The man behind Eskom’s miraculous turnaround

Eskom chairman Mteto Nyati has been instrumental in improving Eskom’s performance and ensuring the country has been load-shedding-free for over two months.

When Nyati was appointed as the new chair on 1 November 2023, Eskom was in chaos. There was daily load-shedding and widespread leadership problems.

Fast-forward six months, and Eskom’s performance has improved dramatically. It has a stable leadership team, its core metrics are improving, and there is optimism in the company.

Nyati was behind many of the interventions that helped Eskom achieve such a rapid turnaround and temporarily halt rotational power cuts.

As non-executive chairman, Nyati would not be expected to engage in operational issues. However, the crisis at Eskom called for a different approach.

He told Biznews the board needed a deep understanding of the issues and often engaged directly with power station general managers to get quality information.

Nyati also became the face of Eskom by design. The board asked new CEO Dan Marokane to avoid media interactions for the first 100 days.

The Eskom board chairman handled most media engagements, giving Marokane time to familiarise himself with the company’s challenges before doing interviews.

The improved performance was achieved through Eskom’s Generation Operational Recovery Plan, which commenced in March 2023.

The plan included accelerating planned maintenance, increased preventative maintenance, major plant refurbishments, and life extension projects.

Nyati said the current maintenance plan differed from the one under De Ruyter as they are now partnering with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

“When we take a plant down, we work with people with deep expertise about the equipment used at that plant,” he said.

Previously, maintenance was done by people with limited or no understanding of the equipment at the plants.

The results are indisputable. There has been a reduction in the Unplanned Capacity Loss Factor (UCLF) and a jump in the energy availability factor (EAF).

Nyati highlighted that while load-shedding is likely to return, the chances of higher stages of load-shedding are much smaller due to work done in the past year.

He added that they are only a year into a two-year maintenance plan, which should further improve Eskom’s performance.

Nyati said South Africans should never feel the power utility’s existence and is confident that load-shedding will be a thing of the past by 2025.

Mteto Nyati’s path to becoming Eskom chairman

Nyati’s appointment as Eskom chairman was widely welcomed because he was an engineer with extensive business experience.

Before he joined the Eskom board, he served as the chief executive of MTN South Africa and Altron.

He also has held senior leadership and executive roles in multinational IT companies such as IBM and Microsoft.

He has received multiple awards and honours, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Johannesburg and IT Personality of the Year in 2014 and 2016.

He was also named one of Yale University’s World Fellows on Global Leadership and Business Personality of the Year in the Oliver Transformation and Empowerment Awards.

These achievements disguise the fact that Nyati comes from humble beginnings in the Eastern Cape.

Nyati was born in Umtata in the Eastern Cape on 21 December 1964. Both his father and mother were teachers.

He attended primary school at the Tabase Junior Secondary School in Umtata, where he excelled academically.

Mteto moved to the St Patrick Mission Roman Catholic school in Libode, Eastern Cape, from grade 7 to 9.

His academic prowess really came to the fore at St John’s College in Umtata, where he matriculated.

During his high school years, he represented South Africa at the International Science Olympiad in London.

Afrox noticed his academic talents and offered him an academic scholarship to do an engineering degree.

He did a BSc in Mechanical Engineering at the University of KwaZulu-Natal from 1982 to 1985 and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

However, his mother’s poor health prevented him from studying towards a master’s degree in engineering in Germany.

After graduating, Nyati became a regional engineer at Afrox and then a process engineer at the company’s Gases Operations Centre in Germiston.

After working in engineering and managerial positions at Tastic Rice, Nampak, and IBM South Africa, he became Microsoft South Africa’s managing director in 2008.

He joined MTN as group chief enterprise officer in October 2014 and took the helm at MTN South Africa a year later.

Altron head-hunted Nyati, where he served as chief executive between March 2017 and June 2022.

Soon after leaving Altron, he invested in the South African business and technology consulting company BSG. He serves as chairman of the company.