According to the report, it isn’t clear if the Eskom board will ask Oberholzer to train a successor. The news of Oberholzer’s imminent departure as a permanent Eskom employee comes after the Hawks arrested someone for allegedly making a bomb threat against him. Oberholzer received the bomb threat from an anonymous and unregistered cellphone number in May 2022.
He told News24 that he doesn’t pay any mind to threats against him individually, but when a threat came in that could hurt his family, he immediately reported it to the police. Oberholzer also spoke openly about surgeries he and his wife had recently undertaken. He recently had a non-malignant tumour removed and was in hospital for two days. He was back at work the day after being discharged.
His wife, Lindy, recently had heart surgery, which Oberholzer believes was brought on by stress. Eskom’s previous board appointed Oberholzer on 7 July 2018 — almost a month after the power utility announced its first load-shedding since September 2015. The utility avoided load-shedding again in 2018 until November. During 2019, Eskom implemented power cuts in February, March, October, and November, spiking up to stage 6 load-shedding in December.
Following the resignations of Phakamani Hadebe and Jabu Mabuza in 2019 and 2020, the Eskom board appointed André de Ruyter as CEO. Although De Ruyter was initially optimistic that Eskom could end load-shedding by September 2021 with an aggressive maintenance programme, his prediction proved naive. Load-shedding only worsened since 2019, when the power utility recorded its worst year for rotational power cuts since 2015 — when Tshediso Matona and Brian Molefe were at the helm.
In 2021, Eskom had implemented nearly double the amount of power cuts than 2019 in terms of energy shed. In 2022, the amount of load-shedding is already double that of 2021. In addition to losing Oberholzer in April, several Eskom executives left the power utility this year. Eskom’s generation executive Philip Dukashe resigned in May. Rhulani Mathebula stepped in as acting head of generation for the second time while the power utility recruited a replacement.
However, Mathebula has also since resigned from the utility. His last day is at the end of November. Thomas Conradie will be Eskom’s new acting generating executive in the interim.
