If Eskom can be fixed in 6 months then why @#$! was it not already?

Trust the politicians to say something to get my blood boiling early in the new year.

This time round it was Gwede Mantashe.

The Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, of course declared last year that Andre de Ruyter was the big problem at Eskom.  Minister Mantashe even suggested that De Ruyter was trying to overthrow the government through ongoing loadshedding.  What a pathetic, but totally transparent attempt to try and draw attention away from the governing party’s role in the power crisis. It was the classic spinning strategy of “look there, not here,” helped by a thinly veiled racial narrative.

The minister never provided a shred of evidence, nor did he suggest on whose behalf De Ruyter was supposed to be overthrowing the government.  Some political party or secret movement perhaps? Surely the minister was not suggesting that De Ruyter took on the job of CEO to launch his own personal revolution?  Shamefully, neither Pravin Gordhan nor Enoch Godongwana or the President said anything in De Ruyter’s defense – presumably because it would not have suited the political narrative. 

However, the thing that really got me angry was Minister Mantashe’s announcement last week that Eskom (presumably if it falls under him) can be fixed in the next 6-12 months.

REALLY, Minister?

If that is true, may I politely ask: “If you and presumably your ANC colleagues knew how to fix it, why the #$%* was it not done in the last 6 months or even the last 12 months?”

And while I’m at it: “Do you mind sharing with us, how?”

I mean, it is seriously problematic that the Chairperson of the ANC and a senior cabinet minister can suggest that he knows and presumably has known all along how to solve the biggest crisis facing our country, but has kept us all in the dark – literally and figuratively. 

The only thing that he has said publicly (apart from the need to change the CEO) was that there was some spare capacity available at Eskom which isn’t used – presumably part of De Ruyter’s anti-government plan.

Mantashe said in an interview: “In Eskom we have 48000 MW connected to the grid but Eskom at best can give us 16000 MW. There’s 22000MW that is idling, but connected, it is not decommissioned. If there was a focus on servicing and maintaining those megawatts, we wouldn’t have loadshedding.”

It sounds astonishingly easy and would of course be a terrible indictment on De Ruyter and his management if all they needed to do was to service these stations and so end loadshedding.

I phoned a number of energy experts, and they all had the same response:

To suggest that these stations are “idling” and with a bit of maintenance can quickly be put back into service is completely misleading.

They are broken – seriously broken.

To get any of them working again would require a lot of money (which Eskom doesn’t have) and significant time. It would also mean taking resources away from the existing power stations that are (kind of) working.  When they then break down – as they inevitably will - it would put us into more loadshedding while the others were still being fixed.

It also boils down to a basic cost-benefit analysis, which the government has presumably done. Surely, they must by now have a list of all the power stations and know how much time and money it would take to get that extra 22000 MW back in operation, what would have to be sacrificed to do that and whether those extra billions should not be spent on building something new – such as additional green energy plants.

If they don’t have that information or if Mantashe is correct about the additional 22000 MW and nothing was done, every cabinet minister should be fired.

Come to think of it, they are of course all to blame.

The current crisis was caused almost exclusively by decisions made for political reasons.  Rewarding allies through tenders, not doing maintenance timeously because the politicians wanted no loadshedding, political appointments and ideological resistance to involving the private sector and independent power plants, are why we are where we are today.

Yes, there are many issues and role players at stake such as Eskom and its management, financing of the power utility, municipal debt and reticulation, the regulator etc. However, government is the sole shareholder in Eskom, Treasury finances Eskom, the Municipalities are part of government, and the regulator is appointed by government.

So ultimately all fingers point back at government.

Of course, all the newfound urgency and recent announcements also have a lot to do with politics. The election is not far away and loadshedding is hurting the governing party’s support. In addition, Mantashe wants to oversee Eskom and now seems to have all the answers – even though everyone who knows anything about energy provision will tell you that there is no chance that Eskom can be fixed in 6-12 months.

It is high time for the politicking (including ridiculous promises) to stop and for decisions to be made for economic and engineering reasons only.  South Africans have valiantly tried to deal with years of loadshedding, but enough is enough!