In a modest conference room at Eskom’s headquarters, the Telkom chief executive sat down with the utility’s top managers.
According to Tech Review Africa, the Telkom CEO shared transformation lessons with the Eskom Executive Committee. Transformation (a comprehensive change in business model, operations and culture) has been a focus for Telkom since its 2022 restructuring, which aimed to shift the company from a legacy fixed-line operator to a digital services provider.
The Telkom chief executive said the company’s move to a more customer-focused model helped reverse a years-long revenue decline and reduced operating costs. He highlighted the importance of clear governance, disciplined capital spending and a culture that rewards innovation. These points are presented as potential guidance for Eskom, which continues to grapple with financial strain, high debt levels and recurring load-shedding.
Eskom, which supplies about 95% of South Africa’s electricity, has been under pressure to stabilise its finances and improve service reliability. Recent reforms have aimed at unbundling the utility and attracting private investment, but progress has been uneven.
The exact topics covered in the meeting were not disclosed, and no formal agreement was announced. Both parties described the session as an informal knowledge-exchange.
For readers interested in the broader challenges facing South Africa’s power sector, see our Energy & Infrastructure coverage.
Cross-utility executive briefings of this kind, where leadership from one state-owned enterprise shares operational or transformation experience with another, have become more common as government has pushed for greater coordination between struggling parastatals rather than each entity working through similar governance and turnaround challenges in isolation. Telkom’s own transformation over the past decade, from a fixed-line incumbent losing market share to a broader connectivity and infrastructure group, is frequently cited as a partial template for what a state-linked or formerly state-linked entity can achieve when given a clear commercial mandate. Eskom’s own executive committee disclosures would carry further detail on the specific outcomes of a session like this one, if published. For related coverage, see this site’s Energy and Infrastructure coverage.
Executive-level knowledge sharing of this kind rarely results in an immediate, publicly disclosed change of policy at the receiving organisation, since transformation experience gained elsewhere typically has to be adapted to an entity’s own specific governance structure, unions and regulatory environment before it can be implemented, a process that plays out over months rather than being visible in the immediate aftermath of a single briefing.
State-owned enterprise boards have faced increasing pressure from Treasury and the Presidency to demonstrate cross-entity learning of this kind, partly in response to years of criticism that each parastatal has historically addressed its own governance failures in isolation rather than drawing on lessons already learned elsewhere in the state-owned sector.
Formal mentorship or secondment arrangements between state-owned enterprises, where staff spend time embedded in a better-performing entity, have occasionally followed initial executive-level briefings of this kind, extending the knowledge transfer beyond a single meeting.
Public sector unions have occasionally raised concerns that cross-entity executive briefings focus disproportionately on efficiency and cost measures without equivalent attention to workforce impact, a tension that has surfaced in past state-owned enterprise turnaround programmes.
The Presidency’s own state-owned enterprise coordinating council has periodically convened similar cross-entity sessions at a more senior level, suggesting this kind of executive briefing may be part of a broader, ongoing coordination effort rather than an isolated event.
Whether this kind of knowledge sharing translates into measurable operational improvement is typically only assessable well after the fact, once the receiving entity’s own subsequent performance reports become available for comparison.
Board members attending a session of this kind often carry findings back to their own audit and risk committees, formalising what would otherwise remain an informal exchange between executives.
