In a prepared speech that he did not read out in parliament, Gordhan revealed that:

finance minister Tito Mboweni will announce measures in the budget speech next week to address some of Eskom’s financial requirements;

the government is calling on Enel, one of the world’s leading energy suppliers, to provide it with external technical assistance. Enel will be soon sending 2 or 3 coal power station engineers to SA; and

engineers who were trained by Eskom but left the entity during the period of corruption and state capture to work elsewhere on the continent have indicated their desire to return home and contribute to the rebuilding of Eskom, in the spirit of Thuma Mina.

“The first point we need to tell the public is that Medupi and Kusile were badly designed and badly constructed and are not performing at optimum levels,” Gordhan told MPs, to much heckling from the opposition benches.

He was participating in Tuesday's debate of President Cyril Ramaphosa's state of the nation address (Sona).

In terms of power generation, Gordhan said coal-powered stations give the country 38,639MW, far more than other sources such as water (including peaking pump storage) at 3,324MW, gas at 2,409MW and nuclear at 1,860MW.

“What we are currently faced with is that not all of the 38,000MW or fully installed 45,000MW is available to us,” said Gordhan.

Gordhan explained that there are planned outages of about 5,000MW, which require units to be removed from the grid in order to repair them before bringing them back online. There are also forced or unplanned outages that involve about 5,500MW and occasional partial outages that involve about 3,800MW.

Gordhan admitted that the wrong choices had been made and faulty designs implemented with regards to Medupi and Kusile. He said with the two power stations currently “not performing”, costs had escalated and were now three times higher than expected, with construction seven years late.