File photo: Gianluigi Guercia/AFP. File photo: Gianluigi Guercia/AFP.
Johannesburg - Taxpayers are picking up the bill for millions of rand in rentals for leased buildings used by cash-strapped Eskom in Sunninghill north of Joburg while its own property space in Braamfontein remains empty.
This emerged this week as the fallout over Eskom management’s decision to stop payment of bonuses to workers took a different turn.
Two weeks ago, the utility told all its employees that they would not be paid bonuses and announced instead that they would get ex-gratia payments equivalent to 6 percent of each employee’s annual package.
The decision came after unions representing workers had charged that the utility was “punishing workers unfairly” for management failures.
The ex-gratia payment promise was made by Eskom chief executive Brian Molefe to unionised staff after they had threatened work stoppages.
Eskom has said it was unable to pay annual performance bonuses because it had failed to avoid load shedding and to bring Medupi power station to production by initially set deadlines.
This week, Numsa said while the workers had accepted the 6 percent ex-gratia payments because they are “better than nothing”, Eskom was wasting far more taxpayers’ money on “unjustified building leases”.
Numsa shop steward Nathaniel Kgoete said this was happening while Eskom’s own properties stood almost empty.
“There are buildings in Sunninghill. Former Eskom executives are directors in companies which own them and they are being utilised at a great cost in lease agreements that run for years,” he said.
“The cost of renting these buildings means Eskom will have paid millions of rand in the end. If Eskom needs to save money this is the area where we have asked them to look at.”
Pretoria News Weekend