The electricity crisis is going to shape our future. It will almost certainly cost the ANC an outright majority at the 2023 election. It is already driving skilled emigration and doing terrible damage to our economy and the national morale.

Unlike most crises, this one affects the middle classes as well as the poor. Even when the middle classes are able to solar up, they are still affected by traffic jams, closed businesses, dark and unsafe streets and children who want to move overseas.

As with all issues of urgent national importance, we need an open and rational public discussion on the way forward. But in South Africa that is never easy.

As in the US, Brazil and India, our public sphere is often split into antagonistic camps, and it is full of charlatans too.

A clear line must be drawn between ­evidence-based lines of argument and conspiracy theories. We have often failed to do so. But that is only part of the battle: equally important is the need to understand that people can legitimately hold different views.

As the liberal camp has grown in confidence in the wake of the collapse of the moral and political credibility of the ANC, it has sometimes started to dismiss people with diffe­rent views as unethical, as shills for vari­ous forces. Liberalism has become often shrill, self-righteous and polarising.

We see this all the time in debates about global geopolitics, where critics of the West have often been smeared as being patsies for the regimes opposed by the West.

The electricity debate has also become polarised. There are certain facts that any rational actor must agree on. These include the fact that burning coal is an environmental disaster, that there has been massive underinvestment in maintenance at Eskom for decades, and that Eskom has been and continues to be looted.

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However, there are also different views held in good faith. Some people think a massive programme of renewable energy can quickly solve our problems. Others think it will take years to get there and that we will have to keep using coal in the medium term.

Some people are certain that the renewables roll-out should be driven by private business while others think that, as a national good, electricity should be publicly owned.

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There are also good-faith disagreements on the geopolitics of energy. Some argue that we need to do all we can to stop burning fossil fuels. Others argue that the vast majority of the carbon in the atmosphere is due to the actions of the West, which must, therefore, make the biggest sacrifices and fund the sacrifices that will be made in the Global South.

We have to stop presenting all those who support publicly owned electricity, who are concerned about workers, and who feel that the West should be taking the biggest hits as we move towards renewables, as being in hock to the “coal lobby”.

Of course, there are people who are connected to pro-coal or pro-renewable lobbies. Where this is the case, it should be noted.

But it is perfectly legitimate for people to have different views. For as long as one side of the electricity debate is misrepresented as illegitimate, if not corrupt, we will never move beyond the current gridlock.

We can and must do better. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.