KEY POINTS
- Former Eskom CEO Jacob Maroga says the utility’s decline began in the 1980s, not under the post-1994 ANC government.
- He argues that scrapping Eskom’s long-term funding framework in 1987 left South Africa without the capital or skills to build new power stations when demand surged.
- Maroga questions the massive delays and cost overruns of Medupi and Kusile, saying sabotage cannot be ruled out.
Jacob Maroga, who once sat at the helm of Eskom during the early years of rolling blackouts, has argued that South Africa’s enduring power crisis took root long before the arrival of democracy in 1994.
Speaking on the African Renaissance Project with academic and politician Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, the former chief executive sketched a picture of a utility weakened by decisions made in the late apartheid era and left without the long-term planning needed to keep the lights on.
Maroga, who led Eskom between 2007 and 2008 when national loadshedding began in earnest, said it was too simplistic to place the blame solely on ageing power plants, delays at Medupi and Kusile, or the well-documented failures of governance under former President Jacob Zuma.
He insisted that the rot began decades earlier, when the National Party government abandoned the financial framework that underpinned Eskom’s major build programmes.
He traced the story back to 1987, when a system that allowed Eskom to place capital reserves into electricity tariffs was dismantled. For decades before that, the utility had used the mechanism to finance large-scale construction, including the coal-fired stations that once made Eskom a global benchmark for cost-effective power generation.
According to Maroga, the shift came at precisely the wrong time. Sanctions and a declining economy meant demand for electricity was depressed in the 1980s, leaving Eskom with excess capacity and mounting criticism over its performance.
A government-appointed commission, the De Villiers Commission, recommended internal reforms and tariff adjustments. But by scrapping the financial buffer for future capacity, Maroga said, the state effectively crippled Eskom’s ability to build for the future.
Former CEO Says 1980s Policy Mistakes Left Post-1994 Eskom Without Tools to Meet Soaring Demand
When the democratic government took office in 1994, Eskom was tasked with electrifying the country at a pace never attempted before. Electrifying millions of homes became the priority, and with Kendal completed in 2003, the focus shifted almost entirely to expanding access rather than planning new generation.
Maroga said that by the mid-2000s, the consequences had become unavoidable. Demand was rising sharply and infrastructure was ageing, yet the utility had inherited no capital cushion to begin new builds. That, he said, explains the dramatic rise in electricity tariffs that followed the onset of loadshedding in 2007 and 2008, as Eskom scrambled to raise funds to catch up.
South Africa had also lost its domestic ability to construct large power stations after decades of inactivity in that field. By the time construction began on Medupi and Kusile in 2007, the expertise had to be outsourced to international firms. But even that did not prevent the projects from becoming some of the costliest and most protracted in modern energy history.
Maroga pointed to the fifteen-year delay in completing the final Kusile unit and the ballooning cost of the Medupi–Kusile programme, which eventually reached R467 billion, almost double the initial estimates. He questioned how experienced contractors with extensive global track records could fail so consistently in South Africa and suggested that the possibility of deliberate interference should not be ignored.
“We cannot rule out sabotage,” he said. “A country’s power system is critical to its democracy. Undermining Eskom undermines the state itself.”
Eskom’s own historical documents do support parts of Maroga’s timeline. In the late 1990s, the utility warned the government that without urgent investment in new base-load generation, shortages would hit around 2007. But the warnings were not acted on, and by the early 2000s the country had added almost no new capacity.
While Maroga’s comments have provoked strong reactions, with many South Africans insisting the ANC government must shoulder the greatest burden of blame, his account places Eskom’s troubles within a longer arc of policy missteps, structural bottlenecks and the long tail of decisions made before democracy.
