SOUTH Africa's just transition from coal resources to a mix of renewable energy debate became painfully historic as Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe likened the “enforced march” to renewables as akin to the 1856/7 prophecy by Nongqawuse that people in the Cape Colony must destroy available assets in anticipation of future windfalls.
Mantashe, who is Xhosa, said the temperament of green energy proponents suggested that South Africa should immediately desist from utilising its fossil fuel resources, enough for two more centuries, in favour of the yet unproven efficiency of renewable energy, from sun, wind, nuclear battery storage and hydrogen outcomes.
In April, 1856 the 15-year old Nongqawuse and her friend Nombanda went to scare birds from her uncle's crops in the fields by the sea at the mouth of the Gxarha River in the present day Wild Coast region of South Africa. When she returned, Nongqawuse said she had met the spirits of two of her ancestors who told her that the Xhosa people should destroy their crops and kill their cattle, the source of their wealth as well as food.
Nongqawuse claimed the ancestors had prophesied that the dead would arise, all living cattle would have to be slaughtered having been reared by contaminated hands, cultivation would cease, new grain would have to be dug, new houses would have to be built, new cattle enclosures would have to be erected, new milk sacks would have to be made, doors would have to be weaved with buka roots and lastly, that people abandon witchcraft, incest and adultery.
In return the spirits would sweep all European settlers into the sea.
The Xhosa people would be able to replenish the granaries, and fill the kraals with more beautiful and healthier cattle.
“One promise that will not work is to destroy all we have for a promise in the future … Help us make a sustainable future with what we have. No view is instructed or extreme. We need intellectuals to give us intellectual ideas. The just transition is a journey we have to navigate carefully,” Mantashe said on Friday at an event to debate on the just transition.
Mantashe confronted the just transition ideology by wondering whether the coal resource was a dying one or being killed at the behest of those who saw benefit in South Africa pursuing the agenda full tilt. “We must avoid the instinct to kill or slaughter coal immaturely. We need research to cleaner technologies that will utilise coal, we cannot just drop it. We need science to work for us now,” he said.
Mantashe maintained that coal was an important job resource, employing close to 90 000 people, while Eskom, the power utility employed nearly as many, which would be catastrophic if the use of coal was stopped without consideration.
“Between now and 2030, renewables are getting the lion's share of the fund allocations. Renewables will grow by 18 percent while coal is reduced from 75 percent to 60 percent. The lobbyists are just talking, they do not look at the numbers,” Mantashe said.
He said current and future bid windows for renewable energy were favouring a gradual growth of the sector, including the Karpowership project and oil and gas exploration by Shell off South Africa's coast.
“I went to Ghana. I went to Core de Ivoire and Gabon. Alternative energy sources are working for everyone, except us. We are now the third largest economy in Africa, but that will slide down to number six or lower because we cannot sustain our own energy needs,” Mantashe said.
But Intelligex chief executive Peter Attald Montalto said there were clear pathways leading to net zero by 2030. “There is a rational technocratic process that lays out the costs and pathway to net zero. The policy goal should be the production of cheap and affordable energy. South Africa is operating in a global context, we cannot ignore that,” Montalto said.
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