[TOP STORY] ‘Ramaphosa hopes an electricity minister could be a Hendrik van der Bijl’

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SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Dr Lumkile Mondi from Wits. Lumkile, I appreciate the time today. The president’s State of the Nation (Sona) address last night – the key theme was obviously around the power crisis. No surprises in that. The two big announcements are [the] state of Disaster [that was declared] and an electricity minister.

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Your sense listening to the speech last night? Is this going to solve our problem, or was that trust deficit from government really a case of ‘we’ve heard stories before, but we haven’t seen the action’?

DR LUMKILE MONDI: It is a continuous scratched record. I think he’s deploying another cadre from one of the senior ANC people to the minister of electricity. And secondly, he hopes that that minister could be a Hendrik van der Bijl [electrical engineer and industrialist] type of minister. Many of listeners will remember that Hendrick van der Bijl, who was recruited by General Jan Smuts to try and resolve the manufacturing challenge of South Africa, and stop his rands from mining. So he’s hoping that this person will become like that. Unfortunately, most of the professional capabilities, your scientists, are still at the DMRE [Department of Mineral Resources and Energy].

So is this really an indecisive president who’s failed to take hard decisions, first as a deputy president managing the war room under Zuma.

But secondly also [to use] all opportunities that [he] has availed himself as a president of the country since 2018 to deal with the crisis, and deal particularly with the DMRE and public enterprises ministers who have been dismal in terms of ensuring that the SOEs [state-owned enterprises] – as well as, specifically here, Eskom does get split into three so that these three different entities can stand alone and therefore each and every entity can bring competition.

We’ve seen that at least the president has allowed competition on generation. However, we remain very concerned because the key institution within the Eskom vertical integration is the transmission company. As long as that does not stand alone, that we don’t spend money on new infrastructure to allow new generation coming from different sources of technologies, I think it’s the same thing. I don’t think much is going to be achieved, particularly given that there are under 18 months for him to become re-elected should he win the elections.

SIMON BROWN: I take your point around the dithering. One of the reports out there [claims] that ministers Gordhan and Mantashe are always at loggerheads, [and] throwing a third minister in might just make this a troika of loggerheads rather than sort of getting someone at the top. The hard decision is perhaps that the cabinet reshuffle will tell us more than anything else: show us rather than tell us.

DR LUMKILE MONDI:

This is really the symbolism and what President Ramaphosa represents: an indecisive, ineffective leader really just shifting chairs without really taking the hard decision the country requires.

So we have a leadership crisis. And basically what it does to South Africans who’ve been following this, is that it seems to me that the ANC has completely run of out of ideas. It’s not the vehicle that will be able to take us out of the mess that they created.

So I’m hoping that Moneyweb listeners will be able to take the hard decision, come 2024, to really give other parties a chance and get rid of the ANC, because with the ANC in power this country’s going to go deeper and deeper into crisis.

SIMON BROWN: We’ll leave that there. That’s Dr Lumkile Mondi from Wits. I appreciate the early morning time.

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