What brought the above headline to mind was whimsy, detecting a similarity between Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece of the ridiculous and Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin’s tendency to inflate his fantasies to gigantic proportions. Remember when Alice eats the little cake and starts to grow enormously? Each time Alec Erwin lurches up in public and expounds on the nation’s need for his beloved Pebble Bed Nuclear Reactors, the predicted costs grow to whopping proportions. The Pebble Beds started out at about R549,99 each (loose generator bolts not included). Alec’s now saying they’re going to cost us billions.
Some reflection seems necessary on Alec Erwin’s latest statements on the intriguing subject of the Koeberg power station generator bolt and ‘human instrumentality”. This grotesque phrase is of Erwin’s invention, thought up in panic as an inane substitute for the word ‘sabotage”, which, despite his later denials, he had used to explain the damage to the generator at Koeberg.
Last week Erwin was up in Parliament trying to explain away the bolt episode. He was speaking within days of the publication of a report by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa), a report which dumped all over Eskom’s lamentable security, inadequate protection systems, slack maintenance, breaches of licences, negligence and generally slovenly management at Koeberg — all of which resulted in a series of power blackouts in the Western Cape earlier this year. Never mind the blackouts, what about the now conspicuous danger of another Chernobyl disaster just up the road from Cape Town? Koeberg is of the same vintage as Chernobyl and the latter went out of control because of exactly what Nersa recently diagnosed at Koeberg: lamentable security, inadequate protection systems, et cetera. You name them, Chernobyl had them.
Last week, Erwin proclaimed to Parliament on this appalling state of affairs. The failures at Koeberg were ‘being dealt with through internal disciplinary procedures”, he said in a prepared statement. In other words, what should be examined and analysed under the floodlights of public scrutiny, is now being held in secret.
Getting curiouser and curiouser, Erwin once again denied that he ever used the word ‘sabotage” when discussing the bolt in the generator. This time he abandoned his risible ‘human instrumentality” and fell back instead on low specific-gravity bilge. ‘It was also why I did not use the word sabotage, as we had to verify the existence or otherwise of a group before any such word was appropriate. The non-existence of such group has now been conclusively established.”
Explanations to Alice about arithmetic by the Mock Turtle spring to mind. With an argument like his, it seems Alec Erwin has indeed been reading Lewis Carroll — not for the first time, either. It would be kind to write off his denials and explanations with such generosity. But he was addressing Parliament and that’s supposed to be a place where even politicians are enjoined by solemn oath to tell the truth.
However, it seems that lying, in Parliament or anywhere else, is a matter of specificity with Alec. At a press conference on March 1 this year, he referred to the generator accident and said: ‘Any interference with an electricity installation is an exceptionally serious crime. It is sabotage.” A day or so later, at another conference, the use of the word was raised, to which Erwin responded: ‘I didn’t use the term sabotage.”
A blatant lie? Of course not. After five months of painstaking analysis and contemplation, some poultry-level reasoning has been added to the meaning-of-sabotage mix. ‘The sentence and the minister’s statement are both very clear,” clucked Erwin’s spokeshen, Gaynor Kast. ‘What the minister said is that if one interferes deliberately with the installation of electricity, it is sabotage. He did not say that the bolt found in the generator in Unit 1 was sabotage.”
Seen in context, Kast’s proposition becomes even more feathery. If only the sentence immediately preceding the oft-quoted statement is attached, her explanation falls flat on its beak. Clearly Erwin was referring to the bolt when he said — in full: ‘This is, in fact, not an accident. Any interference with an electricity installation is an exceptionally serious crime. It is sabotage.” Take out the middle, the qualifying sentence, and you are left with: ‘This is, in fact, not an accident. It is sabotage.” No amount of interpretative egg-rearrangement alters the meaning of what Erwin said and meant.
In a prepared statement, the composition of which has taken only five months to hatch, further clarification came from Erwin himself. It included an even more woeful alibi: ‘Of as much interest has been whether I said this was an act of sabotage. I did not say this and all attempts I made to our erudite media to say what I did say merely got me into deeper linguistic difficulties.”
Judging only by the intellectual tensile strength of his logic, I would say that papers like The People or The Sun probably register as erudite on the Erwin scale. Anyway, in getting himself into linguistic difficulties, Alec Erwin has never needed much help from the media.
Erwin denied to Parliament that he had used the word ‘sabotage”. I’ve suddenly realised why they are letting him get away with it. Coming from Alec, the denial was just a token white lie.