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Cape Town – EE Publishers MD Chris Yelland has teamed up with the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) to take Eskom to court over information it has allegedly failed to disclose.
Outa’s legal team has drafted court papers that have been issued to the North Gauteng High Court on 19 October 2016 and served on Eskom in order to obtain a court order forcing the utility to release the requested information, a joint EE Publishers and Outa statement said on Thursday.
“Attorneys acting for Eskom have indicated that Eskom intends to oppose EE Publishers’ application,” they said.
They said this “secrecy” will be challenged in court
“The information, requested through a Promotion of Access to Information Act application submitted in June 2016, includes information such as the 2016 week-on-week energy availability factor, demand and energy sent out, and is used to analyse Eskom’s performance,” they said.
This information was freely available on Eskom’s website and journalists often quoted the information when reporting on load shedding.
Having restricted the information, Eskom CEO Brian Molefe painted a picture of a load shedding-free South Africa with the power utility meeting demand.
However, in November 2015, Yelland questioned Eskom’s congratulatory tone, saying the “reality is that Eskom’s generation plant availability has not yet improved to where it should be”.
“South Africans should take little comfort that load shedding has stopped when electricity demand in 2015 is some 5% less than in 2014, and about 10% lower than it was in 2007,” he wrote on Fin24.
Molefe hit back almost immediately. "We do not have a demand crisis and your article you published over the weekend is way off the mark,” he told Yelland at a briefing on 16 November 2015.
Since then, Yelland said he has tried everything to get demand and capacity from Eskom. And, he said, he has been blacklisted from attending Eskom press briefings or from receiving press statements.
The Mail & Guardian has also challenged Eskom's good news story, with a 2016 story titled "Eskom's good news debunked by poor economy".
"Industry experts say the reprieve the power grid and the utility have been afforded is largely compliments of an economy in the doldrums," it said in June.
“The poor economy is Eskom’s only saving grace at the moment,” Doug Kuni, an independent energy consultant, told the paper. “What we are seeing are the effects of a rather deep downturn in the economy. ArcelorMittal South Africa has closed some mills; Lonmin is not producing in many of its mines, Highveld Steel shut down. Thousands of megawatts have become available."
Indeed, the SA Reserve Bank had forecast a 0% gross domestic growth for SA in 2016 and recently upgraded this to 0.4%.
READ: Economic slowdown ends load shedding, not Eskom
Eskom's group executive for generation, Matshela Koko, took both Yelland and Kuni on regarding this: "These ideologues ... seem distressed that Eskom has improved performance, which has negated their opportunity to use load shedding to support the ‘#EskomMustFall movement’."
However, EE Publishers and Outa are asking for the data so they can make their own assumptions, "instead of the public being expected to simply believe what Eskom tells the media".
“Eskom’s failure to act transparently in providing such data prevents independent analysts and researchers from reviewing and understanding generation performance trends in South Africa, and enables Eskom to hide inefficiencies and present one-sided and misleading information to the public,” EE Publishers and Outa said.
“Eskom has stonewalled EE Publishers, and effectively refused to provide the requested information, without providing any reasons for doing so.”
They said Eskom’s information officer said the request for information was being considered by an “executive director” of Eskom. The only two executive directors of Eskom are the CEO, Brian Molefe, and CFO, Anoj Singh, the statement read.
“However, no response has since been received from Eskom, which in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act is deemed to be a refusal of access to the requested information.
“The right to access to information from public bodies such as Eskom by the public and the media is a constitutional right, and forms the basis of the Promotion of Access to Information Act.
“The ability of the media and the public to effectively assess Eskom’s performance, or that of any government institution, relies on such publicly available information,” they said.
Yelland said that litigation was the last option to get the information requested. “One can't imagine why Eskom would refuse access to this most basic generation performance data,” he said.
Asked for comment, Eskom spokesperson Khulu Phasiwe told Fin24 on Thursday that it is "advisable to allow that (court) process to take its course".
"Having said that, it is important to note that Eskom has since 2012 being holding quarterly state of the system briefings, which provide details on the performance of our power system," said Phasiwe.
"The last quarterly briefing was in July this year. At the recent past, we have also held the same briefings in Cape Town in an effort to give all media equal access to the same information.
"In between these periods, Eskom periodically briefs Parliament’s portfolio committees on public enterprises and energy on its operational and financial performance.
During the release of Eskom’s interim financial results last week, we did indicate that the plant availability factor has increased to 78% in the six months to 30 September 2016 compared to 71% in the same period last year," said Phasiwe.
