How Mteto Nyati and a hand-picked Eskom board pulled SA from the brink
· Citizen
In September 2022, President Cyril Ramaphosa cut short his visit to the UK and skipped his planned trip to the United Nations General Assembly in New York because SA had been plunged into darkness.
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At the time, SA was experiencing Stage 6 load shedding daily, meaning that parts of the country went without electricity for an average of 10 hours, making it impossible to run an economy.
Nyati to the rescue
Days after landing, Ramaphosa called Mteto Nyati for help and offered him a position on the Eskom board.
The country was in crisis, and the president needed someone with engineering and operational expertise to help steer Eskom out of the darkness.
Nyati, a mechanical engineer and former CEO of MTN SA and Altron, never applied for the job. In fact, he never wanted it.
“Unlike many other boards where people apply to sit on the board, I never applied. Nor did any of my colleagues who were appointed apply,” Nyati said in a Moneyweb interview reflecting on his tenure as Eskom board chair – which was set to end in October but has now been extended for three years.
“They were all hand-picked, approached because of their expertise.”
How Nyati and the board drove recovery
That call from Ramaphosa set in motion a remarkable turnaround at Eskom. More than two years later, load shedding has ended. Eskom is profitable. And the power utility now has too much electricity, which it is struggling to sell.
But why did Nyati say yes? And how did he and his board colleagues pull it off?
Nyati’s decision was not impulsive. He asked himself three questions before accepting.
First, did it align with his life purpose? “My life purpose is to awaken the giant in others,” he says.
Second, did his experience and expertise speak to Eskom’s challenges? As a trained mechanical engineer who had worked at Afrox and Nampak and dabbled as a manufacturing consultant, the answer was yes.
Third, what exactly was the challenge? He says he saw load shedding as a proxy for something more insidious.
The ‘more insidious’ issue
“When people were talking about load shedding, they were actually not talking about load shedding. They were talking about black incompetence in leadership,” Nyati says bluntly.
“I felt that this is something that is not true.
“You can never decide that there is a particular group of people that have got a monopoly on incompetence.”
He also had a point to prove: that his leadership philosophy -though widely applied and tested in the private sector – could work in a state-owned entity like Eskom.
“I’m attracted to problems,” he says. “This was a great opportunity to test this philosophy of leadership.”
Crucially, he believed Eskom’s problems were solvable. Unlike state-owned airline SAA, whose fortunes depend on oil prices and exchange rates beyond management’s control, Eskom’s problems were internal.
“The problems of Eskom are self-inflicted. They are within its control,” he says.
“Lack of power station maintenance in Eskom has got everything to do with Eskom people.”
Diagnosing the problem
Nyati was appointed as a non-executive director in October 2022, alongside a new board chaired by Mpho Makwana.
The board waded into Eskom’s day-to-day operations (traditionally management’s domain) by establishing the Business Operations Performance Committee, chaired by Nyati.
“We spent the first month saying ‘Shareholder [government], please give us the space. We want to go and understand what is the problem,'” Nyati recalls.
The committee, composed of engineers and finance experts, visited power stations and interviewed plant managers.
What they found was startling: 75% of Eskom’s problems came from just six power stations.
Instead of focusing on all 15 power stations, they concentrated on the worst performers.
They also identified nine systemic issues and presented them to the shareholder, the then minister of public enterprises Pravin Gordhan. For the first time, there was a shared understanding of the problem and everyone was “working from the same hymn book”.
However, Gordhan was ambitious. He tasked Nyati’s board with achieving an energy availability factor (EAF) of 60% by March 2023 and 70% by March 2025.
Line in the sand
The EAF is the main metric used to assess the performance of power stations. It refers to the average percentage of a power station’s capacity available to dispatch energy at any given time. A higher EAF indicates that Eskom’s power stations are performing well, which lowers the probability of higher blackout stages.
Eskom’s EAF had been languishing below 53% for most of 2023 from highs of 85% in 2011.
Nyati insisted on two years.
“The minister had wanted higher targets than that, and we said no.”
The board appointed independent consulting firm WSP to monitor power station operations.
“It was Ronald Reagan who said ‘Trust, but verify’. Management could be telling us one thing about power stations, but we needed to independently verify claims,” Nyati says.
“The consultants monitored the whole thing so we could get a heads-up quickly and correct anything that went wrong.”
The Bheki Nxumalo factor
The plan needed an executor – someone to be appointed as Eskom’s head of generation.
Nyati initially looked externally but realised a newcomer would struggle. He found Bheki Nxumalo, the then CEO of Eskom Rotek Industries, who had been keeping out of the fray.
“I noticed the respect he commanded within Eskom, which was uncommon among the executives,” Nyati says of Nxumalo.
Nxumalo initially turned him down.
The culture at Eskom was toxic, with staff often labelled – even publicly – as corrupt and incompetent, and morale at rock bottom.
Nyati persisted, agreeing to his three non-negotiable conditions: Nxumalo would have the authority to move power station managers; there would be no interference by management in their work; and the trashing of Eskom staff would immediately stop.
“Nxumalo asked for three weeks to talk to his family,” Nyati recalls. “I said ‘Don’t you understand that we are in a crisis?'”
Nxumalo eventually accepted and, within months, had replaced nearly half of Eskom’s power station managers.
He also pushed to reinstate the incentive system for good performance, which had been banned by former finance minister Tito Mboweni. Gordhan reluctantly agreed.
“Together with Nxumalo’s positive leadership, staff pulled together in teams to ensure that generation targets were met,” Nyati says.
Supportive shareholder and debt relief
A critical enabler was the change in the shareholder relationship.
Under Gordhan and Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana, the government finally came to the party with R230 billion in debt relief to reduce Eskom’s debt load of more than R300 billion.
Two regulatory changes also followed.
The first was that the government lifted restrictions allowing businesses and households to generate their own power. This eased pressure on Eskom’s power stations and gave the utility more room to increase maintenance.
The second was an exemption for Eskom from localisation measures, allowing it to procure power station parts directly from original equipment manufacturers and making maintenance less cumbersome.
“We had to have a supportive shareholder,” Nyati says. “For the first time, there was no blame game.”
The financial support allowed Eskom to plan maintenance properly. In 2023, the board budgeted R30 billion to burn diesel to create space for maintenance. It was, as Nyati puts it, “bad by design”.
“2023 was bad. It was the worst year ever,” he says. “That’s why people were so surprised in 2024 when we came from the worst situation.”
By the end of 2024, the EAF was climbing, and it is now comfortably near 70% (see blue bars below).
Load shedding has ended. In September 2025, Eskom announced a R14 billion after-tax profit (its first in eight years) and in 2026 it announced another, R30.3 billion.
Where Eskom stands now
Nyati is proud of two things: ending load shedding and restoring pride among Eskom employees.
“When I arrived, the motivation of Eskom employees lacked confidence. They did not even want to be associated with Eskom,” he says.
“Now they stand up and wear T-shirts with logos of Eskom pride. There are good people at Eskom.
“Some people who made Eskom the number one utility in the world in 2005 are still there. They cannot all of a sudden become bad people,” he says.
“They were just poorly led. They remain committed and capable and competent to take this company forward.”
But significant challenges remain.
The challenges ahead …
Municipalities owe Eskom R119.9 billion, which Nyati describes as “the single greatest threat to Eskom’s financial stability”.
Can it be solved? Yes, he insists.
National Treasury can withhold equitable share funding to force municipalities to pay, as it did with the City of Johannesburg, which owed R5 billion.
Eskom has also introduced Distribution Agency Agreements (DAAs), taking over electricity management in municipalities, collecting revenue and investing in infrastructure such as smart meters.
“We cannot allow a culture of municipalities not paying for electricity and writing that debt off,” Nyati says firmly. “There needs to be law and order in our country.”
Another challenge is that Eskom is no longer the only supplier in town. As households and businesses embrace renewable energy, they are relying less on Eskom’s grid, eroding electricity sales.
Warning to Eskom
Nyati saw this coming early. When he and the board arrived, he said, “Eskom did not have a plan to participate in renewables, which are the future”.
Without a strategy, Nyati warned, Eskom would not merely be a bystander to the changing energy landscape; it was “going to die”.
The response is Eskom Green, a subsidiary intended to build solar and wind capacity and sell clean energy to customers who increasingly demand it, particularly exporters facing penalties for coal-heavy electricity supplies.
But the transition also requires baseload power such as nuclear and 14 000km of new transmission lines to connect renewable energy projects.
The task now, Nyati says, is to position Eskom as “an effective player in the future energy space” or risk being left behind.
This article was republished from Moneyweb. Read the original here.