By Mametlwe Sebei
After increasingly louder calls from the top echelons of society, including the government, opposition parties, and churches, among others, President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a national State of Disaster in response to the Eskom crisis, in terms of Disaster Management Act of 2002.
This measure is understandably, but wrongly, welcomed by many, including those who are correctly wary of the ANC government’s capacity and intention to tackle the Eskom crisis it single-handedly engineered.
Eskom’s disastrous state.
Eskom and the energy situation in the country is undeniably in a state of disaster. The relentless load shedding, skyrocketing debt and punitive tariffs, have plunged the country, especially its working class and poor, into the worst energy poverty in decades.
Despite being elected on the mandate to end load shedding, and the incompetence, corruption and mismanagements at SOEs, under Ramaphosa the Eskom crisis has reached new depths, slightly short of absolute collapse.
Load shedding, has increased from 124 hours in 2018, to more than 192 742 hours in October 2022; tariffs by 18.6% in 2023, cumulatively 800% since 2007; and total costs of servicing its R396.3 billion debt, amounted to R71.4 billion in 2022 and are expected to reach R179.9 billion and R118.9 billion in debt and interest rates repayments, respectively, over the next five years.
Against this background, everyone easily agrees that there is a state of electricity disaster, and urgent solutions are needed.
Understandably, many would therefore welcome this declaration of a State of Disaster as not only signifying the appreciation of the Eskom crisis and the seriousness on the part of government to tackle it, but most importantly, for providing a legal framework for emergency measures that are absolutely essential to bringing an abrupt end to relentless load shedding which have caused so much hardship to people and industries.
But as Covid taught us, the ruling elites never abandon their interests for the common good, even in emergencies.
As always, they exploit the crises of their capitalist system for obscene profiteering, even as people fight for their lives and survival.
Covid was no different. The widening inequality, massive profits for big corporations and institutionalisation of emergency measures into permanent, highly exploitative work regimes have become a basis for accumulation of wealth by big shareholders post-Covid pandemic.
Working class and environmental justice movements must oppose this phenomenon.
We have to be wary – especially when people who engineered the crisis – ask for these extraordinary constitutional powers to tackle the crisis they have created.
We must ask the question: is the presidential declaration of the state of national disaster the appropriate and even the most effective, response to the disastrous state of Eskom?
The state and its institutions, including the government, and the rest of social relations in a capitalist society, invariably serve the interests of the capitalist class and its various factions, political and corporate.
In this instance, it is clear this declaration is a brazen legal manoeuvre of the ANC government to dismantle every protection offered by existing laws; for communities protesting land dispossessions, environmental pollution and poor corporate social investments; facilitate industrial-scale looting by extremely parasitic, mainly black tenderpreneurial capitalists in its ranks and ultimately, its sale of Eskom to imperialist corporate vultures glamouring for a private stake in it.
Emergency powers legalise systemic irregularity – not urgency.
Section 27 of the Disaster Management Act, 2002, empowers the Minister of Co-operative Governance to declare a state of disaster in the event of disasters.
The act, however, qualifies these powers with a provision that this can only happen when the current laws and contingency arrangements in the state do not adequately allow the Cabinet to respond to the emergency.
In his announcement, the president has failed to clarify in what ways the current legal framework has stopped the ANC government in procuring generation of additional capacity, which they knew was needed before 1994; or timeously fixing the breakdowns and maintenance issues behind the poor performance and declining energy availability factor in existing power stations today.
The only provision in the act making sense of this declaration is Section 27 (2) (i) which invests in the minister, once the declaration has been made, the powers to issue emergency procurement procedures that will allow the government to procure services from private businesses, without following usual tender procedures in Eskom.
In a situation where this government has facilitated colonial-style land dispossessions, environmental degradations and pollution of many working class and rural communities affected by mining and other big corporate developments, we have to counsel the working class suspicion and opposition to further erosion of inadequate protections these laws afford poor communities.
In addition to environmental protections, the emergency powers are more likely to also further undermine requirements for transparency and accountability in tendering of services, coal and energy supply contracts at Eskom.
These measures are all the more sinister when one considers that overwhelming evidence, including state regulatory reports, shows that it is corruption and non-compliance with environmental regulations and public procurement procedures that are responsible for the crises, not only in the coal mining and other corporate development projects, but in Eskom itself.
ANC engineered state of disaster for profit.
In 2007, like today, when load shedding started due to Eskom’s capacity constraints – that the ANC, by its own admission, had been warned about for more than a decade – the government rushed through the Medupi and Kusile projects, flouting public consultations and procurement procedures, to overcome this electricity crisis.
These projects have not only not resolved the crisis due to poor craftmanship, they aggravated it.
Irregular tenders pushed the costs of constructing these two highly polluting, coal-fired power stations, Medupi and Kusile, from R69.1 billion and R80.6 billion approved by the Eskom Board in 2007, to an estimated R234 billion and R226bn, respectively.
This is a total overrun in costs of more than R300bn, the majority of Eskom’s R400bn.
For this, and misappropriation of R700 billion in capital spending since 2007, working class people and middle class families bear the main burden and not the big corporations responsible for supply-related corruption or those benefiting from special tariffs.
Working class people and middle class families pay the price, not only of increased tariffs, but load sheddings due to Eskom having 25% less capacity, after this astonishing amount had been spend.
The Energy Intensive Users Group of 25 major corporations, which consumes 40% of Eskom’s electricity is shielded from both the devastating load shedding and tariff increases.
Many coal miners and Independent Power Producers, especially those that are politically connected like Glencore, Seriti, and Shanduka – which currently swindle Eskom with extortionate prices – will use doubling of sale prices and lack of transparency to milk Eskom worse than before.
The arrests of former Eskom executives, Thulani Zulu, for briberies of R2 789 200 from commodity logistics managers and Siba Grand Business Enterprise, and much more recently, Brian Molefe, are symptomatic of the scale of tender-related plundering and looting, flagrant disregard and inadequacy of the procurement procedures the government want to further water down.
Working class and climate justice activists must fight for democratic control of Eskom.
The only viable alternative to this corporate and bourgeois ANC government state-engineered crisis is trade unions, community civics and climate justice movements defending public ownership of Eskom and fighting for its democratic control and management.
Unlike big corporate interests across Eskom supply chains, for the working class, Eskom is s public service provider.
Its success as a viable publicly-owned, enterprise is a life and death question. It is the working class that bears the worst of the current crisis, and its rippling effects, that is, rising costs of food, opportunistic and violent crimes.
It is the working class that is interested in ensuring a rapid just transition to clean and renewable energy.
The working class bears the main brunt of the ecological devastations of climate change, as it has no means of insulating itself from the worst of the impacts.
The devastation of poor households facing floods in Mpumalanga, and farm workers dying from heat waves in the Northern Cape, underline the need for a real emergency plan.
Such an emergency plan can simultaneously combat load shedding, affordability and climate change crises.
For these, Eskom must lead a just rapid transition based on social-ownership of energy, democratic control and management of workers, communities and climate activists.
* Mametlwe Sebei is a lecturer at the Department of Jurisprudence at Unisa