Johannesburg - The state of our country’s energy infrastructure purposefully designed to generate, transmit and distribute electricity is parlous and dilapidated, whose malaise has undoubtedly proven to be detrimental to our competitive economic fortunes and individual prosperity, writes Bheki Gila …
In the current climate of policy uncertainty caused by discontinuous initiatives that are spatial and cognitively unrelated to researched planning, it is difficult to imagine urgent initiatives that could curtail this precipitous slide into sheer anarchy.
At this stage, the amount of resources to be deployed to stem these wanton acts of sabotage on the energy economy and the infrastructure that supports it, would easily compare to countries at war. In the month of September alone, our rolling brownouts and managed power shut-offs were worse than the maximum 15% loss of electricity supply in Ukraine.
While the population and economic size of Ukraine are both relatively smaller than that of South Africa’s, with Kyiv having been waging an internecine war against itself in the East since 2014 and entered another in 2022, they are still performing better in supplying electricity to their beleaguered citizenry.
Strangely, however, South Africa seems to have been on an undeclared war since 1994 characterised by sabotage, vandalism of the economic infrastructure and murder rates comparable to countries at war. Unlike Ukraine which can end this war by suing for peace, South Africa has no such hope. Such negotiations for peace would lack a legitimate counterparty. The ruling party is its own virulent enemy.
Bureaucratic minders
Perhaps the only excuse there is, eminently mustered by our bureaucratic minders is that even if we have been at a scale of looting only characterisable as low intensity war, just like the 7 July 2021 deadly mass lootings, there is no easy political path to send in the troops.
To be sure, it is no exaggeration that this administration will do everything in its power to avert the possibility of putting the country on a war footing, no matter the categorisation of the intensity.
Even in the face of widespread and continuous acts of malevolent sabotage, the administration will still find and use other excuses including the proclivity to throw in regional, continental or globally citable anecdotes and statistics which in their mere mention, are expected to minimise its moral turpitude.
A golden opportunity has presented itself. A sizeable national corps of guardsmen with military grade training should be established to protect three things in the main, the economic infrastructure, national borders and all our real estate assets belonging to public works, municipalities and the provinces. It is hoped that with the establishment of such National Guard, the ruling party would not live up to the witch’s curse that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
A new board of Eskom has been announced, raising the optimism gradient of so many of our compatriots. They can’t be blamed. They are desperate for any good news that can relieve their collective angst and festering frustration.
Yet the story of the Board and its composition is not fully told. In our brand of social contract, the expectation is that the government would share with the public the official version of the diagnostics of Eskom's problems. This would enable us to understand the question to which this Board is an answer.
Ramaphosa’s personal pick
Also, we ought to able to estimate how a non-executive board would be able to enforce the recommendations of such diagnostics efficiently, timeously and on budget. Until the disease plaguing Eskom is known, to which this Board is a prescription, it is inexorably difficult to be optimistic.
Quick question, what happened to the Board that ushered President Ramaphosa’s presidency, which he prided himself as his personal pick? If the mandate of this new Board is to continue that mandate, what changed? If it is to discontinue it, what informs the instinct to abandon it or the determination of the new mandate?
Besides, what is the mandate of this Board relative to another quasi-agency deeply ensconced in the president’s office whose task is to bury Eskom for good under a program called “carbon transitioning”? This quasi-agency is a consequence of a scheme contrived at the COP 26 by countries who themselves are deep in energy crises and have resolved to pivot back to hydrocarbons.
South Africa was promised a freshly minted debt of $8.5 billion over and above an intractable R500 billion plus interest owed by Eskom. A great indaba must be organised publicly or clandestinely, for the two parties to meet and conspire for everyone’s sake how to avoid the likelihood of sabotaging each other. After all, in the high stakes of political heft, Eskom trails a distant second to the honchos in the Presidency.
Of sabotage, Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines have been blown up by acts of sabotage. A prominent Polish politician quickly thanked the United States of America in a tweet, and to the United States’ deliberate silence, could be deduced a cacophonous “you are welcome” retort. A week after the sabotage, Poland commissioned the new Baltic Sea Gas Pipeline.
To our collective horror, another pipeline, this time the Druzhba Oil Pipeline that delivers oil to Hungary and Germany among others, has been damaged in proximate territory of Polish control by unknown persons whose motives are beginning to establish a pattern.
The Orwellian dystopian times are upon us and to our collective dismay, not in stealth. They were ushered in at the end of World War II and there has never been peace ever since. Reason has been substituted by unipolarity ambitions by the US supported by a propaganda juggernaut that spawned as it grew, a diverse multiplicity of social media echo chambers.
Therefore a fertile environment has been cultured to proselytise for a perpetual war dogma. It is undergirded by intellectually numbing sound bites and mutually reassuring concepts that have little or no bearing to fact or validating proof. In this setting, reason and rationality are woefully outgunned, out-resourced and made deeply unpopular.
Rules-based order
Peace, whatever it represents to the rest of humanity, is an antithesis to the concept of permanent war, designed to maintain pyramid-like, the dominance of one country over the free will of all humans, couched as the “rules-based order”.
Not to be confused with a law-based order, a rules-based order is generally lawless and chaotic, wholly dependent on the whims of one country that is not accountable to all other global institutions that hold everyone else accountable. The rules-based order makes rules all right, golden ones at that. Consistent with the aphorism that he who owns the gold makes the rules, in August of 1971 the dollar dethroned gold and subsumed the privilege.
Within the sinews of the permanent war theorem, peace is a complex enterprise. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has encountered this reality importunately. He advocated for peace in the eastern Ukraine crisis a la 2014 Minsk Agreement fashion, and so slid into the eye of the storm head first. He is hosting the Starlink internet network via the Spacex satellite constellation for Ukraine at the cost of $33m a month free of charge. Abused by Ukrainian politicians, he has decided to withdraw this service if either Ukraine or the Pentagon do not pay.
In this maligned disinformation metaverse, this demand may expose the most vicious side of the Pentagon war machine and may not end well. If Elon Musk was not in the process of buying Twitter, there is no gain saying that his Twitter account would have been shut down indefinitely. Not to be outdone, the Ukraine political establishment quickly put Musk on the kill list.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia worked hard in a Thabo Mbeki-like quiet diplomacy and helped facilitate a prisoners of war swop, a very laudable and sophisticated diplomatic endeavour. His cardinal sin however, was when he worked with both sides to sue for peace. His efforts were drowned by the US rhetoric on nuclear Armageddon.
A few days later, OPEC determined a production cut of over 2 million barrels. Agreed to unanimously by a group of 27 countries comprising of OPEC Plus, the umbrage of the US politicians got directed at the Saudis, ostensibly for advocating for peace. Concocted from the strong whiff of rising oil prices and the sale of heavy munitions of war, this story may not end well.
Secretary Janet Yellen is unrelenting in her proposition to put a price cap on Russian oil. Despite the persuasion of conventional wisdom propagated no less by Milton Friedman who paraphrased, sagaciously opined that a cap on the price of tomatoes will achieve two irrational outcomes. These are the shortage of tomatoes and the increase of their prices to the detriment of the common market stability, the powerful will ignore this fact and satiate their permanent war ideal nevertheless.
With so much sabotage, the world may find itself in a state of dunkelflaute, with no energy at all, no matter what caused it.
Regrettably, the Russo-Ukraine war has stirred the anarchic streak in global politics and indeed in warfare in particular. Calling for peace has proved more costlier and deadlier than to gleefully and egregiously stoke the fires of a nuclear Amargeddon.
Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law. The views expressed here are his own.