Cape Town – The cabinet minister in charge of Eskom slammed the Democratic Alliance (DA) this week for allegedly not correctly reading its annual report regarding its executives’ salaries.
Natasha Mazzone, a DA MP and shadow minister of public enterprises, said Eskom “spent an exorbitant” R50m on executive salaries during the 2014/2015 financial year, with an additional R10.8m being paid out for long-term incentive bonuses.
“This amounts to R1.4m per executive member,” she said in a statement on September 6.
Eskom incurred R51m on fruitless and wasteful expenditure, which Mazzone said was a reason why “it is extremely unjustifiable that they are receiving these exorbitant pay checks and bonuses”.
All these facts cited were correct. However, the following day, Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown hit back, saying that Eskom executives had not qualified for short-term bonuses in the past two financial years.
“If she had read the annual report correctly, she would have seen that it was actually long-term incentives awarded in 2011/12 financial year, vested in the 2013/14 financial, which was payable only in June 2014,” Brown said in a statement.
“It appears some people are happy to constantly pull our state-owned companies down and to ignore their successes,” she said.
“(Mazzone) conveniently ignored the fact that Eskom managed to record a marginal profit of R3.6bn and instead focused on matters which I … have addressed with the board.”
Brown is a part of cabinet's "war room", which aims to align government and business operations to cut red tape and speed up projects to raise the country's electricity security after half a year of economically-disastrous power cuts.
Eskom has sent media daily press statements noting each day the country has not experienced load shedding, following on from a promise earlier in the year that there would be no load shedding during winter. Currently, Eskom has not implemented load shedding for 32 days.