PRETORIA – Dan Marokane is about to take on the toughest job in South Africa: turning the lights back on. As CEO of state-owned power utility Eskom, he inherits an organisation hobbled by allegations of coal theft and sabotage, and facing financial and technical crises.
He will work with a government shareholder that has a conflicting vision for the country’s future energy mix and is struggling to move forward with a major overhaul of the electricity industry.
As South Africa heads to national elections in May, turning around Eskom and solving a persistent power shortage could save Africa’s most industrialised economy from a cycle of decline, Eskom’s chief executive told Journalist. Failure would mean the country is stuck with the status quo of crippling blackouts that currently cut power to everything from homes and businesses to traffic lights and hospitals for up to 10 hours a day.
“There are two things that need to be done here simultaneously,” Mteto Nyati, Eskom’s chief executive, said in an interview.
“One is to fix the current business. And the other is to reposition and restructure Eskom so that it can be relevant for the future.”
Nyati said the utility’s new boss, who holds degrees in chemical and petroleum engineering as well as an MBA, has the technical know-how and leadership skills to succeed where so many others have failed.
Marokane, who Eskom says will not speak publicly until he formally takes up his post on Friday, previously served as a senior Eskom executive for five years until 2015.
“He will be able to learn and hit the ground running,” Nyati said.
Eskom’s role in powering the country’s economy has made the CEO job South Africa’s most high-profile executive position. But its challenges mean that fewer and fewer corporate high-flyers are willing to take it on.
“Dan is probably the most qualified person on the short list,” says Peter Attard Montalto, managing director of consultancy Krutham. “But that’s an extraordinarily low bar.”
Marokane has portrayed himself as a victim of the so-called state capture era, having been suspended from his Eskom job along with several other executives.
“I was not a moderate performer,” he told a commission of inquiry into state capture in 2020. “To sit at home with a cloud of suspicion and poor performance hanging over you, it’s very painful,” he said, according to the transcript of his testimony to the commission.
Marokane joins Eskom after a stint at sugar producer Tongaat Hulett, where he attempted to rescue the sugar company from an accounting scandal that eventually saw it placed under bankruptcy protection.
On his return to Eskom, he will inherit a troubled company dependent on government bailouts and a need to push through plans to unbundle it into separate generation, transmission and distribution businesses, a process that has become bogged down in bureaucracy and red tape.
He will face a daily battle to keep Eskom’s fleet of ageing plants on the grid while assuaging the concerns of donors who have pledged billions of dollars to wean South Africa off coal, which generates about 80% of its electricity. Marokane will have to push for new generation capacity – largely in the form of solar and wind – and overcome resistance to renewable energy from some quarters of the African National Congress-led government.
