For years, Eskom treated its procurement contracts as a state secret more jealously guarded than most actual classified material. That ended when the Supreme Court of Appeal ordered the utility to comply with a Promotion of Access to Information Act request filed by civil rights organisation AfriForum — and Eskom, having exhausted its legal runway, handed over the files.

The disclosed documents cover contracts that were active as at July 2022, spanning independent power producer agreements, coal supply and transport arrangements, diesel procurement deals, and electricity export contracts with neighbouring countries. These are not peripheral line items. Coal and diesel together account for the overwhelming majority of Eskom's generation costs, and the terms on which those fuels were procured during the years of peak load-shedding go directly to the question of who benefited — and who was paying.

The significance of that timing cannot be overstated. July 2022 sits squarely inside South Africa's worst-ever load-shedding period. Stage 6 blackouts became a recurring feature of daily life. Eskom's diesel bill for its open-cycle gas turbine peaking plants — machines designed for occasional use, not continuous emergency generation — ballooned into the tens of billions of rand. The procurement processes that fed those turbines were precisely what transparency advocates argued needed scrutiny. Eskom disagreed, in court, repeatedly.

AfriForum's access campaign was not a fishing expedition. It was a years-long legal fight that required a Supreme Court of Appeal ruling to resolve, which in itself tells you something about the institutional instinct at Eskom when it comes to disclosure. The PAIA framework exists precisely because public entities exercising public functions with public money are not entitled to commercial-confidentiality shields as a default. Eskom deployed that shield anyway, and held it as long as the judiciary would allow.

The contracts now in AfriForum's possession will require detailed forensic reading. Independent power producer agreements carry embedded pricing, take-or-pay obligations, and capacity allocation terms that can be constructed in ways that favour the counterparty at the public's expense — or not. Coal supply contracts in South Africa have historically been a locus of connected-party dealings, inflated logistics costs, and volume commitments that locked Eskom into above-market terms. The diesel procurement arrangements are arguably the most politically sensitive: the scale of emergency fuel purchasing during the crisis years generated a forensic caseload that Eskom's own investigators have described as a backlog requiring specialist external capacity to clear.

It is worth being precise about what has and has not been established. The release of the contracts is confirmed. Their contents are now subject to analysis. What those contents prove, allege, or imply about specific transactions or individuals remains to be determined by whoever reads them carefully — including, potentially, regulators, parliamentarians, and prosecutors. The documents are primary evidence, not verdicts.

What is already established as fact, separate from these disclosures, is that Eskom is simultaneously pursuing a massive forensic investigation backlog and attempting to recover an estimated R110 billion in unpaid municipal debt. The utility is, in other words, cleaning house on multiple fronts at once. Whether the newly released contracts feed into any of those parallel processes — or surface procurement irregularities that have not yet been formally investigated — is now an open question with actual documents attached to it.

South Africa passed a full year recently without a single day of load-shedding, a milestone driven in part by rooftop solar uptake that reduced grid demand pressure. The immediate crisis has eased. But the accountability question — how the procurement machinery worked during the years it was failing the country, and who the contracts served — does not become less important because the emergency is over. If anything, the return of relative stability creates space to ask the questions that were harder to prosecute when the country was just trying to keep hospitals running.

Eskom's compliance with the SCA ruling is the beginning of that accounting, not the end of it. The files are open. The reading starts now.