Mantashe bounces off wall of bureaucracy
Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe has been enjoying a purple patch ahead of the budget. Tripped up as vague and dismissive in his response to SA’s energy crisis after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation speech (Sona), he bounced back with a raft of detail about new initiatives, including a fifth new renewables window, during the debate after Sona and culminated on Monday with the publication of a long interview with Chris Yelland, an excellent journalist who specialises in energy.
The interview is everywhere. Yelland published the whole thing himself on Monday, but all the major news houses had it in full the next day. It is Gwede in full flight, and worth reading.
He warns Cape Town not to go to court about being able to buy electricity from whomever it wants and says the city should rather talk to find “solutions”. He sees “mischief” in the DA’s legal approach. He nails his colours to gas as the great lifesaver as we transition from coal to renewables. And he lectures leaders on when to panic and when not to.
“I have never run a business,” he says at one point, “but what I know is that where you have a duty to supply a service you have a responsibility to actually look into that service.”
Yes, well, quite. Following Mantashe isn’t always easy, and you have to remember that there isn’t a political bridge he could not double cross. After all, as he tells Yelland: “I am an oldschool Marxist.”
Nonetheless, there was one part of the interview upon which no commentator or reporter has leapt. Twice Mantashe criticises his own department. It is a measure of the pressure he is under to deliver the country from Eskom. Speaking to the 481 responses his department received after a request for information (about solutions to the energy crisis), he tells Yelland, “It’s a learning process, but I sometimes feel that a sense of urgency is not as clear as it should be in the department. We are working on ensuring that the department moves with the necessary speed.
“Officials in the department are used to working according to rules, where it takes three months to do this or six months to do that. The situation we are in requires a change of approach. That’s why we are engaging with [energy regulator] Nersa and everybody to say: Guys, let’s accelerate processes, because if we don’t we are going to be plunged into darkness.”
And then, later, on the recent debate about moving Eskom from public enterprises to energy, he responds thus: “Theoretically, it may be correct for Eskom to be with energy. But in practice it would be a disaster right now. The department of energy must be consolidated into a functional department that is solid and can absorb pressure. At this point we have not reached that stage, but are working towards this.”
You don’t hear that a lot, and it draws attention to an almost standard view of government: just how slow is it? From my own experience trying to help a friend with home affairs, it is pitiful. What does new minister Mantashe do when he walks into a department or ministry that may be full of seriously inattentive people?
I thought I’d test the system, seeing as Mantashe repeats to Yelland that “we are going to open [renewables] window 5 because Nersa has now received the section 34 ministerial determinations for concurrence”. So I called Nersa and asked if it could confirm that it had indeed received the ministerial determination.
A polite gentleman asked me if I could please put my question in writing. I sent off my e-mail immediately after the call, at 3.25pm, also asking how long Nersa might take to answer the minister and, after that, how long it might take to open a new renewables bid window. I asked if it were possible to confirm by, say, 5pm. That deadline passed without a murmur. So I called again, at about 6pm. The poor chap was waiting for approved answers, though he could confirm the ministerial determination had indeed arrived.
When an institution takes three hours to not answer easy questions you get some idea of what even well-intentioned ministers face when they come into office. The bureaucracy is awful. Our public service needs its own boss. A brute for accuracy and punctuality. Independent of government.
Without leadership in our public service, the more urgent the moment the more desperate its behaviour. It is clearly hampering further liberalisation of immigration policies at home affairs too. It is corporate treacle, to be found throughout the public and private sectors.
The polite guy I spoke to at Nersa should have been able to speak for the institution himself. He should know what his bosses think. He should sit on their exco. Eskom just broke ground by hiring a critical journalist as its spokesperson and by giving him untrammelled access to the leadership. It is an example for the rest of the state.
IT’S A LEARNING PROCESS, BUT I SOMETIMES FEEL THAT A SENSE OF URGENCY IS NOT AS CLEAR AS IT SHOULD BE IN THE DEPARTMENT