Former president Thabo Mbeki took a swipe at Cyril Ramaphosa’s government for Eskom’s woes and the country's economic challenges.
Mbeki said South Africa is in a leadership vacuum, and that has led to the economic and energy crisis.
He said the lack of leadership in the country and society is an enormous problem, and this is why the country may never overcome certain issues, including unemployment and the energy crisis.
Mbeki was in conversation with students at an event at Unisa's ZK Matthews Great Hall in Pretoria, organised by the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public & International Affairs on Wednesday.
For the second time in two months, the country plunged into load shedding stage 6, which is the highest stage in the country's history.
Currently, Eskom is rolling out load shedding stage 5, which has a negative impact on the economy, small businesses and citizens.
Mbeki said Eskom’s leadership should be held to account for the current challenges.
However, he said a blind eye could not turn away from the fact that the challenges affecting the energy giant started as far back as 2007, during his tenure as president.
“In order to deal with this electricity thing, it sure is to keep the lights on now. But I think to understand the company better, you need to go further back. Who took decisions like that? One explanation I have seen is that the managers were in charge of this. It said they want to increase the possibilities for black economic empowerment so that if you now have 20 contracts, that means 20 black companies. If you had one contract, they supposedly meant one black company, that's the explanation that was given, but that's part of the crisis,” said Mbeki.
He further said: “As you can see now when Eskom announced that the reason for having level four, level five or whatever, is because there's a power failure at Medupi and Kusile, and the old ones. Why are the new ones misbehaving like the old ones? I'm saying we need to understand all of that in order to contribute to the solution of the problem of Eskom”.
Mbeki said the country needs to adopt the neglected African intelligentsia. He said this would allow more input on solutions to some of the problems faced by the country, and this includes the poor-performing economy not bearing fruit for results.
“At the heart of our problems, economic problems, social problems, political problems, is this failure in terms of our economy. Every day, the number of our people who are hungry increases, and the number of people who are unemployed increases. The suffering of ordinary people is getting worse. So if you want to turn the corner with regard to that, you've got to come back to this matter.
“What do we do with regard to this economy, and when the business people say we are ready to invest in infrastructure, long-term investments in terms of infrastructure, the money is there? And they are talking of monies that are worth more than R10 trillion. But these are huge sums of money that are available, and we don't need to go to the World Bank or out of the country anywhere. It's possible to focus on the matter of recovery of the economy, comes back to the question of leadership,” Mbeki said.
ntombi,nkosi@inl.co.za