Africa's gross domestic product - could help Eskom to be more efficient.

Tough decisions would have to be taken to remove day-to-day pressures so that a time-framed plan could be embarked upon.

The CEO of the world’s largest infrastructure technology company said the State power utility’s problems had taken long to create and would take long to put right.

“They won’t be fixed overnight,” Immelt commented.

Stability had to come first and tough choices had to be made to first stabilise Eskom's current installed base.

Immelt was also of the view that it would be inappropriate for countries in Africa to opt for nuclear power at this stage.

"In the long term, nuclear is going to have its day but it's a really hard thing to do. On a scale of one to ten, the building of a nuclear power plant is a 12," he said.

Rather than implementing challenging nuclear power, he believed in always trying to do the easy things first and providing nuclear would be hard.

"Always start with those things that can be managed, done and grasped. Do the really hard stuff as time goes on," said the man who gave the exact same answer when he was on the panel of the Africa Summit in Washington DC.

He viewed the South African market on its own as being insufficiently large to attract significant volumes of foreign investment and advocated the creation of an enlarged Southern African regional market.

“The South African market on its own is not big enough to do things to scale,” he commented at question time.

GE South Africa, which employs more than 450 people at its South African office in Midrand, has its electrical distribution equipment in nine Eskom power stations and is reportedly investing R700-million to develop critical skills and small businesses locally.