It’s hard not to be annoyed about the Eskom debacle, and remain annoyed about it.
It should be pretty obvious to all but the most blindly optimistic that the inherent structural problems at Eskom that led to Stage 4 load shedding last month have not been resolved, and we are like a patient on life support. Eskom itself has in effect already told us that.
But as long as we’re not having to spend more of our time in our EskomSePush app than on playing Fortnite, the noise quietens down, and we get back to our normal preoccupations.
I try hard not to think about how my bedside lamp is staying on, but it’s difficult. By now, most of us should have more than a nagging suspicion that the ongoing lack of load shedding has everything to do with the looming elections.
And it’s too easy to imagine all the noise that distant slurping up of diesel into giant gas turbines is making. Pouring rivers of diesel into Eskom’s open cycle gas turbines is not a solution and not a way to run a country. Such a “solution” is eye-wateringly expensive. It’s all of us who will have to pay for it, one way or the other, to bail out the HMEskom Titanic with our increasingly smaller buckets.
Many experts are now even advising Eskom to stop wasting further billions on trying to make their new Medupi and Kusile power stations work, because apparently fixing them will cost more than it’s worth. So despite the fortune we’ve already blown on (half) building them (badly), we should probably just write them both off and see what we can get for them on the scrap market.
Really?
One could almost forgive this near-comical level of incompetence if it wasn’t for the fact that the ANC profited directly from the contracts awarded to Hitachi Power Africa to build the boilers at these deformed and dysfunctional white elephants. It was such a sloppy effort that Hitachi at one point had to repair about 9,000 faulty welds alone, and that was just a part of the problem (the biggest apparently being that Medupi and its useless sister are using simply the wrong kind of coal power station design for South Africa in the first place).
Although we were told some time ago that the ANC’s investment arm, Chancellor House, sold its 25% black empowerment stake in Hitachi Power Africa, they made good money. One report I came across suggested they’d made a return of 5,000% by 2012.
The Japanese paid Chancellor House millions in “consulting” and “success” fees over the years. You can’t help but cringe at the irony. We know it was all corrupt.
Hitachi agreed to pay a $19 million settlement (about R266 million at the time) in 2015 to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, who found they had illegally bribed the ANC government to get their Eskom contracts. (They didn’t use the word ‘bribed’, but try calling an “inaccurately recorded improper payment” something else.)
Hitachi must have used just a fraction of the profits they’d made from South Africa to transfer our money to the world’s richest country for doing something that actually only damaged us. Hitachi didn’t even have to admit guilt after paying their settlement, and the ANC got off scot-free, because the US has no jurisdiction over them.
So how did we get here? In around 2005, the ill-suited Medupi and Kusile were decided on by the ANC as the best way to keep South Africa powered up in the years ahead. Their decision went against the advice of many experts who knew what kind of coal power stations are actually needed in South Africa. In an ideal world, they would have invested in modern nuclear power (because we shouldn’t keep dumping carbon dioxide and other poisons into the air) – but just about anything other than Medupi and Kusile would have been an improvement.
Even building nothing would have been better, we now know. The same goes for other disastrous decisions from the ANC, including those on e-tolls, how they have tried (and failed) to improve our public transport and rail infrastructure, running SAA (into the ground) and more or less putting Sadtu in charge of education.
Come to think of it, there’s barely a state-owned entity we’d be better off leaving in government hands, or at least this one’s. How exactly can we keep trusting them, year after year?
This shouldn’t detract from many of the achievements over the years, including in the provision of housing for the poor, welfare grants, the provision of antiretrovirals, and so on. But I’m not sure all that is enough, and it shouldn’t be an excuse. Another government run by a party less narcissistically distracted by how glorious its own century of selfless struggle had been could have done the same, and possibly far more.
It’s a tough proposition to make, because at one point I believed the only thing that could produce progress in South Africa was a strong, and good, ANC. Part of me still wants to believe in the New Dawn.
Regardless of what I may think, according to the poll predictions, the ANC will indeed get its chance to try yet again (at least at a national level). But they definitely don’t deserve another chance.
All the same, I wish them well. There, tragically, appears to be no other choice but to root for them getting their act together somehow.
In an ideal world, we would long ago already have saved the ANC from trying to help us with their solutions and given someone else a shot at running (and actually running) the country for five years, never mind another whole 25.
That again doesn’t seem too likely even this time around, so we’ll have to just keep believing there’s a sun behind that dawn, and not an exploding hydrogen bomb.
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