The majority union at power utility Eskom, the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (Numsa), yesterday said that it was perplexed by the Department of Public Enterprises’s SOS call to Solidarity to help fill a skills shortage linked to “aggressive transformation”.
Trade union Solidarity earlier this year offered to help Department of Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan to recruit at least scarce skills for the power utility, saying it had a list of more than 1 000 skilled people who were willing to assist and would set up a panel to select the top 100 people.
Reports emerged yesterday that the minister had formally requested Solidarity to help with the recruitment of power station engineers - including mechanical, nuclear, electrical, system and maintenance skills, as well as senior artisans and plant operators for coal and nuclear power stations.
Numsa’s spokesperson, Phakamile Hlubi-Majola, said, “What recruitment process is this that the minister is personally driving? This is not normal. There are HR policies in place and what Pravin is doing is highly irregular. At the same time this is clearly an attempt to reverse BBBEE. We reject the fact that Solidarity claims the lack of skills is due to ‘aggressive BBBEE’.”
Hlubi-Majola said Numsa was not aware of a work-skills plan at Eskom requiring the intervention.
“Black engineers at Eskom are highly qualified. Many of them are more qualified than their white colleagues. Pravin is proving once again that he knows nothing about Eskom. And, therefore, he has no solutions to the problems facing the power utility,” Hlubi-Majola said.
Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha said in response to queries that Gordhan was a shareholder representative, but recruitment did not fall in his terrain.
“Eskom has forever been talking about procuring skills to fill gaps in its systems,” he said.
“We cannot discuss the current Eskom skills crisis without looking at the historic context. Eskom was reckless in the implementation of a transformation programme and, since 2000, they offered packages to skilled Eskom workers to make space, in today’s money approximately R1.8 billion was paid out,” chief executive Dirk Hermann said.
Meanwhile, Solidarity is up in arms over Eskom’s latest application submitted to the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa). Solidarity says it will oppose the proposal with all the legal recourse at its disposal.
This comes after Eskom in its latest application requested among other things that a tariff of R938 per month be levied on consumers who are generating power themselves.
Solidarity’s Hermann said, “It is one thing if Eskom does not want to contribute towards solving South Africa’s power crisis. However, by making proposals such as this Eskom is changing from being a millstone around the neck to being an enemy of reliable power supply. If Eskom does not want to be involved in solutions itself we will litigate until at least Eskom no longer stands in the way of others who want to solve the matter.”
Solidarity argues that, right now, the country should go out of its way to encourage and facilitate private power generation while Eskom’s tariff proposal only exacerbates the situation.
According to Solidarity, South Africa’s only hope of getting out of the power crisis lies in small-scale power generation that is taking place on a large scale, and Solidarity is of the opinion that it is through proposals such as this one that Eskom is turning itself from being an obstacle to power security into being a threat to it.
“Instead of encouraging private power generation, Eskom now wants to tax it. Paying tax for a service is one thing; to pay taxes for no service is something totally different. Eskom now indeed wants to tax South Africans who are starting to provide their own services as a result of Eskom’s inability to supply power. Simply by tabling such a proposal creates huge uncertainty. The proposal should be eliminated as soon as possible,” Hermann said.
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