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The fact that it has now become clear that President Zuma's interference helped precipitate the departure of Eskom chairperson Bobby Godsell is a very serious indictment of the way in which the ANC leadership has handled the Eskom saga. The fact that we have a cabinet minister telling the Sunday Times that the President's intervention ‘stalled' attempts to resolve the crisis at Eskom verifies what the DA has been saying about this matter over the past two weeks - that the interference of the ANC leadership suggested that personal and political considerations were informing decision making, and that such interference was ill-timed, unwarranted, and would not bode well for achieving stability at Eskom. The end result clearly demonstrates that this has been the case - indeed, the President's interference now appears to have been one of the major reasons for the resignation of one of this country's most experienced and highly respected businessmen as chairperson of the power utility. We are owed an explanation. Likewise, the Zuma administration needs to explain why:

The minister of public enterprises was sent to the Eskom board meeting on Friday October 30th, shortly after the board had reportedly resolved to accept Maroga's resignation. We need to know what the minister's mandate was at that meeting, and what role it played in precipitating the resignation of Mr. Godsell.
Attempts to announce Mr. Maroga's departure at a press conference were apparently blocked by the ANC leadership, with chairperson Bobby Godsell telling reporters that he had been summoned to a ‘high-level meeting'.

We do welcome the fact that the minister of public enterprises appears to have resisted bowing to direct pressure from Maroga to have him reinstated. The minister is quoted in the press this morning as saying that Maroga "asked me to use my political influence to overrule the board and reinsert him, and I wasn't prepared to do that." However, the fact that Maroga lobbied for political support like this, together with the racist diatribe he published last week (under the auspices of a "Chief Executive Strategy Document"), is evidence enough that if Maroga ever was in the correct state of mind to be running an entity as important as Eskom, he certainly is no longer now. The question, though, is why Maroga was receiving such strong political backing from the ANC leadership in the first place, particularly when it is clear that his tenure as CEO has been largely a failure. We will submit parliamentary questions on all these matters.