Fana Mokoena: ‘Keeping the lights on can’t be the main mandate at Eskom because it will destroy the utility’

Former EFF MP Fana Mokoena has taken aim at President Cyril Ramaphosa after Eskom implemented stage 6 load-shedding.

Eskom pushed load-shedding to stage 6 on Sunday after several breakdowns at its power stations.

Stage 6 load-shedding took effect after a generation unit each at Kusile and Kriel power stations tripped.

“As we speak, Ramaphosa is jet-setting in the US and Europe, achieving absolutely nothing for the people of SA, yet the country is on stage 6 of load-shedding, which his presidential campaign said it would eradicate,” said Mokoena.

“Keeping the lights on cannot be the main mandate at Eskom because it will happen at the bigger cost of completely destroying the utility. This stage 6 thing is a side show. The damage Ramaphosa, [public enterprises minister Pravin] Gordhan and [Eskom CEO André] De Ruyter are doing at Eskom is of a much grander scale.”

Mokoena said Ramaphosa’s decision to cut short his international trip to address load-shedding was pointless. 

The president made the decision to come back to SA after “an urgent virtual meeting with all the relevant ministers and officials”.

His spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said Ramaphosa “wanted a briefing on what led to so many units tripping, taking the country back to a situation that had been managed”.

He said Ramaphosa had led “eight years of complete-uselessness at the highest level".

“Leader of government business and chair of the Eskom War Room in the so-called ‘nine wasted years’. He leads an ineffective government and collapsing Eskom in his own ‘four years of nothing’ as president,” Mokoena said. 

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