Eskom’s new chair, Mteto Nyati, has pledged that a CEO will finally be announced to replace André de Ruyter before the end of the year.
Speaking in parliament this week, Nyati said three names from which the new CEO will be chosen had been submitted to public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan.
This is far from ideal. Not only is this a full year after De Ruyter quit, but the government has shown little willingness to fix the glaring governance issue at the root of so much failure at state-owned entities: allowing politicians to appoint CEOs, rather than their boards.
But then, given the talent for self-deception in our ruling class, this is hardly a surprise. Barely a week after Eskom announced the sort of loss that would fell many an actuary — a blinding R23.9bn — the backslapping in parliament this week about how well Eskom had done to prevent a worst-case scenario seemed entirely off-key.
It was also at odds with electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa’s admission, days earlier, that Eskom had “dropped the ball”, leading to unplanned outages.
Empty words and backslapping will get Eskom nowhere. An inability to front up to reality is why we got here in the first place.
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