Failure to light our way out of darkness hurts

AS WE enter the second quarter of the year, and the new financial year, the pocket-hurting 18.65% electricity tariff increase kicks in. The nights get longer and colder, and sadly, the road ahead out of the load-shedding crisis and its debilitating effects on the economy is still not getting any clearer.

Very few fellow South Africans can claim to see any clearer as we approach the megawatt-guzzling winter and countdown to the first anniversary of the energy crisis action plan announced in July last year. The new minister of electricity is settling in his hot seat, but matters of energy remain far from stabilising.

Instead, we continue to leap from crisis to crisis and confusion to more confusion as to what our leaders are doing to fix Eskom.

The chopping and changing of last week around the utility’s exemption from reporting on fruitless, wasteful and irregular expenditure compounded the confusion. Even after the finance minister’s about-turn, there were still suggestions the ill-thought-out regulation amendment might come back in a revised form.

And then there was the furtive dropping of the national state of disaster that was supposed to help speed up the process of fixing Eskom’s troublesome power plants.

It now appears we didn’t need the state of disaster declaration.

President Cyril Ramaphosa described the power crisis very well when he unveiled his government’s agenda for the year during his State of the Nation Address on February 9.

In his attempt to inspire us all, he correctly described South Africans as a nation of hope and resilience who refused to be browbeaten, even by the Covid-19 pandemic.

In reaction to the address, we, as a newspaper, expressed in this column the need for speed as well as “clear and co-ordinated action and communication” in dealing with our number one priority.

At the time, there had been confusing messages from the president and others in leadership regarding the 18.65% increase. Ramaphosa left us confused, giving us false hope something might still be done to suspend the increase or somehow lessen or delay the pain.

This past week, the circus continued.

It’s getting harder and harder to remain hopeful that we are going to see the end of load shedding sooner rather than later and resume rebuilding our moribund economy.

Ramaphosa told us what we knew very well already when he said we “are in the grip of a profound energy crisis, the seeds of which were planted many years ago”.

He was also right in saying we “cannot undo the mistakes that were made in the past, the capacity that was not built, the damage that was done to our power plants due to a lack of maintenance, or the effects of state capture on our institutions”.

But we cannot also continue fumbling like this on such an important issue.

We cannot afford the ongoing missteps, flip-flopping and confusion.