Eskom mess needs diplomacy

ESKOM is to charge 9.41% more for electricity from April 1.

Next year, consumers face an increase above that of 8.1% and then the year after that 5.2%.

We all knew it was coming – we lived through a series of rolling power cuts immediately after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation address last month.

The excuses then, as they were more than 10 years ago, when we were first introduced to “load shedding”, were banal to the point of being insulting.

Whether it’s wet coal or drowning in ash, the bottom line is that the two mega coal plants that were going to meet all our power needs, still aren’t up and running, and are horrifically over budget.

They were also part and parcel of the state capture kleptocracy that criminally further compromised Eskom over the past decade.

We will be paying for this for generations to come.

The problem, though, is compounded. It’s not just Eskom which sells expensive power, but municipalities which then sell it on.

Electricity is one of their major sources of revenue – but not everyone pays for it, because of a combination of rampant unemployment in the townships and a continuing culture of nonpayment for services by those who could afford to.

All of which places further strain on an infrastructure that by all accounts is not only fit to collapse, but the scale of the debt – never mind the consequences of Eskom’s potential catastrophic failure for all of us – threatens our entire economy.

Resolving this will require not leadership, but statesmanship. It will require an unequivocal statement that those who put us into the mess and compromised our sovereignty will be properly punished and that whatever we are asked to do will actually put us on the road of recovery, not lead us by the nose yet again until those of us who do pay are milked dry and living in a preindustrial age by candlelight.