As SA faces its biggest power crisis in the democratic era, Eskom executives are divided on the critical skills deficit hurting its ability to provide electricity.
Several senior leaders at the power utility have said there is disagreement along racial lines about the skills issue in the company's upper echelons after a repeated SOS from public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan to those with experience to come to the rescue.
One insider said: “You know when you talk about the issue of skills at Eskom, even at executive level, it depends on whether you’re speaking to a black person or a white person, and you will hear a different answer.
“There is a feeling that when whites say there are no skills, they are talking about blacks who are now in charge of most of these power stations. The blacks feel that the whites only say this because they do not recognise their capacity.”
Another said: “The view from human resources is that Eskom should not talk about the lack of skills and how this contributes to load-shedding because it will anger some of the unions who feel that it is a concession that the aggressive affirmative action and employment equity that was implemented in the past has failed.”
The issue hogged the headlines this week when trade union Solidarity claimed that Gordhan had asked them directly for a list of names of those who could be recruited to help stabilise Eskom. Gordhan's department said the letter to the union was in response to Solidarity answering his initial call in May for all South Africans to help.
The claim by Solidarity led to outrage from labour unions and ordinary South Africans on social media as they construed this to mean Gordhan was racialising the issue.
Public enterprises spokesperson Richard Mantu said: “The issue of skills and experience or the lack thereof is being politicised, which is unfortunate at a time when constructive and pragmatic solutions are required.”
Meanwhile Eskom, which implemented load-shedding intermittently this week, is slowly recovering from power losses that resulted in stage 6 load-shedding earlier this month.
There is a feeling that when whites say there are no skills, they are talking about blacks who are now in charge of most of these power stations
The power utility revealed that its technical skills is so dire thatits coal-fired stations are unable to staff all shifts at all levels, especially with senior plant operators, panel controllers and shift supervisors, leading to excessive overtime and the cancellation of crucial refresher and progression training.
The training is critical for Eskom as more than 60% of all technical employees leaving the generation division have between 11 and more than 30 years' experience, while 80% of those who replace them have less than 10 years' experience.
“It takes on average eight years to train an external cadet to become a proficient panel operator. [The] trainer pipeline was no more, and some stations ended up with no-one to train recruits,” Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha said.
Mantshantsha added that the loss of experienced staff with critical and scarce skills poses serious challenges and risks to Eskom and the country because it contributes to power plants being unreliable and unavailable.
“Despite the good progress made in filling core and critical vacancies it must be noted that the majority of the recruitment is internally driven as per the HR process, hence very [little] new critical talent is attracted and recruited from the external market. It is also evident that as much as we are recruiting and filling vacancies, we are losing skills at the same rate.
“The majority of these vacancies are filled with resources meeting the minimum academic qualifications, on potential, with much less experience and the requisite skills to build and sustain a robust workforce.” .
The younger staff replacing the old hands are not getting the necessary on-the-job training because training has not been structured and has also been neglected, Mantshantsa said. “For example, the engineer-in-training (EIT) programmes have been discontinued. This means that years of tenure does not necessarily equate to competence,” he said.
Over the past quarter, Eskom has lost 504 people across all levels in its operations, mostly to resignations or retirement, with a cumulative 12,160 years of related experience. Of those, 209 were in generation.
One of the issues compounding the skills shortage is a freeze on external recruitment since 2018, which was meant to reduce the workforce by encouraging internal redeployment.
An audit of the generation division has uncovered that in the past 10 years Eskom lost 15 experienced senior managers to resignation and retirement.
Eskom has also seen a high turnover of power station general managers. Of the 10 appointed in 2021, only four remain in their jobs.
A black senior manager, who asked not to be named, said the high turnover was one of the reasons power stations were not running optimally. He blamed the impatience of the Eskom leadership wanting rapid results.
“It is nonsensical to put someone in a power station and then remove them in six months. How can you expect results in such a short period, and then you talk about skills? These are the same guys who have grown up in these plants, and worked there when they were performing,” he said.
Mantshantsha said Eskom was addressing deficiencies through targeted external recruitment, as well as restarting competence and skills development programmes.
“Eskom is making use of external skilled resources and will continue to do so to augment skills gaps in the organisation, and to provide accelerated development and skills transfer through mentoring and coaching of employees,” he said.
“Eskom is engaging various stakeholders and other parties who want to help to acquire specific skills to further support generation where there are shortages. This is particularly the case to address the shortage of critical skills as training was neglected.”
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