Johannesburg – President Cyril Ramaphosa has been criticized for striving to lead for the second term while South Africa suffers insurmountable power outages.
Ramaphosa, who has openly conceded that load shedding might stay longer than anticipated, has been under scrutiny for refusing to act decisively to deal with the energy crisis facing the country.
This has also resulted in opposition parties calling for his resignation as president.
The Young Nurses Indaba Trade Union (YNITU) revealed how load shedding is costing lives and accused Ramaphosa of having no strategy to alleviate the challenges they face.
They explained that blackouts were dangerous because they cause life-saving equipment, such as ventilators, to fail.
They further revealed that patients are dying because there is no electricity. Only 76 hospitals out of 213 hospitals are exempt from load shedding, and we have at least 3000 state-run clinics that are also not exempt from load shedding.
The YNITU General Secretary, Lerato Mthunzi, said, "The situation is made worse by the fact that there is no clear plan from President Ramaphosa on how to tackle the crisis, and the public enterprises' minister, Pravin Gordhan, has no solutions. Politicians do not care that there are lives at stake. They will never be exposed to this situation because they never use public health care facilities, so it makes it easier to dismiss the problem".
Numsa pointed out how the ANC is killing the working class and the poor with load shedding.
"For the last couple of days, we have experienced stage 6 non-stop rolling blackouts, and we are now at stage 5 load shedding. We also reject with contempt the lame apology made by the public enterprise's minister, Pravin Gordhan, for load shedding because we know that he is not being genuine. Eskom is collapsing, just like all the other SOEs that have been destroyed under his leadership as the minister, because he is an SOE wrecking ball," said the party.
"What do you call a person who wants to give him a second term?"
EFF member Fana Mokoena asks this question as he reveals a string of promises that were made by President Cyril Ramaphosa, highlighting load shedding as one of the big problems that SA faces.
"Ramaphosa promised to end load shedding. He failed; in fact, Eskom is getting worse. He won't fire Pravin and Du Ruyter. He promised jobs. Unemployment keeps rising. He promised women protection, but GBV keeps rising. So what do you call a person who wants to give him a second term?" asked Mokoena.
"This is not a coincidence. Load shedding is a consciously engineered crisis from which the capitalist class, including Ramaphosa and his family, directly benefits. They are making a fortune from our misery."
"We are not surprised that Ramaphosa would prioritise the involvement of the private sector as a solution for energy generation in this country. Energy and renewable energy, in particular, have become new sites of capitalist accumulation. As long as we have persistent load shedding, then it becomes difficult to justify the existence of Eskom, and the role of the private sector can also be justified."
"At the same time, we must stop being naïve about how self-serving capital is. After all, Ramaphosa is himself a billionaire, and he has all the hallmarks of a greedy, corrupt capitalist, particularly when you look at the whole Phala Phala farmgate saga. The president had the audacity to hide a minimum of 580 thousand U.S. dollars in his sofa, which is the equivalent of 9.8 million rands. Ramaphosa brazenly continued to do business while occupying the presidential office," Numsa explains.
The Star