Lesufi’s populism is desperate and dangerous

Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi must be desperate to save a province slipping away from his party. That is the only conclusion we can come to after he resorted to dangerous populist rhetoric over debt owed by Gauteng townships, including Soweto, to Eskom. His province won something of a victory when the central government decided to fork out 70% of the R47bn roads agency Sanral owes on the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project, leaving the province to cover the remaining 30%.

But instead of taking the win and running, Lesufi decided to up the ante. He tweeted that if the national government intended taking over some of Eskom’s R400bn debt, the R5bn owed to Eskom by residents of Soweto and other Gauteng townships should be scrapped.

This is dangerous thinking. The standing principle when it comes to electricity is that while government must subsidise part of the consumption of indigent households, the user-pays principle must apply beyond a certain threshold. Soweto residents are not special. They have already had R8bn in arrears scrapped by Eskom; is the suggestion that they should enjoy free electricity while poorer households in villages, inner cities and peri-urban settlements pay for their consumption?

Also, because there is such a high resistance to the installation of prepaid meters in Soweto, what happens after the debt is scrapped? How do you ensure that residents pay for their electricity after the slate is wiped clean, as proposed by Lesufi?

Municipalities and government departments already owe Eskom R50bn, and a large share of this staggering amount is a result of users not honouring their debt. This is untenable and cannot continue. No country in the world can afford to give away for free a commodity as expensive to produce and transmit as electricity.

Lesufi & co must find other ways of convincing Gautengers to vote for them in 2024. His tweet is whipping up already dangerously high emotions on an extremely sensitive subject.