In the early 2000s, President Thabo Mbeki faced a growing backlash against his economic agenda, which was caricatured as “neo-liberal”. In this environment, what was essentially the privatisation of future generation capacity became a non-starter, and nothing was done about the looming energy crunch.
When the government finally woke from its slumber in 2004, when the Department of Minerals and Energy finally invited proposals for increasing power production by 1,000 MW a year from 2007, the private sector was hesitant, as it was explained that Eskom would retain market dominance and control at least 70% of generation.
As a result, when the predicted shortfall came in 2007 and 2008, Eskom introduced a new phenomenon, “load shedding”, a euphemism for blacking out sections of the grid because there was insufficient power supply. It was believed that, without load shedding, there was a risk that the entire grid could collapse.
Medupi and Kusile
Panicked by the shortfall, the government responded by authorising Eskom to build on a scale never seen before. Two power stations — initially codenamed Alpha and Bravo and later named Medupi and Kusile — each producing a mammoth 4,800 MW, would be rapidly constructed to plug the generation hole.
Eskom, now bereft of the project management, engineering and procurement skills it had lost when the government said it no longer needed to build power stations, found itself managing two of the largest power station builds on the planet.
The scale of these build programmes was astonishing, matched only by the scale of their failure. Over budget, under capacity and at the centre of the State Capture feeding frenzy, they have cost the country hundreds of billions of rands.
On the eve of the party congress that would elect Jacob Zuma, Mbeki issued an apology for the crisis. “Eskom was right and the government was wrong,” he said of the decision to halt new power station builds almost a decade earlier.
During President Jacob Zuma’s euphemistically named “lost decade”, no policy adjustments were made and the crisis grew worse as Eskom became a parking lot for unskilled party cadres on bloated salaries, as the feeding frenzy intensified with coal contracts going to the Guptas.
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