Thabo Mbeki on Eskom

Thabo Mbeki has taken a strong stance regarding the initial electricity crisis, asserting that the load-shedding experienced towards the end of 2007 and early 2008 was not due to technical failures but was an internally generated crisis deliberately engineered at Eskom. He claimed that power station managers intentionally ignored internal warnings about low coal supplies to create the blackouts, which led him, as president, to apologize for the government's perceived failure in his State of the Nation address. The former president stated that the truth of this deliberate intervention, which he termed an act of "counter-revolution," was only revealed to him years later, specifically through a Special Investigating Unit report delivered to the Presidency in 2017.

During his presidency, Mbeki was also associated with the policy of expanding electricity access, setting a goal for universal access by 2012, a drive that saw millions of households connected to the grid. However, the historical context shows that the government failed to heed Eskom's earlier calls for capital expansion, a fact for which the former president later apologized, acknowledging that Eskom had warned the government of a looming shortage. While Mbeki's administration oversaw massive electrification efforts, the subsequent crisis of generation capacity was attributed by him to deliberate internal sabotage rather than solely to underinvestment, though underinvestment was acknowledged as a contributing factor at the time.