All over South Africa, the power is going off – not accidentally; it is being switched off. Interruptions are normally between two hours and two-and-a-half hours at a time. The power interruptions occur on Saturdays, Sundays and during weekdays.
It is a fact that this hasn’t occurred before in the history of this country. For those of us who are over 60, there was a time when it was almost unthinkable for the power to go off and unheard of for it to go off nationwide. As a former Eskom employee – and in particular one who was a senior operations engineer – to be in a position whereby large-scale power failures occurred would result in a great deal of criticism. Eskom did not turn the power off. That was the policy, and that was the fact. We’ve said the word there, Eskom. It’s a simple fact that, if the Eskom power is interrupted, so is the power to the various municipalities, and so on.
It is estimated that this has been going on for more than a decade. The question is: Why hasn’t something been done?
There are three answers to this question. The first period of loadshedding occurred when Eskom was largely being run by corrupt and self-interested people. They arranged things such that power interruptions occurred to benefit people who sold Eskom power in return. The second period occurred when it was believed that it was simple to fix the power interruptions, and the third when it was realised that there were large-scale corruptive situations which required a great deal of effort to fix. We are in the third phase.
It is difficult to understand the challenges in fixing this. Apart from routine security checks, there was not a great deal of Eskom control, which meant the Eskom system ran smoothly, but many people had access to its various substations. It has now been realised that the type of Eskom system that exists in 2022 is one that requires rigid control, and this, once implemented, provides good system management. However, it needs a great deal of administration.
The question is: Will this type of system, to wit, a rigid control system of Eskom’s management structure, result in the desired outcome? If not, it’s an enormous amount of money for very little result. The problem is that Eskom and government are largely avoiding the problem. Eskom is not a private enterprise. It started off as a limited holding company and got past the problem of having to finance the large investments by this means. For it to become or to be a private company would mean that a private company becomes financed by money from the taxpayer. This is a very sweet deal for whoever gets that but will be very unfair to whoever doesn’t.
It should be clear to most people that the idea of Eskom creating an organisation that is not separately funded is fundamentally unfair and will not succeed in the long run. To put it another way, the concept of having a version of Eskom which is not privately owned is doomed to fail. If this is the case, what is not doomed to fail? Simply put, a private organisation. We should put to one side the concept of ‘fairness to all’ and just allow Eskom to become a listed company and pay government for the privilege. This will bring an enormous amount of money into government coffers, which is desirable and will very swiftly allow the creation of a whole lot of private Eskom facilities.
A lot of people cannot grasp this concept, but it is relatively simple; it is how the Americans run their power system – separate systems selling power to individuals. This is where we should be going, but we are not going to go there. Because of that, daily power interruptions will continue to occur. Eskom has always been an interesting creature and continues to be so. There is the outside chance that Eskom is going to cease completely and something new will replace it.