R11.7 Payday for Eskom CEO, But You Fixed the Problem
Eskom chief executive Dan Marokane was paid R11.728 million in the 2025 financial year, including a near R5 million pay increase, while the utility received R140 billion in taxpayer support under the Eskom Debt Relief Act. Staff costs across the company rose by R8.3 billion in the same period. Economist Dawie Roodt has said the improvement in load shedding owes more to private solar adoption than to Eskom’s own operational turnaround.
Eskom’s chief executive, Dan Marokane, was paid R11.728 million in the 2025 financial year, according to figures reported in the utility’s annual results. That package included a basic salary of R9 million, after Marokane’s pay was increased by nearly R5 million during the year.
Marokane’s raise was not an isolated increase. Eskom’s average staff salary rose by R167,000 in the same financial year, the biggest nominal increase in the company’s history. Headcount grew as well, from 40,625 employees to 42,030, even as Eskom maintained that it needed to control costs. Combined, Eskom’s total staff bill increased by R8.3 billion in a single year, from R37.1 billion to R45.4 billion.
The increases came in the same period Eskom continued to draw on taxpayer support. By 31 March 2025, the utility had already received R140 billion under the Eskom Debt Relief Act, a package originally structured to take over as much as R254 billion of Eskom’s debt and later adjusted to around R230 billion in loans absorbed directly by government.
Efficient Group chief economist Dawie Roodt raised the pay increases on the State of the Nation podcast, and said Eskom’s improved performance on load shedding has been driven largely by private solar adoption rather than by the utility’s own management. Roodt said homes and businesses installing rooftop and industrial solar systems, after years of unreliable supply, have done more to stabilise the grid than Eskom’s operational changes, though he said Eskom’s own improvements played some role too.
Roodt went further and said Eskom functions like a subdivision of government rather than an independent company, despite its corporate structure and board. He said South Africa has around 2 million civil servants, including state owned enterprise staff such as Eskom’s, roughly 3% of the population, a group he said accounts for 17% of the country’s economy in wage costs alone. Roodt said Eskom’s contribution to the economy in the past year was negative.
Eskom has previously defended executive and staff pay increases as necessary to retain skilled engineers and technical staff amid competition from the private sector and international employers. That argument does not, on its own, explain an increase applied broadly enough to add 1,400 jobs and lift average pay across the workforce, in the same year the utility needed a taxpayer funded rescue to remain solvent.
The pay increases and staff cost growth were disclosed in Eskom’s own 2025 annual results, the same set of results that confirmed the utility’s continued reliance on the Eskom Debt Relief Act to remain financially viable.
