Thank you very much. Well, there has been an attempt on the side of government to explore all avenues that will help us to come close to the truth, especially, on what we call state capture. We have instituted all these commissions to allow our people to come forward and say whatever they say they know, in terms of all these state-owned enterprises, SOEs, we can't say Eskom alone. So, that platform has been created and we still call upon our people to come forward if they know whatever wrong that has been done.
I cannot say that Eskom is not fully aware of its own asset because it is a company that has been operating. On the basis of its asset
register Eskom went out to borrow money. Definitely, they should be aware of the assets they own because they borrowed money against the assets they have. Government came in as a guarantor that these funders that borrowed Eskom money, borrowed them on the basis of their strength of their assets. Assets which in the main are the power stations, the challenge that we see and that we noticed overtime is that these assets of power stations were not well maintained. There were moments when these power stations were pushed too hard because we wanted to avoid load shedding. So, they were pushed beyond their capacity.
Some of these assets are old. There are continuous disruptions and breakages. At times these breakages are not planned and they disrupt the entire power system. So, Eskom failed over time to do planned maintenance. If you do planned maintenance, you switch off a power station knowing the power that you have and you will still supply to your people but maintaining that power station, you know how much energy you are taking out of the grid and how much energy is left out of the grid. That is planned maintenance. However, over the past few years we have been hit by unplanned maintenance. All of a sudden a power station that has been running, for instance, I will take Hendrina Power Station that generates more or less above 3000 megawatts, if that power station can be interrupted we loose the
entire 3000 megawatts. That will definitely result into loads shedding because it was unexpected and unplanned.
I am sure Eskom is aware of its own assets but the problem with these assets is that they were not well kept and well maintained. Thank you.