SA pays ultimate price for Eskom
THE member (of the Upper Jukskei Flyfishing Collective) is grateful to the Free Market Foundation’s Leon Louw for drawing attention to the intolerable contradiction in the attitude of the Loopy Left (communists and labour federation Cosatu and its galumphing puppies) to the privatisation of SA’s electricity supply, by which he hopes Mr Louw means the sale at auction of Eskom’s distribution network.
The Loopy Left (profoundly to paraphrase Louw) acknowledges and praises the benefits of incinerating the Megawatt Park Muppet in its own coal-fired furnace and proposes to replace it with profit-driven, service-orientated and accountable entities in open competition, while it cites those very virtues as reason to oppose privatisation. Thus, Loopy Left: proponents of ideas and practices so deranged and psychotic that they represent a danger to society.
Granted, Louw does not go as far as that, but he does articulate the now well-known and irrefutable arguments for the efficiency and wealth creation that result from privatising state enterprises. Yet, in the intemperate view of the member, Louw omits the main argument in favour of disposing of Megawatt Park.
The terrifying fact is that Eskom regards itself as above the law, and that it reinforces that atrocity through its actions. It is possible to contemplate the necessity of scale and the degree of capitalisation required to supply electricity to all South Africans as the province of the state, but it should be intolerable even to the marginally loopy in the soft left that an entity that is supposed to be exemplary in service and submission to the constitution grossly violates the rights of South Africans.
Thus, a danger to society: Greenpeace Africa quotes a European Union study that has found the air polluted by Eskom at Witbank in Mpumalanga to be the worst in the world and that Eskom’s own research found that air pollution caused by its coal power stations is killing at least 20 people a year. Greenpeace’s research shows the figure to be about 2,200 premature deaths per year.
That is Ebola levels without the press and it is every year, year after year, and presumed to get worse when the new coalfired power stations, Medupi and Kusile, are commissioned.
But here’s the thing. The government knows all this and has known for many years. The member wrote about precisely these issues in the mid-1980s and got Evkom/Escom on his back for his efforts. Since then many research reports and media investigations have revealed the terrible human price we pay for the way Eskom produces electricity.
Finally, legislation was passed to determine emission standards, applicable from April next year. Now Eskom wants a postponement of the deadline — of which it has been aware since 2005 — that will see two-thirds of its coal-fired power stations exempted.
That means more people will die.
The temperate Mr Louw does not go that far either, but that is what will happen. And if that is not reason enough for outrage, know that Eskom will get away with it and will do so not only because is it a corporatised agency of the state, but because its purpose and culture is conflated with that of the government.
When next Eskom fails to balance its books, know that it is the government that has failed. When next the lights go out, blame the state as the sole shareholder and ultimate boss of Eskom.
Until all Eskom’s assets, most notably its distribution network, are privatised, the modest cogeneration concessions offered by Eskom will do little more than entrench the government’s incompetent grip on power. Until the generators of renewable energy are permitted to sell as much electricity to whomever they please at whatever price they can get for it in open competition, the efforts are no more than cynical window dressing.
What Mr Louw does not say is that unless the deranged and psychotic Eskom is shut down, more people will die.