Embattled City Power CEO says she’s relaxed about her position

JOHANNESBURG - CEO of embattled Johannesburg City Power Tshifularo Mashava said she is relaxed about her position at the state-owned entity.  

The power utility has been in the news following a scathing auditor general’s report on its finances.  

ALSO READ: City Power did not take reasonable steps to avoid nearly R5bn irregular expenditure - AG

News24 has also been running a series of reports into alleged corruption within the organisation.  

However, Mashava said since she took the helm in 2021, she has turned around City Power’s fortunes.  

“I couldn’t possibly expect to sit on this chair and not have to deal with these types of pressures because the ones that came before me also had to deal with this. I think it gets compounded by the election period. There is always politics at play in the public sector, but one has to focus on their job at hand and do it to the best of my ability, and the only thing I can do is to gain trust through transparency.  

“Personally, since I took over, we have flipped the organisation upside down internally. We have made so many changes because the model was not working, the business model was obsolete. If we carried on doing what we were doing back then, we were just going to die. We were not customer-focused. We were too over-reliant on contractors and Eskom. 

“So, we stopped certain contracts, we moved certain executives, we made some decisions that angered people internally and externally, and when people are angered, sometimes they do things that are unexplainable. Is it the first time something like this is happening? No. Will it be the last time? I doubt it.”