South Africa is once again in the grip of higher stage load-shedding. The last time Eskom declared stage 6 before last week, was in September. We nearly faced stage 7, before Eskom held back maintenance of Koeberg that would have taken us to that stage. Either way, rolling blackouts are the norm this year.
When the September load-shedding happened, President Cyril Ramaphosa was on a visit to the US and the UK, which he cut short in acknowledgement of the level of crisis our country was facing.
This was followed by an emergency cabinet meeting, and soon after the president announced a raft of measures to alleviate the worst of the problem and chart a way forward for the long-term solution to Eskom’s power problems, which is critical if we are to secure our power grid and sustainably grow the economy.
We obviously had all hoped that this signalled the beginning of the end of our electricity crisis and that at the very least, the short-term alleviation actions being taken would help avoid higher-stage blackouts. This has sadly not proved to be the case.
As things stand, we are still living with the bout of load-shedding. Given that this is the beginning of our summer holiday period, which is when the power utility generally takes some capacity off the grid to carry out planned maintenance, it is far from ideal.
The December period is also critically important to key sectors of our economy, such as the tourism and hospitality industries, as well as retail and other consumer-driven industries.
What is most disturbing about this period is that the announcement of sustained high-stage load-shedding has not elicited the sort of reaction we have seen before, either from the government or from citizens in general.
This suggests sadly that four-hour and longer blackouts carried out over weeks on end are now just another challenge we have come to accept and even assimilate into our daily lives as if the situation we find ourselves in is normal.
It is not, and we should all demand that our government and the Eskom management demonstrate that they take this crisis seriously and treat it with the urgency it deserves.
What should we be doing to deal with the crisis? A lot of the things that we need to see done are already in the basket of actions the president announced, and which the minister responsible for Eskom should be driving with the utility’s management. We need urgency and acceleration of the common-sense interventions already in place.
In the short term, we must do all we can, including but not limited to, making emergency funds available for the utility’s sufficient supplies of diesel and coal to run its plants.
Second, responding to emergency breakdowns and general plant maintenance must be treated as Eskom’s number one current priority. If this requires the emergency recruitment of repair and maintenance personnel, in order to bolster our capacity to anticipate and respond to breakdowns, then Eskom must do so immediately.
We are not without the skills, nor the expertise required to respond to this crisis, but those skills need to be brought into the fold even if we do so on short-term contracts until we get over the current crisis.
It is true that one of the problems with Eskom is that the company is bloated on staff and spends inefficiently on its salary bill. But in the main, the inordinate growth in personnel that it saw over the last decade or so was not in its engineering and technical components that are critical to the maintenance of its fleet of power stations.
It is in fact its management levels that have become most bloated, while its technical capacity has continued to be eroded. Urgently restoring Eskom’s technical capacity can and should precede the necessary work that needs to be done to reduce non-core management staff to cut the salary bill. Reducing costs is very important to fixing Eskom in the long term, but it must take a backseat to getting over the current generation crisis.
Lastly, the next short-term intervention is ramping up the security and protection of Eskom’s critical installations. Even from media coverage, it is clear that part of the problem is theft and organised sabotage of Eskom’s infrastructure (often by contractors who sabotage stations so that they may be called on for the “repairs”).
The protection of critical economic infrastructure — including communications, rail, port, transport and other strategic installations — is one of our main challenges, and we cannot achieve the economic growth we need if criminals have a free hand to loot the lifeblood of our economy as they currently do. A critical economic infrastructure security plan is urgent and overdue.
All of Eskom, Transnet, Telkom and the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa have for months now, in collaboration with the South African Police Service, been working on what they call the anti-Economic Sabotage of Critical Infrastructure plan in order to stem the wholesale criminal assault on our core infrastructure.
These SOEs, as well as private-sector players, are the key custodians of the installations that run our ports, logistics, electricity, telecoms, and passenger rail networks. We must support them and others in these economic network industries to protect what is our common economic endowment.
The president, on taking over the reins of the state in 2018, launched an ambitious drive to bring at least R1 trillion of investment into our economy to kickstart sustainable economic growth and create jobs. This drive has already achieved great success in positioning us as an African investment destination and is in fact ahead of the 2024 deadline to reach R1 trillion.
Most of the investment pledges are focused on the reconstruction and revitalisation of our economic infrastructure. Building, repairing, and maintaining infrastructure (as well as extending its reach to previously under-serviced areas in the townships and rural parts of our country) is also a key lever to use to grow employment.
All of this begins with and depends on getting electricity right. Energy security is the basis on which any modern economy is built. We have to be single-minded in solving the power crisis.
Over and above the short-term crisis management steps suggested above, we must be determined in rolling out the long-term plan as well. We have already made the decision to diversify our energy mix, as well as to liberalise the generation and distribution of electricity.
The earlier we get alternative sources of power — whether they are renewables, encouraging industrial power efficiency, secondary generation from other industrial activities et cetera — the better it is for our economic prospects.
Paul Mashatile is the treasurer general of the ANC.
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