Gwede Mantashe’s anti-Eskom push could shove SA into oblivion

11 Dec 2022

The ANC’s top officials may be stomping their feet over Eskom, but the ruling party still has no comprehensive agreement or plan on how to resolve — or even tackle — the country’s energy crisis. And, somehow, the debates and arguments about Eskom always revolve around race.

Although South Africa spent much of last week at Stage 5 or 6 of rolling blackouts, and there is still much more pain to come, it should not be surprising that the ANC is divided on how to handle the country’s energy problems.

Rolling blackouts have cost the ANC votes in the past, and the fact that such intense “load shedding” is happening just before the party’s national conference was always going to lead to more tension in the movement.

All of this comes like oil on the fire that will be the ANC’s main conference, just a few days from now.

The Energy Council’s CEO, James Mackay, made the point last week that there is a huge shortage of trust among all the role players, underlining the sense of chaos that South Africa suffers because of the ANC’s internal chaos.

As we endured another weekend of Stage 5 power cuts after a week of Stage 6 power cuts, the ANC’s National Executive Committee reportedly saw intense debates on the issue.

A group of people at a meeting at the weekend reportedly said Eskom CEO André de Ruyter should be removed and be replaced by someone with “engineering qualifications”.

ANC chair and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said last week that the implementation of Stage 6 was “akin to agitating for the overthrow of the state”.

This was clearly another attempt to put more pressure on De Ruyter, who, to his detractors, is the cause of all Eskom problems.

Cracks in Bid Window Six

Meanwhile, it appears that the government’s plans involving Bid Window Six to get more energy on the grid have run into trouble because the cost of raw materials for renewable power production has increased dramatically.

This is largely due to supply problems in China and because of increased demand in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

There are also still those who are pushing for coal, in stark contrast to where the world is moving.

It should be no surprise to anyone who has followed our politics over the past 15 years that Mantashe is at the centre of both of the big issues of this moment: continuous power cuts and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s continued stay in office.

Mantashe has played critical roles in the ANC and the government over the years and appears hellbent on continuing his role for some time.

His comment about Eskom “agitating for the overthrow of the state” cannot be ignored. It is not entirely certain what Mantashe’s real aim was with such a militant attack. And if De Ruyter were to resign or be fired, who would take over?

If he should be replaced by someone with “engineering credentials”, it would be hard to find someone with more experience than Eskom’s Chief Operating Officer, Jan Oberholzer, who is retiring in April 2023.

Would that be the kind of person Mantashe would prefer? It seems unlikely.

De Ruyter was appointed after a long process to find the right candidate, particularly after his predecessor Phakamani Hadebe said he was resigning for health reasons. Rhulani Mathebula, the acting head of generation, quit last month, citing family reasons for his decision.

Racial complications

This is also shot through with race. Considering the totemic nature of the position, our history and our racialised inequality, this should be expected.

It is for this reason that the Black Business Council has never accepted De Ruyter’s appointment in the first place, and demands that he be removed at every opportunity to speak in public.

His appointment led to much commentary: John Dludlu asked why state-owned entities had become “slaughterhouses for black executives”; Lumkile Mondi wrote movingly about how the appointment of a white man to run Eskom had “reopened old wounds I thought had healed” and explained how, despite being allowed to attend Wits University in the 1980s, “I have accepted that I will never catch up to my white former classmates”.

It was also reported that up to “27 black executives” had been approached to apply for the job, but all declined to do so.

Considering the pressure of the position, the nature of the moment and the anger of the public, it may be harder to find someone to do it now than it has ever been.

Grounds for suspicion

The issues involving race may not end there.

Although several Western countries — the US, the UK, France and Germany — have offered funding and easy loans to transition South Africa from coal to renewables, there has been pushback to this from some quarters.

It appears the argument goes like this: These countries want to use our country as an experiment to see if this will work. They are also emitting much more than we are, and they are often using coal-fired power plants themselves (including, in at least one case, reopening a coal mine).

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The argument for accepting the money might go along these lines: it is the best deal available considering Eskom’s debt levels and our economic situation. It is much quicker to build renewables than coal (two years vs 10 years). We need to save humanity’s habitat on Earth, and no one will buy goods made here if they are produced using coal-fired electricity in the future.

There may be grounds for suspicion of the motives of Western countries here. Considering the long history of abuse of people on our continent by these countries, this is completely understandable. If a country once colonised you, why would they not now be prepared to use your economy as an “experiment”?

That said, the world is moving on in terms of power production, and there may be consequences for missing an opportunity.

Within all of this, Ramaphosa has appeared to generally back the move to renewables. Certainly, his reforms announced in July were aimed at getting as much renewable power on the grid as quickly as possible.

Sabotage

His main opponent this weekend, Zweli Mkhize, has also spoken about this recently. He was quoted by the Sunday Times as saying that “we need to accept that coal is here for many years because we have billions of tonnes of coal… There must be understanding that we have that we will need it for many years…”

But he also said: “We must, however, take into account available technology for reducing emissions. The level of emissions in South Africa is not as bad as the rest of the world.”

For some, this may suggest that he is tending towards the protection of coal, although that may be a matter of interpretation.

In the middle of all of this are persistent claims that sabotage is responsible for the rolling blackouts, or at least partly responsible.

On SAfm two weeks ago, De Ruyter said that sabotage, the deliberate damaging of Eskom equipment, was responsible for at least one or two stages of load shedding.

On Monday, 5 December, Sampson Mamphweli, the director for the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies at Stellenbosch University, said he believed the intense number of power cuts was also a result of this.

Then, on Thursday, 8 December, Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan referred to the possibility of sabotage.

There are many ways for this to happen, and possibly many motives. Power stations are massive machines with many moving parts. Though there are always issues of demands for more money for workers, local communities or their families, political agendas appear to be the main drivers, particularly when power cuts reflect badly on the man running for a second term as ANC leader.

No easy fixes

This shows how complicated the situation is, and that there are no easy fixes.

There are also two other features of this interplay between the political crisis and the electricity crisis that should be considered.

The first is that Cabinet ministers do not suffer rolling blackouts. It was revealed last week that the government has spent at least R800,000 on running generators at the private homes of ministers since July to protect them from power cuts.

The second is how we got here. And how it was the ANC that has failed, and failed and failed to fix it.

Eskom is a mess, and so is our country. Using the problems that were created by the internal battles in the ANC as a weapon in the fight for leadership within the very same ANC is a fresh new low for a party that’s been sinking for a long time. Anywhere in the world it would have paid the ultimate price at the polls — but this is South Africa, after all.

And yet, the damage to us all is now increasingly difficult to bear. This increasing callousness and separation from reality will eventually have to cost the ANC a lot of votes.

But, for now, that the ruling party of South Africa, the very cause of this deep existential crisis, is seemingly not interested in solving it, reveals a near future that could be beyond disturbing. DM

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South Africa

Cracks in Bid Window Six

Racial complications

Grounds for suspicion

Sabotage

No easy fixes