Echoing the sentiments of South Africa’s civil society and trade unions, global research and advocacy institute Transnational Institute and Municipal Services Project researcher and author Dr Daniel Chavez on Wednesday cautioned against the privatisation of State-owned power utility Eskom before shaping it up to be more efficient and transparent.

Chavez, who was critical of privatising the provision of basic services, said there was great value in public ownership and suggested that the South African government should focus on the recovery of the utility through several alternative measures rather than privatise it to the detriment of the country's citizens.

In a study reviewing alternatives to privatisation and corporatisation of basic services utilities in Latin American, which had some parallels to the situation South Africa found itself in, a direct link emerged between public-run energy utilities and the universal access gains made, with State-owned entities providing more access to the citizens of their respective countries.

“Countries that did not privatise [or those that had renationalised their assets] had the [greatest electricity] coverage – they are getting close or already there in terms of universal coverage,” Chavez told delegates on the second day of the four-day National Civil Society Conference, in Booysens, Johannesburg.

His comments emerged as trade unions and civil society organisations called for a reversal of the corporatisation of Eskom and protested against government’s proposal to partly privatise the utility to turn the embattled company around.

“One of the key problems with Eskom right now is that it is run as a commercial operation. In our view, Eskom must be a service to the rest of the economy. It must operate for the benefit of that economy, not to make money for shareholders,” said National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) deputy general-secretary Karl Cloete, who believed that electricity generation and supply were the function of the State.

He added that the privatisation of the power utility would “entrench the problems of the economy, not alleviate them”.

Currently, Eskom, which had a theoretical maximum generation capacity in excess of 40 000 MW, struggled to meet peak demand of around 30 000 MW, resulting in continuous rotational load-shedding over the past year that was harming the economy.

“We are skeptical of privatisation. It seems to us that often privatisation ends up as a government guarantee to some buyer that he will be protected from competition. This just creates a new monopoly, harmful to the interests of the vast majority of people,” said Solidarity CEO Dirk Hermann.

There were other “much more promising” interventions to consider, he pointed out.

Chavez cited the progress made by Uruguay, which had voted against privatisation in a civil protest, which was now set to become a net exporter of electricity by 2016, after significant investments in wind farms, and more recently solar power generation plants.

Struggling State-owned utilities needed to attract – and inject – more equity, ensure a more inclusive participation, improve efficiencies, “pay more attention” to the quality of service, develop heightened accountability and transparency measures and promote solidarity and public ethos, as well as ensure sustainability, quality of the workplace and the transferability of experiences.

Hermann believed Eskom should open its grid to other power producers. “We propose that wide-ranging, meaningful exemptions from regulations must be given to the public so that they can generate, distribute and even sell their own electricity to each other and to the workplaces where our members hang onto their jobs,” he said, in a reference to the tenuous position of manufacturers as a result of load-shedding.

“When we talk about social ownership of energy systems, we are speaking of a system where workers, communities and consumers have control and a real voice in how energy is produced and used,” Cloete added.