Ramaphosa: Previous administrations partly to blame for Eskom woes
President Cyril Ramaphosa has pinned some of the problems at Eskom on previous government administrations.
Speaking during a sitting of the KZN ANC provincial executive committee in Pietermaritzburg on Monday - the president said there were plans to expand generation capacity in the 1990s.
“In 1998, Eskom came to government and said we need to build power stations because the economy is going to keep growing and the population is going to increase. And government said, ‘no wait don’t build, the private sector will come in’. As it turned out, that didn’t happen, and it was only in 2008 when we finally woke up.”
He said the situation was later made worse by non-maintenance at Eskom.
”Over time, we did not maintain our power stations. And, in fact, we went through a period at Eskom where the word that was issued was ‘don’t maintain, just run the power stations and keep the lights on’. Particularly as we went to 2010, so staff at Eskom just kept the light on.”
