Eskom chief operating officer announces retirement
Eskom chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer will retire from the state-owned power utility in April 2023 after over 30 years of service, News24 reports. He turns 65 in April.
According to the report, it isn’t clear if the Eskom board will ask Oberholzer to train a successor.
The news of Oberholzer’s imminent departure as a permanent Eskom employee comes after the Hawks arrested someone for allegedly making a bomb threat against him.
Oberholzer received the bomb threat from an anonymous and unregistered cellphone number in May 2022.
He told News24 that he doesn’t pay any mind to threats against him individually, but when a threat came in that could hurt his family, he immediately reported it to the police.
Oberholzer also spoke openly about surgeries he and his wife had recently undertaken.
He recently had a non-malignant tumour removed and was in hospital for two days. He was back at work the day after being discharged.
His wife, Lindy, recently had heart surgery, which Oberholzer believes was brought on by stress.
Eskom’s previous board appointed Oberholzer on 7 July 2018 — almost a month after the power utility announced its first load-shedding since September 2015.
The utility avoided load-shedding again in 2018 until November.
During 2019, Eskom implemented power cuts in February, March, October, and November, spiking up to stage 6 load-shedding in December.
Following the resignations of Phakamani Hadebe and Jabu Mabuza in 2019 and 2020, the Eskom board appointed André de Ruyter as CEO.
Although De Ruyter was initially optimistic that Eskom could end load-shedding by September 2021 with an aggressive maintenance programme, his prediction proved naive.
Load-shedding only worsened since 2019, when the power utility recorded its worst year for rotational power cuts since 2015 — when Tshediso Matona and Brian Molefe were at the helm.
In 2021, Eskom had implemented nearly double the amount of power cuts than 2019 in terms of energy shed.
In 2022, the amount of load-shedding is already double that of 2021.
In addition to losing Oberholzer in April, several Eskom executives left the power utility this year.
Eskom’s generation executive Philip Dukashe resigned in May.
Rhulani Mathebula stepped in as acting head of generation for the second time while the power utility recruited a replacement.
However, Mathebula has also since resigned from the utility. His last day is at the end of November.
Thomas Conradie will be Eskom’s new acting generating executive in the interim.
Rhulani Mathebula, acting Eskom executive for generation. Credit: YouTube/Jurgen Tietz
Eskom’s acting chief nuclear officer, Riedewaan Barkadien, also resigned this year, leaving the power utility on 31 July to join a Canadian nuclear power producer.
Keith Featherstone stepped in as Eskom’s new acting chief nuclear officer.
Eskom and public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan have admitted that an exodus of experienced individuals has exacerbated the crisis at the power utility.
Illustrating the desperation, Gordhan accepted an offer from trade union Solidarity to supply a list of hundreds of names of experienced engineers willing to return to Eskom. This was in July.
However, since it’s politically problematic to simply hire back hundreds of predominantly white engineers, Eskom launched a skills crowdsourcing platform in November.
Eskom said this is to make the process of bringing back experienced engineers more equitable.
“To ensure sustainability and to maximise the impact of these skills, each crowdsourced individual is required to transfer skills to the permanent Eskom team that they will work with,” it said.
Oberholzer has stated that the issue is not that Eskom doesn’t have talented and promising engineers working for the company right now.
The problem is that the utility is in a crisis, and the old hands with the experience to show younger engineers how to handle the various emergencies were allowed to leave the company before transferring their skills to the next generation.
Insiders at Eskom have stated it less delicately. They said experienced engineers were encouraged to leave while the power utility went on a recruitment drive to hire staff it didn’t need to balance its demographic quotas.
A recent Daily Investor analysis showed that Eskom’s gigawatt-hours generated per employee is at its lowest level since 1996/97.
Profit per employee is also at one of its worst levels since 1990 — barring the 2008 global financial crisis.
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