Why school bullies shouldn’t be prefects

IF you listen carefully you can hear the Good Ship ANC creaking as it sinks. Becalmed and adrift, each noise is a drama on its own with a cast of its own. There’s an SABC noise, a universities noise, a banking transparency noise.

President Jacob Zuma is the only person present at all the creaks, including what may become the mother of all creaks. Nuclear power.

I try to watch the way the battle lines move on this issue, not because I’m anti-nuclear but because I’m interested in the politics of it. Who profits?

Thursday marked a turning point for the worse, however, because following a cabinet meeting the minister in the presidency, Jeff Radebe, strongly hinted that Eskom, and not the Department of Energy, would oversee the procurement programme. That’s new. And it’s like making the school bully head boy.

From the moment she signed a secret deal with the Russians to fulfil a promise made by Zuma to Vladimir Putin to order 9 600MW worth of Russian reactors, Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson has had control of the programme. Signing that deal was what Zuma required of her after the last election, when Ben Martins turned him down. She has been faithful to the promise.

But she has also made a big mistake — she let herself get swept away by a drive for sources of renewable power and piloted into existence an incredibly successful wind and solar power programme that is highly regarded around the world. She doesn’t get enough credit for it.

Sadly, she had little real insight into Eskom, the big, brooding apartheid relic now so beloved of Zuma’s bosom friends, the Gupta family. Eskom reports not to energy but to public enterprises, so Joemat-Pettersson has been working blind. The fact is Eskom is the school bully who doesn’t want to grow up. It is a monopoly and likes it that way. It believes in its soul, today as it did during apartheid, that only Eskom can generate, transmit and distribute electricity in South Africa.

And while the wind of change has battered Eskom, leading to epic failures such as load-shedding, it has been casting around for salvation. People want to break it up, to privatise it, to tell it what to do. So when nuclear came up, Eskom’s eyes welled with joy. Here was deliverance.

Parachute in a competent Zuma loyalist such as Brian Molefe as CEO and it was clear Eskom was not going to stand idly by while Lady Tina ordered nuclear power plant for them to polish. No ma’am, Eskom would do the procurement, Eskom would do the pricing, Eskom would do the management.

That strategy reared its head about two months ago, when Molefe announced Eskom would buy no new power from renewable projects. Joemat-Pettersson was aghast. So were Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies and Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel, both of whom had championed the manufacturing of renewable energy equipment in South Africa. So was the ANC, or the bit of it that Gwede Mantashe still represents.

Too bad for all of them. Over at Eskom, Molefe had carefully juxtaposed the qualities of nuclear power as base load against the fact that sun and wind power weren’t always available when they were needed. His head of power generation, Matshela Koko, every day sends out a mocking tweet on how much surplus power Eskom has available on the day and how little of it is renewable.

On Thursday, the strategy paid its first dividend. There’s now to be a pause while the government decides (and there’ll be a fight, but Zuma loves Molefe so the outcome is in no doubt) which of Eskom or the Department of Energy runs the nuclear deal.

Eskom is jumping up and down with its hand up like an excited child who knows the answer. Joemat-Pettersson has been told to sit. She had promised to issue a request for proposals to the nuclear manufacturing world last Friday. She didn’t.

This will be Eskom’s show and Eskom is “captured” by the Guptas good and proper. They have their people on the board and they’ll get all kinds of contracts out of the deal, even if Eskom scales it back from the 9 600MW Zuma promised Putin. So they win again, presuming Eskom doesn’t mess up nuclear the way it messed up Medupi and Kusile. Nice, juicy, low-hanging, radioactive fruit.

Eskom is no longer going to stand idly by while Lady Tina orders nuclear plant