Cyril is just not energised enough to power SA with his shock

The trouble with having no electricity for 11 hours in a day is that it gives one lots of time to stew, and over the last few days many South Africans have been getting angrier with President Cyril Ramaphosa for being overseas while they sat in the dark. Which is strange, since what this country needs most is for senior ANC politicians to be as far away as possible.

Besides, what exactly did they want Ramaphosa to do once he got back? I mean, does it really make that much difference whether he’s being pointless in London or pointless in Pretoria? One answer was that it was important for Ramaphosa to cut his trip short because it showed the government is taking the crisis seriously. OK, but so what? I take collisions with comets seriously, but that doesn’t mean I know how to stop them.

Another answer I saw fairly often was that Ramaphosa should come home to “suffer like the rest of us”, suggesting that many South Africans still don’t understand that to Ramaphosa and his cabinet load-shedding is the name of an obscure daily ritual nobody can quite explain, whereby for some reason a generator is switched on in the ornamental shed below the koi pond and the plebeians start keening out beyond the razor wire.

In some cases we plebeians are keening at each other. I’ve recently been told that I need to check my privilege before I complain about load-shedding, given the millions of South Africans who have never had electricity. You know, the way calling the fire brigade before the fire has reached your house is tone-deaf and disrespectful to those whose houses have already burned down.

This time around, however, the noises coming from beyond the razor wire have been far more anxious than usual, and tinged with a new kind of paranoia. Of course, social media had been awash with conspiracy theories about Eskom for years, some of which are clearly promoted by the Radical Economic Transformation wreckers who keep trying to tell us the power utility enjoyed a golden age under former president Jacob Zuma but has since been sold off to the Broederbond, the World Bank, George Soros, or whichever other bogeymen visited the RET faction in a feverdream last night.

For example, I regularly read that the ANC has deliberately broken SA’S coal-fired power stations to create a crisis that will force the Treasury to fasttrack renewables, which will allow all our coal to be sold to China; or nuclear, which will allow all of our money to be sprayed all over ANC fixers.

Over the weekend I also heard someone, described by ENCA as an energy expert, claim that Eskom has cut maintenance budgets by 75%, although given what we know about the ANC a maintenance budget might simply refer to the amount of money required to keep senior officials in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, in which case a 75% drop is excellent news.

What was depressing, though, was how many otherwise sensible acquaintances of mine seemed willing to believe something sinister had happened. It was depressing because it showed how quickly and completely we’ve become habituated to this collapse. To insist that a sudden lurch to stage 5 and then stage 6 loadshedding is proof of skullduggery is to imply a belief that there is an unremarkable, normal, and perhaps even acceptable stage of load-shedding; a gold standard of deindustrialisation, if you will, from which we have suddenly veered.

It was also depressing because it suggested the ANC’S strategy of rebranding Eskom as a malignant, vaguely secessionist, possibly racist, entity is working. To drive this narrative home the ANC has persuaded the media that there are two ANCS but only one Eskom. When the ANC commits some or other crime, it’s always someone in the other ANC who’s done it; but when Eskom fails, well, that’s all Eskom.

The truth, of course, is that it’s the other way around. There is one ANC, rotten and broken and desperate to be put out of its misery, but there are two Eskoms: one staffed by engineers who want to generate electricity, the other being strangled by cadres who want to generate early retirements.

The confusion of our current moment is caused by trying to tell them apart through a fog of conventional corporate spin, relentless RET propaganda, and the shadowy manoeuvres of tenderpreneurs smelling an easy mugging in the dark little alley into which we’ve been led by the ANC.

But beyond the smokescreen, cold, clear realities are looming into view. There is no more time to build new power stations. Now the only thing that will keep the national grid up is a huge and extremely rapid mushrooming of private power generation, mostly from solar.

Then, and only then, will Eskom have the half-inch of breathing space it needs to do the work former president Thabo Mbeki delayed, Zuma’s cronies hijacked, and Ramaphosa gazed at blankly.