Like Christmas, rolling blackouts always come back

We know Christmas comes every year. Now we also know that rolling blackouts, or its more sanitised name, load shedding, will also always be back, no matter what our minister of electricity says.

Stage 6 is back with a vengeance despite Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, our not-so-new anymore minister of electricity telling us recently that the lower stages of load shedding (let’s call it that if it is under stage 5) were thanks to government’s interventions.

He was even confident that the grid could handle the cold front that brought snow to a large part of the country this past week. We all know what happened. Stage 6 in the coldest week of the year. We look forward to a weekend of rolling blackouts where my power will be off for half of the day today and tomorrow.

It was Joseph Goebbels who said if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. It did not work for Ramokgopa. He lied to us. The “recovery” in generation capacity could not be sustained. Until the end of winter? It is the middle of July!

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Since his appointment he strutted around everywhere looking like a man with a plan. Did he have a plan? Was the plan to lie to us until we believe it?

Rolling blackouts are not under control and generation capacity has not improved. In his update last Sunday, he said Eskom is using the open-cycle gas turbines less this winter because power generation is doing so well.

Now we hear that just in June, Eskom burned diesel to the value of R1.122 billion just in the first 11 days of July after burning through R1.495 billion in June to keep up appearances for the lie that the grid has stabilised, according to Netwerk24.

Was this to show how well they could do without Andre de Ruyter? Well, this one came back to bite him.

It is clear that Eskom’s budget for diesel to run the turbines will not last the entire year. There will be nothing left to keep rolling blackouts at bay when summer comes. When farmers will have to forgo running their pivots to irrigate their lands as they will not be able to depend so much on rain as we also face an El Niño summer with possibly less rain in the summer rainfall areas.

Of all the things we would expect of our minister of electricity to be, honesty would be top of the list.