Eskom arrests show ‘gradual but meaningful progress’, says Ramokgopa

Since April 1 last year, 2,147 criminal cases relating to Eskom have been opened, of which 1,586 are under investigation and for which 126 arrests have been made. 

These are the figures released by electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa at Monday morning’s briefing on progress made on security issues related to the implementation of the energy action plan. 

“This is gradual but meaningful progress,” he said, adding there was also an ongoing focus on fraud, corruption and security within Eskom.

Police minister Bheki Cele was scheduled for the briefing but was drawn away by other emergency commitments.

Ramokgopa said an operational investigative unit was embedded within Eskom, tasked with attending to problems and power stations and within coal yards through regular visits. 

“We are looking at the configuration of the anatomy of a criminal operation by looking at the sources. We’ve been checking on secondhand dealers and will elaborate on that later. At this stage we have carried out 15,043 compliance inspections, and we are cutting the arteries of syndicates,” he said, estimating the value of physical recoveries of stolen property at “just shy of R94m”. 

The long-awaited update was to give specifics on progress in regard to crime and security – workstream five of the nine streams managed by the national electricity crisis committee.

Admitting Eskom had “dropped the ball on planning” last week, Ramokgopa said they had learnt “significant lessons” from the abrupt return to stage six load shedding in the coldest week of the year so far. 

“We will do everything possible to avoid that happening again. We know it disrupted lives and businesses, and we profusely apologise,” he said, admitting the grid “remains vulnerable and susceptible despite the amount of reprieve we worked for”. 

Explaining the “perfect storm” of events that led to the disastrous situation, he said the inclement weather “starved us of sun and so people no longer had the privilege of support from PV solar”. 

This prompted consumers with solar systems to not only draw on the grid for their needs but to also recharge their batteries.

This surge in demand was compounded by plummeting electricity generation in a situation where Eskom’s buffer and storage capacity were not fully replenished.  

“We were caught off guard, and we are working on this,” Ramokgopa said, adding the country had since been moved back to lower stages of load-shedding. 

He said low availability of extra power, rocketing demand, increased planned outages for maintenance and partial load losses (where power suppliers are unable to perform at maximum capacity) and delays in recovery had all collided. 

Acknowledging that the accuracy of load shedding schedules was integral to household planning, Ramokgopa admitted sudden shifts out of promised lower stages of load shedding undermined Eskom’s credibility. 

“And it is important that we remain credible or the public won’t listen to us as we are not a reliable partner,” he said, promising that by July 18 Eskom will have brought in an extra 6,800MW of additional generating capacity to boost performance. 

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