Over the last few weeks we had load shedding numerous times and Esklom announced it regularly with the Government fuming and bringing in experts from Italy to help in fixing generating and reticulation problems.
So what really happened that caused the problems over the past 12 years:-
Getting rid of experts
In 2001 Eskom was regarded as the top electricity authority of its kind in the world. It was also one of the cheapest suppliers in the world - so what went wrong?
Running a company like that requires advanced expertise and the ANC decided that there were too many White experts working at Eskom and started to get rid of them and replacing them with Blacks and some Indians. The replacements were totally inexperienced and some were weak in their field of work.
In getting rid of the expertise the ANC were courting disaster.
New Power Stations
In 2007 the Government decided to construct two of the biggest coal fired power generators in the world, They made enquiries world wide - but could not find any company who could or willingly design coal fired power generators of the required size and then got the designs done internally. With the lack of expertise referred to above, they delivered designs that the contractors found totally impossible to implement.
The contracts went out in 2008 and the Kusile and Medupi power stations are still not completed while the construction cost went up from R150 billion to R450 billion landing Eskom in an unsustainable debt trap.
Of the R450 billion it is estimated that R173 billion were spent on bribery and corruption and a court case to recover the money is in progress.
The Zuma Years
In 2014 the then Public Protector launched an investigation and found Massive so much bribery and corruption in Eskom and PRASA She found that billions were stolen - there were more than R500 billion allegedly stolen. from both institutions and in her report recommended that President Zuma establish a Commission of Enquiry and since Zuma himself was implicated - that the Chief Justice nominate a Judge to lead the enquiry. Zuma took the report on review - but the Judges did not take long to discard the review application.
For a year after that Zuma talked about the establishment of the Commission of Enquiry and after his dismissal the Commission was established by Ramaphosa with Judge Zondo as Chairman. This is a total horror story spoiling our day on TV.
The Coal Supply Situation
The Optimum story saga is well known as a process to sell Optimum Coal Mine to Gupta-Zuma Inc and Eskom even contributed more than R600 million for the purchase price. They quickly asset stripped the mine and the mine is noiw under judicial management and not any coal is mined while the employees has no been paid for six months,
That is not the only mines under-delivering or non-delivering causing problems. For years Government has supported the establishment of new Black-owned mining companies to take over mines from major mining companies and the result is that dust and mud is delivered causing major damage to generators, All the inspectors responsible for quality control has been fired and either not replaced or replaced by people with no expertise prepared to be bribed,
Other problems
The above are not the only problems. In the period 2008 to date the number of Eskom employees have increased form 30 000 to 48 000 with no increase of electricity supply being in evidence,
Conclusions
At this stage Eskom is in total crisis and they gets Billions in grants from Government to keep them operational
A recent 14,5% in tariffs increase has been announced and to even make it worse a huge petrol price increase have been announced. A new petrol price increase will also be announced in April
To make matters worse we had 4 blackouts lasting 2 hours each over the past 24 hours,
An election is just about 6 weeks from now. The ANC support has dwindled to 52% already and is set at 42% in Gauteng. At this rate and the voters getting more and more desperate the ABC can only hope that their support does not drop below 50% and they will have to look for coalition partners. If they were a united party it would not be all that difficult - but the Zuma faction of crooks are still in the party and occupying ministerial posts.