Daily Investors | May 10, 2025
For years, Eskom prioritized racial goals over maintaining and developing valuable technical skills. Power utility is currently paying for the price of this strategy.
For years, Eskom prioritized racial goals over maintaining and developing valuable technical skills. Power utility is currently paying for the price of this strategy.
During Eskom's Winter 2025 Outlook Briefing, Chairman Mteto Nyati said the power utility did not meet expectations.
“We're not proud of how we did it. Some metrics showed that things didn't match what we could,” he said.
The issues included power plant reliability, delays in the return of power generation units to services, and coal supply issues.
He said the Eskom Board of Directors and the executive team discussed the issue. “We spend a lot of time establishing the root cause of the problem,” he said.
They learned that Eskom has no equipment issues. Instead, the problem is focused on employees.
“It's mainly related to leadership. They need to follow standard operating procedures and hold people accountable,” he said.
“You need to have tough conversations when you need them, and you need to recognize them when they do things well.”
“Every problem is leadership and management-related issues, which will become our focus as we move forward.”
Nyati's comments about employee issues are not surprising. In 2023, Energy Analyst Professor Sampson Manhueli said Eskom had experienced a skills crisis.
“If you look at the skills needed to run Eskom, the utilities don't have them anymore,” Mamphweli said.
“The fact that maintenance is overtime and exceeds budgets is also a poor quality, but it reflects Eskom's lack of skills.”
He said the departure of skilled employees began more than a decade ago when utility companies were undergoing a positive transformation process.
As part of this agenda, Eskom trained black engineers and pushed them to high positions within the organization.
“In the process, Eskom lost a good white engineer who chose to work abroad or in the private sector due to an increase in political interference in utility services,” he said.
Even black engineers trained at EKSOM have begun to leave the utility as the work environment deteriorated, political pressure increased, and employee morale was low.
He added that it will affect Eskom in the near future, and will have an even greater impact over the next decades.
He said the Power Utility lost the ability to train engineers and lost employees with operational experience.
Many other experts warn that there is only a small percentage of ESKOM employees who have the skills necessary to perform their duties, especially in the technical department and engineering departments.
For example, former Eskom Coo Jan Oberholzer has denounced Eskom staff for load suppression of “pure negligence.”
He said the employee did not perform his duties.
Eskom focused on transformation at the expense of maintaining skills
Eskom's struggle with skills is no surprise. For 30 years, it has lost valuable skills as it has focused strongly on change.
The battle between Eskom and the union dates back over 20 years. For example, in 2001, the Alliance of Former Miners (MWU) sued Eskom over racism.
At the time, Eskom said there were strict racial and gender targets and that he would not compromise by meeting them.
“We are committed to achieving that goal and making sure our workforce reflects the demographics of our country,” it said.
In 2015, union solidarity warned that it was playing with fire by alienating white employees.
This comes after news came out that Eskom wanted to reduce its white employees by up to 3,400 to achieve its strict racial goals.
By then, Eskom had already abandoned more than 10,000 white staff, including many experienced and skilled technicians.
Eskom had a positive will to achieve its goal of reflecting the nation's racial demographics by 2020.
Eskom denied cutting back on white employees to meet racial quotas, but said solidarity created an environment in which the usefulness of power encouraged white staff to leave.
Solidarity said Eskom's decline, which caused load suppression, was linked to a policy of aggressive positive action that lost thousands of skilled employees.
“The problem isn't that the people who left the utility were white, they were people with management and technical skills,” said Solidarity CEO Dirk Hermann.
The union added that Eskom lost many skilled employees and lost the memory of the institutions needed to establish a stable company.
When the same happened in 2023, when Solidarity announced a strategy to remove white men within Eskom.
“The current number of white men in Eskom is 1,873. According to Eskom's goal, they want to reduce this number to 1,379. Therefore, Eskom wants to remove 494 white men.”
“This group was primarily responsible for maintenance work at Eskom. These employees have the skills that need to be protected and preserved at every cost.”
The union warned that plans to remove more white people would be to undermine Eskom and South African individuals.
Despite these warnings, Eskom continued its aggressive transformation agenda, resulting in widespread loss of skills.
So, Eskom's current skills issues have focused on employment equity goals for decades, instead of maintaining and building skills.
Power Utility continues to track and report on its transformation, with an emphasis on demographic collapse due to race and gender.
This article will be first published by Daily Investor and reproduced with permission.
“Disclaimer – the views and opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author and are not necessarily those of the Bee Room.”
