Johannesburg – The DA has slammed former president Thabo Mbeki for saying the Eskom crisis was deliberate.
DA spokesperson on public enterprises Ghaleb Cachalia said Mbeki was suffering from historical amnesia and had grossly misrepresented the factors that led to the ongoing load shedding, adding that his utterances were propaganda and outright lies.
Mbeki also said that government institutions such as Sars, Eskom, and Transnet were being destroyed by greedy and dishonest leaders.
Mbeki was speaking at a Unisa event this past week.
Mbeki said Brian Molefe and his team were able to deal with the issue of load shedding successfully.
“Brian Molefe was Eskom CEO from April 2015 to November 2016. When he took over, there was load shedding. He instituted a maintenance festival where he asked the country to bear with stage two load shedding for three months, and Eskom would take units off-line for reliability maintenance. Furthermore, they used an outage optimisation tool, and were strict on outage maintenance. This was done successfully,” Mbeki said.
However, the DA said on Sunday that it was Mbeki’s ANC administration that committed the original sin by failing to invest in new generation capacity when they were warned that demand was close to outstripping supply.
Cachalia accused the former ANC leader of shifting the blame for the origins of the load shedding crisis to Eskom.
He said Mbeki's claim that Eskom’s management deliberately caused an electricity crisis and load shedding “because the people in charge of the power stations did not do what they were supposed to do – replenish coal”, was false.
“In a cowardly cop-out in which he tried to absolve himself and his ANC administration from any responsibility, Mbeki said that the narrative that his government ignored warnings to invest in new generation capacity and infrastructure was ‘false’ and ‘cooked up’.
Cachalia said Mbeki should shoulder the blame, as he was quoted in 2007 saying: “When Eskom said to the government, ‘We think we must invest more in terms of electricity generation,’ we said no, but all you will be doing is just building excess capacity. We said not now, but later. We were wrong. Eskom was right. We were wrong.”
Cachalia said Mbeki must inform South Africans of what had changed from his earlier stance on load shedding.
He said Mbeki wanted to absolve himself of any responsibility.
The DA said in December 1998 that the Department of Minerals and Energy, in a White Paper, warned that Eskom’s present generation capacity surplus would be fully utilised by about 2007.
“The truth is, the first seeds of South Africa’s electricity crisis were sown by Mbeki’s ANC administration. His actions, or lack thereof, have led to a 16-year crisis that has led to the loss of hundreds of billions of rand, a stagnant economy, and one of the highest unemployment rates in the world,” Cachalia said.
“If anything, Mbeki must apologise to South Africans for the role that he, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa have played in almost collapsing the economy.”
The Star