Could Eskom and Zuma be writing Cyril’s swansong?
PWe may have heard the last of his emptypromise Sonas. No-one will miss them but heaven help the country
resident Cyril Ramaphosa had barely finished his disappointing state of the nation address on Thursday night when Eskom ramped up its loadshedding to stage 4. It was the perfect full stop to a speech almost entirely devoid of meaning.
Ramaphosa learnt long ago to keep a straight face. It takes a lot of experience to praise the premier of the Eastern Cape, as he did, for the quality of the roads in the province without sniggering. Just two weeks ago the hotel at Mazeppa Bay in Transkei announced it was shutting its doors for good, blaming the quality of the road.
I checked with a friend who has a cottage there. He said it had been “really bad” for many years.
Eskom tells more truth than Ramaphosa. Every Thursday the utility publishes its weekly energy availability factor (EAF), the ratio of available energy generation over a given time period to the maximum amount of electricity that could be produced in the same period.
On Thursday, week five of 2024, Eskom’s EAF was 51.55%, down from 54.71% for the same week last year, and far from the glib and cynical promises of an improvement by the new board appointed by public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan towards the end of 2022.
What’s worse, the declining EAF — in only one week so far this year has it been marginally better than 2023 — comes after the return to service late last year of three giant generating units, capable of producing 800MW each, at the Kusile power plant.
“We are now able to turn the corner in relation to additional capacity,” crowed electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa last October.
“The Kusile units are going to be indispensable to the resolution of this problem, and in the short term to help reduce the intensity of load-shedding.”
Erm, no they’re not, it seems, and Eskom took us to stage 6 late on Friday. Ramaphosa and Ramokgopa are clearly cut from the same cloth — their many promises are merely cheap tricks, tactics employed by shallow men who know exactly what they’re doing.
They’re already paying a price, as are we all. The rush of new polling suggests once more that the
ANC is going to be lucky to hold on to its majority in the National Assembly after the elections and is almost guaranteed to lose it in
Gauteng and KwaZuluNatal.
Add the Western Cape and the ANC will have lost control in all three of our economic powerhouse provinces.
An Ipsos poll just released but conducted before former president
Jacob Zuma broke cover with his new MK Party in December gives the ANC just 45% if the elections had been held at the time of the poll, with the DA stuck at 21% and the EFF climbing spectacularly from just under 11 % in 2019 to 18%.
You have to treat Ipsos polling with caution, however. It badly underestimated the DA vote and overestimated the EFF’s ahead of 2019. But it got the ANC just right.
Much, much worse for Ramaphosa, though, has been the launch of the MK Party with Zuma, snarling and threatening, as the star turn.
It did extremely well in a small municipal ward by-election in what used to be Vryheid this week, taking 19% of the vote out of nowhere.
Preliminary data from Social Research Foundation polling in January that I saw as the Sunday Times was going to print is just breathtaking though with the caution it had not been thoroughly processed.
But the raw data strongly suggests that MK has the potential to take more than 20% of the KwaZulu-Natal vote in a general election and could become the official opposition in the province in just a few months.
More by-elections in the next week will give us a clearer picture, but this didn’t all happen in the seven weeks since the launch of the new party. It must have been in the planning for months.
And for every 5% of the vote MK gets in KwaZulu-Natal in a national election, the ANC could lose a percentage point of its national vote. If current polling is correct, Ramaphosa could be struggling to stay above 40% rather than 50% come May, when the election is expected.
He would have no-one to blame but himself. He has dithered way too long and to too little effect. Eskom has already defeated him and if Jacob Zuma becomes a playmaker in future coalitions I can’t see Ramaphosa hanging around. So we may have heard the last of his empty-promise Sonas. We may not miss them, but heaven help the country.