South Africans paid dearly for load-shedding. It was a time when factories lost countless shifts. And many small businesses closed their doors. Across the country, households arranged their lives around a schedule. The story of how load shedding was ended deserves to be told with the same seriousness.
The Daily Investor article of October 25, 2026, which traces the end of load-shedding to a phone call from President Ramaphosa to Discovery founder Adrian Gore, falls well short of that seriousness. It places a pledge above an engineering programme and relegates the people who did the work to a supporting role when they should be the stars of this narrative. story.
The Black Business Council regards a correction as necessary.
A pledge is not a maintenance plan
The Daily Investor article places extraordinary weight on a pledge published on July 27, 2023 and signed by 155 chief executives. It presents that pledge as the bedrock of private participation in the reforms that ended load shedding. Mr Gore, for his part, ranks such mechanisms among the most important things business has ever done.
Load shedding is an operational problem. It yields to boiler tube repairs, disciplined outage schedules, competent plant managers, available spares and units returned to service. No one is suggesting that the goodwill of business was not welcome. But sentiment, no matter how positive, does not fire and keep the turbines on.
The article’s timeline offers the claim little support. The pledge arrived in the middle of 2023, and 2022 and 2023 stand as the worst years of load shedding on record. The decisive turn came in 2024, as the recovery programme inside Eskom matured under new leadership. A serious account would ask how a statement of hope and positivity became megawatts on the grid. The article does not ask the question.
What actually changed at Eskom
In March 2023, Eskom initiated its Generation Operational Recovery Plan, centred on accelerating and executing planned maintenance. In April 2023, Bheki Nxumalo, a career Eskom engineer and former power station manager, became Group Executive for Generation and took charge of its implementation. He reviewed plant managers and senior staff across the fleet. Acting Chief Executive Calib Cassim stabilised the decline. In October 2023, Dr Mteto Nyati was appointed chairperson of the board, which held management to a two-year turnaround plan. Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa drove the Energy Action Plan from government.
On March 1, 2024, Dan Marokane assumed office as Group Chief Executive. He returned to an institution he knew, in a sector he understood. In his first 100 days, the unplanned capacity loss factor fell from 35.5% to 27.69%, and the energy availability factor rose from 53.7% to 61.29% for the year to date. The fleet has since exceeded the 70% availability target set by the board. In September 2026, government renewed Dr Nyati’s term, noting that the country had gone more than 490 days without power cuts.
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This is what engineering and systems’ excellence looks like. It is patient, unglamorous work, carried out by people who knew the plant, knew the institution and were given the authority to fix it. The article treats Mr Marokane’s arrival as a development that dovetailed with the efforts of business. That framing inverts cause and consequence.
The silence on André de Ruyter
The most revealing feature of the article lies in what it omits.
Load shedding reached its worst levels under André de Ruyter, who led Eskom from January 2020 to February 2023. He promised a significant reduction in load shedding from September 2021. It was an empty promise. Over de Ruyter’s tenure, the energy availability factor of the fleet fell from about 61% to about 53%. Mr de Ruyter has himself acknowledged that many would regard his term as a failure, and that promising to end load shedding was among his biggest mistakes.
Organised business welcomed his appointment in 2019 and presented him as the turnaround executive the country needed. The turnaround did not arrive on his watch. When it did arrive, Dr Nyati was clear that Mr de Ruyter could not claim the credit.
An honest account of the crisis would have to confront that record. It would have to explain why the executive so confidently endorsed by business fell short, and why those who followed him succeeded. It appears easier to replace one hero with another than to examine why the first one failed.
Priorities that were not the plant
During his tenure, Mr de Ruyter placed considerable emphasis on accelerated decarbonisation. He championed the decommissioning of the Komati power station with devastating consequences for the communities for whom this power station had been a lifeline. For de Ruyter, this shut-down was a showcase of the just energy transition and he argued loudly that refurbishing old coal stations would slow decarbonisation. Clive le Roux, a current Eskom director, has since said that the previous board’s plan for a fast shutdown of coal units left power station staff feeling they had no future.
Coal remains the baseload on which the stability of the grid rests. South Africa needs an energy transition. A transition that runs ahead of the reliability of the existing fleet, however, is a wager placed with the economy as the stake.
Considerable executive energy also went into a private intelligence operation. A R50 million investigation into crime and sabotage at Eskom, to which Business Leadership South Africa contributed R18 million, proceeded without the knowledge of the Eskom board. The head of the Special Investigating Unit later told Parliament that acting without board authority pointed to possible maladministration. Critics described the resulting allegations as uncorroborated.
Corruption at Eskom is real, and the Council has always supported its prosecution through proper channels. A parallel operation outside the governance of the board, however, is no substitute for running power stations. Its effect was a climate of suspicion inside the utility, in which experienced managers and engineers found themselves under the shadow of untested allegations. Public attention moved from the hard question, why the fleet kept deteriorating, to narratives of sabotage.
Organised business is not a neutral narrator
Business Leadership South Africa and the wider organised business community were participants in this saga, not observers. They welcomed the appointment. They funded the intelligence operation. They advocated vigorously for an accelerated renewables agenda. Some of that advocacy had merit. Private renewable investment and rooftop solar did ease pressure on the grid, and the Council recognises every business and household that invested in its own generation. The secondment of engineers by business was also welcome.
These contributions belong in the story, in proportion. An organisation that shaped so much of the strategy during the years of failure cannot now present itself as the author of the recovery.
The saviour habit
South Africa has a long habit of searching for a saviour and of finding him in a familiar place. When a white executive is appointed, he arrives as the rescuer. When he falls short, the failure is attributed to the system around him. When black technocrats succeed, the credit drifts elsewhere: to a phone call, a pledge, a book.
READ: De Ruyter part of Ramaphosa’s zero accountability legacy
This is not a question of Mr Gore’s sincerity. His concern for the country is not in doubt. It is a question of who is permitted to be the protagonist of South African success. The recovery at Eskom unsettles an enduring assumption about where excellence resides. That is precisely why its authorship should not be quietly rewritten.
Telling the story properly
The end of load shedding ranks among the most significant achievements of the democratic state in the past decade. It was delivered by a minister who set clear targets, a board that held management to account, a generation executive who knew every station, and a chief executive who returned to an institution he understood and steadied it. Thousands of Eskom engineers, artisans and operators did the rest.
It is understandable that Mr Gore is back in the news. He has a book to promote, The Four Principles, and every book deserves a good launch. Authors are also entitled to a generous reading of their own chapters. A book tour, however, is not a commission of inquiry. A promotional circuit should not become the occasion on which a largely tangential contribution is promoted to a starring role. Disciplined optimism is a fine principle. Disciplined accuracy would serve readers better.
The hunger for a white saviour should not become an excuse to diminish the extraordinary contribution of technocrats such as Marokane, and the team around him, in solving South Africa’s most pressing problem of the past decade.
When the story of load shedding is told, Mr Gore and his colleagues deserve a place in it. That place is a cameo.
- Matabane is the CEO of the Black Business Council.
- Load shedding in South Africa peaked in 2022 and 2023, with the decisive recovery beginning in 2024 under Eskom's Generation Operational Recovery Plan and new leadership.
- Dan Marokane became Eskom Group Chief Executive on March 1, 2024, leading improvements that reduced unplanned capacity loss from 35.5% to 27.69% and increased energy availability from 53.7% to 61.29%.
- André de Ruyter, Eskom CEO from January 2020 to February 2023, saw a decline in energy availability factor from about 61% to 53% and admitted his promise to reduce load shedding was a failure.
- During de Ruyter’s tenure, accelerated decarbonisation efforts included decommissioning Komati power station, which negatively impacted local communities and coal remained the baseload for grid stability.
- The Black Business Council argues the recovery should credit Eskom's engineers, artisans, and management rather than business pledges or individual corporate figures like Adrian Gore, emphasizing disciplined engineering work over symbolic gestures.
