Ramaphosa’s plan a tarted-up version of decade-old energy ideas

It is a measure of how low our expectations have sunk. A last-gasp intervention to avoid the total collapse of the national grid and the economy’s final, despairing act of hara-kiri, is being hailed as an act of remarkable presidential statesmanship.

From the applause, one would have thought that President Cyril Ramaphosa had single-handedly discovered the Holy Grail and plucked Excalibur from Arthur’s Stone to lop off Jacob Zuma’s head. But doing the bloody obviously necessary at the last possible moment, after years of procrastination and prevarication, is not statesmanship.

It’s the desperate moves of a weak and embattled head of state – one hesitates to use the word “leader” – who will act only when there literally is not a single other option.

Make no mistake, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement on steps imminently to be taken to ease the Eskom power crisis is to be welcomed. The plan allows Eskom to speedily acquire more generating power by doing all the things that were previously verboten: allow large-scale private and small-scale domestic generation; bypass incapacitating local content regulations and tariffs; and employ staff according to skill, not race. None of this is new.

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What is now being called the Ramaphosa plan is no more than a tarted-up version of what Eskom, the DA and energy experts have been proposing for a decade.

If the new plan is implemented as announced, it has great merit. It is a rare concession by the government that the tripartite alliance’s ideological obsession with finding a state-driven solution – preferably paid for private enterprise – is being abandoned.

The plan has the potential to privatise power generation in SA. It is a tacit acceptance that Eskom, burdened as it is with R400 billion in debt, cannot possibly find in state coffers the up to R1.4 trillion that it needs to develop capacity.

This aspect, privatisation by stealth, is one of the reasons why it has taken so dangerously long for Ramaphosa to act. He knows any move to curb the undue influence of the unions in Eskom will encounter stiff resistance.

And since the unions and SA Communist Party are key allies in his increasingly ragged campaign for a second term, he must have hoped the country could have limped through until after the December leadership election.

Unfortunately, that’s now how it worked out. Events, his enemies and even his nominal allies have conspired against him. He was hit by a double whammy. The increased power demand that winter brings coincided with a campaign of sabotage of Eskom’s infrastructure, from both inside the utility by staff and from the outside by unknown actors.

The pressure the grid was under was compounded by Ramaphosa’s union allies. In response to the bankrupt utility’s planned 0% wage increase to a workforce whose wages have increased way beyond inflation for a decade, the unions called a violence-ridden illegal strike.

Unsurprisingly, with the economy staggering and the national grid at the point of total collapse, Ramaphosa folded.

This approach is similar to that which his administration used to try to resolve the crippling challenges faced by SA Airways. It involves running a malfunctioning state-owned entity into the ground and then trying to reassemble the pieces in a more efficient configuration.

At SAA, that didn’t work out particularly well. On the other hand, if Ramaphosa pulls off his Eskom magic trick, his immediate survival is assured. The only issue is whether the country’s economy can survive the party’s legerdemain for that long.