Listening recently to a live rendition of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as South Africa descended into yet another unwelcome bout of loadshedding, it did not require much imagination to compare the seasonal progression of the four concerti to Eskom’s post-1994 performance.

While Vivaldi reflected each season’s delights and perils, the lightness of his first spring movement yields steadily, albeit not linearly, to some coarser realities.

Notwithstanding Eskom’s historical ties to the apartheid government, for which it formerly apologised at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the dawn of democracy did nevertheless represent something of a spring.

Much of this was down to Eskom’s role in electrifying areas and households that had not previously enjoyed electricity. While this electrification programme predated democracy by some years, it was enlarged and integrated into the Reconstruction and Development Programme. Targets were met ahead of schedule and the programme was widely seen as a success, despite some early signs that nonpayment persisted as a problem.

Summer and autumn combined in the form of Eskom’s abundant coal generation translating into a harvest that was aggressively consumed. The country’s industrial policy leveraged it to attract electricity-intensive industries. Tariffs were suppressed on the basis that the private sector and not Eskom would build the next set of power stations, despite the price point being unattractive to new investors. Nevertheless, the weather remained fair enough for Eskom to be proclaimed by the Financial Times to be the Global Power Company of the Year in 2001.

But the summer storms and autumn winds soon started to gather and howl, as it became apparent that the new build programme had been left too late and the first signs of this deficit was felt in the late 2007 power cuts. With serious consequences, policy was rapidly changed to enable Eskom to build not one but two mega coal stations, despite having not done so for decades. This was soon followed by painful and ongoing tariff hikes both to support the build programme and to align with what Eskom called cost-reflectivity.

Winter, like bankruptcy, set in slowly at first and then rapidly. The build programme went badly and became corruption infested. The supply-demand deficit widened and loadshedding intensified to a point where it was being implemented almost daily in 2022 and 2023. Eskom’s finances deteriorated, accelerated by State capture, which precipitated a breakdown of confidence and a flight of skills. While bail-outs accumulated nominally, a breakdown in trust meant that Eskom was drip-fed until the big R254-billion debt-relief announcement of 2023.

Winter has been long, cold and dark, but there have been recent green shoots in the form of Eskom’s turnaround and a major legislative overhaul aimed at introducing a competitive market that breaks the country’s over-reliance on one provider, one primary energy source (coal) and one shareholder backstop (the taxpayer).

For this spring to become summer, it’s crucial that this derisking continues, and for current attempts to claw back Eskom’s monopoly power to be rebuffed.