Kevin Mileham: Struggling ESKOM plunges millions into the dark - again…

Millions of South Africans were plunged into peak-hour darkness again last night. In this interview with BizNews, Kevin Mileham, the Democratic Alliance (DA) spokesperson on Electricity and Energy, says that ESKOM's fleet is running at 28% unplanned outages - and that “this last week, they've burned 210 million rands worth of diesel to keep the lights on.” As for sabotage, Mileham says: “I think that we've come a long way in that respect, that there's less, to use that word, sabotage than there was before… and I think that certainly the department and ESKOM are taking steps in that regard to weed those people out and take the necessary action against them. It's not happening as quickly as I would like, but there are steps being taken.” ESKOM is also battling the financial impact of corruption . “I think one of the challenges that we've got is, and again, I'm going to emphasise State Capture as being part of the problem, that we had a massively corrupt entity where things ran years over time, cost more than double what they were budgeted for. And as a result, ESKOM's balance sheet took a huge hammering.” Meanwhile, Mileham expresses concerns around the National Transmission Company which he says “needs to be really fully independent…it needs to be out of ESKOM's control and more independent minded so that there's a level playing field between ESKOM and the private sector generators.” He notes that ESKOM still behaves in a “very monopolistic fashion; that they aren't willing to play fairly and competitively with other role players”.