FOR two days in succession, Eskom has not implemented load shedding. They promised that Kusile had started coming online and that we could be assured of the six units being fully functional by 2024. If the two days performance is anything to go by, the glory days of Eskom are back.
That is the moment South Africa will embrace, and all will have a sigh of relief. Children writing matric will no longer have to worry, nor will self-serving politics exhibit hyper concern about the exercise of democracy in the dark. By the way, some political parties have blamed Eskom for their poor performance at the polls.
One Matshela Koko, on one of the social media platforms, discussed a management lesson, which if you get blinded by the allegations labelled against him for corruption and ignore his advice, then you will lose.
Koko, who is an engineer, makes the obvious and valid point that need not be made by an engineer, but experience suggests that they are always worth repeating to understand how this giant called Eskom, which carried us for almost a century, got destroyed in a decade?
Koko says: “It generally takes five to seven years to build a high performing culture in a generation fleet the size of Eskom. This culture can be destroyed overnight.” And we are witnesses to that.
He goes on to say: “If corruption was the problem, as indeed it was, they should have zoomed into it and nipped it in the bud without collapsing the high performance culture that they inherited.”
He concludes by saying: “If you get the culture right, Eskom’s performance will improve, but that operational culture must be based on operational excellence that can only be driven from the top.”
Is the two-day high performance of Eskom heralding new beginnings, especially in the middle of winter?
I can relate to the leadership and management ethos Koko refers to because I exercised it at Stats SA. The questions I put to myself and to staff was always where, when and why? Then finally, the tyre hits the tarmac, which is how? I demanded a spreadsheet and a map at all times (despite remaining very poor at map reading and despite my love for geography and toponymy – the study of place names).
Then I would demand “morning and afternoon coffee”, my special code name for reports, which operations had to file with me at the end of every shift. This was followed by a call of engagement to clarify and understand what next needed to be done and with what quantum of resources to solve the problem, especially what will my subordinate require of me - a basis for 360 degree accountability. Anything else outside that I referred to as an “adventure in muffins and cream”, the usual civil service snack at jamborees.
Take, for example, the census, when you are faced with 120 million images that are completed through scanning, and there is no data coming from these images. It is akin to the laws of physics and colour subtraction. These principles govern the perceived colour resulting from the mixing of different colours of light, which can lead to misconceptions about what you see.
So, when looking at the data and talking to the stats team, you unexpectedly hear about blue light for the first time, which you should have used on blue forms instead of white light. You then have no choice but to be seized with the issue of the moment with the tight immersion in the operations until the problem is solved. I became a teetotaller overnight.
Ultimately, the data on the 120 million images was read and, hooray, the 2001 census results were published in 2003, a notable record for those days of statistical operations.
A culture of operational focus that started in 1996, transformed into one of excellence and got firmly embedded into Stats SA, and continues to blossom to date.
But in 2003, no staff member wanted to be associated with Stats SA. I was at the helm of the institution, and I had just been accused of theft of money and buying property (A lie, of course, I did not steal any money - I raised bonds with banks).
Then the reconstruction of the institution was faced with resistance from users who wanted the same levels and trends in numbers when actually there was a rapture brought about by the introduction of methods.
The sharpest critic was the late combative analyst, Mike Schussler (MHSRIP). Another was Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, the now chair of Eskom. He penned, in retrospect, a very helpful historical benchmark in the Sunday Times headlined, Affirmative Action Gone Wrong. Meanwhile, cartoonist Zapiro wasted no time and had a cartoon which depicted Stats SA as a train off the rails.
In the stead, Makgoba spoke colourfully about Eskom, Transnet, SAA and the SA Revenue Service (Sars) and lampooned StatsSA for ineptitude. He asked if these world class institutions were to be run by the likes of me, where would they be today – that today being 2005? And by then, we had observed the multiple shoots of real progress in the institution, and I chose not to respond.
Perhaps, the answer should be now clear applying the contrast.
By 2006, Stats SA staff would hold their heads high because the foundational work, ethos and the hard work on focusing on building human resources had started to show significant results.
It paid for scholarships anywhere in the world and, especially with a bias toward Africa. This we did in order to mould and rebuild our relations with the continent and be part of its renaissance. Study leave, internships, executive training, succession planning - name them, the whole works. Drivers and cleaners were sent to school, and so were shop stewards without taking away their role of activism. A learning institution was in the making.
Collaboration with University of KwaZulu-Natal, under the able leadership of Makgoba, was established in teacher training for teaching statistics at schools. A whole culture of learning and excellence was embedded. Twenty-two years since 1996, and five years into my successor’s tenure, and reporting to a variety of ministers, StatsSA remains a citadel of professionalism. It is respected here in South Africa and the world.
So, coming back to the seminal question of Makgoba, the question of where Eskom, Transnet, SAA, Sars would have been, were they to be under the likes of me, the answer is perhaps rhetorical - all those institutions would have been like StatsSA is the answer.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a Research Associate at Oxford, a Professor of Practice at UJ, and the former Statistician-General of South Africa. Meet him @Palilj01 and at www.pie.org.za
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