You’re to blame for SA’s dark days, you not-so-bright spark

fter meeting Eskom’s board and damagement at the weekend, Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan said: “The South African public is requested to understand that many power stations are between 37 and 50 years old and many operate at suboptimal levels due to their age.”

Thing is, comrade, a lot of South Africans are between 37 and 50 years old and also operate at suboptimal levels, but you don’t see them destroying the economy. Well, I suppose some do indirectly by voting for the ANC every five years.

Perhaps I’m being oversensitive, but Gordhan seems to be suggesting that our fury at Eskom, the government and the ruling party – the unholy trinity – is caused by a lack of understanding on our part. If only we were bright enough to grasp that it is the elderly power stations and not actual humans which are to blame for this hellish clusterf**k, we would all be so much happier.

This is a form of gaslighting – which, ironically, is rapidly becoming the only source of illumination. In the Gordhan context, gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that aims to sow doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. It’s a tactic frequently used in relationships as a means of gaining more power.

And as much as we hate to admit it, we are in a relationship with the government. An abusive, toxic relationship, to be sure, but a relationship nonetheless. One cannot survive without the other. We need the government to keep us from murdering each other wholesale and the government needs us to keep voting for them and giving them chunks of our money. To say they get more out of this deal than we do is a massive understatement.

Apart from misdirecting blame, Gordhan seems to imply that we ought to give power stations a break simply because they are old. We would be monsters not to feel sorry for them, right?

It’s like when Grandma forgets to put clothes on and walks to the shops. Do you cut her some slack because she’s in her nineties or do you wrestle her into a straitjacket and dump her on the steps of a mental institution? You go for the straitjacket. Obviously.

But at least Granny occasionally bathed and brushed her hair and took multivitamins and every Christmas allowed herself a snifter of brandy, one cigarette and a teensy-weensy line of cocaine. Eskom’s power stations, on the other hand, got no love growing up. They were horribly neglected by a succession of derelict foster parents and have now turned feral.

After his meeting, Gordhan shouted and stamped his foot. “Load shedding is unacceptable,” he told the nation with a stern look. We shuffled our feet and looked suitably shamed until it dawned on us that it wasn’t entirely our fault.

Apart from the usual suspects – frogs in the diesel, chickens in the coal, dog ate the turbine – Eskom latched on to a fresh act of God to blame for the latest round of blackouts. If Cyclone Idai hadn’t been so rude as to smash into Mozambique, we would be wallowing in electricity. You could have thrown parties where friends would bring their appliances to your house and plug them in just for the hell of it. Every man, woman and child could have gone down on their hands and knees and sucked on the national grid and still there’d be megawatts to spare. Damn that cyclone’s selfish eye.

So, anyway. Our anglerfish of a president – because he survives under extreme pressure while plumbing the darkest depths – took a train on Monday to prove that he was one of us and not, as some believe, an arthropod from outer space.

The 50km trip from Mabopane to Pretoria took more than three hours. He would have got there quicker on a skateboard. Following in the tracks of our economy, the train puttered along for a while, then sighed heavily and refused to budge.

A spokesgoblin for the railway later said the delay was caused after someone threw a stone at a train driver on another train further down the line. Prasa, like all our state-owned enterprises, has learnt the dark arts of lying and denying by observing their masters. However, they do need to realise that the government is at the top of its game when it comes to this kind of thing.

“A stone was thrown at a driver” is the work of an amateur and they will need to up their game considerably if their statements are to meet even the most basic requirements of plausible deniability.

The spokesgoblin overcompensated by taking a wild stab at the truth. Rookie mistake. “We’re actually happy that the president got to experience the day-to-day struggles of our commuters,” he said.

If you see a new guy at the robots tomorrow, that’ll be him.

The president was less delighted. Addressing a wretched knot of commuters, some of whom had been waiting for the 6.15 to Mlamlankuzi since Thabo Mbeki was knifed, he promised to do something about something.

The crowd seemed strangely unmoved. He also said Prasa must fix the situation “otherwise heads will roll”. Er, there’s a bit of a backlog in the head rolling department, comrade. And you’re going to need more guillotines.

Gauteng premier David Makhura said he had a “very big problem”. With the president, not the railway. “I had to calm him down,” he said, close to tears.

Oh dear. If a delayed train upsets Ramaphosa this much, best not let him near a state hospital. If he sees the carnage at Chris Hani Baragwanath, he’ll have to be brought down with a tranquilliser gun and rushed to a decompression chamber fitted with tasteful artworks, recessed lighting and classical music filtered through speakers discreetly mounted around a neo-rococo champagne fountain.

Power stations were horribly neglected by derelict foster parents