What happened

Eskom's leadership said in early 2023 that fraud, corruption and sabotage had 'taken root' within the utility and were contributing materially to South Africa's rolling blackouts, citing a pattern of documented cases across multiple coal-fired power stations. At Camden Power Station in November 2022, a contractor was found to have intentionally removed an oil drain plug from a bearing to cause repeated burner trips, reportedly to generate further paid maintenance work; separately, truck drivers were arrested at Camden for delivering substandard or stolen coal. At Tutuka Power Station, equipment was reported to have been deliberately damaged by individuals seeking to trigger paid maintenance callouts. Eskom and the Hawks (South Africa's Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation) opened coal-theft and coal-fraud cases linked to Kendal and Camden power stations, with seven transport companies under investigation for coal procurement fraud and theft; one prior case involving a transport company and an Eskom employee was reported to have cost the utility approximately R35 million and resulted in a conviction. Then-CEO André de Ruyter said Eskom attributed one to two stages of national load shedding to sabotage-related unavailability, and warned that unchecked criminal conduct risked making the country 'ungovernable.' This record aggregates multiple distinct, separately reported incidents and investigations into one pattern-level entry because individual dates, exact damage and full case outcomes were not consistently published for each; it should not be read as describing a single dated event, and no single incident here is presented as proven beyond the specific arrests, convictions or public attributions cited.

When cited sources give different casualty, damage or spill figures for this event, they’re reported side by side above rather than merged into one number. See how confidence levels work.