This government cannot keep the lights on

There is something profoundly unsatisfactory about a president who seems uninterested in solving the destruction wrought on social, economic and everyday life by frequent ongoing blackouts.

It is a known fact that bears repeating: Eskom has placed pressure on the economy and writ large on the GDP. Inflation remains above 7%, and with food price inflation exceeding the South African Reserve Bank (Sarb) target range of between 3% and 6%, many South Africans can barely afford to put food on their plates.

Sarb points out that the ongoing load shedding has reduced the growth economy outlook from 1% to 0.3%. It says the downtime due to power outages ranges from six to 12 hours and reportedly costs the economy between R204 million and R899 million daily.

Compounding these challenges is the 18.65% electricity tariff increase granted to the power utility by regulator Nersa.

South African leaders have once again demonstrated their disdain for fixing the Eskom crisis.

At a political party level, the governing ANC, like past oligarchies, has ossified, is arrogant and has failed to adjust to the challenges of running government.

This applies to adjusting the delivery of basic services as the population grows, key infrastructure that becomes more reliant on technology, and user consumption demands that change. But specifically here it applies to the incredibly complex system that delivers electricity and how that system is continuously being transformed by generation infrastructure and technologies that are changing along with the needs of consumers.

Now that the political contests within the governing party are somewhat settled, with officials back in their offices after holiday breaks and  Cyril Ramaphosa having secured a second term as president, as citizens we are inclined to think that surely this year the government will focus on solving the Eskom crisis?

For better or worse, it is an unavoidable reality that the politicians at government’s helm came into office blissfully ignorant of what it takes to manage an electric power system.

As we have come to observe, the politicians in office have such a severe dearth of knowledge related to improving energy generation, transmission and distribution systems and implementing policies for supply efficiencies, that it leaves no doubt of their inability to keep pace with the evolving needs of South Africa’s power system.

Worryingly, it seems South Africa has reached a point where leaders in government do not understand, or refuse to grasp this, thus focusing only on a partial solution.

To provide reliable and resilient electricity to communities around South Africa, the national government discovers that, for various reasons, it is unprepared.

Further, a rapid change in population growth, urbanisation, consumer’s needs, distributional capacities and the quality of infrastructure at all spatial and temporal scales, are some of the cross-cutting challenges the government is neither able nor organised enough to solve on its own.

Politics tends to be short-sighted and overlooks the fact that the government cannot operate in a vacuum. Currently, Eskom is subject to political and institutional negotiations that hinder its progress and its efforts to create linkages to address the issue of affordable and reliable electricity.

But in any project related to the power system, those leading government ought to understand that a politically-neutral approach that advances the national interest is more urgent.

Oddly, the presidency understands that to address the Eskom challenge, government needs to leverage the wide community of researchers, experts and practitioners to ensure electricity delivery and a resilient power system.

The dysfunction has set in for three reasons:

1. Government, due to party politics;
2. A lack of practical steps to match the expertise, skills and operating and planning systems at Eskom; and
3. Policy uncertainty – through which it prevents the establishment of a baseline that could demonstrate how, with the correct policy, the transformation of failing power utility into one that provides a reliable and consistent supply of electricity to South Africans can be achieved.

It should be no surprise then, from our leaders’ behaviour and their politics, that they have no intention to fix the electricity crisis.

Neither should it be accepted as the norm that planned or unplanned outages are justifiable actions of government, nor should it be tolerated that the electricity crisis – ergo, ‘the Eskom question’ – is presented as single-factor issue.

We know that the Eskom question is intertwined with the fabric of society. Therefore, electricity is also about access and the economy, and it has dynamic interactions within society, women’s development, the services that communities can access, affordability and environmental sustainability.

Eskom, electricity and load shedding featured prominently in Ramaphosa’s recent State of the Nation address. However, what was missing is the admission that the country is falling apart.

Of course such a truth will never be uttered. The incumbent, much like his predecessor and their political party are stuck in an idea trap that has led to bad policies and bad growth.

As the discussion throughout this column attempts to makes clear, without a broader systematic approach and the involvement of relevant organisations and individuals, continuous blackouts will remain.

The government alone cannot fix Eskom or build a resilient national electricity system.

See the price South Africans are paying for letting ill-prepared men and women play with Eskom, whose function they are unable to understand?