If you, like most South Africans, don't have much of a clue about what's happening at Megawatt Park, it's no coincidence. With a power grid that lost 45% of its available capacity on Tuesday, an executive suite with tumbleweeds blowing through it and rolling blackouts every few hours, Eskom seems to have stopped bothering trying to communicate.Mercifully on Friday, the highly rated Brian Molefe was announced as the stand-in CEO to plug the hole left by suspended CEO Tshediso Matona. Let's hope Molefe is far less prickly than Matona - if he wants Eskom's message to get out, that is.For months during the hot flush of load-shedding fury last year, the voice of Eskom was that of its mild-mannered spokesman, statistician Andrew Etzinger.Late last year, if you tuned into just about any radio show during the day, you'd hear Etzinger copping flak for traffic backed up from Sandton to Fourways, or having a strip torn off him by Elsie from Boksburg, who missed the 7de Laan omnibus due to load-shedding.A beekeeper who also sells honey from his "Happy Little Farm" in the Magaliesberg, Etzinger said last year that "when my parents met they were both working at Eskom, so it's in my blood".Then Etzinger "misspoke". Or rather, Matona misspoke, when he said "one unexpected event" could push Eskom to lose control and spark a catastrophic blackout.Etzinger's mistake? Explaining that this wasn't what Matona meant, and that it was just "bad grammar".Matona was reportedly furious, and Etzinger was banished into the netherworld of "demand-side management", or whatever they're calling purgatory at Megawatt Park.Now ex-journalist Khulu Phasiwe has been handed the worst hospital pass in spin-doctoring's history.Phasiwe, softly spoken and likeable, seems also to have had no luck getting much sense from above.Of course, quite who Phasiwe would go to for answers in the Hollywoodland of Megawatt Park - where everyone is in an acting post and no one is actually directing the show - is anyone's guess.So in that vacuum this is what happens: for the past three weeks, this newspaper has sent through numerous queries to Eskom about its lucrative list of coal contracts.In particular, questions were asked about how it was that the politically connected Gupta family had seemingly managed to snare coal contracts from Eskom.The first set of four questions, sent on March 27, was about possible interference in the coal contracts and included a request for details about the dealings with the Guptas.Eskom ignored it completely.It also ignored the next two sets of questions, sent on April2 and April8, on this subject.This was important, considering that the Gupta-owned Idwala, for example, did not have a water licence at last count, and was breaking the law by mining in a wetland.We also asked how it was that our sources told us that "Eskom has conducted a witch-hunt against individuals who raise concerns about several of these contracts".How did Eskom respond? How do you imagine an entity would respond that should be trying to win back public confidence?Well, weeks late, it sent a one-line statement, ignoring the questions, and saying its board "is in the process of launching an investigation into Eskom's operations, and the specific issues that you have raised will be addressed in that probe".Gupta spokesman Gary Naidoo rejects any notion that there was political interference. He says the Guptas have "become accustomed to receiving media enquiries based on wild, untested, unfounded statements made by unnamed sources".He's probably right. The Guptas are often unfairly derided as bogey-men, and whatever deals they get are immediately derided as supposedly emblematic of an insidious system of seedy political patronage.But the family has not exactly helped itself by antics such as swinging it so that their plane full of wedding guests could be dropped off at the Waterkloof air force base. In that context, lucrative deals dished out by a state-owned entity like Eskom to the Guptas deserve scrutiny.But Eskom and its political masters seem not to care that the public has no insight into how it makes its decisions, or spends our money.Perhaps it is redundant to talk of a lack of leadership when the leaders have been put on ice. But if, in the absence of executives, Cyril Ramaphosa and Lynne Brown are supposedly in charge, this is their failure...