Ramaphosa, get on with running country
If you have a product everyone needs and no competition, that’s basically a licence to print money.
Only a fool would mess up such an opportunity, right?
Well, by law Eskom has the monopoly to produce and sell electricity, yet it has debt of R419bn and needs to increase the price of its product to national bankruptcy-inducing levels to survive.
R419bn? That’s 30-40% of the government’s yearly budget! Sheesh, how did these geniuses mess up so badly?
Clearly, if room-temperature IQ is bad even on the hottest day in Saudi Arabia, then the collective IQ of “Eishkom” must be the temperature of a Siberian room with broken windows during the coldest winter considering how it failed to stay afloat, never mind profit, from the supply of electricity to a market it still holds hostage with its outrageous demands.
Last week, one of my friends spent daily close to two hours stuck in PE’s traffic on his way to the office from dropping off his son at school, because good old Uncle “Eksdom” and the municipality decided to cut power while the latter does not have enough to deploy out-of-- shape traffic cops to, you know, actually police traffic.
I spoke to a business owner and one of his managers four days ago. The latest round of power cuts is killing them because the businesses rely on high turnover and four hours of lost productivity at their busiest time of day is not sustainable for longer than the next two months.
The business owner had opened another branch in November or December 2018, which apparently made very good money, but now it’s all in jeopardy. Shutting down his businesses will leave at least 12-15 people unemployed, yet besides leaving SA this is exactly what I advised him to do rather than go bankrupt because of Eskom.
If one is charitable, Cyril Ramaphosa can be described as a man of many contradictions. Almost the first thing he said was to commit the ANC to “expropriation of land without compensation” – then got some CEO force multipliers and went on a charm tour of foreign capitals to convince investors that our country is a good place to invest capital and open businesses.
He declared himself against corruption and committed to clean up government, then appointed Bheki Cele as minister of police and made David Mabuza deputy president.
Supposedly SA has an extradition treaty with the United Arab Emirates, yet the Guptas are still sitting pretty in Dubai, still spending R100m on weddings, especially now that Atul’s arrest warrant has been cancelled.
Ramaphosa promised an end to political interference with state security organs and the NPA, but there were no consequences when Julius Malema fired what looked like an assault rifle at that EFF rally. The law is clear – if you use a toy gun or banana in the pocket to rob a bank, you will be charged with armed robbery. Malema still hasn’t been arrested, never mind charged.
So Cyril is going to break up Eskom into three divisions – Generation, Transmission and Distribution. If he was honest, he would have added two more divisions – Mismanagement and Corruption – because they’ve been there for about two decades anyway.
Selling wolf tickets and running a country are different things. Ramaphosa (until the elections anyway) should stop with the former and apply himself to the latter.