‘Get out … of your own way!” said the transcendental meditation guru Maharishi. TM devotees believe that their daily dive into “pure consciousness” is the ultimate form of renewable energy. Alec Erwin might want to sign up for a course because at present we are in danger of consolidating the very policy choices that got us into this mess.
At the centre of those choices is Eskom’s monopoly, unchecked by either competition or a regulator with meaningful disciplinary capacity. We owe this situation to the muddled thinking of a government that has never matched its management of macro fundamentals with a coherent attitude to the real economy. Nowhere is the confusion clearer than in the infrastructure strategy. Eskom and Transnet are supposed to deliver efficient services.
They are supposed to remain commercially sound. They are supposed to fund investment through the bond market, rather than the fiscus, and they are supposed to keep prices low. It can’t be done. You can have low prices and efficient services underpinned by state subsidies, or higher prices and efficient services backed by commercial lending.
Or you can have low prices and crappy services, which, as we have now learned, impose their own massive costs. Even a state-subsidised generator would cost us — the electricity tariff would simply be disguised as tax. Just three years ago the option of introducing substantial private-sector generating capacity was still on the table. That no takers were found should have been a warning that Eskom was living off capital — power plants built before 1990 — rather than income.
It should have been obvious too that the need for new investment would expose deep contradictions. In fact Eskom has not only been living off its capital stock, it has been running it down, botching its maintenance, losing skills and mismanaging its coal supplies.
It is now accepted that higher prices are inevitable and that some kind of differential tariff scheme is essential to ensure that the poor have access to electricity. But no challenge to Eskom’s monopoly is contemplated: not from foreign investors, not from industrial co-generation and not from householders with solar panels.
That is partly because of stubborn dirigisme, but it is also because Eskom has been an instrument for objectives that have nothing to do with electricity. It has delivered funding to the ANC through its shabby deal with Chancellor House, patronage to party figures and big empowerment deals. To weaken the monopoly would be to limit these opportunities.
Of course that is exactly why we need power producers, the only mandate of which is to produce energy as efficiently as possible. The government has said “sorry”. Now it needs to step back and make space for help to arrive. Suggested mantra: “I must learn to let go.”
Old trade, new regime
The suggestion by an ANC MP this week that prostitution be legalised during the 2010 World Cup makes no sense. But it does put the issue of where our society stands on prostitution back in the spotlight. To legalise prostitution for just the month of the tournament would be confusing and impractical. What is needed is comprehensive legislation to decriminalise prostitution. This would make it possible to regulate it to some degree and give sex workers a more protected working environment.
The question of what to do about the oldest profession is muddied by moral and religious prejudices. The only things that should count in our constitutional democracy are freedom, justice and the welfare of citizens. As in countries like Holland, decriminalisation would confine prostitution to official, red-light areas and provide for regular health advice and testing.
In theory this would break the coercive power of pimps and bring a measure of control over the sex trade as a vector of HIV/Aids and other sexually transmitted diseases. In cases of violent abuse, particularly by clients, sex workers would have access to the law enforcement system. Abortion is similarly unacceptable to moral and religious conservatives.
But the point is that you cannot suppress it by outlawing it — you merely drive it underground, making it less subject to control and associating it with other forms of crime, including the corruption of minors and drug and human trafficking. There is, in addition, the occupational and gender freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.
If terminating pregnancy is considered a matter of choice, why not sex for sale? Indeed suppression is not a rational aim — prostitution has always been, and will always be, with us. In its 2002 judgement the Constitutional Court remarked on the wide range of options used to regulate prostitution by open and democratic societies worldwide, acknowledging that in South Africa this is a matter for Parliament to decide. It is time to reopen the debate on this issue — and to prise it from the deadening grip of the Mother Grundies.