Happy anniversary, dear old Eskom. Your centenary will be celebrated on 1 March 2023. We Maverickniki remember how the Electricity Supply Commission was founded during Jan Smut’s premiership with physicist Hendrik van der Bijl in charge.
Russia’s Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, would have applauded. Lawyer Lenin, like lawyer Smuts, appreciated the importance of electricity to political power.
Van der Bijl went on to create the South African Iron and Steel Industrial Corporation (Iscor), another element of the commanding heights of the economy of the Boer-Briton developmental state built after the Union of 1910.
Boer-Briton empowerment (BBE) took the form of the nationalisation of railways and ports, then electricity, next state-owned iron and steel works, the mega dams and irrigation schemes. All to function on cost recovery principles with capped profits. Along came World War 2, and Van der Bijl engineered the Industrial Development Corporation. And it was good. Kind of.
Enter Grand Apartheid with the new Atomic Energy Corporation, Armscor, Sasol, forestry, fertilisers and all. Add totale aanslag and the stew went bad, though not for the minority. Yet.
In opposition to apartheid came the Freedom Charter, that would enlarge the role of the state with its plans for a national bourgeois revolution. And so to civil war, and it became worse. Alongside the Anglo-American empire which played all sides.
Eskom chundered along, belching smoke and acid rain, absorbing new technologies to become a vertically integrated power utility whose network skills were a wonder to behold. Super-high-voltage stuff, with locally made insulators, cables, transformers, pylons and control equipment. Horizontal integration with secondary industries beckoned, and the price, wondrously low. The mine owners loved Eskom for its cost plus cheap power. The environment? Pah.
And so to the 1980s. Sasol II? Unaffordable; go to the market. Iscor? Uneconomic. Sell. Eskom? Over-capacity. Enter deals with metal refiners. Corporatise, then privatise. The civil war? Export to Angola and Mozambique. Eish. Unwinnable. Negotiate. Settle on a national democratic revolution – votes for all, separation of powers, rule of law. Done.
The national bourgeois revolution? That will take a bit longer. The majority gain control of the state, subject to the rule of law. Anglo makes for the plane. Is this State Capture? Not yet. But first back to the candlelit birthday celebrations.
Read in Daily Maverick: “A counterfactual imaginary — where would Africa be today if Japan had conquered it in World War 2?”
Today Eskom would appear to have rapidly fallen from First World to Third World status. Is this a fair judgement? Many think so, and plan their days according to power availability. But that’s the point. Businesses can/must plan, simply because Eskom has deployed world-class MBA skills, its Managed Blackout Approach, based on clever algorithms that might qualify for an Ig Nobel Prize.
It waits for government factions, new economic interests, criminal syndicates and the market to decide whose turn it is to eat, even as its publicity engine sows confusion and its staff collude with who knows whom.
It is just so messy. Junior miners elbowing the majors; truck owners chowing the roads; syndicates a-stealin’ and a-lootin’. Rearguard actions against renewables. Dreams of the worker state. The hands of France, Russia, Japan, the US, Germany and China? All in there.
Now Minister Gwede Mantashe claims he is being victimised. That is something. If you can’t handle the heat, get out of the boiler room. Talk of treason replaces reason.
Samson Gwede Mantashe is a fully committed communist cadre, steeped in the history of the South African Communist Party. He knows the resolutions; he knows the catechism; he reminds the cadres about the history of the party from its July 1921 founding.
The minister might even recall that just six months earlier, Lenin addressed the Council of People’s Commissars declaring inter alia that he “looked forward to the time when the rostrum at All-Russia Congresses will be mounted, not only by politicians and administrators but also by engineers and agronomists. This marks the beginning of that very happy time when politics will recede into the background, when politics will be discussed less often and at shorter length, and engineers and agronomists will do most of the talking.”
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Fact is that Lenin was addressing the session on electrification, to which he further expounded: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”
Lenin, unlike our union leadership, and some Cabinet ministers, understood the power of science and technology, as did Stalin in the early years of crash industrialisation when the Soviet Union pursued joint ventures with foreign capital. The goal was to industrialise and get the job done. All were pressured to align behind this endeavour. Oh happy times. Resist and be purged.
What might be the lessons for us, the true believers? For a quick start, subjugate factional battles to keep the shafts a-turnin’ and the lights a-burnin.’ We are all suffering pain, dealing with loss of income, loss of freedom, loss of education, loss of family and friends due to Covid. Come winter the schoolkids need light for study. Let them use candles? No way. The candle factory is on short time.
Read in Daily Maverick: “We are all Ukraine – South African history’s next chapter, Unravelling of a Special Type”
The solution could be simple. We endured the State of Disaster – no booze, no fags, no freedom of movement. Why can we not have a State of Disaster that declares:
- Every power station, every pylon, every transformer is a protected zone. SAPS waits for you;
- Every power station complex is a special economic zone exempt from selected regulations;
- Derelict rail corridors are state land available for the immediate erection of new grid;
- Joint venture agreements with any company able to commission a power rig (PV, wind, gas) in under two years; and
- Construction of a pipeline to Mozambique to import natural gas?
And by the way, we produce the necessary hardware. That’s what import substitution is for.
Why stop there? Fix the rest of the crumbling heights of the economy, the rail network, pipelines and ports. Fix the darn things. Ag pleez, Mr President. No more committees. As Bertolt Brecht lamented in the days of East Germany: “So many reports. So many questions.”
Lights (?), camera, action.
The government knows how to write and impose such rules. We can, yes, we can. Get the job done. We are at war, for heaven’s sake.
The grand-scale larceny of State Capture ensures that the national democratic revolution is incomplete. Without electricity it is doomed. For the rest of us, we don’t care. Just get on with it. We shall muddle through without the vanguard leadership that some profess.
For now Developmental State II is a dream best deferred. Comrades: remember the Council of People’s Commissars — Коммунизм это советская власть плюс электрификация всей страны (Ленин, 1920).
Not in the South, sorry. DM
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Concise and to the point ….. wonderful to read ……. how do we get someone to ‘just do it’.
I fully agree, what an excellent to the point article.
We need a benevolent dictator for say 10 years to fix South Africa.
The stealing of infrastructure is sabotage/internal war and transgressors must be punished to such an extent that it will act as a deterrent.
How can the guy that burnt Parliament decide he does not want to pitch for his court case? What is the chance of us pulling that off?
A joy to read. Thank you for a gloriously non-partisan perspective.