Former president Thabo Mbeki has accused Eskom of self-sabotage for ignoring the coal shortage reports by the internal monitoring system in 2007.
This failure later resulted in inflated coal prices and contributed to the country’s first major loadshedding crisis.
Addressing delegates at the uMkhonto weSizwe Liberation War Veteran’s inaugural conference, Mbeki described Eskom as a case of counter-revolutionary sabotage.
He said the company’s internal monitoring system had flagged declining coal reserves, but these alerts were disregarded until the problem escalated into a crisis.
He explained that each Eskom power station was required to maintain a minimum coal supply of 22 days at all times, and the monitoring system was designed to enforce this rule.
However, alerts showing that coal supplies were becoming inefficient were overlooked from as early as November 2007.
“It was an internally generated crisis, and the immediate consequences were that, according to its rules and regulations, Eskom declared an emergency, and what an emergency meant was that now you don’t have to tender coal; you have to buy it where it is,” Mbeki said.
“That immediately doubled the price of coal at Eskom overnight. It was deliberate; it was deliberately caused.”
Mbeki not aware of power cuts causes
As president at the time, Mbeki said he was unaware of the root cause of the power cuts and apologised during the State of the Nation Address.
“The first national breakdown, the national loadshedding, was in January 2008. I was president of the republic at the time.
“When I had delivered the State of the Nation Address, I had to apologise to the nation for whatever we had done as the government that was wrong, which had resulted in this loss of electricity. We apologised because we didn’t know what had happened.
“I’m saying we apologised in January 2008 in the State of the Nation Address because we didn’t know this truth; this truth was dug out many years later by the Special Investigating Unit.”
According to IOL, Mbeki first made his public apology for the country’s blackouts related to Eskom’s loadshedding 18 years ago.
“Eskom was right, and the government was wrong,” the publication quoted Mbeki at the time while he was speaking at an ANC fundraising dinner in Bloemfontein, after indicating that the government had been asked earlier to invest more in electricity to keep pace with the country’s economic growth.
