It was alarming this week to hear Eskom board chair Mteto Nyati argue, first on social media and then in a radio interview, that BLSA and Business Unity South Africa are guilty of the kind of political interference we have spent years campaigning against. He went further, suggesting that if we are not simply accepting Eskom’s own account of the matter, our advocacy must be “driven by… other interests” rather than the interests of the country.
I want to address this directly, because the substance matters and because questioning BLSA’s integrity is not something I will leave unanswered. Nyati is fundamentally mistaken both on the motives for our advocacy and what good governance demands of the Eskom board.
On the underlying principle, Nyati and I agree entirely. Rules should bind the powerful as they bind everyone else. Business leaders who ignore established procedures and ask state-owned enterprise boards for favours, while publicly demanding clean governance, deserve the criticism he levelled at them. If individuals are doing what he describes, they should be named and held to account, and we support that without reservation.
But conflating that behaviour with BLSA’s position on the independent transmission system operator (ITSO) is very disingenuous and gets the substance completely the wrong way around, in three ways.
First, this is not a private request for a favour. It is a public, published position grounded in law. Section 34A of the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act requires that the ITSO, as the licensed transmitter, control the network it operates. President Cyril Ramaphosa said the same thing explicitly in his February State of the Nation Address, confirming the new entity “will have ownership and control of transmission assets”, and the Presidency reaffirmed this again in June. Asking the president to implement his own government’s stated policy is the opposite of asking for an exception. It is asking Eskom’s leadership to follow the wishes of its shareholder and align with public policy. That is the essence of good governance, not a departure from it.
Second, our position is designed to resist precisely the pattern Nyati rightly criticises. The whole reason for separating ownership from Eskom is to remove the conflict of interest that arises when the same entity is both generator and gatekeeper of the grid – an entity that runs the network but doesn’t own it cannot be relied on to treat every generator on it equally. Structural separation will ensure that insiders or incumbents are not favoured. When the operator of the transmission network is institutionally separate from electricity generation, it is better able to provide non-discriminatory access to all generators and to inspire confidence among investors that access decisions will be made impartially. Describing advocacy for that separation as if it were itself a request for favourable treatment is the inverse of what we are advocating for.
Third, what Nyati criticises and what he describes experiencing from individual business leaders is undisclosed, personal, and made in private, away from any public record. What BLSA does is the opposite: we publish our position, we sign joint letters with BUSA, we engage Parliament and the Presidency in the open, and we track outcomes through the BLSA Reform Tracker for anyone to see. Transparency is the distinguishing feature of legitimate advocacy, and it is exactly what separates it from the behaviour he is right to condemn.
There is a further point on the substance itself. What Nyati described in his 702 radio interview – that Eskom’s board and “a minister in that line” have concluded the assets should remain within the National Transmission Company South Africa and Eskom – is the position Eskom itself proposed in December, and which the president publicly overruled two months later. An operator that does not own the assets it manages has no balance sheet of its own, and therefore no capacity to raise the financing needed for the R440bn transmission expansion South Africa urgently needs. It would also remain permanently dependent on Eskom for its financial standing, which is the opposite of the independence Nyati says matters. Continuing to advocate for that outcome in the media is a position at odds with agreed policy. This raises legitimate concerns about governance and accountability. Eskom should not be allowed to act in conflict with agreed policy while frustrating a competitive electricity market that is plainly in the public interest.
We are not asking for anything beyond what Eskom’s own shareholder has already made clear is public policy. We are asking that Eskom stick with that policy and implement the unbundling without further delay.
Business remains committed to Eskom’s success. We have said so consistently, including on the utility’s genuine operational turnaround under CEO Dan Marokane. But that support cannot extend to accepting a rewriting of settled policy, still less a suggestion that our motives require justifying. Our positions have been published consistently and argued openly. They are available for anyone to scrutinise. And we will continue to advocate for the full liberalisation of the electricity market.
Written by BLSA CEO, Busi Mavuso