The ANC and The Failing Eskom Power Grid

 

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Editor's notebook

ADRIAAN BASSON, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

De Ruyter vs the ANC: The Emperor is naked The ANC's hysterical reaction to outgoing Eskom CEO André de Ruyter's bombshell interview last week has yet again shown us how naked the emperor is.   There wasn't as much as a hint of humility or self-reflection as ANC ministers fell over each other to scream "right winger!" (read: racist) into the nearest journalist's microphone in the wake of De Ruyter's strangely timed interview with eNCA's Annika Larsen.   If nothing else, De Ruyter has succeeded in uniting comrades in their outrage over his disparaging remarks about the governing party. The ANC is really, really good at closing ranks against a perceived common enemy. And if that enemy is white and Afrikaans, so much better!   The ANC is not so good at taking responsibility for its own created crisis at Eskom, but more of that later.   What did I think of Larsen's interview with De Ruyter? In journalistic terms, this was gold. I interviewed him last year at News24's inaugural On the Record summit, and he didn't divulge even 10% of what he revealed to Larsen.   His resignation clearly gave him the freedom to name and shame (without actually naming) his bosses in government, and it was clear from the questions that De Ruyter wanted this information out. Larsen didn't push back on his answers, and there was disappointingly little about what exactly he did to counter load shedding.   Apart from admitting he had failed to lighten the burden of load shedding, I wanted to hear more about his maintenance strategy and whether he still believed it was the right way to prevent total grid collapse.   The interview timing was strange; I would have expected De Ruyter to wait to spill the beans when he was out of Eskom. It's unclear what caused the urgency to air the interview now.   I was also disappointed with De Ruyter's comment about his "white Afrikaans blind spots" supposedly preventing him from understanding the depths of extraction and corruption at Eskom. Apart from being a crime against humanity, apartheid was one massive state capture project that enriched the Afrikaner elite and their corporate friends.   Afrikaners understand corruption all too well, and De Ruyter shouldn't shy away from Eskom's complicity during the apartheid years in developing a working state for whites only. In fact, one of the major issues still bedevilling Eskom is that it was never supposed to provide electricity to 60 million South Africans, the majority of whom are black.   Another comment I found odd was his insistence that a microchip found in his car was a bugging device. I read numerous articles after the discovery of the chip, quoting technology experts saying it was definitely not a tracking or bugging device but part of Volvo's tracker system.   I assume De Ruyter's private investigators still insist it was a bugging device, and one can only hope that nobody is fuelling his paranoia for nefarious reasons.   The rest of the interview was rocket fuel and fire. It was astonishing to hear how little has been done by the police to accost the person(s) who tried to poison him in December; that despite organised coal syndicates being identified in Mpumalanga, no arrests have been made; that ministers advised him to turn a blind eye to potential corruption with the R150 billion loans and grants given by Western countries to South Africa for decarbonisation at COP26 last year, and that a senior ANC minister is allegedly himself involved in Eskom's corruption.   No wonder Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe called De Ruyter a 'policeman' and said he would prefer a pliant engineer in the job of Eskom CEO. Go figure.   The public lynching of De Ruyter, even by his own minister Pravin Gordhan who is now blaming the Eskom CEO for travelling too much abroad and not giving enough attention to power generation, is pitiful to see. Would Gordhan have preferred to see De Ruyter in a blue overall, spanner in hand, getting into the thick of things at Tutuka power station?   De Ruyter clearly touched the comrades on their studio, and the venom was piled on with such abundance that you had to wonder whether the likes of Gordhan, Mantashe, Fikile Mbalula and Mondli Gungubele had been living in a parallel universe for the past three years.   Were it not for De Ruyter and his team, we would still not have known the extent of maintenance neglect at our power stations during the Matshela Koko and Brian Molefe years; South Africa would not have been successful in securing hundreds of billions of rands for the just transition project; organised mafia syndicates would have continued unhindered to plunder Eskom's assets; Eskom would not have been able to buy parts from original equipment manufacturers, and we would have been much closer to grid collapse.   Despite the best efforts of De Ruyter's detractors, old and new, to blame him for our perilous state of load shedding, history will show that it was the ANC itself that broke Eskom to the point of no return.   It was the ANC's lack of foresight and planning in the 1990s to build new energy capacity; the ANC's rent-seeking through Chancellor House at Medupi and Kusile; the ANC's deployment of state capturers to plunder Eskom, and the state capturers' opportunistic "strategy" of running our power stations into the ground until they broke, that gave us Stage 6 load shedding. Not André de Ruyter's trips abroad.

Another South African Police Leader On "The Wrong Side Of The Law"

 

Editor's notebook

ADRIAAN BASSON, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Edging closer to a mafia state Is anyone surprised that our new police chief, barely in his position for a year, is embroiled in a tender scandal involving Louis Vuitton bags and bulletproof vests?   We've seen this movie before, haven't we? Remember the names Jackie Selebi, Richard Mdluli and Khomotso Phahlane? All senior policemen who ended up on the wrong side of the law.   We know how this movie ends. Following months of investigations and unrelenting pressure from anti-crime activists, General Fannie Masemola will likely exit the police and face charges relating to the 2016 trip to Germany, sponsored by businessman Inbanatan Kistiah during which Masemola and KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi were allegedly showered with gifts.   And for the next few months, the focus of the South African Police Service (SAPS) will be on Masemola's case, instead of trying to bring down the country's obscene crime rate. Despite a few thousand police officers added to the ranks of the SAPS, crime will not come down.   Violence will continue to rip our country apart, and Police Minister Bheki Cele will find new scapegoats like "human behaviour", which he credited last week for the spike in crime.   One shouldn't make statements like this cheaply, but I think it's time we seriously considered that our country is falling into becoming a full-blown mafia state.   I have reached this conclusion after speaking to a range of people over the past few months who told me hair-raising stories of how organised crime has infiltrated almost all levels of society, from higher education, to construction, mining and even politics.   The SAPS simply do not have the authority and skills to fight the scourge of organised crime ravaging our nation. At a recent briefing attended by senior law enforcement players, someone pointedly said organised crime was the new state capture.   At a seminar last week, the Zondo Commission's evidence leader, Paul Pretorius SC, warned of a "darker and more sinister" period to follow state capture.   In December, I spoke to a Gauteng-based builder who told me it is no longer feasible to do any business without encountering the construction mafia, now styled as self-appointed "business forums".   These are essentially groups of thugs, often from the area where the building project is taking place, who insist on getting a cut of the business. They are often heavily armed and entirely incompetent, and cannot contribute meaningfully to the project. It is clear what will happen if you refuse to pay the protection fee.   I've subsequently heard from many businesspeople this is now a widespread and established "business practice" across the country, where organised groups of criminals have reinvented themselves as business forums.   Young building contractors, quantity surveyors and engineers are even trained in conflict management and negotiation skills when the construction mafia set foot on your site. The SAPS is nowhere to be seen.   Extortion rackets, particularly in the Western Cape, have reached mafia levels. Recently, a city official told me about a woman on the Cape Flats who is about to lose her house because she refuses to pay protection money to a mob who threatens to burn down her house.   The young woman had to drop out of tertiary education because she needs to be physically present every day to prevent the family home from being destroyed.   In places like Khayelitsha, Philippi and Gugulethu, extortion gangs are rife. I'm told it is quite common for these tsotsis, armed with knives or guns, to demand protection money from residents wearing nice clothes or sneakers, in exchange for leaving them alone.   "We won't stab and kill you for your Nikes if you pay us," is the message.   The SAPS is nowhere to be seen, and there is no central plan or strategy for how to deal with extortion gangs.   Institutions of higher education are increasingly at the coalface of tender mafias, who utilise students under the ruse of "fees protests" to plunder procurement budgets. I'm told many leaders of colleges and universities, not only the well-publicised case of Fort Hare, are now under permanent close protection.   The brutality of illegal mining coupled with rape was laid bare last year with the gruesome Krugersdorp case, where eight women on a film shoot were robbed and raped. The police arrested 13 men but failed the most basic of requirements to positively link them to the crimes.   Despite Cele's bravado in rushing to the scene, nobody is currently facing any charges for this horrific crime.   Much has been written about the attacks on key state infrastructure like Eskom power stations and railroads. President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a dedicated Eskom-focused police squad, but the proof will be in the arrests.   The coal mafia is being spoken about like a well-known corporate entity, in Cape Town gang bosses enjoy their beachfront cappuccinos in peace and the taxi mafia, allegedly deeply involved in the spate of assassinations we recently saw in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, is well-known to the police.   In Johannesburg, a party led by two ex-bank robbers now run the housing and transport departments in the city; a populist thug-cum-politician arrived armed at a school last week to push around children, and the third-largest opposition party, the EFF, is funded by a self-confessed cigarette smuggler.   The country's so-called "integrated crime and violence prevention strategy" from 2022 only mentions "organised crime" once, and our intelligence agencies are effectively out of order.   You can have the best prosecution agency in the world, but if your police department is broken, crime will flourish.   We are in deep, deep trouble.

Zimbabwe: A Wild Election COmes!!

 

The Puppetmasters

ZIMBABWE

Police in Zimbabwe recently arrested more than two dozen members of the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) opposition political party during an “unsanctioned gathering.” It was the latest example of “a wave of politically motivated violence against opposition supporters,” reported Reuters.

That wave is likely due to expectations that CCC leader Nelson Chamisa will challenge President Emmerson Mnangagwa later this year when Zimbabwean voters cast ballots for a new president. Officials have yet to schedule an exact date but a vote this summer is likely, explained Africanews.

Mnangagwa belongs to the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, the party that has ruled the country since independence from the United Kingdom in 1980. Known as “the crocodile” due to his “political shrewdness,” the BBC reported, he ousted longtime authoritarian leader Robert Mugabe as head of state in 2017 – ending Mugabe’s 30-year reign. Mnangagwa defeated Chamisa in the 2018 general election.

The ZANU-PF has been leveraging its control of government to crack down on CCC supporters and anyone else who might represent a threat to his power, argued the Daily Maverick, a South African newspaper.

In June, for example, a ZANU-PF activist abducted and gruesomely murdered Coalition member and opposition activist Moreblessing Ali, Vice News noted. Police arrested attendees at her funeral on charges of “inciting violence.” As the Africa Center for Strategic Studies wrote, many remain incarcerated even though they have yet to be charged.

The intensity of the crackdown could be directly proportional to the threat the CCC poses to Mnangagwa.

Polls now show that Chamisa is likely to win the upcoming presidential vote, according to the Brenthurst Foundation. Pollsters said that economic stagnation was driving dissatisfaction with the status quo. Half of the country said they would emigrate if they could, noted Bloomberg. Better pay and conditions in countries like the UK have caused a brain drain in Zimbabwe’s health sector, for example, Al Jazeera added.

The prospects of a Chamisa victory are not as good as polls might show, however. Mnangagwa would likely secure victory, predicted Straftor, a think tank, due to “corruption, violence and election interference.” The researchers added that his ill-gotten reelection would further undermine the economy, facilitate mismanagement of public finances, fuel corruption in mining, and hurt the country’s prospects regarding foreign aid and investment.

Writing in the Africa Report, researchers Ibbo Mandaza and Tony Reeler called for a political settlement that would recognize the will of the people and allow for a government that can work to boost Zimbabwe’s economy.

A free and fair vote is one place to start.

South Africa: The ANC's Biggest Failure

 

Editor's notebook

ADRIAAN BASSON, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

The ANC's biggest failure No, it's not corruption, state capture, the collapse of infrastructure, record-breaking levels of crime, a failing public health system, a sluggish economy, mismanaged land reform, crippling municipalities or even breaking Eskom.   The ANC's biggest failure after almost 30 years of governing South Africa is a poor, under resourced and unionised education system that has condemned an entire generation of children to a future of unemployment, poverty and hardship.   Nelson Mandela championed nation-building and avoiding a civil war; Thabo Mbeki focused on economic growth and empowerment; Jacob Zuma enriched an Indian family and built a compound at Nkandla, and Cyril Ramaphosa spent five years trying to undo Zuma's damage.   Not one ANC administration has had a firm and dedicated focus on education and acknowledged, as Lee Kuan Yew did when he became prime minister of Singapore in 1959, that a solid education system underlies all other success.   Without a proper, world-class education you cannot grow the economy, create jobs, reduce poverty and remove social ills that breed crime.   There was one number that stood out from last week, and it did not come from Ramaphosa's seventh State of the Nation Address (SONA), delivered in Cape Town on Thursday.   It was from the opening address of former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka's release of the annual Reading Panel report on the levels of literacy in our primary schools.   In 2022, only 18% of Grade 4 or 10-year-old children in our public schools could read for meaning. Eighteen percent. Which means 82% of 10-year-olds cannot read for meaning.   If there is one reason the ANC should not be re-elected into power next year, this is it. Despite promising in his 2019 SONA that all children would read for meaning by 2030, Ramaphosa's basic education minister has failed to even put up a reading plan four years later.   At the current trajectory, it will take another 85 years to reach Ramaphosa's goal.   I don't blame Mlambo-Ngcuka for not attending Thursday's SONA. How could she sit there with a straight face, knowing that Ramaphosa would fib his way through education and seek applause for a nonsense matric pass rate number, that ignores our massive dropout rate?   "There is a silent revolution taking place in our schools," said the president last week. Let's look at this "revolution" in more detail.   If he had asked her, Mlambo-Ngcuka, working with the country's best educationists and economists, would have told Ramaphosa that only 40% of children in poor, no-fee schools can read the letters of the alphabet by the end of Grade 1.   If he had asked her, the former deputy president would have told Ramaphosa that a decade of reading progress has been wiped out by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga and her officials' inability to manage teaching during Covid-19.   Using a vivid metaphor, Mlambo-Ngcuka said the government was load shedding a generation of children through poor education. "We need a plan, we need a budget, and we need action… We should shift our focus from exclusively focusing on matric results to what happens before a child gets to matric. The concerns start in Grade 1, and only some make it to Grade 12. Those we lose along the way become tsotsis, they are unemployed and develop mental health problems."   A "silent revolution", Mr President? Rather a thunderous crisis.   It is no surprise that only the Western Cape and Gauteng, the two richest provinces, were running their own reading programmes. The Western Cape, the only province not under ANC control, has set aside R111 million of its own budget to fund the project, while Gauteng managed to get donor funding to pay for 80% of its R107 million plan.   It's hard to argue with the fact that Premier Alan Winde's DA administration seems much more interested in fixing education than the ANC.   On Wednesday evening, on the eve of the SONA, Defend our Democracy, an umbrella body for civil society organisations championing the Constitution, gathered at St George’s Cathedral to reflect on the real state of the nation.   It was painful to listen to teenagers, dressed in their school uniforms, taking to the stage, lamenting the state of education and the country at large, singing struggle songs in 2023. Why aren't they studying robotics and Singapore math?   Unlike the ANC, Lee managed to successfully straddle the world of a revolutionary struggling for independence, and was the leader of a progressive, developing economy that championed education and progress.   "We invested heavily in our younger generation since they were our most precious resource," Lee told the World Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce in 1978.   "Education was universal and was both academic and technical and from primary to tertiary levels. Because we had a trained and educated workforce ready, industries needing such a workforce came and set up operations in Singapore." A no-brainer, not?   Whoever wants to be president in 2024 needs to present the country with a visionary road map, like that of Lee's, to liberate us from the ANC's destructive swamp.

The Energy Disaster In South Africa

 

Lights Out

SOUTH AFRICA

André de Ruyter launched investigations into corruption and organized crime at South Africa’s state-owned energy company, Eskom, where he was CEO. Soon after he tendered his resignation in December, he says someone slipped cyanide into his coffee, Quartz reported. He survived the alleged attempt on his life but the episode illustrates how energy, politics, and lawbreaking are intertwined in the troubled country.

De Ruyter resigned after Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe criticized him for failing to prevent the rolling blackouts that have become commonplace in South Africa, instigating deep cynicism and unrest among the citizenry. “Eskom by not attending to load-shedding is actively agitating for the overthrow of the state,” said Mantashe, according to Voice of America. South Africans refer to blackouts as “load-shedding.”

Due to years of neglect and lack of maintenance, South Africans experienced a total of four months without electricity, the Wall Street Journal wrote. Analysts forecast that the problem will cut 2 percent off the country’s gross domestic product this year.

The impact goes far beyond the economy.

People are dying in hospitals, CNN reported. Livestock is perishing in barns when ventilation systems stop. Crime, traditionally high in South Africa, is skyrocketing as home alarm systems shut down. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa now might declare a national disaster like the one he instituted in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. Water shortages are also becoming more frequent, making it even harder to simply live, added the Maverick.

It’s not clear if South Africans have any confidence in Ramaphosa or his administration to solve the problem, however.

Last year, a judicial commission found that Ramaphosa was mishandling allegations of misconduct in government, noted Transparency International. At the same time, the president is combatting allegations that he covered up a theft of at least $580,000 from his farm in 2020 in order to conceal how he acquired so much cash in the first place. The scandal has become known as “Farmgate.”

While he hinted that he might resign, Ramaphosa managed to avoid impeachment and won reelection as leader of the African National Congress, the country’s most important political party, late last year, the Guardian wrote. His problems, incidentally, are arguably small compared with the corruption allegations that his predecessor, former President Jacob Zuma, is still facing, the Associated Press added.

Commenting in Forbes, Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the conservative Heritage Foundation argued that the South African government should privatize power plants to attract investors and inject competition into energy markets. She noted that nobody in South African politics would support that idea, however.

The people certainly wouldn’t trust the government to handle such reforms.

South Africa Needs A New President

 

Editor's notebook

ADRIAAN BASSON, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Wanted: A president with unquestionable integrity to turn around SA There is a line in the advertisement for the new CEO of Eskom that struck me when I read it: "stabilising an organisation in crisis". Isn't this precisely what we need for the entire South Africa?   It is February, and President Cyril Ramaphosa has yet to address the nation's crippling power crisis that is causing hundreds of businesses to close their doors, exacerbating the country's already scandalous unemployment number.   For Ramaphosa, it is business as usual, and he will probably tell us everything is hunky dory with the government's so-called emergency power programme when he delivers his State of the Nation Address on Thursday.   The new Eskom CEO must be a "leader with unquestionable integrity and ethics" who can "turn around commercially and operationally challenged organisations". They need a postgraduate degree in engineering or economics, a "solid track record" in managing "crises", and be responsible for "building an ethos of excellence" in the organisation.   The successful candidate understands the workings of a "complex environment" and how to lead a "business turnaround".   Isn't this the type of person you would like to see at the helm of South Africa Incorporated?   It is six days into February, and Ramaphosa has yet to reshuffle his Cabinet and get rid of the dead wood, the anti-constitutionalists, and incompetent executive members. It is clear that the ANC, not Ramaphosa, is in charge of the reshuffle, despite the president having vast and clear powers under the Constitution.   If Ramaphosa cannot even get rid of his deputy, David Mabuza, who has really done nothing in four years and willingly wanted to vacate his office for greener pastures in Mpumalanga last week, we shouldn't expect him to make inspirational, unconventional appointments to his Cabinet, whenever that moment arises.   After his re-election as ANC president in December, his supporters told us that we would see a different Ramaphosa taking charge of a "renewed" ANC in January.   Well, all we have seen so far is Ramaphosa's party making deals with the country's dodgiest politicians in the EFF and Patriotic Alliance to take back power in Johannesburg, and soon Ekurhuleni and elsewhere. Is this the so-called "renewal" Ramaphosa's supporters sang about at Nasrec?   We won't know because Ramaphosa is not talking to us.   On Sunday, EFF leader Julius Malema, who is on trial for criminal offences, explained his party's deal with the ANC at the EFF's provincial conference in the Free State.   "Here, in the Free State, we are negotiating with the Metsimaholo Local Municipality because there we can also go in, but we refuse to go in under the ANC, so we came up with a new strategy now that we would rather have a small party mayor because we can't have each other and serve under each other.   "We would rather have MMC positions and run our own governments, so we are gonna do that in the Maluti-a-Phofung Local Municipality."   Fantastic. So presumably, this is what Ramaphosa's "renewal agenda" looks like to take back municipalities: cosy up with a criminally-implicated party, appoint a puppet mayor from a minion party and divide the spoils between the ANC and EFF (and sometimes PA) to run as mini "governments", in Malema's words.   This is clearly a recipe for disaster and a desperate, last attempt to access these municipal departments' budgets and procurement systems.   I'm not arguing the DA-led coalitions were perfect; they were far from ideal, and the DA has practically been in charge of Johannesburg and Tshwane for the largest part of the past seven years. But it's telling that one of the first things the new ANC-concocted city government in Johannesburg did was issue letters that would end forensic investigations into corruption.   And it's fair to say the DA-led city governments had to spend lengthy times and large amounts trying to undo the ANC's poor governance during the state capture years.   Oh, how I wish for a president with "unquestionable integrity and ethics" to turn around this beautiful, but "commercially and operationally challenged" country.   It's going to be a long 15 months before the long-suffering citizens of South Africa can remove the ANC and its new bedmates from power.

The Pope Visits The Congo

 

‘Amnesty of the Heart’

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

Pope Francis kicked off a visit to Africa this week, telling crowds of more than a million people in the Congo to forgive those who have harmed them, while admonishing world powers to “stop choking” Africa, the Associated Press reported.

On his first stop in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, crowds stretched for miles, singing and dancing, with the Congolese traveling from across the country to see the pontiff because his visits to other regions were canceled due to insecurity. Congo has seen a resurgence of long-simmering violence as rebel groups continue to seize control of more eastern territory, forcing millions to flee.

He said the world must pay attention.

“We cannot grow accustomed to the bloodshed that has marked this country for decades, causing millions of deaths that remain mostly unknown elsewhere,” the Pope told high-level officials just after arriving. “What is happening here needs to be known.”

The Pope also gave a nod to the issues many African countries continue to grapple with, including ethnic tensions, forced migration, and hunger and conflict, laying the blame for some of these issues on the centuries of plundering of Africa’s mineral and natural wealth by foreign powers, the Guardian reported.

And he noted that despite its natural wealth, Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world due to the exploitation of its natural resources, especially cobalt in Congo’s case, used in smartphone batteries.

“Hands off the Democratic Republic of the Congo! Hands off Africa!” Francis said. “Stop choking Africa. It is not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered.”

On Thursday, the Pope was set to address thousands of youngsters in a stadium for 80,000, Agence France Presse reported. That followed an open-air Mass Wednesday that drew a million people.

On Friday, the Pope will fly to South Sudan, where he has previously tried to broker peace between the rival rebel factions. A 2018 peace accord continues to hold even as fighting goes on, contributing to one of the world’s biggest refugee crises.