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The DA calls on Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan to account for the current Stage 3 rolling blackouts with urgency.

The Department of Public Enterprises is expected to appear before Parliament today. It would be wholly remiss of the Portfolio Committee of Public Enterprises to meet during this time and not be briefed by the Minister as well as Eskom’s senior management about South Africa’s electricity crisis.

While the Eskom CEO tried to alleviate fears during a press conference yesterday, it’s clearer than ever that it would take a miracle for the power utility to provide for all South Africa’s electricity needs in the near future.

South Africa is being driven to the very brink of disaster. And even then, Minister Gordhan, his board at Eskom and its senior management have been woefully silent while the President’s sole contribution in a rambling address to the nation on the matter was to say, "If there is anything that keeps me awake at night, it is Eskom and electricity generation."

The public no longer wants to hear long and meaningless ramblings of turnaround strategies and contingency plans – there clearly are none. South Africans want the honest truth about the state of Eskom and whether the grid is on the brink of collapse. Blaming municipalities who are trying to protect their economies for Eskom’s failures is simply disingenuous. Eskom has failed at every turn to meet the growing needs of the country, and there is every indication that the SOE will never catch up.

Despite regular pleas and documented warnings over the years from the DA in Parliament and from various experts in the field about the state of Eskom, the ANC government has repeatedly fiddled while the utility literally burned and the country was plunged into darkness by successive blackouts.

The transition from a single State-owned monopoly to accommodate private investment in sorely needed generation has been tardy at best and effectively non-existent at worst, with delays, blocking mechanisms and the continued misguided spending of public monies – to the tune of hundreds of billions of rands – to little or no effect.

The crisis has reached chronically unmanageable levels. A radical change at Eskom is called for without delay that addresses its operating system and that institutes an independent management board comprising experts and not cadres must be effected without delay. Like California in the US, we need to institute a permanent, competent and independent Energy Commission. All electricity generation stations are national key points and are not overridden by labour laws – this has to be invoked to prevent any ongoing sabotage.

In the interim the baseload must be stabilised while the supply from Independent Power Producers to households, businesses, and industry needs to be fast tracked along with adequate battery storage to facilitate the dispatchability of electrical power. The viability of combined cycle gas turbines investigated and implemented without delay while the transparent cost of diesel contracts and emergency supply solutions to manage peak demand be made plain. In parallel the retrofitting of flue gas desulfurization must happen with the attendant funding mechanisms, privatisation of plant and planning.

Current structures at governmental/shareholder level, board and management levels have been proved to be criminally incompetent and radical solutions are called for that involve the private sector – time has all but run out along with the lights and power needed to keep the nation running. The time for action is now in line with solutions that have been documented at length by DA and various experts.

DA Shadow Minister of Public Enterprises, Ghaleb Cachalia MP