Editorial
Johannesburg - South Africa teetered dangerously close to the unprecedented Stage Eight load shedding this week. Our increasingly irascible energy minister, Gwede Mantashe’s answer was to castigate Eskom, describing the power utility’s increasing inability to fulfil its obligations, as worse than state capture.
And of course, that is precisely what it is. Without a reliable national grid, our economy cannot develop, vitally needed jobs remain a dream and the rest of us struggle to do even the most basic tasks.
Inverters become useless when there is insufficient power from Eskom to actually charge them, while people who have generators will be buckling under the strain of having to fill them with petrol or diesel to provide power for up to 12 hours a day.
All of this we know, because it is what we are living through. Our leaders though seem immune to it and interested only in pointing fingers. If anyone is to be blamed for the failure of Eskom and the abyss over which it now perilously teeters, it is the ANC – and only the ANC.
The government was advised well ahead of time that Eskom needed to build new generation capacity. When it finally bit the bullet, it commissioned the construction of two massively environmentally unfriendly power plants which became rent extraction schemes, ran horrifically over budget, were badly built and still don’t provide us with enough generative capacity, in spite of what we were promised.
We have had load shedding for 15 years now. The ANC, despite its words to the contrary, seems to have a pathological abhorrence for renewable energy, so the situation has progressively got worse with little extra capacity being added to the grid.
On social media, the cynics accuse Eskom of stealing the Kers (candle) from Kersfees, but the real Grinch that stole Christmas, is Mantashe’s own party and government.