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Public firms' boss paints rosy picture

The Medupi Power Station near Lephalale. Picture Credit: Gallo Images
The Medupi Power Station near Lephalale. Picture Credit: Gallo Images

Eskom's "war room", established at the height of South Africa's energy crisis, has been closed down, parliament heard.

Public enterprises director-general Mogokare Seleke told the parliamentary portfolio committee on public enterprises that as the situation had improved at Eskom, the "war room" had been closed down.

The "war room", headed up by Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, was established in December 2014 in a bid to deal with the energy crisis when the country was experiencing daily load shedding.

It developed a five-point plan to offer immediate and longer term strategies to prevent load shedding.

The first point in the plan involved emergency measures to ensure that Eskom's plants were properly maintained without creating further disruptions to the grid.

Seleke said that a group of young engineers were basically playing "Tetris game" to move resources around to coordinate maintenance of all of Eskom's plants without creating an energy shortage.

Medupi's unit 6 had also meanwhile come online, allowing for more power to be fed into the grid. SA is currently experiencing a six-month load shedding-free streak.

The five-point plan included co-generation agreements, gas imports, coal independent power producers (IPP) and demand side management by liaising with some of the most energy intensive users.

Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Petterson told Parliament earlier this month that there were IPPs for gas and coal and said she hoped that nuclear would be handled through the IPP office too.

Seleke, meanwhile, said other state-owned companies were also starting to show signs of improvement.

South African Express, which is currently at the centre of talks over whether to merge state-owned airlines, had also moved from the "urgent attention" column to the "close monitoring" column.

Denel had moved from "close monitoring" and was on par with some of the better performing state-owned entities such as Transnet and Sentech when it came to performance monitoring.

Seleke said that of those companies falling under his department, almost all had leadership in place with only Safcol and Transnet without chief executives.

Safcol is also without a chief financial officer currently but Seleke said these appointments were at "an advanced stage".

Several committee members questioned the positive news, with acting chair, ANC MP Zukiswa Rantho saying it appeared to her as if Seleke was "too defensive".

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