By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
State owned power utility Eskom’s new chief executive officer, Dan Marokane will be starting the job on 01 March 2024 as opposed to previous announcement.
Eskom previously said that Marokane would join the organisation no later than March 31, 2024, to allow him time to finalise his existing responsibilities.
At the time when his appointment as Eskom CEO was announced, Marokane was leading troubled sugar producer Tongaat Hullett, which this week named Rob Aitken as acting CEO, following news that the Vision Partners consortium had succeeded in acquiring the company out of business rescue.
Chairperson Mteto Nyati said Eskom employees were excited to learn that Marokane would be rejoining the utility, as “[they] remember his hands-on leadership style that is needed right now”.
Marokane worked at Eskom for several years, but departed in 2015 after being suspended following what was later found to be his taking a stand against fraud and corruption at the utility.
He is a qualified chemical engineer who also has an MBA and some 20 years’ experience in senior executive positions.
The country will be looking to Marokane to decisively deal with the energy crisis and load shedding.
Nyati also expressed the board’s gratitude to Calib Cassim, who stepped in as acting CEO, following Andre De Ruyter’s earlier-than-expected departure in early 2022, following an explosive television interview in which he outlined worrying levels of ongoing corruption and criminality.
Eskom meanwhile says that load shedding will be eased this weekend thanks to the return to service of a generating unit and a reduction in load losses.
As generating capacity has improved, load shedding will be reduced from a rotation of stage 2 and stage 3 outages to continuous stage 2.
Stage 2 load shedding will continue on Friday (19 January) until 05h00 on Sunday. Thereafter, stage 1 load shedding will kick in from 05h00 to 16h00.
An update for the week ahead will be published on Sunday, Eskom said.
Breakdowns are currently at 13,792MW, while units off for planned maintenance amount to 8,484MW.
Eskom said that it is working to return 2,150MW to service by Sunday evening, while demand peak is expected at just under 25,000MW.
For access to other load shedding schedules, Eskom has made them available on loadshedding.eskom.co.za.
Smartphone users can also download the app EskomSePush to receive push notifications when load shedding is implemented, as well as the times the area you are in will be off.