Eskom's loading shedding crisis 16-01-08

 

Eskom’s ‘load shedding’ crisis

The Congress of South African Trade Unions shares people’s anger at the enormous disruption to their lives and the economic prospects for the country caused by Eskom’s ‘load shedding’. It has become a serious national embarrassment and could have a major impact on economic growth and job creation.

We are particularly concerned at reports of discrimination in the way in which power cuts are being imposed, with much longer outages in poor communities than in the affluent formerly white suburbs, who have better access to the media through which to complain. We demand that at the very least Eskom communicate far more effectively with the public to inform us in good time when power will go off and for how long.

COSATU accepts that Eskom are not to blame for the crisis we now face. They warned the government years ago that they needed money to invest in new power stations, and applied to the government for this. But the government refused to provide the money, which President Mbeki has now admitted and apologised for.

This was because at the time that Eskom made the application, the government were set on privatising it and other public utilities, and selling them off to the highest bidder. They thus made Eskom to be inefficient.

COSATU consistently opposed privatisation precisely because we insisted that it must be a national service, efficiently providing secure and affordable power to the people and to industry. This could never be achieved by a utility that was motivated instead to maximise its profits. We welcome the government’s rejection of the planned privatisation.

We demand that the government and industry now speeds up the process of providing Eskom with the money they need for capital investment, so that we can bring an end to the crisis as quickly as possible. We also repeat our demand that Eskom does not impose the whole burden on the consumers, as they have proposed, and remain opposed to their planned 14.2% tariff increase.