“Morale is Gone”: Ex-Eskom Engineer Warns of Winter Load-Shedding Crisis as Skills Drain Deepens

Lack of incentives, skilled staff and internal morale are dragging Eskom to the brink, just as South Africa heads into its coldest season

Winter is creeping into South Africa with its usual bite, but for millions of residents, it’s not just the cold they’re bracing for it’s the looming dread of another round of load-shedding. And if you ask former Eskom engineer Matthew Cruise, the real storm brewing isn’t in the sky, it’s inside Eskom itself.

Cruise, who spent nearly a decade working in Eskom’s technical trenches, says the power utility’s crippling skills shortage and broken morale are far more dangerous than faulty transformers or outdated infrastructure.

“It’s not the machines that are broken, it’s the system, and the people trying to keep it going,” Cruise told Cape Talk.

Slipping Behind on Maintenance

One of the major red flags, Cruise explains, is what the industry calls “slippages”, delays in scheduled maintenance that increase the risk of unplanned breakdowns, which in turn push the country closer to rolling blackouts.

It’s a vicious cycle: less maintenance leads to more outages, more outages mean emergency generation, and emergency generation comes at a massive cost. Eskom has already spent R3.76 billion on diesel since April just to keep the lights on using open-cycle gas turbines.

Eskom’s Skills Crisis: A Long Time Coming

Cruise isn’t the only one sounding the alarm. Even Eskom chairperson Mteto Nyati admitted in early May that the real crisis at the utility is not mechanical, it’s people-related.

“What we realised was not that we have issues relating to equipment, but rather people-related problems,” Nyati said during Eskom’s State of the System briefing.

Cruise agrees and says this isn’t a new phenomenon. He joined the company in 2010 at Komati Power Station and says the warning signs were flashing back then.

“I was told during onboarding that China and Australia were poaching our best talent. China would offer Eskom engineers three times the salary. And who wouldn’t take that?”

He also paints a bleak picture of working life inside Eskom: no salary increases for four years, stalled promotions, and a public narrative that made employees feel like villains in their own country.

“We were constantly labelled as the reason for load-shedding. The public and press made it demoralising to come to work.”

Contractors Struggling Too

It’s not just Eskom staff that are under pressure. Generation head Bheki Nxumalo revealed that even Eskom’s contractors and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) are battling to field adequately skilled workers.

“Many of our partners have told us they also have skills-related problems,” Nxumalo said. “It’s a fleet-wide issue.”

This comes at a time when South Africa is sitting on 16,000MW of unplanned outages , well above the 13,000MW ceiling Eskom says it can handle without load-shedding.

Winter Is Here: Can Eskom Cope?

So far, Eskom has avoided plunging the country into full-stage load-shedding thanks to diesel-fueled turbines and what Cruise calls a “miracle of demand stability.” But he’s not optimistic.

“We haven’t seen the usual winter surge in electricity demand yet. But Eskom predicts the worst stretch — low supply and high demand will hit between mid-June and mid-July.”

In other words, the real test starts this week.

A Company Starved of Hope

Cruise’s perspective is sobering. As someone who worked from power station floors to head office boardrooms, he’s witnessed the brain drain from the inside. Eskom, once a world-class utility, is now struggling to keep hold of talent, motivation and control.

And while political statements continue to pin hope on leadership changes or procedural fixes, Cruise suggests the crisis is deeper.

“You can’t fix a machine with no mechanic. That’s what’s happening here.”

If the forecast is correct, South Africans could be facing the coldest and darkest June-July stretch in recent memory. And it’s not the weather we need to fear most, it’s what’s happening inside Eskom’s gates.

{Source: My Broad Band}

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