Eskom Charman Mteto Nyati speaks on his life and business. Mteto Nyati is a former MTN and Altron CEO. He is a mechanical engineer by training and has an honorary degree in IT. He spoke with Kaya FM after South Africa has gone for 170 days without load shedding.
Mteto Nyati explained that the problem at Eskom was leadership at many levels withing the organisation. So when he came into Eskom after he was appointed by Pravin 2 years ago, in October 2022, they decided that they were not going to be a board that and just meets every quarter. we decided that we are going to meet our sleeves and meet with staff, going to the different power station and we came to the conclusion that the problem was defined in the wrong way. people were saying we had an aging fleet and the answer was that we should retire that aging fleet and allow the private sector to take over.
When we looked at this problem deeper, the problem was the unreliability of the fleet. So the answer became, maintain the fleet.
What we then needed to ask was:
– Can we then work with the original equipment manufacturers? For example if you own a Toyota, you go and take it to a Toyota dealer.
– The next question was do we have the right funds? Can we spend money to do this maintenance? We didn’t. So we went to national treasury and get this debt relief tat helped us to do the maintenance that we did.
– As we removed the equipment, we had huge loadshedding and we burnt a lot of diesel, R30 billion worth of diesel in that first year. But that was a short term pain. Now we are seeing the results of that work that was done.
– What was happening was that at the time when we were about to start with our generation recovery plan, that month the CEO resigned.
– At the time I was not the chairman.
– At that time the President appointed Dr Ramagoba as Minister of electricity who represented us very well. But some people also wanted to hear from Eskom directly. So he helped us a lot when we did not have a CEO.
Incentives
We also realised that our employees had low morale. A previous minister had removed bonuses and this was important for driving behaviour. So went to the minister and said people need increases, we cant have a CFO that is a contractor and we noticed that these decisions are big and they needed to be done by the Minister. So we went to him and he allowed us to be part of the decision making. After we implemented the incentives, people are driven and this is large.
Acting positions
There was so many Acting positions within the organisation. So we pressed in the board that we need to have permanent people in those key roles. One of the role that was acting was the head of Generation. As we began to have discussions, we got Bheki Nxumalo who had been moved aside and we talked to him and he is responsible for all the turnaround that has happened at Eskom.
Other topics
1. The GNU has allowed all political players to put South Africa first.
2. When I look at this, it means we are looking in the right direction.
3. Other state enterprises are reaching out to Eskom to see howe we have done it.
4. Shift in corporate culture
5. Sidelining of talented engineers
6. Dealing with corruption
Mteto Nyati is the author of the book betting on a dark year
Please watch the video below for more details
