NUMSA rejects decision to bail Eskom out using workers money
8 February 2018
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) is shocked that the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) board has agreed to bail Eskom out to the value of R5 billion. The power utility has been marred by allegations of corruption and state capture, leading to Parliament's public enterprises committee establishing an inquiry into the affairs of the state-owned enterprise (SOE).
To make matters worse there has been a long grocery list of corruption allegations against former board members and some senior managers at Eskom in recent years. The former acting CEO’s Sean Maritz, Matshele Koko and Brian Molefe are but a few of the senior executives who have been accused of looting at Eskom. It has also been dogged by scandals of questionable contracts which have defrauded the power utility of hundreds of millions of rand, including a R1.6 billion payment unlawfully made to Trillian Capital and global consultancy McKinsey. The rampant levels of corruption at the SOE have contributed to the financial crisis at the SOE, which is why it needed to be bailed out in the first place.
Now that the bosses have messed up, they are shifting the cost of their evil deeds onto the working class! That is typical of all Capitalists. They mess up and then pass on the cost of their failure onto the workers. That is exactly the situation with this bailout. There are no guarantees that this money will be paid back to the workers. NUMSA has always maintained that SOE’s should not be funded with workers’ pension funds, until all SOE boards have been radically transformed. The new board at Eskom still does not have any representative from labour or civil society on it. How do we know that the current pathetic situation at Eskom won’t be repeated? There is no one on the board who will fight in the interests of the majority of people.
Business has welcomed the appointment of the new Chair Jabu Mabuza and they are praising him to high heaven. We are not surprised. Mabuza was merciless in massacring the working class at Telkom during his tenure. At least 4 thousand workers lost their jobs. This is in itself a clear indication that workers are in trouble. Privatization and cost cutting by job shedding and all sorts of anti-working class strategies are to be expected, from now on, and business will cheer all these evil measures. "Stability" will only be achieved at the expense of the workers. For over two decades SOE’s like Eskom have been used as piggy banks by the ANC to loot the coffers of the state in order to benefit their cronies. This is likely to be repeated as nothing has changed in the governing party. The same culture of cronyism and corruption continues unabated. We will not allow Ramaphosa to replace one group of capitalist looters with another.