Corruption convictions expose how bribes drained South Africa's power crisis funds

South Africa’s electricity supply, already strained by years of load-shedding, sits at the center of a corruption case that reached a milestone in the Gauteng High Court on August 6, 2026, when two men pleaded guilty to charges tied to a bribery scheme at the Kusile Power Station.

The scheme compromised a R745 million contract awarded to Tubular Construction Projects for upgrade work on air cooled condensers at Kusile, part of a broader project valued at up to R1.4 billion. That project was designed to improve the reliability and efficiency of one of South Africa’s major power generation facilities. The corruption, prosecutors say, diverted those gains before they could reach the public.

For the millions of South Africans who depend on Eskom, the state-owned utility, the case lays bare a double loss. Corrupt contracts inflate costs from the outset. They also drain funds that could have gone toward genuine infrastructure improvements, leaving the grid weaker and citizens worse off.

Businessman Hudson Kgomoeswana admitted to moving more than R6 million through his company, Babinatlou Business Services, to bribe a senior Eskom employee. He pleaded guilty to corruption, 18 counts of money laundering and 15 tax evasion offences. The court sentenced him to 15 years for corruption and money laundering, with 10 years suspended, and an additional five years for tax evasion. Both sentences run concurrently, making his effective term five years.

Meanwhile, former contractor Michael Lomas, 79, arrived in South Africa after being extradited from the United Kingdom. Under a plea agreement, Lomas admitted to facilitating more than R2.6 million in bribes to senior Eskom officials. He received a suspended sentence rather than prison time, and has agreed to serve as a state witness in trials against others implicated in the network.

That cooperation matters. Lomas’s testimony gives prosecutors documented admissions they can deploy against additional accused individuals linked to the Kusile contract. His agreement signals that further prosecutions are coming, and that the full scope of the scheme inside Eskom’s procurement divisions has not yet been publicly established.

The case fits a pattern that South Africa’s state-owned enterprises have struggled to break. When contracts are awarded through bribes rather than competitive merit, the public bears the consequences in degraded services and wasted public funds. Eskom’s procurement processes have been scrutinized repeatedly in this context, and the Kusile scandal adds documented convictions to what had previously been a landscape of allegations and inquiries.

These are the first major convictions tied to the Kusile contract. They confirm what many citizens already suspected: that corruption reached senior levels of Eskom’s management and shaped decisions about infrastructure the country cannot afford to get wrong. The institutional conditions that made such a scheme possible, however, remain largely unaddressed. Whether the prosecutions now expected to follow will reach far enough into those structures is the question that will determine whether this reckoning amounts to genuine accountability or simply its appearance.