Electricity
Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa says there is a “compelling” case for expanding the use of nuclear power as there is a pressing need for additional generation capacity. Photo: Phill Magakoe/Getty Images
Thursday.
It’s dark still and the lights are very firmly off as another day at stage six load-shedding in our fair republic begins.
There are two more two-hour planned outages ahead before the end of the working day, courtesy of the move to stage six.
The situation may or may not improve by the end of the week, according to our beloved minister of electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, who gave us the bad news on Saturday.
Ramokgopa says there is likely to be plenty more of the same waiting for us as the summer approaches and Eskom services its power station fleet and deals with new breakdowns — a sombre prediction for the jolly season at the end of the year.
Predictions by Eskom management that we would be over the hump, load-shedding wise, by the end of the year appear to have gone out the window, along with the hope of some electricity in our Christmas boxes.
The dire picture painted by the minister did not, however, appear to dampen Ramokgopa’s spirits — or his levels of enthusiasm — at the ANC’s election campaign launch on Sunday.
Ramokgopa thrilled the comrades with his fancy footwork, barely hours after he made his weekly update on the electricity situation and the move to stage six, a man with no apparent care in the world.
The minister was charged up and brimming with energy at the manifesto review — just not energy of the electrical kind that he was appointed to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet to provide.
Ramokgopa, for all his gift of the gab on Sputla Sundays, appears to be far better at busting dance moves than he is at keeping the lights on.
Granted, Ramokgopa doesn’t have a lot to work with — either in terms of electricity or assistance from his cabinet colleagues in energy and public enterprises departments — but it’s hard to see progress with six hours of power missing on deadline day.
Perhaps if the minister were paid according to Eskom’s capacity to generate megawatts, rather than his ability to churn out soundbites, he might have been less lively in lifting a leg on the stage at the Dobsonville Stadium on Sunday and more focused on the job at hand.
Perhaps.
One wonders if the move to stage six is the ANC in government “dealing decisively with load-shedding,” one of the priorities it identified in the review of its 2019 manifesto for the months left between Sunday and election day in 2024.
Not the approach one would have anticipated. Taking away power is a strange way of improving its provision, by anybody’s measure — except the ANC’s, it appears.
It’s a weird logic.
Then again, so is the mass deportation of Zimbabweans who have permits to legally reside in South Africa as a means of cracking down on undocumented migrants who have crossed our borders with no papers — or impounding legal taxis to deal with the illegal operators on our roads.
Ramokgopa is, it appears, in pretty good company.
The ANC president — and the punters in the stands at Dobsonville Stadium — appeared to be far less enthused by the day’s events, and the party’s review of its performance since 2019, than Ramokgopa.
It’s hard to blame either.
Ramaphosa’s promise of a new dawn has never materialised — thanks mainly to himself and those on the stage with him — so the president can be forgiven for delivering his speech with long teeth.
Ramaphosa also can’t really be blamed for focusing on the ANC’s achievements since 1994, rather than on what he had promised to do when he took over, and if voters gave him a term in office as president.
The promises of 2019 have, in the main, failed to materialise, so there’s not a lot for him to report back on to the party faithful and the voters when it comes to wins — or even points scored — during his first term in office.
The comrades who turned out to hear Ramaphosa deliver what was meant to have been an assessment of progress in implementing the 221 commitments it made to voters in 2019 had a right to be restless.
Not many of the pre-election promises have been implemented — Ramaphosa pegged the figure at about 35 — a pretty poor result, even by ANC standards.
Instead of an accounting for the past five years, all the comrades got was an appeal to focus on what the ANC used to do, rather than on what its present leadership promised to do — and has failed to do — since they last voted the party into office.
Again.