BRITS POS – BRITS - For years, Eskom prioritised race targets over retaining and developing valuable technical skills. The power utility is now paying the price for this strategy.
During Eskom’s 2025 Winter Outlook briefing, chairman Mteto Nyati said the power utility did not meet expectations.
“We have not been proud of how we have performed. A few metrics showed that things did not align with what we were capable of doing,” he said.
They have learned that Eskom does not have equipment issues. Instead, the problems centre around its employees.
“It is mainly leadership-related. We have to make sure they follow standard operating procedures and we hold people accountable,” he said.
“We need to have tough conversations when we need to. We also need to recognise them when they do things well.”
“All of the problems are leadership and management-related issues. That will be our focus when we move forward.”
In 2023, energy analyst Professor Sampson Mamphweli said Eskom experienced a skills crisis.
“When you look at the skills required to run Eskom, the utility no longer has them,” Mamphweli said.
“The fact that maintenance runs overtime and over budget, while also being of poor quality, reflects the lack of skills at Eskom.”
He said the exodus of skilled employees began over a decade ago when the utility underwent an aggressive transformation process.
As part of this agenda, Eskom trained black engineers and pushed them into high-ranking positions within the organisation.
“In that process, Eskom lost good white engineers who chose to work overseas or in the private sector due to the increased political interference at the utility,” he said.
Even black engineers trained at Eskom have begun to leave the utility because of the deteriorating working environment, heightened political pressure, and low employee morale.
He added that it affects Eskom in the immediate term and will have an even greater impact over the coming decades.
Mamphweli said the power utility has lost the ability to train engineers and has lost employees with operational experience.
Many other experts have also warned that only a small percentage of Eskom employees have the needed skills to perform their duties, especially in technical and engineering departments.
Former Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer, for example, blamed load-shedding on “pure negligence” by Eskom staff.
He said employees did not perform their duties, which included ignoring alarms at power stations.
Eskom focused on transformation at the expense of retaining skills.
Eskom’s struggle with skills should not come as a surprise. For three decades, it has strongly focused on transformation, which has caused it to lose valuable skills.
Battles between Eskom and trade unions date back over two decades. For example, in 2001, the former Mineworkers Union (MWU) sued Eskom over racial discrimination.
At the time, Eskom said it had strict racial and gender targets and would not compromise on meeting them.
“We are committed to achieving that target to make sure that our workforce reflects the demographics of our country,” it said.
In 2015, trade union Solidarity warned that it was playing with fire by alienating white employees.
This was after news emerged that Eskom wanted to decrease its white employees by up to 3,400 to meet strict race targets.
By then, Eskom had already shed more than 10,000 white staff, including many experienced and skilled technical personnel.
Eskom was on an aggressive drive to reach its target of reflecting the national racial demographics by 2020.
While Eskom denied that it would retrench white employees to meet its racial quotas, Solidarity said the power utility created an environment which encouraged white staff to leave.
Solidarity said that Eskom’s decline, which caused load-shedding, was linked to its aggressive affirmative action policy through which it lost thousands of skilled employees.
“The problem is not that those who left the utility were white but that they were people who possessed managerial and technical skills,” Solidarity CEO Dirk Hermann said.
The trade union added that Eskom lost many skilled employees and the institutional memory needed to create a stable company.
The same thing happened in 2023, when Solidarity published a strategy within Eskom to get rid of white men.
“The current number of white men at Eskom totals 1,873. According to Eskom’s targets, it wants to reduce this number to 1,379. Eskom therefore wants to get rid of 494 white men,” it said.
“This group was mainly responsible for maintenance work at Eskom. Those employees have skills that must be protected and preserved at all costs.”
The trade union warned that plans to get rid of more white people were to the detriment of the individuals, Eskom and of South Africa.
Despite these warnings, Eskom continued its aggressive transformation agenda, which resulted in the widespread skills loss.
Therefore, Eskom’s current skills problems resulted from decades of focusing on employment equity targets instead of retaining and building skills.
The power utility continues to track and report on its transformation, focusing heavily on the demographic breakdown by race and gender.
