Politician must play far away from decision-making at Eskom
IN YEARS gone by, coal miners took canaries underground with them. Their purpose was to warn the miners when they were in imminent danger from poisonous gases, and to buy them precious time to evade an untimely demise.
Eskom is our coal mine canary, and not just for the ANC.
In 2001 the Financial Times named Eskom its Global Power Company of the Year. The company had an AAA+ credit rating, and was producing the cheapest electricity in the world.
Addressing a lack of investor confidence in South Africa at the time, the executive director for resources and strategy at Eskom, Dr Steve Lennon, said: “This sends out positive messages about what new businesses in South Africa can do.”
Two decades later, Dr Steve Lennon now works in Australia, Eskom has a CCC- credit rating, electricity prices have outpaced inflation by 286% (with Eskom requesting a 33% price increase again this year), and South Africa has stage 6 load shedding, which leaves South Africans without power for eight hours a day.
President Cyril Ramaphosa personally headed up the “turnaround” of Eskom and has been serving up empty promises for almost a decade.
These culminated in a risible and mercifully now-abandoned plan to just start a new Eskom. Meanwhile, Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer, who personally warned the government of the impending crisis in the 1990s, confirmed that Eskom no longer has the technical skills to maintain and repair its own power stations.
Unfortunately, not even this has caused the government to allow Eskom to accept the help of 300 technical experts, which trade union Solidarity has arranged for them. Politicians, instead, instructed the parastatal to find a more “inclusive” solution.
Credible experts are unanimous on what must be done to rescue Eskom, the success of which is critical to the economy, but ANC politicians have no intention whatsoever of doing it.
It is, however, not just the ANC who have lessons to learn. The impotence of DA policy has been just as ruthlessly exposed. Predictably, the DA took to social media to remind Capetonians just how lucky they were only to be experiencing stage 3 load shedding when the rest of South Africa was enduring stage 5.
At times, politicians are hopelessly out of touch with ordinary people’s realities. It is highly doubtful that Capetonians were feeling lucky, and it must really have stuck in the throat of Kaapenaars outside the Cape Town metro who got to experience Stage 5. They voted DA, too. As it turned out, when later the same day load shedding was escalated to Stage 6, Cape Town was treated to stage 5 anyway.
The DA in the Western Cape must accept that no amount of tinkering around the edges is going to solve the numerous politically initiated problems that threaten to overwhelm us.
We know exactly why we have run out of electricity. We have a socialist government who insist on Eskom being a national monopoly, and who have actively kept independent power producers excluded from the system.
Cadre deployment has ensured that political goals have been prioritised above commercial and technical necessities. Race-based employment policies have stripped Eskom of skills, and race-based procurement policies have led to endemic corruption.
The solution is not for the City of Cape Town to add 300MW to the grid. That certainly won’t end load shedding. The solution is to abandon state-owned monopolies and introduce capacity and competition to the market, get rid of cadre deployment and race-based policy to recruit the necessary expertise at Eskom, and get politicians far away from any operational decision making.
The DA can’t do much in the provinces where voters still support the ANC, but it can and must in the Western Cape. For the Western Cape, the CIAG (Cape Independence Advocacy Group) believes sovereign independence is the answer.