Illustrative image | Nersa logo. (Photo: nersa.org.za) | Nersa chairperson Thembani Bukula. (Photo: Phando Jikelo / Parliament RSA) 
I’m sure you’ve been in a factory, office or workplace where you feel the awful hush of something going badly, catastrophically wrong.
Like, career-ending bad.
I wonder if that hush spread through the headquarters of the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) a couple of weeks ago. When it suddenly became oh so obvious that someone had made a major mistake.
Like, a once-in-a-generation oopsie.
I’m obviously talking about the mistake that is going to lead to you having to pay a lot more to Eskom because SOMEONE at NERSA didn’t do their sums right.
Because of that, and previous mistakes by Nersa, Eskom is allowed to charge you a lot more for electricity. The mistakes are now compounded, leading to a bigger-than-usual increase.
This week, the chair at Nersa, Thembani Bukula, confirmed to Parliament that SOMEONE had been suspended as a result of this. And he promised that there would be appropriate action.
There are some interesting facts here that really suggest quite a lot has been happening behind the scenes.
As BusinessLIVE reported yesterday, Bukula confirmed that in fact they were aware of this mistake as early as January. And in fact what happened was that the mistake had been noticed, and instructions given to SOMEONE to fix it.
But, in Bukula’s version, SOMEONE did not do that, and the incorrect figures then marched ahead into the final decision.
While it might have gone through Nersa’s processes, it did not get through Eskom’s. They noticed the problem and shouted to high heaven.
Now, I’m fairly certain that life for SOMEONE at Nersa is very tough right now. They don’t know what will happen to them, and they might well feel a huge sense of responsibility.
But personal accountability is incredibly rare in South Africa. I can think of very few cases where a politician has said sorry for something they did.
I sometimes wish more people would do it more often. Because, as any adult knows, when you apologise for something it allows you all to move on.
A politician as mature as Mosiuoa Lekota knows this very well. When he promised in 2014 that Cope would increase its share of the vote, he said he would eat his hat if he was wrong. When it turned out he was completely off he did exactly that on
style="font-weight: 400;"> live TV. Unfortunately he did not have a hat to hand, but the ever-resourceful and fashionable Iman Rappetti was able to source one at short notice (he was offered a choice of mustard or tomato). As a result he was never asked about it again.
But generally speaking, it is hardly ever the case that a big mistake is the fault of one person.
This is why we have institutions and not just individuals to make sure that many people work on processes to come to the right outcomes. Otherwise Nersa would not exist, we would just have one person working out the electricity tariff.
And this, for me, gets to the nub of the case.
If I were the union rep for SOMEONE, I don’t think the argument would be too difficult to make.
Surely the people who really sign off on a Nersa decision are the full-time members for electricity and the rest of their committee? And considering how important this Eskom application was, wouldn’t virtually everyone have had a quick look before the final decision was handed down?
Those who know me will tell you, happily and unhappily, that I’m no maths genius. But I do know in my gut sometimes when my change is wrong, or my bank account doesn’t add up. I’m sure you’re the same. You know it’s off and you go and check.
I’d expect the people at Nersa to know in their gut when an electricity tariff doesn’t add up.
If there is some kind of public disciplinary case against SOMEBODY for this, I’d also like to suggest that Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa might well need to take some responsibility.
Just as this Eskom application process was about to start he decided to suspend the full-time member for electricity, Nhlanhla Gumede. His alleged crime is that he told the Sunday Times that one of the reasons power prices were so high was because Nersa was using the wrong methodology.
Just to be clear, this was the minister removing a key person from an independent regulator just as the process of determining a tariff was beginning.
I have no way of knowing how much stress this must have put on all the other people at Nersa, but it must have had some effect.
Anyone with any experience also knows that when big accidents happen it’s usually because of a long series of mistakes. And investigating how a mistake was made is in fact a science.
The high point of this art is probably the processes that follow plane accidents.
If your kids have spent a fraction of the time that mine have watching Air Crash Investigation, you will have learnt that it doesn’t matter whether the incident occurred in Russia, Italy or the DRC, it is hardly ever the fault of one person.
It must be the case here. Nersa might well want to hang SOMEBODY out to dry.
But firing them isn’t going to solve the real problem. DM