South Africa gets a grip on its blackouts crisis just in time for election year
Almost exactly a year ago, I was in South Africa and encountered a country where its struggles to provide reliable power to its population was undermining every aspect of society. The dreaded load-shedding – an unconvincing euphemism for power cuts – which, at times, added up to 11 hours of cuts per day last year, seemed likely to drag on for years with all the economic and social knock-on effects that you would expect. I was back in South Africa last week and am pleased to report that the situation has vastly improved. Although it’s summer in South Africa and power demand is lower than it would be during the winter, load-shedding is, for the moment, under control with South Africans experiencing some minor inconvenience each day but nothing close to what has gone before. Traffic jams are, once more, caused by kamikaze driving rather than by power-deprived traffic lights.
Whether this happy state of affairs will continue into the winter is, as yet, unknown, but the ANC government will be relieved. There’s no better way to ensure that you will be kicked out of office than failing to provide the most basic of services to the electorate and, after all, it’s election season in South Africa with a general election due in the first half of the year. Six months ago, the ANC would have felt very queasy about their chances; now it seems possible – at the very least – that they will hang on to their much-prized majority at the ballot box. It’s a majority that they desperately need too: without it, they will be forced into coalition with either the quasi-communist, Mugabe-inspired Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), led by the unlovely Julius Malema, or the Democratic Alliance (DA), led by John Steenhuisen, which many ANC voters see as a white man’s party. ANC leaders, especially President Ramaphosa, will know that selecting either party as a partner in a coalition would likely lead to the implosion of the ANC.
So Ramaphosa has reason to thank his Minister for Electricity, Kgosientsho “Sputla” Ramokgopa. Appointed in the middle of last year to grip the load-shedding crisis, Ramokgopa is the driving force behind South Africa’s improved situation. He came into office with precious few executive powers but has performed so well – mostly by identifying where the problems lay and then talking about them openly – that he has recently been granted very significant powers to instruct Eskom, the failing national utility, wherever he thinks they are falling short. And it is Eskom that’s the problem: poor management, spectacular corruption and blatant misconduct has simply eaten out the insides of what was once a high-performing company and led it to insolvency.
While he has had plenty of success so far, there are other hurdles for Ramokgopa to surmount not least vested interests that will be hard to dislodge: Gwede Mantashe, the powerful Minister for Energy, wants the power system in South Africa to rely on fossil fuels to appease his coal-mining power base while Pravin Gordhan, the equally powerful Minister of Public Enterprises, who is responsible for Eskom, will fight very hard to maintain his influence over the state utility.
Ramokgopa’s success, then, is against the odds. Most people, including me, thought that he would fail when confronted by myriad vested interests within the South African government. The fact that he has succeeded tells us something about his personal qualities but also the depth of the crisis that South Africa faced – the idea that even the most embedded vested interests realised that something had to change.
But those embedded vested interests haven’t gone away and they haven’t stopped damaging South Africa. Every Capetonian I met last week was keen to stress that Cape Town, and especially its richest suburbs where I was lucky enough to be staying, is a bubble that tells you nothing about the real South Africa where failing infrastructure, deep-rooted dishonesty and horrific criminality are just things that South Africans have to put up with every day. This is why the South Africans I spoke to seemed unsure about the outcome of the upcoming election: all of them agreed that the improvements in electricity supply had helped the ANC’s prospects; all of them agreed that President Ramaphosa is the best of an ordinary bunch; all of them agreed that the ANC desperately needs a taste of what it’s like to sit on the outside looking in. As it stands today, however, it looks as though Sputla Ramokgopa has saved the ANC’s bacon – at least this time around. In 2029, who knows?
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