Most governments are thick, but some spectacularly so

It is hard, sometimes, to find the right words to describe the madness of governments. Most are stupid and slow. Ours can be spectacularly thick. Not long ago it contrived to force the resignation of Mark Barnes, the only CEO in 25 years to leave the Post Office in better shape than he found it. Barnes had a vision for the Post Office and Postbank (a wreck of a thing whose deposits the regular Post Office used to raid to pay salaries), and the experience and balls to make it happen.

At a state-owned enterprise (SOE) you need that, to take your board, executive, unions, parliament and the government with you. Barnes fought to run social security payments and won, saving the fiscus many millions of rands. He had to demonstrate that an SOE like the Post Office could do it and he did. And he didn’t need the job. He wanted to prove a point — that the state needn’t be useless.

Barnes’s vision was an integrated organisation where the bank remained within the Post Office infrastructure so that it had seamless access to the national payments system, an efficient allocation of capital politicians just couldn’t live with. Not where there’s real money involved.

So against the advice of the board, the CEO, the unions and parliament, the government decided to split Postbank from the Post Office, triggering the CEO’s departure. Where the bank goes, literally no-one knows. Someone high up in the

National Treasury may have an idea. We will see. This is their doing, I’ve no doubt.

The communications minister, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, under whom the Post Office falls, was later unable to tell parliament’s portfolio committee what her plan was for Postbank. Nor did she have one for the Post Office. She was told the committee rather approved of Barnes’s plan and could she please come back with a better one. She won’t.

Last Thursday the Communication Workers Union said it “rejects” government plans to split the bank from the Post Office. Echoing the former CEO, the union’s general secretary, Aubrey Tshabalala, said, according to News24, that the postal service needs “an integrated network that is congruent with security, parcel clearance, currency conversion and delivery”. The split is “Thatcherite”, he implied, using the privatisation of Britain’s Royal Mail as a precursor to its near collapse.

More recent madness from the government has been watching minerals & energy minister Gwede Mantashe lecture mining executives in Johannesburg. This is just weeks after having revealed our boundless reserves of the priceless mineral hazenile to an Australian mining indaba, imagining it would attract huge inflows of investment. Sadly, hazenile doesn’t exist. It was created for an April Fool’s joke.

But Gwede’s people found it, much like they have him saying this week that “if electricity remains this expensive, the economy is going to collapse”. And it’s a double act, where Eskom chair and acting CEO Jabu Mabuza warns that coal is Eskom’s biggest cost and asks coal producers to put country before company and cut their prices.

Ag please man. I’ve written myself (and, you, probably, as well) sick trying to make the case for briquetted coal slurry, of which there is more than enough to keep all of Eskom pumping for more than 20 years without a single chunk more of coal being mined. It is a fraction of the cost of mined coal because all the work’s been done. And the technology to bind it and burn it is local. But don’t tell anyone.

A lot of coal miners already mix slurry into what they supply to Eskom, and Eskom is either too foolish or too corrupt to stop them. It pays them top dollar. But slurry is cheaper than coal by a factor of three. And there is no reason coal mines can’t make bigger margins by selling cheaper pelletised and then briquetted coal fines to Eskom. Heaven forfend we should try anything different. This is just a mere national emergency.

There may be some hope, as the new deputy chair of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, Mark Swilling, believes he has found in a statement delivered after the latest ANC national executive committee meeting. In the part on energy it says: “The Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) should articulate the lowest-cost option for the future energy mix for South Africa.”

The IRP, which outlines future energy plans, is a decade late. It should emerge this month. Swilling’s reading of it is that by “lowest-cost option” the ANC means renewable energy. That it means no coal and no nuclear.

I hope he is not being too optimistic. The ANC’s default is cock-up, and, depending on your levels of optimism, “articulate” and “implement” are potentially in different solar systems.