Government’s own state of disaster

ON THURSDAY night, Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration effectively declared a national state of disaster on itself.

Our electrical supply is vital to our well-being as a state and its decline over the last 16 years is entirely due to the ANC.

Over the past year, we have teetered close to catastrophe because of the age of the coal fleet and corrupt suppliers fighting tooth and nail to prevent being brought to book.

Declaring a state of disaster in this regard, when soldiers have already been deployed to protect our coal power stations from potential sabotage, would be the right response. A state of disaster gives the president incredibly broad executive powers to cut corners, bulldoze past spurious objections and get the job done. It’s a tailor-made tool for a decisive person of action.

Our president, though, has proved himself to be anything but.

South Africans are still too scarred by the fallout from the state of emergency declared to combat Covid-19 to have any faith in this state of disaster.

The distrust is not spawned by the bizarre, often nonsensical and capricious regulations of the last state of disaster, but rather the way in which the government removed itself from democratic oversight.

This must not be allowed to happen again.

The government has to be empowered to act quickly and firmly, but it must also be held to account.

This is especially pertinent where a state of disaster allows for procurement rules to be flouted, and we know the efforts being waged on the sidelines to give the Turkish Karpowerships a financially ruinous 20-year deal.

We can’t be saddled with that, or have to endure the profiteering we witnessed during Covid-19.

Ramaphosa must answer to his fellow South Africans at every juncture, not just lecture us when it suits him during ad hoc “family meetings”.