Thabo Mbeki defends Brian Molefe's tenure at Eskom - but analysts ...
He said that, under Molefe's leadership, Eskom was able to eliminate load shedding. Energy experts provided a mixed reaction to Mbeki's comments.
Former president Thabo Mbeki came to the defence of ex-Eskom CEO Brian Molefe regarding his record of ending load shedding, despite a history of state capture allegations during the same period.
On Thursday, Mbeki surprised a room filled with students and academics when he defended Molefe as having saved Eskom from load shedding when the entity faced sabotage from power station managers, who failed to replenish coal and avoid an energy shortage.
Mbeki's comments came despite the corruption allegations that Molefe faced while he worked at Eskom.
"Load shedding began in 2008, and there was a severe crisis. The argument for that was that Eskom had told the government in 1998 that there must be investment in new infrastructure, but the government did not listen, hence the blackouts. That story was false; that story was cooked up.
"There was a shutdown because the people in charge of power stations did not do what they were supposed to do: replenish coal. We had coal nearby to put into the power station, and they did not. The power stations ran out of coal," Mbeki said.
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Mbeki referred to Molefe as a "friend", saying his tenure at Eskom marked a turning point in rescuing the power utility from load shedding when he was appointed in 2015 until January 2017.
If you ask anyone what Brian and the others did in 2014... for so many years, there was no load shedding. They could maintain and do repairs; indeed, there was no load shedding for so many years.
"It was correct for Brian Molefe to say that I have been brought from here to there to deal with this matter of load shedding, and let's look at it seriously and deal with it effectively with positive results. By the time this load shedding comes back in 2017/2018, you must be able to guess why we have new people who do not behave like Brian Molefe," Mbeki said.
Energy expert Lungile Mashele told News24 the former president correctly assessed that load shedding was under control during Molefe's tenure.
"Brian Molefe was Eskom CEO from April 2015 to November 2016. When he took the reins, Eskom was load shedding. He instituted a 'maintenance festival', where he asked the country to bear with Stage 2 load shedding for three months, and Eskom would take units offline for reliability maintenance. Furthermore, they utilised an outage optimisation tool and were strict on outage management. This was done successfully," Mashele said.
Professor Hartmut Winkler, of the University of Pretoria, shared similar sentiments, saying the record showed that Eskom had reduced load shedding between 2015 and 2018.
He argued that the lack of load shedding meant that only some aspects were good during Molefe's period.
Winkler added that the strategy was to decrease maintenance of power stations to ensure the grid was uninterrupted, causing an after-effect that saw load shedding return in 2018, after Molefe had left.
Winkler said:
The way that they dealt with load shedding was to cut down on maintenance. So, instead of taking power plants off to fix them for service, just like you would do with a car, they left them running until they all started breaking down.
Molefe faced a series of allegations of corruption during his tenure at Eskom.
He was flagged at the Zondo Commission for starving Glencore-owned Optimum Coal Mine funds, enabling the Gupta family to purchase the coal mine.
Another controversy around Molefe's time in office was the slow progress in completing big projects at Medupi, Kusile and Ingula.
Mbeki's denial that the government was warned about load shedding are contrasted by the public records available. In his book - Sabotage: Eskom Under Siege - News24 journalist Kyle Cowan revealed that Eskom had ignored warnings on upgrading power plants.
READ | I could not 'with a clean conscience' allow Eskom to be 'financially ruined' - Brian Molefe
"The reluctance of the Mbeki administration to immediately approve new power station builds was not due to concern over Eskom's ability to get the job done, but must be seen against the backdrop that, at the time, the utility presided over significant surplus capacity.
"In 2001, Eskom was named the best power company in the world, and a shortage of generation capacity was, for those outside Eskom, a problem of the future. Within six years, that reputation would come crashing down around the ANC-led government with the implementation of the first rotational power cuts, known as load shedding," Cowan wrote.
