With engineering expertise and private-sector experience, the Eskom chair is leading the utility out of the bog in which it's been stuck for years.
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...
