Publications
Partners
Cape Town - The leadership of Eskom has been given a tick-box list of targets to achieve including that its performance is in line with what shareholders of a multi-billion rand privately owned company would expect.
In her budget vote speech in the national assembly on Thursday evening, Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown noted that Eskom and Transnet had assets of about R745bn and the six state-owned entities under her command were worth about R755bn. They had a turnover of over R200bn.
“In the context of an economy with a GDP of about R4trn, this places the state owned companies … especially Eskom and Transnet, at the sharp end of driving growth, this administration’s industrial development strategy, transformation of the economy and therefore the assault on poverty, inequality and unemployment,” she said.
In the year ahead, over and above addressing “all the administrative basics”, the leadership of Eskom needed to accelerate the completion of its build programme, increase the generation capacity of the existing fleet of power stations and re-establish an “inviolable, responsible maintenance regime".
She called for the elimination of the need for load shedding “by all other means as well”, developing a sustainable funding model, reducing the costs of primary energy [currently at close to 60% of revenue], fill critical vacancies, and bring a greater reliability to the load shedding schedule to allow consumers to plan effectively.
While Brown earlier told a press conference ahead of the budget vote that she did not see Eskom shedding bits of itself in a privatisation drive before an “end-game” vision was in place for the provision of energy, she did appeal to the management of Eskom to run the company as shareholders of a private company would expect it to be run.
Talking broadly about all six state-owned enterprises she said her department’s task was to “interpret and understand the companies’ performance ... to the standard that would be expected by the shareholders of a R750bn privately owned group of companies".
Brown appealed to the Eskom management to “do everything possible to win back the confidence of citizens, business, financial markets, international and domestic investors and staff”.
She, however, warned that electricity supply would remain a challenge for the next two to three years.
