LISTEN: Gordhan says Eskom executives need 'words of encouragement' as they battle load shedding
Members of Parliament have renewed their calls for management at Eskom to step down amid the country's ongoing energy crisis.
MPs want Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter and COO Jan Oberholzer to resign, citing a failure to turn the ailing power utility around.
Eskom faces financial woes, ageing power plants and is fraught with corruption.
This has led to the utility having to implement load shedding on a regular basis.
On Thursday, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) led a debate at the National Assembly on the energy crisis at Eskom.
IFP chief whip Narend Singh didn't mince his words in his assessment of the crisis.
"Parliament will lose its bite if we continue biting in this House with zero consequences. Our words here cannot be tabled and answered to sit on a shelf for years. As members of this House we must unanimously agree to the solutions that all have offered in turning Eskom into a viable entity capable of delivering on its mandate.
"If government allows Eskom to fail, it could out South Africa over the brink into becoming a failed state," Singh said to MPs.
The EFF's Omphile Maotwe added to a list of recommendations to help recover Eskom.
"We are going to repeat this and repeat this until it sinks into your brains. We need to stabilise coal prices, including cancelling Exxaro corrupt contract. We need to fire the Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter and COO Jan Oberholzer today and appoint a new competent executive with an engineering qualification, competent and must come with operational generation experience.
"We must stop the nonsense of unbundling Eskom; it is misguided, and it is corrupt. We must create an independent renewable energy division, so we are not at the mercy of parasitic, greedy capital to build renewable energy capacity as a country," Maotwe added.
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Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan responded to the MPs criticism.
While he told MPs he understands the urgency of the challenges faced by the power utility, there needs to ne patience.
"It [energy security] won't be achieved tomorrow but it will be achieved.
"Eskom is not broken, it is not dysfunction, but it does have a crisis. It has a series of challenges, and it will take time to resolve some of them."
Gordhan again defended the Eskom executive, adding they weren't entirely to blame for the rot at the power utility.
"The senior management team at Eskom also faces a huge burden on behalf of the country and they do require words of solidarity and words of encouragement when we do see that load shedding is happening at the rate that is happening."
Listen to Gordhan below:
