By Nco Dube | 08 October 2026

For years, Eskom’s problem was brutally simple: it could not produce enough reliable electricity. That problem has changed.

In the financial year to March 2026, Eskom reported a R30.3 billion profit, its second consecutive year in the black. Load-shedding was limited to only 26 hours across four days, diesel use fell sharply and the utility’s finances strengthened. A public entity many had written off is functioning again.

But recovery has exposed a different problem. Electricity has become painfully expensive, Eskom is selling fewer units, municipalities owe it more money, and more of its strongest customers are learning how to reduce their dependence on Eskom-generated power. The next Eskom challenge is no longer simply how to produce enough electricity. It is how to remain financially strong in a market where customers can buy less of its power while still depending on the system Eskom helps keep alive.

A Turnaround Worth Acknowledging

It would be dishonest to discuss Eskom as though nothing has changed. The generation recovery is real. Reduced breakdowns have cut expensive diesel generation, and businesses and households can once again plan without load-shedding dominating daily life.

Credit for that recovery is shared. Engineers, plant managers and employees did the technical work. Government debt relief and wider electricity reforms also created room for the utility to stabilise.

Leadership still counts. The board chaired by Mteto Nyati and the executive team led by Dan Marokane have helped turn a temporary reprieve into a durable recovery. They have shown that a public institution many assumed was beyond repair can respond when governance, operational discipline and accountability improve.

That record creates a higher expectation. If this team could help restore reliability, it should now be able to confront the next big problem: how to keep electricity affordable enough for households and industry while repositioning Eskom for a market in which it no longer needs to sell every unit of power that crosses the grid.

The Price Problem Cannot Be Brushed Aside

Electricity prices have risen sharply. Average Eskom direct-customer tariffs increased 18.65% in 2023/24, 12.74% in 2024/25, another 12.74% in 2025/26 and 8.76% in 2026/27. Compounded, that is roughly 64% in four years.

Those increases did not come from nowhere. Eskom carries ageing assets, large fixed costs, debt, transmission expansion needs and years of deferred maintenance. A financially broken utility cannot supply reliable electricity for long.

But “cost reflective” cannot become a phrase that closes the argument, because price changes behaviour. A household that can afford solar buys fewer units from the grid. A mine signs a power-purchase agreement. A factory invests in embedded generation or efficiency. Another factory may reduce production because electricity has become one more cost it cannot carry.

Eskom’s own numbers show the effect. Electricity sales fell 6.2% in the last financial year, while industrial sales fell 22.5%. Some of that reflects weaker industrial activity, some greater efficiency, and some private generation and wheeling. Those are different forces and they require different responses.

The deeper issue is whether Eskom’s future can still depend on a model built mainly around selling more kilowatt-hours.

The Grid Is Becoming More Important Than the Electrons

The old Eskom model was built around a simple logic: generate electricity, move it across the network and sell it to customers. That world is disappearing.

A mine can buy electricity from an independent producer. A company can wheel renewable energy across the network. A household with solar may buy little Eskom power during the day and rely heavily on the grid in the evening. In each case, the seller may change, but the need for a functioning network does not.

Think of the grid as a road. For decades Eskom owned much of the road, the trucks and the cargo. The emerging market increasingly allows other people to own the trucks and cargo, but they still need the road. That road must be maintained, expanded, balanced and kept stable, and it has economic value even when Eskom did not generate the electricity moving across it.

This is why Eskom’s tariff restructuring, wheeling work, use-of-system charges and search for new demand are important. The utility is already responding. It is trying to attract data centres, electric-vehicle charging, exports and energy-intensive customers, while separating energy charges from network, capacity and service costs more clearly.

The interesting question is not whether Eskom sees the change. It clearly does. The harder question is whether it is prepared to take that change to its logical conclusion: can Eskom become valuable because everyone needs the electricity system, rather than because everyone has to buy electricity from Eskom?

Who Pays for the Common System?

This is where affordability becomes a political-economy problem.

The customers best able to reduce their dependence on Eskom are often those with the most money. A wealthy household can install solar and batteries. A mine or shopping centre can contract elsewhere for power and pay to move it through the grid. Poor households cannot exit as easily.

Yet the fixed costs of the electricity system remain. Transmission lines do not become cheaper because fewer units are sold. Substations still need maintenance. Reserve capacity still has to exist.

Handled badly, this can create a vicious cycle in which tariffs rise, stronger customers cut grid purchases, sales fall, fixed costs are spread over fewer units, prices rise again and more customers with capital reduce their dependence on Eskom. Over time, the people least able to leave could become the most exposed to a system whose strongest users have partially exited.

The answer is not to punish solar, block private generation or force customers to buy electricity they no longer need from Eskom. South Africa needs those investments. The answer is to charge more honestly for what the system actually provides.

Customers should pay for electricity when they buy electricity, but also transparently for network access, capacity, backup, balancing and the services that keep the grid available. Poor households still need protection, and industry still needs internationally competitive energy costs, but those choices should be visible rather than buried inside a tariff structure that pushes the system towards higher prices and lower sales.

Municipal Debt Cannot Be Left Out

None of this works if municipal debt keeps rising. Eskom reported municipal arrears of R111.6 billion at year-end and has warned that the figure could reach R358 billion by 2031 without intervention.

That is not a generation problem. It is a state problem.

Eskom can improve plant performance and still be weakened by municipalities that consume electricity but do not pay for it. Municipalities themselves are caught between weak billing systems, political pressure, non-payment and the cost of distribution. There is no credible affordability strategy that ignores this.

National government, municipalities, NERSA and Eskom all sit inside the same problem. The utility cannot solve it alone, but it cannot design its future as though municipal debt belongs entirely to somebody else either. A sustainable electricity market needs commercial discipline from the generator to the final customer.

The Next Test of the Turnaround

Nyati and Marokane have helped show that decline at Eskom was not as irreversible as Andre de Ruyter had punted. That is precisely why the next test should be harder.

A turnaround team proves its worth not only by stopping collapse, but by redesigning the institution for what follows. For Eskom, that means moving beyond a business model that depends too heavily on selling more units of electricity and towards one that earns value from maintaining the grid, enabling wheeling, providing system stability, managing capacity, connecting generators and customers, and helping a competitive electricity market function.

That may make Eskom more important in a different way.

For fifteen years, South Africans asked whether Eskom could keep the lights on. Increasingly, it can. Now they are asking whether they can afford to switch them on.

The current leadership helped solve the first problem. The next achievement would be building an Eskom that can answer the second without retreating from competition, punishing self-generation or weakening the grid.

Not simply an Eskom that sells electricity reliably, but an Eskom that makes the electricity system work.