It’s 34 years since I worked for State-owned power utility Eskom. At the time, I was working for a consulting engineering practice in East London. It was a very noble consulting engineering practice and had very interesting partners and it was obvious (judging from the smart cars they drove) that the partners made a decent living.

The only problem was that I wasn’t making a decent living. At the time, the banks didn’t encourage customers to generate huge debt, and regular harsh communications from my bank were starting to wear me down. By accident, somebody asked me if I’d like to go to work for Eskom as the senior engineer for operations. I told them I knew nothing about power systems. He said not to worry; I would soon learn.

So, I went to work for Eskom as senior engineer for operations and it was a fabulous job. In some other column, I will go into the details of what I did, but just believe me, it was great. At the time that I joined Eskom, the utility had changed its whole system of management. Instead of having one huge central control branch in Johannesburg with a whole lot of sub-branches whose function was to distribute and recover power costs, Eskom was changed into a system of five major separate units, each with a manager, all of whom reported to central management. The result of this system was to relieve Eskom of a massive management burden and give each of the units the ability to set its own costs and salaries and to hire and fire more or less at will.

We must remember that this was still during the time of apartheid. So, because Eskom didn’t pay some of its staff (black staff) very well, it was providing users with some of the cheapest power in the world. Working for Eskom at the time was great. Everybody’s salary was at least twice some of the normal engineering salaries in the private sector and there were other benefits.

Eskom promoted the idea of ‘MSP’, which stood for ‘Methods, Systems and Philosophies’ (I think), but everybody just translated this as ‘Meetings, Seminars and Parties’, of which there were plenty. It would be incorrect to say you could have whatever equipment you wished to have to keep the power system going, but it was a fact that you could have a great deal of equipment, some of which might not have been necessary. With such equipment support and a staff massively motivated by a great income, Eskom ran very well indeed.

If we compare the Eskom of today, we see a very different picture. The Eskom CEO, André de Ruyter, is doing a good job, but he is running an Eskom which is coming back from the dead. Eskom’s operations for the past eight years have been run by crooks and ignorant managers. Unbridled theft has occurred virtually everywhere. The two power stations recently constructed, Medupi and Kusile, are massively overpriced and were fraught with corruption during the construction period. As everybody knows, power outages occur every month and this has happened over the past eight years. There is wide-scale organised corruption and theft, even at the highest level. While De Ruyter and his team are doing their best to improve things and are succeeding, it is a very tough road for them and very tough for anybody running a business in South Africa who would like that business to have a consistent electricity supply.

The question we all have to ask is: Why were things so good when I was there, and are now so bad? The answer would probably take months to explain. In the next few articles, I am going to write more detail of how Eskom went from hero to zero and how it’s coming back. In the interim, there is something every South African should pray for or, if not pray, fervently wish for: that the current management should continue to stay with Eskom and look after its administration and direct its future.