North West University (NWU) Principal and Vice-Chancellor Professor Bismark Tyobeka, has been appointed a member and chairperson of the Ministerial Expert Panel on Nuclear.
The appointment was made by the Energy and Electricity Minister Dr. Kgosientsho Ramokgopa.
Prof Tyobeka is no stranger to the sector, following his stint as the CEO of the National Nuclear Regulator.
His appointment comes just two weeks after he was appointed Chairperson of the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), by the Trade, Industry and Competition Minister, Parks Tau.
Speaking on YOU FM Prof Tyobeka said that he will easily juggle all the two key positions as they are not full-time appointments.
“Of course, one will have to manage their time carefully to be able to juggle all these responsibilities with running a busy, growing and vibrant university such as ours, NWU, to ensure the effective governance of these important institutions,” said Prof Tyobeka.
He however acknowledged that he is aware of the task ahead at the SABS, which plays a pivotal role in ensuring the quality, safety, and competitiveness of products and services.
“The entity has had its fair shares of challenges of leadership, there’s been challenges of instability, there’s been a board that has recently been dissolved by the Minister and therefore you obviously can say that there’s been governance problems.
The entity has been operating for the longest time without a permanent CEO, almost for five years or more with acting CEO’s and under administration here and there.
One of our priorities really is to ensure that there’s stability at the top, by the way it is not only the CEO’s that has been acting there, but also you have several acting appointments at the executive level which does not augur well for the stability of the organization,” Tyobeka explains.
Furthermore, he said the task of the board will be to ensure that it put a team of leadership that will stabilize the organization, which will have to respond to the immediate challenges.
He said previous board has provided them with a compendium of outstanding issues that they must urgently attend to and share with the newly appointed new acting CEO.
Meanwhile, Tyobeka highlighted that the country has always been a nuclear country, operating nuclear power plants for almost 40 years.
“The Nuclear dialogue of our country has been taking place for quite a few years, as far back as during the era of President Jacob Zuma when we were ready to procure 9.6gw of nuclear energy.
That programme as you’d know was intercepted and stopped by the courts because certain prescripts were not followed.
It is therefore important that we go back and correct some of the administrative and procedural lapses that were picked up by the courts,” remarked Tyobeka.
He’s optimistic that together with eminent persons and experts appointed alongside him, will help the minister and the government in restarting nuclear new plants, to ensure that the country increases the production of electricity from clean energy.
“The team that I am privileged to chair will amongst many other things advise the minister on things such as the pace and scale by which this new nuclear build should be phased into our economy given all manner of constraints such as the fiscal constraints nuclear cost money.
We need money to build new nuclear power plants, we need to advise the minister on the procurement strategy, we need to advise the minister on the choice of the technology to deploy for the newly built nuclear power plant, when we eventually do so.
But we are not limited to nuclear energy, but we are also going to advise the minister on other nuclear related matters including nuclear science and technology, etc,” concluded Tyobeka.
