Eskom, we were reminded last week, is drowning in debt and anticipates a shortfall of R250 billion in income over the next three years. Yet the organisation apparently still luxuriates in using race as a criterion in calling for tenders.
Accordingly, the business organisation Sakeliga has renewed its legal challenges to regulations under the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act of 2000. Promulgated in 2017 by the then finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, the regulations came into operation in April last year. Sakeliga's argument that they were unconstitutional was dismissed by the High Court in November last year. But the organisation is now taking this decision on appeal, as Politicsweb reported last week.
Sakeliga CEO Piet le Roux says that Eskom is "increasingly stipulating race-based pre-qualification criteria in its tender documents". Businesses that are "not 51% black-owned are frequently pre-emptively disqualified from consideration for award of a tender". They are indeed "rejected out of hand".
The claims are made in a letter to finance minister Tito Mboweni, Eskom CEO Phakamani Habede, and Mr Gordhan in his capacity as minister of public enterprises. The three are asked to suspend all race-based pre-qualification criteria pending the outcome of the appeal. Sakeliga implies that pre-emptively rejecting contractors on racial grounds is not in keeping with the "team effort" Mr Gordhan has called for to resolve the country's electricity crisis.
If Eskom is indeed using race to disqualify contractors on an "increasing" scale, as the Sakeliga letter states, then both Eskom and the government have proved once again that they do not wish to learn from their own calamitous mistakes. Awarding coal supply contracts on the basis of race was one of the reasons for the blackouts that struck the country in January 2008. The use of race to weed out white staff down the years has helped to perpetuate the disasters that Eskom continues to inflict upon the country.
If experience is a guide, Eskom will simply take refuge in denial. That is what its chairman, Jabu Mabuza, did last year. Despite the fact that the organisation had some years earlier specified that coal mines supplying power stations needed to have a black ownership target of more than 50% throughout the life of the mine, Mr Mabuza said Eskom did not have a policy that coal suppliers had to be majority black-owned.