Ramaphosa leads SA to the brink of apocalypse

WThe ANC may have added only a fragment of the electricity we need by the time Ramaphosa leaves office in 2029

here would you rather be a fly on the wall? At a strategy meeting of Nkosazana DlaminiZuma and Lindiwe Sisulu as they plan a joint campaign to run for leadership of the ANC against Cyril Ramaphosa in December, or at a playback of calls between Helen Zille and ousted Johannesburg mayor Mpho Phalatse over the past two weeks? Or at a private conversation between Ramaphosa and Gwede Mantashe on the future of Eskom?

As president, Ramaphosa must rue the day he decided to work with Dlamini-Zuma as a “unity” project after beating her for the party leadership in 2017. Ever since, he has fawned over her, flattered her pitiful contribution as cooperative governance & traditional affairs minister and empowered her to such an extent that she was handed the country when the pandemic hit. She has got nothing right other than to still be standing now to have another run at Ramaphosa.

Her “legacy”, the so-called “district model” of rural development, is a fiction. The idea was to herd small, broken and embarrassing municipalities into bigger, broken and slightly less embarrassing municipalities in the hopes of finding in the bigger entity perhaps a plumber to fix the water lines or an engineer to restart sewage treatment.

Ramaphosa never missed an opportunity to talk up the district model. It was all about making Dlamini-Zuma feel important. And she believed him! Why else take seriously her former husband’s instruction to a delegation of KwaZuluNatal ANC officials to support her in December? The visitors received this sage counsel with song and poem and promptly endorsed Zweli Mkhize.

If she stays in a Ramaphosa government after December you can literally write him off for the next five years. It would mean he has learnt nothing. He stood aside and allowed her to wreck the economy during the pandemic. As she now combines to unseat the president with Sisulu, another sanctimonious and irrelevant minister who has done nothing for Ramaphosa in office, you almost wish they’d succeed.

A 2024 election with these ladies running the government would be a juicy prospect, even with the opposition as divided and weak as it continues relentlessly to be.

Sadly, they will lose, leaving Ramaphosa free to continue promising to fix the unfixable, ignoring the obvious and avoiding reality. That means at least five more years of loadshedding as we fail, time and again, to install enough renewable generation and storage.

An Eskom presentation I have seen is remarkably frank: by the end of Ramaphosa’s second term in 2029, according to briefings Eskom CEO André de Ruyter has been giving senior CEOs in the past few months, SA, at the current rate of economic output, will require much more power than we have been led to believe by the state. Remember that the last time Eskom forecast required capacity the ANC ignored it and we live with the results today. The same will happen now — this leopard does not change its spots.

“Current projections,” says a slide in De Ruyter’s presentations, “show that by 2030 new capacity of at least 50-60GW [that’s 60,000MW, the equivalent of more than 12 new power stations as powerful as Medupi] renewable capacity will need to be added ... The quantum of new capacity required doubles (120GW) by 2030, when a 5% increase in demand growth is assumed.” Um, 2030 is seven years away. No way can we make it.

This is the brink of apocalypse, which makes the social media frenzy over whether Zille or someone else lost the Johannesburg mayoralty for the DA seem almost pointless. The mob is outraged that while the ANC has won back the council, no DA blood has yet been spilt. It is not nearly outraged enough that the ANC may, at best, have added only a fragment of the electricity we need by the time Ramaphosa leaves office in 2029.

It wasn’t his fault when it started but it is now, and there is no reversing what’s coming. The tiny few projects planned will barely make a dent and we don’t have the market, the money or the time any more to change the future. We will still be load-shedding in 2030 and beyond. Private sector generation won’t help much. Companies with capacity will use what they need first and steer the rest to Eskom at night.

We have no batteries (and only meagre battery plans) to store it. I used to think a good war would unite SA. Sadly, our enemy is within. Negligence, incompetence and hubris are what we bequeath our children. We are The Omnishambles.