Between the chains
PetroSA - just another defunct SOE
Its web page proclaims that “PetroSA is proud to be SA’s national oil company”. This is accompanied by a few more lies giving the impression that the state owns a worthy producer of petroleum, when the truth is the exact opposite. If you didn’t notice the few other items populating the landing page, you’d be left with the impression that government owns a strategic asset through which it can ensure a consistent and reliable supply of fuel. A closer look would quickly disabuse you of this notion. The annual report highlighted on the right-hand side of the page is that of the financial year 2017. To find the current annual report you have to search deeper. The last media statement was in late 2017.
That’s because PetroSA is long dead. It has no news. It has no business. It is fast running out of feedstock to supply its gas-to-liquid plant at Mossel Bay. Come July 2020, the plant will be a white elephant as PetroSA has failed to find gas reserves to continue running it.
The search for gas feedstock ended with the organisation claiming the dubious record of being the only entity to lose R15bn in a single financial year. In 2015. What the utility does have are a few fat cats who owe their employment to their political connections, rather than their skill and work ethic.
PetroSA was developed by a desperate apartheid government as an answer to sanctions that threatened to starve the country of oil. Today it survives only to help politicians and their friends drain taxpayers.
In this respect PetroSA fits in perfectly with its sister companies under the state’s control: the SABC, Denel, Eskom, SAA.
For the past eight years, PetroSA has been stripped of all talent and has been hobbling along. Anyone with a useful skill has either been fired to make way for corruption, or has left to find employment where their contribution would serve the country.
Instead of being an asset to facilitate economic development, these companies have been turned by greedy politicians into vehicles to accelerate the looting of resources.
Alongside them you find companies that have been fulfilling the mandate of facilitating economic development. Take the example of Total, which may have just discovered a huge gas and oil reserve off the SA coast. While it is still too early to say exactly how much there is, it can be said that once production starts, SA will be close to self-sufficient when it comes to fuel production.
What makes this find even sweeter for Total is that the wells were drilled in the same vicinity where PetroSA sunk more than R15bn in a vain attempt to find feedstock to replenish the Mossel Bay gas fields.
If these two contrasting examples of Total and PetroSA don’t sway even the biggest champions of state ownership of economic assets, look no further than the disaster called SAA, and compare it to Comair and FlySafair. Investors in those two have been drawing profits and dividends while the owner of SAA has been throwing scarce resources at the national liability, all in vain.
Look wider, and you’ll see that the security industry is booming in SA as a result of the ineptitude of the police under the mismanagement of politicians. So are private education institutions.
The less said about Eskom, the better.