You can keep your Noam Chomsky ‘Eskom’ quotes

If there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that Eskom is a complete disaster. The disagreement comes when we try to explain why.

There’s even more disagreement on how to fix it, or even if it can be fixed.

What should be obvious by now is that Eskom is heading towards more privatisation in one form or another, despite both the ANC and government’s vehement denials.

Our president announced last week that the power utility would be chopped into three parts – generation, transmission and distribution – which the unions immediately slammed as a stealthy way of selling Eskom into private hands.

They feel so strongly about it that they were marching all over the country today, hoping to inconvenience a public already so stuck in traffic jams that we probably didn’t even notice them. In fact, we were probably jealous they were able to walk faster than the cars.

Moneyweb reported last week that Cyril Ramaphosa’s billionaire brother-in-law Patrice Motsepe may even be a potential buyer of Eskom’s assets, adding spice to the conspiracy soup. The fact that Ramaphosa’s company Shanduka (which he’s now supposedly got nothing to do with) used to supply coal to Eskom just adds to all the intrigue.

The president told us that any sales of Eskom stuff would be limited to “non-core assets” – though how that line will be drawn and by whom is unclear. Numsa, for one, thinks Ramaphosa’s plan is just an ANC cover-up of decades of mismanagement, looting and corruption at Eskom.

But at this point, just about anything Cyril does seems like a cover-up of all the above, and not just at Eskom.

If you travel down some of the less well lit social media corridors I often do, you will repeatedly bump into a Noam Chomsky quote that’s being widely shared and is the featured image on this article. It comes from a very interesting speech Chomsky delivered in Toronto in April 2011, in which he said the “standard technique of privatisation” is to “defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital”.

Chomsky offered some compelling examples to illustrate his point. You should read the whole piece.

But here’s the catch when trying to apply his quote here: Eskom was never defunded. We’ve thrown a lot of money at the Eskom problem (debt went from R40 billion 10 years ago to about R400 billion now), and that has only made everything worse. It was probably not even broken on purpose.

So, sorry, you can keep your little Noam Chomsky quote this time.

Eskom was once capable of providing some of the world’s cheapest electricity, and was protected by the apartheid state as the engine room of its own survival against global sanctions. It was the (very dirty) jewel in the apartheid crown.

When the Great Parastatal of Prejudice was handed over to a democratic government, it should have been treated like the gift it was: an ideal springboard from which to launch a more industrialised African society that would lift millions out of poverty. China, over the same period, showed how this can be done – and they added power station after power station, year after year (climate be damned, right), while in South Africa, white papers warning about the future of Eskom were turning yellow.

It was only when load shedding first hit us in 2008 that there was a sudden rush to build two new mega power stations. Today, more than a decade on, we know that Medupi and Kusile, which were meant to have been our saviours, are only the harbingers of our further electric doom. They are now years behind schedule, have cost us billions more than planned for and started falling apart before they were even completed.

We already paid for those power stations many times over, and still don’t have them. So please don’t tell me about “defunding” as a privatisation tactic.

It may be true that there is a plot by big business and even the West to destabilise and ruin Eskom. If there is, they’ve done a great job. There’s an even more outlandish theory doing the rounds that Eskom is actually fine and this whole load-shedding malarky is mere theatre to fool us and justify future privatisation.

If you believe that, though, you’re just intellectually lazy.

Not for one moment do I think big business hasn’t played a major role in buggering up Eskom. Big corporates have often benefited handsomely from exploiting the utility, especially when you consider apartheid-era sweetheart deals such as BHP Billiton’s smelters that have been paying so little for power that Eskom has lost billions (R10.7 billion by 2013 for one smelter alone, according to one report) over recent years just for the honour of having BHP use its services.

And not for one moment do I think that big business and privatisation will bring the price of power down or be a good thing for us in the long run. But it’s probably going to happen, because if you don’t look after your nice shiny things, you don’t get to keep them. That’s just life.

Maybe Ramaphosa, Pravin and Co will surprise us and set Eskom on a more sustainable, independent path and restore Eskom to being a national asset we can boast about. But I wouldn’t bet on it. It’s probably all too FUBAR now.

The truth is that the people in charge of this country have too often ignored the simple, primary principle that anyone who’s played many a strategy game on any old computer knows very very well: you need to build power stations if you want to grow. Clearly, Thabo Mbeki spent too much time smoking pipes and drinking his whisky in exile and too little time playing Sim City, so that when he first had the chance to prevent our current conundrum, he would have taken it.

Now, if the privatisation vultures swoop on us, and if it costs us dearly in both jobs and the price of electricity, well … that’s what you get when you play the game badly.

And trying to keep doing it ourselves may just end up costing us all even more.

Citizen digital editor Charles Cilliers

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