ANALYSIS
Gwede Mantashe’s anti-Eskom push could shove SA into oblivion
The ANC’s top officials may be stomping their feet over Eskom, but the ruling party still has no comprehensive agreement or plan on how to resolve — or even tackle — the country’s energy crisis. And, somehow, the debates and arguments about Eskom always revolve around race.
Although South Africa spent much of last week at Stage 5 or 6 of rolling blackouts, and there is still much more pain to come, it should not be surprising that the ANC is divided on how to handle the country’s energy problems.
Rolling blackouts have cost the ANC votes in the past, and the fact that such intense “load shedding” is happening just before the party’s national conference was always going to lead to more tension in the movement.
All of this comes like oil on the fire that will be the ANC’s main conference, just a few days from now.
The Energy Council’s CEO, James Mackay, made the point last week that there is a huge shortage of trust among all the role players, underlining the sense of chaos that South Africa suffers because of the ANC’s internal chaos.
As we endured another weekend of Stage 5 power cuts after a week of Stage 6 power cuts, the ANC’s National Executive Committee reportedly saw intense debates on the issue.
A group of people at a meeting at the weekend reportedly said Eskom CEO André de Ruyter should be removed and be replaced by someone with “engineering qualifications”.
ANC chair and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said last week that the implementation of Stage 6 was “akin to agitating for the overthrow of the state”.
This was clearly another attempt to put more pressure on De Ruyter, who, to his detractors, is the cause of all Eskom problems.
Cracks in Bid Window Six
Meanwhile, it appears that the government’s plans involving Bid Window Six to get more energy on the grid have run into trouble because the cost of raw materials for renewable power production has increased dramatically.
This is largely due to supply problems in China and because of increased demand in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
There are also still those who are pushing for coal, in stark contrast to where the world is moving.
It should be no surprise to anyone who has followed our politics over the past 15 years that Mantashe is at the centre of both of the big issues of this moment: continuous power cuts and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s continued stay in office.
Mantashe has played critical roles in the ANC and the government over the years and appears hellbent on continuing his role for some time.
His comment about Eskom “agitating for the overthrow of the state” cannot be ignored. It is not entirely certain what Mantashe’s real aim was with such a militant attack. And if De Ruyter were to resign or be fired, who would take over?
If he should be replaced by someone with “engineering credentials”, it would be hard to find someone with more experience than Eskom’s Chief Operating Officer, Jan Oberholzer, who is retiring in April 2023.
Would that be the kind of person Mantashe would prefer? It seems unlikely.
De Ruyter was appointed after a long process to find the right candidate, particularly after his predecessor Phakamani Hadebe said he was resigning for health reasons. Rhulani Mathebula, the acting head of generation, quit last month, citing family reasons for his decision.
Racial complications
This is also shot through with race. Considering the totemic nature of the position, our history and our racialised inequality, this should be expected.
It is for this reason that the Black Business Council has never accepted De Ruyter’s appointment in the first place, and demands that he be removed at every opportunity to speak in public.
His appointment led to much commentary: John Dludlu asked why state-owned entities had become “slaughterhouses for black executives”; Lumkile Mondi wrote movingly about how the appointment of a white man to run Eskom had “reopened old wounds I thought had healed” and explained how, despite being allowed to attend Wits University in the 1980s, “I have accepted that I will never catch up to my white former classmates”.
It was also reported that up to “27 black executives” had been approached to apply for the job, but all declined to do so.
Considering the pressure of the position, the nature of the moment and the anger of the public, it may be harder to find someone to do it now than it has ever been.
Grounds for suspicion
The issues involving race may not end there.
Although several Western countries — the US, the UK, France and Germany — have offered funding and easy loans to transition South Africa from coal to renewables, there has been pushback to this from some quarters.
It appears the argument goes like this: These countries want to use our country as an experiment to see if this will work. They are also emitting much more than we are, and they are often using coal-fired power plants themselves (including, in at least one case, reopening a coal mine).
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The argument for accepting the money might go along these lines: it is the best deal available considering Eskom’s debt levels and our economic situation. It is much quicker to build renewables than coal (two years vs 10 years). We need to save humanity’s habitat on Earth, and no one will buy goods made here if they are produced using coal-fired electricity in the future.
There may be grounds for suspicion of the motives of Western countries here. Considering the long history of abuse of people on our continent by these countries, this is completely understandable. If a country once colonised you, why would they not now be prepared to use your economy as an “experiment”?
That said, the world is moving on in terms of power production, and there may be consequences for missing an opportunity.
Within all of this, Ramaphosa has appeared to generally back the move to renewables. Certainly, his reforms announced in July were aimed at getting as much renewable power on the grid as quickly as possible.
Sabotage
His main opponent this weekend, Zweli Mkhize, has also spoken about this recently. He was quoted by the Sunday Times as saying that “we need to accept that coal is here for many years because we have billions of tonnes of coal… There must be understanding that we have that we will need it for many years…”
But he also said: “We must, however, take into account available technology for reducing emissions. The level of emissions in South Africa is not as bad as the rest of the world.”
For some, this may suggest that he is tending towards the protection of coal, although that may be a matter of interpretation.
In the middle of all of this are persistent claims that sabotage is responsible for the rolling blackouts, or at least partly responsible.
On SAfm two weeks ago, De Ruyter said that sabotage, the deliberate damaging of Eskom equipment, was responsible for at least one or two stages of load shedding.
On Monday, 5 December, Sampson Mamphweli, the director for the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies at Stellenbosch University, said he believed the intense number of power cuts was also a result of this.
Then, on Thursday, 8 December, Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan referred to the possibility of sabotage.
There are many ways for this to happen, and possibly many motives. Power stations are massive machines with many moving parts. Though there are always issues of demands for more money for workers, local communities or their families, political agendas appear to be the main drivers, particularly when power cuts reflect badly on the man running for a second term as ANC leader.
No easy fixes
This shows how complicated the situation is, and that there are no easy fixes.
There are also two other features of this interplay between the political crisis and the electricity crisis that should be considered.
The first is that Cabinet ministers do not suffer rolling blackouts. It was revealed last week that the government has spent at least R800,000 on running generators at the private homes of ministers since July to protect them from power cuts.
The second is how we got here. And how it was the ANC that has failed, and failed and failed to fix it.
Eskom is a mess, and so is our country. Using the problems that were created by the internal battles in the ANC as a weapon in the fight for leadership within the very same ANC is a fresh new low for a party that’s been sinking for a long time. Anywhere in the world it would have paid the ultimate price at the polls — but this is South Africa, after all.
And yet, the damage to us all is now increasingly difficult to bear. This increasing callousness and separation from reality will eventually have to cost the ANC a lot of votes.
But, for now, that the ruling party of South Africa, the very cause of this deep existential crisis, is seemingly not interested in solving it, reveals a near future that could be beyond disturbing. DM
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It is wise to keep your mouth shut, because when you open it, people might realise you are an idiot!!!
De Ruiter has failed in my view by not getting the right people in to run generation. Start by getting the right exec to head it up, then get the right power station managers in place, then empower them to get competent people to run the operations. If his hands are tied so that this can’t be done he should resign because the job is not doable
These generators must be removed, how could they even have thought this was a good idea. Time for the ANC crime syndicate to go!
NO, those generators at the homes of ministers at the taxpayers expense is totally unacceptable. If we have to suffer blackouts, then they must also – unless of course they are paying for the extra cost of the generators. After all, they can afford it, contrary to the rest of us.
Ideally, the Ministers and ruling party MPs should be obliged to send their kids to state run schools and to use state run medical facilities and hospitals for their own and their families’ medical needs, in addition to paying for their own generator costs.
Ii agree 100%
Abdolurely agree.
It is very easy to write about the pain of load shedding when people can afford to run expensive generators and have solar power that millions cannot afford in particular small business. The tendency for the media to make Mantashe a scapegoat for the incompetence and frankly negligence of ESKOM management has not escaped us in particular when they refer to experts who are renewable energy proponents. The fact that the author is oblivious to the fact that the electricity issue will be on the ballot in 2024 and Mantashe as a governing party leader who understands we are told that he must keep quiet. The fact that Eskom is not under his department gets lost when the proponents of the unreliable renewable energy make him the scapegoat of poor management at Eskom. The most interesting thing that does not escape one is the failure by this author to question the President as head of executive and his failure to have his Ministers speaking with one voice and his nonsense that we must give the board and Eskom management time when we feel the extra costs of blackouts and incompetence by Eskom. We have tobe given a country run on solar and wind to be able to believe the drivel against Mantashe. We see opening of coal mines in the UK and an increase in imports of coal by Europe in the face of their energy crisis. de Ruyter has to decide if he is a CEO of a phantom company with renewables or of Eskom whose fleet is coal powered.
Bearing in mind of course that the UK and EU reversion to coal is a reaction to the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the use of gas a weapon by Putin. It is not a policy shift or long-term reversion to fossil fuels, no matter how much Gwede Mantashe wants you to believe that. It’s a straw man.
The fact is, if history will ever be bothered to give Mantashe a footnote, it will simply be to say that he was the worst luddite to ever occupy his post, destroying South Africa’s mining and energy sectors at the same time. He is abysmal, lacks any strategic insight, any ability to move with the times, any creativity in how to transition away from coal and CREATE employment: he is so completely out of his depth in a 21st century setting, with a mindset dating from the dawn of the industrial revolution and the luddite fear of change. Fire him into the sun and let’s appoint someone with energy and vision, with a grasp of the opportunities at hand and an understanding of how to utilise these to ensure our future.
Spot on – very good insight, thank you!
“The fact that Eskom is not under his department gets lost when the proponents of the unreliable renewable energy make him the scapegoat of poor management at Eskom.”
And what supporters of Mantashe fail to realise that unreliable renewables are better than no electricity at all.
And an argument can be made that Eskom isn’t being poorly managed considering what it’s dealing with (lack of skills, bloated staff, sabotage, resistance from the department of energy to get more power so proper repairs can be done, etc).
?????? Haaibo Cunningham! You cant be serious? I think you are just stirring to get a reaction from folk. You are very naughty!
Escom was raped and looted by ANC cadres long before De Ruyter & co took over and started the attempt to clean up the thievery and sabotage at the organization.
One can only pray that KOKO & company will get their orange overalls issued sooner than later, along with the rest of the saboteurs and thieves who are putting the entire economy at risk.
It is indeed those who can not afford generators etc who suffer most – those who the ANC professes to care about, but are happy to cheat out of a decent living at every opportunity.
Exactly. The bottom feeding scum in the parasitic ANC are now squealing because Eskom cannot be “fixed”, while the cause of this mess is their own corruption, neglect, incompetence and galactic stupidity.
Cunningham is a regular responded. I struggle to follow what exactly his stance on things is as he flip-flops from one extreme to the other. Punctuation and sentence structure isn’t his strong point either so he fails to get his message across. Who knows, he might just be a trouble-maker wanting a reaction.
We ALL know that Mantashe is not politically in charge of ESKOM. However, for years he has actively prevented the development of alternative energy. By the way, he is part of the ruling clique that kicked the country down a hole from which it may not recover.
Cunningham : instead of attacking the people with solar + batteries and generators you should be thanking them because if they did not, their businesses would close along with the jobs. Without those despicable renewable IPP last week would have gone through stage 8. Wind and solar average between 3.5 and 4GW so go do the math on four stages of extra loadshedding when we were at stage 6 and the schedule only goes to 8. You can vote all you want about electricity – what will change? If the RET & EFF crowd take over where will the electricity solution come from? We are well past the stage where it is every man for himself. Sort your business’s energy resilience out, or close it.
Thank you very much, Mr Grootes, for this assessment of the political aspect of the assessment, and the last paragraph sums up the situation precisely. The Party isn’t interested in properly addressing the crisis, they just blame the Ministers and Eskom, and the Ministers blame the management. They are just so focused on the factional infighting and leadership contests, the crisis facing the country just gets lip service, blame shifting, and inaction.
Spot on! The issue is that because of the Ponzi scheme that the ANC is, with power and patronage the glue, we never get breathing space from the ANC’s internal power struggles:
• 2007 – ANC Elective Conference in Polokwane catapults Zuma into power
• 2009 – National And Provincial Elections, he consolidates power
• 2011 – Local Government Elections: lust for patronage that is clearly the Zuma way begins to kill services
• 2012 – ANC Elective Conference in Mangaung – the zenith of his power and destruction
• 2014 – National and Provincial Elections: Zuma’s popularity starts to wane
• 2016 – Local Government Elections: ANC slides towards 50%, Cyril’s faction on the up
• 2017 – ANC Elective Conference gets Cyril over the line, with an eye on 2019
• 2019 – National and Provincial Elections: Ramaphosa gets over the line, despite Bell Pottinger relics in his Cabinet
• 2021 – Local Government Elections – ANC gets hammered, but his grip is tenuous with 2022 so close
• 2022 – ANC Elective Conference: 5 years on, nobody who was part of the R1 trillion in State Capture imprisoned;
• 2024 – National and Provincial Elections, with potentially the same constituents of today, largely because the ANC is in it’s own death spiral of internal contestation;
Essentially, the ANC is only ever two years away from an internal or external election and the opportunity for different factions and opportunists to stake their claims at the various levels of government for patronage and power
Entitlement demands Accountability.
Eskom is a fitting metaphor for the ANC. I just the the latter collapses before the former. It makes sense to doubt the European’ s motives, but then why allow them to drill for gas off the Wild Coast? Eskom is now such a poisoned chalice, who would want the position? Don Quixote? Dr Ruyter is doing no worse than anyone else could, and perhaps help from law enforcement and the security services in stopping the sabotage would be more useful. Criticize them for allowing organized crime to run rampant, and leave Dr Ruyter alone. Race is a red herring that diverts from the real cause: corruption, incompetence and cadres.
Agreed! Whilst supposedly intelligent South Africans are still whining about the colour of de Ruyter’s skin, we stand no chance. He doesn’t need to be a engineer as long as he has the required management skills. This is just an excuse to shift the blame for all the disasters. The biggest and reddest of red herrings. Grow up.
Gwede Mantashe has passed his sell-by-date and needs to be put out to pasture. When politicians resort to populist rhetoric, it’s because they have nothing left to offer.
I quote. – ” Gwede Mantashe said last week that the implementation of Stage 6 was “akin to agitating for the overthrow of the state”.
Maybe he knows more than we do about taking over the democratic government. Maybe he means that if there are enough blackouts the democratic government will be taken over by his communist party?
This is a complicated mesh-mash of who is to blame and who is not to blame. Nothing will happen (except blackouts) until the ANC is tossed out of government. There is only one party fit to run South Africa and that is the DA. Those tiny parties may or may not have great policies but who knows? They do have a democratic right to contest the elections. It will be far better if they step back for the up-coming elections and get going once the ANC is out.
Just shows once more that the people in charge have no understanding of the issues. It is simply not possible to build new coal power stations as there is no funding available. The existing ones will not last for ever, and we still need to add a lot of renewables to the grid while they are running. This will make electricity cheaper, no question.
How can SA be an “experiment” when the UK and Germany already have a far higher proportion of renewable generation?
And SA’s emissions per capita are worse than most countries.
Since the ANC took over, Eskom has never had a clear strategic plan which takes into account factors such as population growth, available and future energy requirements, options, skills, maintenance, operational plans etc. It’s not rocket science. Instead the government accepts no responsibility. It’s is everyone else’s fault. And the people in government such as Mantashe and Gordhan, responsible for Eskom, are not only incompetent but completely out of their depth. When will the government realise this is a crisis of Covid proportions and it requires skilled people from the private sector, government, energy experts etc. to lock themselves in a room and come up with a realistic plan and then implement it.
As Andre de Ruyter recently put it: The stone age didn’t end because the world ran out of stones – “technology” moved the world forward. The fact that we have abundant coal, gives us a great opportunity to export [if the trains can get the stuff to the ports – also broken by ANC incompetence] and is no reason to cling to coal fired power generation.
Gwede Mantashe is the typical example of the stupidity of Communist thinking that is so prevalent in the decrepit ranks of thieves, idiots & looters that calls itself our government. His active sabotage of renewables, over many years, is why we are where we are today. A crook, stuck in the stone age.
We can pray for lightning to strike them all down, but the next election is the probably the best we can hope for, to get rid of the people that care only for themselves and not one moment for the welfare of the rest of South Africa.
Your time line is correct save that you fail to put Cyril as Deputy President in 2012 and in 2014 as being responsible for the war room to deal with Eskom. You also fail to actually put that as head of the executive he has a responsibility to ensure that there is one voice that comes from government regarding the energy crisis. You also fail to point out that de Ruyter when he took over the job at Eskom, his job was to spew excuses but to come up with a plan to address the crisis. He knew what he was getting himself into. If you take over a company in crisis in particular an heavy engineering company you carry out an extensive audit of skills, the state of its fleet and parts, the supply chains of the company and management skills at various levels and then come up with a plan not drivel of excuses. He ought to have known about the causes of various breakdowns from the first month he took over and have these causes addressed in a master plan to turn around Eskom if it exists, Do not defend rubbish of de Ruyter. He has failed with distinctions.
ESKOM like all the other SOEs and anything else that is being run by the ANC has suffered from the lack of maintenance for the last 20 years. De Ruyter is trying to do maintenance and at the same time to keep the electricity network going despite sabotage, bad-quality coal etc. Moreover, the company has been a victim of misappropriation for years by former senior executives and is without money. Who else is ready to take over a job like that and be able to keep the lights on, at least from time to time?
It would be helpful if the Govt addressed the endemic crime and sabotage around our generators. This could easily be done by deploying troops to protect and deter. To complain that Eskom hadn’t filed a request for additional diesel budget ignores the fact Eskom are having to police their own property as they cannot rely upon SAPS. The Govt must protect their asset, that’s what has to be done as custodians of SOEs. As for Mantashe suggesting Eskom’s actions were akin to overthrowing the State, as a prime contributor to State Capture, recipient and condoner, he really is a busted flush!
I am grateful that De Ruyter is such a resilient and dignified person. To be constantly subjected to calls for resignation and to be facing such opposition while trying to keep the lights on must be terribly stressful. I think all saboteurs should face charges of treason. Stealing / swapping coal / forged quality checks / staged breakdowns are not just theft, they are crimes against humanity.