A new report lays the blame for the country's electricity crisis squarely at the door of Eskom and the government and calls for heads to roll in both sectors.
The report brings together the opinions and recommendations of 50 government leaders and businessmen on the crisis and outlines proposals to resolve it.
Among these is Eskom chief executive officer, Jacob Maroga, who called the energy crunch a "five- to eight-year emergency". He also acknowledged that the utility could not pull off its turnaround plan in its current form.
"We cannot assume that the current institutions, in their current form, will be able to get the job done," Maroga is quoted as saying in a summary of the report released on Sunday.
The report also calls for the electricity industry to be overhauled by opening it up to the private sector and dispels "myths" about the source of the crisis. Perhaps the most well known of these was Eskom's claim that it had not anticipated the rapid expansion of the economy.
The "real causes" of the crisis include: the government's refusal to allow Eskom to build new power stations, which wore out existing plants that were forced to cope with the rising demand. Other causes highlighted were a lack of capacity and "serious leadership failure" within Eskom and the government.
"During the discussions it emerged that poor decisions and miscalculations were among the most important causes of the crisis," said Ann Bernstein, executive director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise, who edited the report.
But that is not to say that Eskom was a "passive victim of government's poor decisions".
Eskom failed to persuade the government to sanction new power stations and favoured affirmative action rather than attracting and retaining valuable skills, the report says.
It also did not do enough to extend the long-term contracts that had ensured cheap coal supplies and instead increasingly sourced it from small, inexperienced and expensive suppliers for the sake of BEE compliance.
The report puts forward three immediate priorities to secure electricity supplies and other longer term solutions.
In the short term, it proposes that Eskom increase electricity prices, secure coal supplies and contract independent power producers, without which "the blackouts of January 2008 and the ‘load-shedding’ that followed will be just a mild foretaste of what is to come".
"Without private sector generation, the lights will be going out for hours every day by 2010, and South Africa can abandon any hope of reaching its growth targets and development goals," says the report.
Longer term, it suggests that a special electricity portfolio, headed by a senior politician, be created; that those found to be responsible for the crisis resign or be fired; that Eskom recruit badly needed skilled staff, without being too focused on affirmative action.
gershwin.wanneburg@inl.co.za
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