Eskom finances to take another knock in 2021 – De Ruyter
Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter says he doesn’t believe there is any political interference behind the scenes at the power utility.
De Ruyter told the Free Market Foundation on Monday that in his year at the helm of Eskom, he hasn’t experienced any political meddling.
This comes after some energy experts pointed the finger at the African National Congress (ANC) for cadre deployment at the power utility.
Last week energy expert Ted Blom told Jacaranda FM that he believed government had appointed officials with no generation experience.
Blom claimed that “the government is running a political agenda syndrome and every senior at Eskom must be ANC approved”.
But De Ruyter said this has not been the case under his watch.
“The narrative that there’s undue or excessive political interference at Eskom certainly is not something that I’ve experienced.”
De Ruyter added that his interactions with minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe was based purely on data.
“I’m not too concerned about political interference in terms of receiving dispatch from any minister to do x, y, z. Of course, we follow the prescripts of our shareholders and the minister is grumpy with us when there’s load shedding but so are 59 million other South Africans,” said de Ruyter.
“We believe in having data driven debates with our shareholder, we engage in discussions and sometimes heated discussions to make our point but at the end of the day, the numbers speak for themselves and we arrive at a rational conclusion but from the seat I’m in I don’t think there’s any truth to excessive political interference.”
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The rolling bouts of load shedding have made Eskom less popular with the public.
De Ruyter admits confidence in the power utility had taken a knock due to its failures to ensure generating capacity.
“We recognise that load shedding is a phenomenon that is the cause of hardship in the country, to the economy, to factories, to businesses, to households but it’s something that we only apply as the last resort, it’s not something that we do lightly.”
In addition to improving generating capacity, De Ruyter vowed to improve the power utility’s bottom line.
“The second top priority of our turnaround plan is our income statement. Our income statement is under pressure. We were able to report a very modest profit for the first half of the current financial year, but that profit is not going to be sustained so we will again this year be reporting a substantial net after tax loss.”
He added ending load shedding was on his wish list, as well as building a financially self-sustainable power utility and making Eskom the poster child for a just energy transition.
