MAMPARA OF THE WEEK

Now here’s a bright spark

ANC chief Gwede Mantashe has a strange idea of a crisis. The problems at Eskom — a failed management, an inquiry into dodgy coal-supply deals, projects over budget and past deadline, and power cuts every day — are a “positive crisis”. Forget “instant solutions”, says this mampara, and think about the seven million households the ANC has linked to the grid. And if we get Medupi and Kusile going, he says, the problem will be halfway solved.

Now the ANC is asking the cadres it deployed in state institutions to pull up their socks and show the party in a better light. Mantashe did not say if these other bodies — the SABC, SARS, the NPA — are also in crisis because of ANC meddling. But, if so, their problems are surely also a tonic for us all.