The private sector is ready to work with government in bringing the much needed investment into the country.
This transpired at the Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) in Durban meeting where one of the Presidential Special Envoy for Investment, Phumzile Langeni, addressed the gathering.
BLSA chairman, Jabu Mabuza, who is also the chair of the Eskom board, admitted that the wage negotiations at the power utility took off in a wrong foot with the company offering zero percent wage increment.
“The consequence of our pricing has led Eskom to the situation that very few people are still on our system. We actually need to pay people to come off the grid, so the challenge is, we do not have all that excessive capacity, but we have a situation that we have run out of clients that can pay.”
“We have not even started thinking about what the future of Eskom should look like – even when you are dealing with a fossil type of energy source, when you are dealing with the issue of wages, I think we could have handled this issue better as Eskom… it was perhaps tackled wrong to go to the negotiation chamber and say we are going to have a zero percent increase. I think that was a bit wrong, and the timing… the decision to announce our cost cutting measures was earlier than the day we walked into the negotiation chamber,” says Mabuza.
