Eskom cut off
A DESPERATE effort late last year by Eskom to hire skilled engineers and technicians to head off the looming power crisis was badly hobbled by the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), which stepped in to prevent the utility from hiring foreigners without its consent.
The NIA wrote to Eskom CEO Jacob Maroga in November to warn him that Eskom’s facilities were national key points and that the presence of foreigners at them was a threat to national security.
The NIA intervention means Eskom is now badly hobbled as it scours the globe in search of the expertise it needs to keep its overstretched and exhausted kit going.
Last year, several Zimbabweans hired by Eskom were sent home because they were appointed to “strategic” positions without having work permits or security clearance.
“The number of foreign nationals at Eskom was increasing at an alarming rate, and most of them did not have proper work documentation which could be verified,” the NIA said in a letter to Eskom last year.
The letter to Maroga from the NIA’s Gauteng head, PV Manana, raises “concern” that foreign nationals — who had not applied for posts — were being appointed to strategic positions without having been vetted.
“Of concern is whether the confidentiality, the integrity of the security of the state and the institution’s processes and functions are not compromised,” Manana wrote.
NIA spokesperson Lorna Daniels did not respond to requests for comment.
Although it apparently flouted national security to bolster its skills deficit, Eskom has undertaken to mend its ways. The utility’s spokesman, Andrew Etzinger, says it has since satisfied the NIA’s concerns and is following the letter of the law.
But the Institute for Security Studies’ Lauren Hutton says that regardless of the skills shortage, Eskom should not have put national security at risk.
“If a national key point is sabotaged, the effect would be unimaginable. It is a risk we cannot afford to take.”
She points to the Sasol attack of 1980, where the African National Congress’s military wing bombed the Secunda plant and two other Sasol installations.
Hutton says the National Key Points Act of 1980 was passed to prevent similar acts of sabotage and although the political climate of the country has changed, it would be “unwise” to flout laws that are intended to protect national interests.
Eskom finance director Bongani Nqwababa said this week that Eskom had begun an aggressive skills recruitment drive, locally and internationally, as part of its multipronged strategy to deal with its multiple failures.
According to Eskom’s 2007 annual report, it needs 6200 engineers, technicians and artisans over the next five years, and 1400 this year alone. SA produces about 1400 engineers a year, according to the Joint Initiative for Skills Acquisition (Jipsa), whose strategy is to “retain engineers, re-employ retired engineers and remove blockages to importing experienced engineers”.
“We are aggressively recruiting engineers. We are now partnering with global firms such as Fluor Corp and Black & Veitch, we will be outsourcing certain functions,” Nqwababa says. “We will have new experts join us every year — South Africans, Africans, as well as people from the US and the UK. We are now employing technicians from Thailand.
“We are also getting calls from international consulting firms who’ve said they are happy to come on board to help, for free, for a few months. They say they just want to be part of the solution — we’ve said yes to them.”
The skills recruitment drive will not be race-based, so while Eskom intends to continue to be compliant with employment equity, Nqwababa says its external recruits are “unlikely to be a constraint due to current employee demographics”.
“Eskom has 32000 employees and recruiting nonpreviously disadvantaged engineers is unlikely to have a material effect on our diversity numbers.
“Skills shortage and diversity management are not mutually exclusive as skills transfer is a key component of our skills strategy.”
Nqwababa says the mood at Eskom is now changing as offers of assistance from the public and local businesses roll in.
“It has reinvigorated the Eskom leadership into thinking failure is not an option. We have to get this right, we understand the public’s frustration and anger but things are beginning to happen.
“Last year we said there was going to be a crisis. They refused to listen. We have been so used to having a surplus supply, nobody believed us, not government, not business, not the public, even internally there was denial.”
The best news, he enthused, was the significant increase in government expenditure for infrastructure, the highest in more than 20 years, at 21%. But successfully spending the R400bn allocated is completely dependent on attracting certain expert skills.
“The number of foreign nationals at Eskom was increasing at an alarming rate, and most of them did not have proper documentation”
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