Maroga plays race card on Olsen memo
The last thing we need to do is racialise the debate over Eskom's mismanagement, at a time when securing energy supplies is so essential for the future of all South Africans. We ought to focus on the facts, and the facts alone. So it is extremely regrettable that Jacob Maroga has now come out and lambasted Susan Olsen's report for "reflect[ing] the white supervision phenomenon in Eskom" - ostensibly on the grounds that it "was written by a white person" (see here).
Likewise, it is disconcerting that the ANC and likeminded groups appear intent on reading race into the crisis at Eskom. The question facing the ANC government right now is simple: does it want electricity, or does it want another misguided debate about race? If it is concerned about the former, it needs to ensure that Eskom has the best possible leadership structures, systems and policies; if it wants the latter, it needs to put the ANC Youth League in charge of Eskom.
Susan Olsen's confidential memo, which was released publicly by the DA in September, showed how Jacob Maroga, while Eskom CEO, had been warned that Eskom's internal practices were precipitating an energy crisis in South Africa, and how, "without intervention", Eskom's primary energy generation faced "collapse", and would not be able to "meet current needs, much less future requirements" (see here). This memo was delivered to Maroga just six months prior to the rolling blackouts that hit South Africa in early 2008, but his only action following it appears to have been to fire Olsen.
Now it seems he may have even discarded Olsen on the grounds of her race. In his ‘Chief Executive Strategy Document', which he has now released publicly, he claims that the Olsen memo is one of the signs of the "white supervision phenomenon at Eskom", and claims that the fact that "[t]he Olsen report was written by a white person" is significant in this respect.
This is a shameful attempt at fostering up racial antagonisms where absolutely none existed. Susan Olsen is a well-known energy expert, and a partner at the internationally respected Wingfield Consultancy research group in Boston, Massachusetts. To label her complaints as carrying some or other racial undertone would be dubious to begin with, and the fact that her concerns proved to be accurate shows categorically that cries of racism are just a smokescreen.
Maroga also now claims that the issues raised in the Olsen memo "were already being addressed", despite the fact that the very basis for the memo is the fact that these claims were not being addressed, and that if they went unaddressed South Africa would likely face a crisis in its energy generation.
Mr. Maroga needs to explain why, if the cost plus contracts and the array of other matters identified by Olsen were being "addressed", we still endured a period of extended ‘load shedding' six months later?
Statement issued by Cobus Schmidt, MP, Democratic Alliance deputy shadow minister of energy, November 8 2009
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