Businessperson of the Year: Eskom chair Nyati brings light and hope back

Mteto Nyati, the Eskom chair, was overwhelmingly voted the Daily Maverick community’s business person of the year. It’s easy to see why.



Nyati and Eskom’s management team are steering the 101-year-old state-owned entity (SOE) out of perennial crisis mode.

Under Nyati’s leadership, South Africa’s 17-year energy crisis faded in 2024 and the country can finally imagine life without blackouts. In fact, Eskom says it might be able to declare the permanent end of blackouts by the end of March 2025. It is also predicting that it might return to profitability for the first time since 2017.

Nyati was appointed more than a year ago by former public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, becoming the sixth chair in 10 years. He was already respected in the business community, having led and turned around multinational companies, including Business Systems Group (a consulting and technology company), Altron, MTN, Microsoft and IBM.

His mettle must have been tested because SOEs are different from private companies. They are bedevilled by politics, vested interests, red tape and low productivity – to mention a few of their problems.

However, Nyati’s experience and qualifications al­­layed fears about his transition to the public sector. Unlike his predecessors at Eskom, Nyati holds a BSc in engineering and understands energy generation. In his early days as chair, along with his board colleagues, Nyati targeted three areas to improve performance. These include pushing back on political interference in day-to-day operations, improving staff morale, and implementing plans previously left to gather dust.

Government officials, in­clu­ding the many ministers involved in Eskom’s affairs, had requested regular meetings with the power utility’s board.

“Within the first two or three weeks of the board being appointed, it was having meetings every other day,” recalled Nyati in October 2024 at the Serious Social Investing Conference in Johannesburg.

“The new board pushed back against this, asking [for] the space to do the job and finding out what are the systemic issues.”

Once given space, Nyati and his colleagues focused on motivating those involved in running the 14 power stations. Eskom moved to award a 7% pay increase to staff over the next three years.

“We wanted workers to be on our side while we fixed Eskom,” said Nyati.

He said appointing credible individuals to key positions was also crucial. Eskom’s board now has seven qualified engineers, including the CEO, Dan Marokane.

Eskom’s energy availability factor – the main metric for the performance of power stations – had been languishing below 53% for most of 2023, but it improved to 65% in April 2024 and has remained at similar levels. It must reach 70% before blackouts can be considered a thing of the past.

Eskom is still not out of the woods. It is battling to get municipalities to pay for electricity, with municipal debt now standing at R85-billion and set to swell to R120-billion by the end of 2025/26. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.