Nothing compares to apartheid

PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa used his Human Rights Day address this year to focus on the Eskom crisis. It was something, he said, that the country would overcome “just like apartheid”.

At a certain level, it is clear what he intended to convey – our country’s resilience first and foremost, but it is a message that will have been discomfiting to many because it suggests a moral equivalence between what was a crime against humanity versus rolling power blackouts.

There can be no moral equivalence between the legalised suppression of a people for more than 40 years and a fortnight of power cuts. There is, however, a distinct moral equivalence between the criminal intent needed to enforce apartheid and the criminal intent needed to subvert state-owned enterprises over a 10-year period aided and abetted through the collusion of corporates to such an extent that our economic sovereignty is jeopardised to such an extent that we are almost bankrupt.

This wasn’t the president’s message this week. Then again, nor has the ANC, the party which he leads, shown any real intent to deal with the cancer eating it up by allowing the very leaders accused of being party to state capture to occupy high positions on its list for the upcoming general elections.

The rolling power cuts that we endure because of the catastrophic mismanagement of our power utility, can only be resolved if there is the necessary honesty and unequivocal will to overcome them. Platitudes and, in particular, blame avoidance by making it the nation’s responsibility suggest a total dearth of the leadership we require to navigate out of a crisis that actually threatens our future.

Blithely equating the current crisis at Eskom, without spelling this out, to the horror that was apartheid not only underscores this – it insults the memory of the millions who in the words of Sol Plaatje, were rendered “pariahs in the land of their birth”.