THE DARK BEFORE DAWN

Eskom has got to where it is now by ignoring, for many years, red flags and warnings of looming disaster. There won’t be an overnight solution

There’s a startling video doing the rounds, taken at what is meant to be a coal pile at one of SA’S power stations that supply Eskom. Only, instead of coal, there are mountains of what seems, pretty plainly, to just be grey rocks and sand. You’d have a better chance of burning a beaker of Theresa May’s tears.

But the point is, for these rocks, Eskom and by extension the taxpayer, has lavished R900 a ton on the entrepreneur who shovelled whatever he could find at the nearest construction site into his bakkie.

This example, of course, is just one small pocket of SA’S brittle energy infrastructure that speaks so much about the weakness of the entire fabric. You can bet that it’s not the only power station sporting a pile of rubble, rather than anything approaching combustible coal. As South Africans seethe about the series of fitful blackouts seizing the country, it’s sobering to realise that the place we’re at is a culmination of many years of threads gradually fraying.

Depressingly, the inverse is also true: stitching Eskom back together again isn’t a job that will take five minutes, which suggests that stage 4 load-shedding won’t disappear overnight.

The gravity of just how bleak the prospects are for Eskom was evident this week, when public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan addressed the media at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Rosebank. It was an entirely sobering affair, not least because journalists are predisposed to expecting politicians to promise the earth. In an election year, you expect them to throw in a few nearby planets for good measure.

Of course, the reality of the cold facts is so stark, it’s unspinnable anyway