Tshwarelo Hunter Mogakane
Pretoria - Former chairperson of the parliamentary standing committee on public accounts (Scopa), Themba Godi, has accused Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan of being racist.
This comes after Gordhan’s department reached out to workers’ trade union Solidarity to provide power station engineers, senior artisans and plant operators in order to mitigate the crisis at state-owned power utility Eskom.
In May, Solidarity chief executive Dirk Hermann wrote to Gordhan, stating that the union could provide hundreds of professionals who could help Eskom with critical skills to manage recurring blackouts and other power station maintenance issues.
In a letter widely circulated on social media, Gordhan wrote back to Hermann, accepting Solidarity’s offer.
“Government appreciates the support from Solidarity with the redeployment of skilled and experienced engineering and technical skills addressing challenges facing Eskom.
“Due to the urgency of assistance required from Eskom, can you kindly provide the list of names of engineers and technical experts that can be deployed to Eskom to address the generation performance challenges facing the company?” wrote Gordhan.
This has angered the African People’s Convention (APC), which is led by Godi.
“The APC has noted with disgust Minister Gordhan’s call for Solidarity trade union to help with skilled personnel at Eskom. Ordinarily, as APC, we wouldn’t take an issue with a call or head-hunt for any skilled South Africans to assist a state entity. We, however reject, this selective call to a conservative all-white trade union to assist with skilled personnel.
“This perpetuates a debunked assertion Mr Gordhan made when he became minister that affirmative action led to a loss of capabilities at Eskom, thus showing a lack of confidence in African workers. Why are progressive unions such as the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and the National Mineworkers Union not engaged?
“The problem with Eskom lies in the weak leadership of Mr André de Ruyter and his management, and also a weak board that has no competence in running a complex entity like Eskom.
“We reject the reinforcement of racist stereotypes that Africans equal incompetence and non-Africans equal excellence,” he said.
Public Enterprises spokesperson Richard Mantu said the minister had for long indicated in his budget policy speech that state capture had compromised technical skills within Eskom.
“The experienced engineers and technical skills were hollowed out as a result of state capture and corruption over the years. In response, various professional and business organisations have offered to assist in this regard.”
However, former Eskom engineer Dr Bongani Mvelase rejected Gordhan and Hermann’s claim, saying their assertion that the power utility became “obsessed with retrenching white competent engineers” and replaced them with the incompetent black engineers for affirmative action “was disgusting”.
In an open letter which went viral, Mvelase denied that Eskom ever retrenched competent white engineers, saying Gordhan and Hermann gave white artisans and technicians the title of “engineers” to justify painting black engineers as incompetent.
“I worked for Eskom for many years and I never came across the register of such competent people and neither did I witness their legacy of novelty they left behind. By the way, former white Eskom ‘engineers’ never left Eskom, they were only transferred from normal salaried employees to contractors who continued to milk Eskom,” Mvelase said.
“Those that remained Eskom salaried employees were given special titles such as ‘corporate specialists’ or the so-called ‘grey-beards’… These ‘specialists’ or ‘grey-beards’ have two mandates – to marginalise qualified black engineers and to milk Eskom by providing no sustainable solutions so that they remain relevant to the organisation.”
Mvelase added that the root cause of Eskom problems was a racist culture which gave unqualified white “matriculants” authority over qualified black engineers.
“In my stay in Eskom, I never came across one black artisan that earned a title of an ‘engineer’ by years of service,” Mvelase said.
Hermann could not be reached for comment.
Pretoria News