Eskom is bleeding skills — but race elephant clouds debate
Eskom employees are divided on the role that race-based transformation has played in the skills shortage that is hampering the utility’s ability to keep the lights on, Sunday Times reports.
The paper also reported that Eskom is struggling to staff all the shifts at its coal power stations due to a rapid loss of technical skills.
That has resulted in the remaining skilled workers having to clock excessive overtime and essential training being scrapped.
Eskom told the publication that 209 skilled staff from its generation division had resigned or retired in the past three months.
The utility lost 295 more employees at other divisions during the same period.
Combined, these employees had 12,160 years of related experience and 13,364 years of Eskom service.
The newspaper spoke to several Eskom insiders who explained that race’s role in the skills shortage was a dividing factor.
One said that the opinion of black and white employees differed, even at the executive level.
“There is a feeling that when whites say there are no skills, they are talking about blacks who are now in charge of most of these power stations,” the insider said.
“The blacks feel that the whites only say this because they do not recognise their capacity.”
Another source said Eskom’s human resources division believed that the utility should not talk about how the skills shortage worsened load-shedding.
They feel such statements could anger some unions who would regard them as concessions that the utility’s past radical affirmative action and employment equity implementation had failed.
Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshanstsha said the utility had filled the majority of core and critical vacancies, and that HR drives recruitment according to internal processes.
Therefore, Eskom is unable to source essential skills from outside the company.
Vacancies have been filled with people who have the necessary academic qualifications. However, they possess much less practical experience than those they replaced.
Eskom workers inside a coal-fired power station’s control room in 2012. Editorial credit: Sunshine Seeds / Shutterstock.com
Eskom’s race requirements for employees and suppliers were under the spotlight again this week after public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan accepted trade union Solidarity’s offer to provide a list of skilled workers to help fix Eskom.
That came after the union wrote to the minister, offering to help locate skilled and experienced engineering and technical staff.
Solidarity’s letter was in response to Gordhan’s explanation during his 2022 Budget Speech that technical and engineering skills shortages contributed to Eskom’s operational problems.
Solidarity has repeatedly offered to provide the list to the government and Eskom since 2019.
The union told MyBroadband it had amassed more than 1,100 names of people with engineering, technical, and general skills willing to help Eskom restore generation capacity.
It is now planning to appoint a panel to work the list down to around 100 candidates with the best skills and most extensive experience.
The union contends that Eskom’s “reckless” race-based transformation programme was to blame for some of the operational issues the utility has been experiencing.
“From 2000, they made exit packages available to skilled Eskom workers worth around R1.8 billion in today’s terms,” he said.
“The loss of skills also resulted in a lack of institutional knowledge, and it was just too much, too fast.”
Race-based procurement causes higher prices — Solidarity
A report from the Solidarity Research Institute (SRI) also found that black empowerment criteria for suppliers pushed up South Africa’s electricity prices by no less than 27%.
The SRI determined this figure by comparing Eskom’s production costs with those of India’s biggest power utility, NTPC Limited. The latter is also heavily reliant on coal-fired generation.
According to the report, Eskom and NTPC’s production costs were relatively similar up until 2011.
But in 2012, Eskom’s costs per kWh were 42% higher than the NTPC’s. Between 2012 and 2020, it would be 34% higher on average.
The SRI attributed this surge to the appointment of Malusi Gigaba as public enterprises minister and Zola Tsotsi as Eskom chairperson.
According to the SRI, Gigaba and Tsotsi were focused on aligning Eskom’s goals with the government’s, which the SRI said would have included black economic empowerment-related targets.
Loading ...